this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
36 points (100.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35260 readers
1529 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I see stories about how election is rigged or that there are security vulnerabilities and lots of people don't believe the outcome. Why don't they just open source everything so that anyone can look at the code and be sure the votes are tallied correctly?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Our society is not able to understand modern technology. Most people haven't even heard of concepts such as Open Source or Free Software. They have only been around for over 30 years, but ok.

I see people here are cheering for some proprietary app for Lemmy called Sync. It just makes me sad. I guess they don't want security on their devices.

Everything made by the government should be Free Software. Public money, public code: https://publiccode.eu

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think there's a problem with people using Sync, I access Lemmy mostly through Windows!

People are happy about sync because they're going to be able to use a UI they like, are familiar with, and has been refined over a really long period of time. It's just a frontend, I think it's way more important that the foundation you choose to build a platform on is open-source and can't be pulled out from under you. If people prefer accessing through Sync, Chrome, or whatever else, it's not really an issue as there's always other options if any of them go sour.

I fucking love open source, seeing the rapid advancements in 3D printing, robotics, prosthetics and a host of other technologies as people build on each others' ideas is amazing. The fact that a dude can use a brain-computer interface and machine learning to control a fucking exoskeleton he built in his residential house in his free time is like witnessing the future. But at the same time, also using closed-source software is not inherently a problem, and is often unavoidable.

And yes, it's insane that people have to pay for access to information that they paid for. The fact that I have to pay money to see the standards of how to wire my home safely, that was drawn up with public money, is pure insanity!

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

The post was about voting machines and that we should be able to verify they are secure and that their software doesn't have any malicious functionality. So why wouldn't you want the same on your own devices? Shouldn't our computers be secure too? Don't we deserve to be able to control our devices and the software that runs on them? I think we do. I think computers should be secure and that we deserve privacy. But you can't have any of those things with proprietary software. When using it, you are at the mercy of the person/company who developed it and they might not have your best interest in mind. Very often they only care about their interests and add things like spyware and DRM.

Only with Libre Software users have the freedom to control their devices (because of the 4 essential freedoms). Proprietary software is unethical, because it takes away those freedoms from us. It gives developers power over their users, which they often abuse. Developers should know better and give their users the freedom they deserve. That's partially what makes me sad about Sync. Its developer is making a proprietary app for a Libre platform, probably because they just don't know any better.

Another sad thing is that there are Libre apps for Lemmy. But some people still choose proprietary ones. They choose to not have freedom, security and privacy. Most of them do that, because they just don't know any better.

Open Source is similar to Free/Libre Software, but it's a corporate term that doesn't mention those ethical issues.

You mentioned some of the amazing things people do with Free Software. But most software is proprietary. Imagine what we could achieve if i wasn't.