An ag(e)ing hacker - posts tagged as "free-software"

Languages and complexity, Part I: why I love Anki — 2024-01-02 19:47 Updated: 2024-08-21 12:01

August 2024 update: lack of endorsement This article used to endorse the services of a certain Russian language teacher and mention her by name, with permission. That person has now expressed the intention of making her course recordings “expire” trough some time limit which will make them unusable after a set date; the stated intent is motivating procrastinating students who hesitate too long before starting their study in earnest. Independently from the technical nature of their implementation and from whether the restrictions are possible to circumvent, anti-features are unacceptable and insulting. The teacher in question, now referred to here as [...] Read more

p≡p-mail-tool: easy privacy for email with existing Mail User Agents (p≡p is working with Gnus!) — 2023-08-07 03:05 Updated: 2024-01-11 12:15

During the last month and a half I have unfortunately mostly disappeared from GNU, having been busy and focused writing p≡p-mail-tool (https://codeberg.org/pEp/pEp-mail-tool), a new work project I have let overflow into my personal time as a beautiful little hack in which I believe. p≡p-mail-tool is of course free software. Motivation Freedom of speech and privacy are more and more threatened by governments and hostile corporations working against the public interest. In this season of death of liberty the minimum we can do to respond is making surveillance more difficult, by providing the general public with easy tools to use for [...] Read more

Announcing make-gallery, a simple web image gallery generator — 2022-11-21 01:33 Updated: 2022-11-21 23:53

I wrote a script generating an image gallery suitable to be included in web pages. Since it can be generally useful I cleaned it up and published it, of course as free software (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html); you are welcome to download a copy of ‘make-gallery’ from <https://git.ageinghacker.net/make-gallery>. The software is released under the GNU General Public Licence (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html) version 3 or later; the generated code is in the public domain. I hate the web I have never made a mystery of my personal dislike for the web with its gratuitous ever-growing complexity, inefficiency, lack of expressivity, hostility to the developer and to [...] Read more

SMTP, OrangeWebsite and using your own computing resources — 2022-10-24 00:35 Updated: 2024-01-04 19:55

I have had a personal server with the domain ‘ageinghacker.net’ since 2010. At the beginning I was sharing hosting costs with two or three other people, each of us running a virtual machine inside a Virtual Private Server. By 2016 my requirements had grown, I wanted stability and so decided to rent a VPS by myself. Around that time I had also decided to run a Tor exit node for the benefit of the global community, and more in general wanted my server to be in a country that allowed some freedom of speech; since I did not, then like [...] Read more

A personal reflection on the GNU Hackers' Meeting 2022 — 2022-10-11 00:30 Updated: 2024-01-04 19:41

According to the definition on the web site (https://www.gnu.org/ghm/2022/) “The GNU Hackers’ Meetings or ‘GHMs’ are a venue to discuss technical topics related to GNU and free software”. And GHMs are in fact events structured as conferences with talks and presentation slides and all; very technical indeed, the way we like them and the way they should be. But if we take the time for attending every year since 2007 or so, and organising, it is mostly for the fun of spending time with our GNU friends in a relaxed environment. After many years in which most GNU Hackers’ Meetings [...] Read more

GNU Hackers' Meeting 2022: Call for presentations, even remote — 2022-09-12 18:05

The GNU Hackers’ Meetings or or “GHMs” are a friendly and informal venue to discuss technical topics related to GNU (https://www.gnu.org) and free software (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html); anybody is welcome to register and attend. The GNU Hackers’ Meeting 2022 will take place on October 1st and October 2st in İzmir, Turkey; see the event home page at <https://www.gnu.org/ghm/2022/>. We decided to help students who wish to attend by contributing 50€ out of their 60€ attendance fee (required by the hotel for use of the conference room, coffee and snacks) so that students will need to only pay 10€, upon presenting proof of [...] Read more

The GNU Hackers' Meeting 2022 is less than one month away — 2022-09-04 20:21 Updated: 2022-09-05 12:15

