Yeah… But LM has spotify, Google Earth, Dropbox and Sublime Texteditor mixed in open source software (like d-feet, a dbus inspection tool) in their repos… Those aren’t propritary Codecs, WiFi driver or firmware…

Debian and Ubuntu have different APT repo sections for closed source stuff. That is what I would have expected…

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I don’t care if a Linux distribution offers proprietary applications or not. I just want to be able to filter it out, and that they offer open alternatives first.

I’m not a purist, I want people to be informed users, not just sheep that get fed whatever corporations want them to eat. If they still choose to use closed source software, then that is fine.

I’m in an organization that helps people install Linux on their devices, and we collectively decided to install Linux Mint. I never used it myself, and to me, the distribution doesn’t matter too much.

However, I was negatively surprised that Linux Mint decided to mix closed-source proprietary software together with open-source software: http://packages.linuxmint.com/search.php?release=alfa&section=import&keyword=

They also advertise them in top positions on their package installers, which also doesn’t show the packages licenses anywhere. To me advertising them and mixing them like they are the same is bad… They also don’t offer ways to filter them out… So… while I still install LM for others, I’m not a fan…

You seem to be missing my point. You are arguing against a point I did not make.

I’m not the owner of that laptop, I would just be a user. So with my argument I wouldn’t have a right install my own keys on it. I don’t need to trust that device. It isn’t mine. It is the one of my employer in that case the bank.

So I never said that the bank should trust my personal laptop with their data.

However, if I am a customer of that bank, and they give me access to my account data from my private laptop or smartphone. Then they have no right to enforce someone else to put their root of trust on my device. I need to be able to trust my device to protect my data, so the root of trust needs to come from me. If I don’t want to manage my device or if I don’t trust myself to do so, I should be able to transfer my trust temporarily to some other third party, and pay them to do it for me.

Imagine if you went to work at a bank in IT for example. They issue you a laptop.

Who is the owner of that device? The Bank.

Who is the owner of that network? The Bank.

So they are the arbiter of trust in that area. They are free to exclude non-bank-owned devices.

I work in IT, and I’m fine with getting a company laptop for company work. I don’t trust that laptop. I isolate it when I work at home. But the company trusts it, and that is fine.

You are not giving a reason for your statement. The owner is the one that bought a device. The sole arbiter about what a device should do or shouldn’t do. The person responsible of the device. The owner must trust their device in order for the device to be trusted. It doesn’t matter what if other people do or do not trust that device, they are not the owners. They should take care to protect their own data on their own devices.

Pipelining? Rabbit-holing? Trojan horsing?

I disagree. For any actual security, the owner of the secrets is the only one that can be trusted. It is their secrets. Their own interest to keep them save.

Any company or government is a shifting entity, maybe now they are trustworthy, but maybe in some years they aren’t.

Owners are the only stabile point, because it is their data. They should be able to transfer the trust to a company or government to handle security, but they also need to be able to take away that trust and access, and either handle it themselves or transfer that trust to some other entity.

It is not okay for companies or government to hold the data of individuals hostage… That is not security, that is a business strategy.

Also software… I would love to have regulations that make it clear that the root of trust on all devices need to start by the owner of the device, not by the vendor… That would allow the end users to repair the software on their devices… Replacing it with whatever else they want. Next would be to provide hardware documentation to the owners to program their own devices… I don’t expect that to happen, but I can dream.

Right, that’s it. Though… you probably shouldn’t assume someones gender ;)

Maybe because I’m not a native english speaker, but to me ‘digitising’ means converting an analog medium to a digital one. Like with vinyl, VHS, etc. And ‘ripping’ is about an extraction process. Like overcoming a protection or more difficult to access mediums like Audio CDs, which don’t have a real filesystem, and into a easily accessible single file on a harddrive.

DVDs are already digital, and if they don’t have a copy protection, which you have to rip through, you can just copy the files to a hardrive and then, if you want reencode them into one more portable file…

First, you can digitize a DVD.

Nitpick: Why would anyone do that, DVDs are already digital mediums with a filesystem. So they first have to convert to analog media first… And that introduces losses…

You just put a DVD in your drive and now you can copy files from it to you HD… If copying files is now called ‘digitizing’ we live in a strange world…

Oh, just wait when all these AI companies ask for a government bailout… Free market in action…

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You lost sympathy for the people of Ukraine, because their leader does the same as most leaders of other western countries?

Are you well? Maybe you should sit down, get out of the sun and possible call your local medical emergency number.

That would be the same with future sight… Which people would argue is a super power…

How is smelling smells three minutes into the future a curse?

I mean if it works similar to other time powers like seeing into the future, that future would be preventable.

Smelling the future and acting to it seems like pretty awesome, and three minutes is pretty long… You have enough time to act and escape you death maybe, if you suddenly don’t smell anything anymore… Or you can make sure that you only eat the best food available… Since tasting food is mostly about smells… You could become an awesome cook… you just have to deal with the five tongue senses…

Then why aren’t they up-front about it? Why are they calling their thing “open source” if it isn’t?

If they’d call it “source available” printer, then they are better then closed source alternatives, but if they aren’t honest… I’d rather buy from someone that is clearly telling me what they are selling to me, instead of obfuscating or maybe even lying about it.