If you have been in the world of #freesoftware long enough, you will find that a lot of them are likely to be either one of them:
Copycat of de-facto software (gratis alternative to …) with “pro” and “community (peasant)” separation looking for cash which should be trickling down from broader demand
Boring software looking for actual problems to solve, which lacks substantial demand; whose authors desperately trying to justify their cheap work taking advantage of the notion of “sustainability” for their own interest, although nobody has begged them to create it in the first place
Due to the constant increase of the number of programmers who are trying to make their living on software, along with the constant improve of literacy about software among us all, that trend will not stop for a while.
Tilix: a tiling terminal emulator
Lately I have found this pretty nice terminal emulator named Tilix. It is basically a tiling terminal emulator, which spares you from looking for emulator windows on your desktop environment.
Keyoxide is a privacy-friendly #FOSS to create and verify decentralized online identities.
Since years there have been similar tools like Keybase, but because it is provided as proprietary and centralized one, you are supposed to fully trust that it should work as expected. Keyoxide, on the other hand, is free software, therefore it is possible for anyone to audit, copy, modify the code as you want to, and run it on a server of your choice. (keyoxide.org is maintained and provided by the developers as a public server). The identities you can verify with Keyoxide include: DNS, Forgejo, GitHub, services on ActivityPub, IRC, Liberapay, OpenPGP, Reddit, Twitter, XMPP, etc.
In #Japan, it is possible for a company to use and share personal information for an internal usage among the companies which have the same parent one, as long as you have once got a consent. This is one of the important differences between GDPR and The Japan Act on the Protection of Personal Information, also known as APPI.
So, if you have agreed that your private information to be used to “improve their services”, you have basically given the green light to let them use it for whatever objects which they regard improve them, including to train #ai model by machine learning.
Also, the usage of data for machine learning is not limited by the copyright of the data. See: https://coinpost.jp/?p=465637
That's why Japan is called as the heaven for machine learning by the private companies, whereas it is privacy hell for the general population, compensated by nothing for letting them use the data for their business.
One of the projects which I like to do when I have free time is to localize #FOSS projects which I actually use for myself, to collaborate with my colleagues, etc., into my primary language (Japanese). Localization is an enjoyable experience for me and I'm convinced it is one of the meaningful ways to empower users who are not native English speakers.
Below is the list of the projects to which I have contributed or actively localize on mainly voluntarily basis:
I'm open to new projects to contribute. Please let me know if you have found interesting and promising ones.
One of the merits of encrypting your data with OpenPGP using a Yubikey is that the private key to decrypt data is stored offline on the hardware and it will not be hacked online.
When it comes to file synchronization, there are several choices based on free software:
- Set up Nextcloud or Cryptpad instance by yourself: file synchronization service on-premise.
- Run Syncthing on your devices: continuous file synchronization, which is completely decentralized.
リチャード・ストールマン『フリーソフトウェアと自由な社会――Richard M. Stallman エッセイ集』アスキー、2003年の要約です。
Richard Stallman, “Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M.Stallman”, 2002, GNU Press (http://www.gnupress.org/).
In this article I would like to share resources I referred in order to set up a desktop environment and applications on #FreeBSD 12.
When I have started writing a book I often used Twitter to compose my thoughts to write about. Tweeting has helped me to output some sentences despite being fragmented. Still it is also sure that most of them are simply gone and neither reread nor rethought. From writing books I learned that rethinking your thought and rewriting your writing is a critical way of enhancing and organizing the insight to the size of a work. I would say when it comes to developing a thought, leaving raw ideas in sliced notepads leads you nowhere because you will easily forget what you have thought.