The GNU Hackers’ Meetings are a venue to discuss technical topics related to GNU and free software. GNU Hackers’ Meetings have been taking place since 2007: you may want to look at the pages documenting most past editions (https://www.gnu.org/ghm/previous.html) which in many cases also include presentation slides and video recordings. The event atmosphere is always friendly and informal. Anybody is welcome to register and attend, including newcomers. The next GNU Hackers’ Meeting will take place in İzmir, Turkey on Saturday 1st and Sunday 2nd October 2022. We updated the GHM 2022 web page (https://www.gnu.org/ghm/2022) with information about the venue, accommodation [...] Read more

GNU Hackers' Meeting 2022 proposal: İzmir, Turkey — 2022-06-10 01:55

The GNU Hackers Meetings (https://www.gnu.org/ghm) are a friendly and informal venue to discuss technical issues concerning GNU (https://www.gnu.org) and free software (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html). The time we proposed for GHM 2022 is approaching but unfortunately we only received three replies expressing interest. If we are to hold the event then we need more participants; at this stage a simple informal expression of interest is enough. The event is planned for an extended weekend (with talks from Friday to Saturday) in October 2022 in İzmir, Turkey. For the time being all the infamous entry barriers or restrictions are lifted in Turkey, with the [...] Read more

GNU Jitter and GCC: the fun of playing with fire — 2022-03-10 21:32

A few days ago on March 6 I participated in the Binary T00ls Summit online event (<https://binary-tools.net/>) organised by José Marchesi (<https://jemarch.net>); a video recording is now available. My presentation had the ridiculous title GNU Jitter and the illusion of simplicity or Copying, patching and combining compiler-generated code in executable memory or The Anarchist’s guide to GCC or The fun of playing with fire — or, in shortened form, GNU Jitter and GCC: the fun of playing with fire. This is the official abstract: GNU Jitter is a generator of portable and efficient language virtual machines; a Jittery VM lies [...] Read more

Global variable initialisation in C++ — 2021-11-18 22:00 Updated: 2022-11-26 18:37

Today Volker Birk (https://fdik.org/) and I were speaking over lunch about object initialisation in C++ and about how weakly defined a program entry point is, because of objects with static storage duration. Volker wrote a short program whose output changes after reversing the order of two variable definitions, both out of a ‘main’ function whose entire body was ‘return 0;’. He discussed it in German (https://blog.fdik.org/2021-11/s1637238415), on his blog (https://blog.fdik.org). I was more annoyed by the fact that initialisation order is not guaranteed to respect functional dependency across compilation units. Here is my test case, where GCC and the GNU [...] Read more

Thanks for fighting against the European copyright directive — 2018-09-11 21:50 Updated: 2021-11-18 17:48

As I am writing this, the European Parliament is debating the disastrously liberticide copyright Directive. After out previous mailing campaign (The European Parliament has voted against the copyright directive, for now (<https://blog.ageinghacker.net/posts/20>)) organized along with a group of GNU friends, we again contacted the Members of the European Parliament before the forthcoming vote. I wish to name all the people who helped by translating the text into several languages and improve it, working tirelessly and with very little time: Christopher Dimech, Yavor Doganov, Rafael Fontenelle, Alexandre Garreau, Bruno Haible, José Marchesi, Tom Uijldert. Thank you all, friends. Update: we failed. [...] Read more

The European Parliament has voted against the copyright directive, for now — 2018-07-06 00:47 Updated: 2022-10-29 02:03

The EU copyright directive in its present form has deep and wide implications reaching far beyond copyright, and erodes into core human rights and values. For more information I recommend Julia Reda’s analysis at <https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/>, which is accessible to the casual reader but also contains pointers to the text of the law. Today on June 5, following a few weeks of very intense debate, campaigning and lobbying including deliberate attempts to mislead politicians (<https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180703/16343340172/>), the European Parliament voted in plenary session to reject the directive in its current form endorsed by the JURI committee, and instead reopen the debate. It [...] Read more