I understand that in a system with clients and servers having encrypted communications between the server and the clients is not enough to have end-to-end encryption.
Even then I find it strange to cobsider TLS not end-to-end, the whole gist of TLS is enabling confidential communications between 2 network nodes without any of the intermediate nodes participating in the communication being able to decrypt the data.
Of the ones I’ve tried that are fully open-source, zulip is the best one regarding UX functionality.
I’ve found Matrix is a UX nightmare, with many different clients implementing different features, or having issues if a non-default login mode is used, ending in people getting locked out after the browser logged them out because they forgot to copy a key when they were logged in.
Others like rocketchat are opencore like matter most, which means they can do the switcheroo.
The things I would care the most when checking this kind of service are:
What’s not changing though is that most of their focus will be on integrating AI which most people don’t want.
I agree that AI chatbots are absolutely useless and have no place in a browser, but out of the three ML features in the screenshot, one is great for blind people, and another one is great for making the web more multilingual, so their usefulness is quite self-evident. Regarding ethics, at least for the last one it’s using a local model, and was trained using open-source datasets.[1]
What makes so-called “AI” bad is not the amount of users that can benefit from it, but how useful it is to the people that do use the feature, which usually means having experts tailor machine learning unto a single purpose.
I personally use the translation feature at least once a week when looking at news article that are not in English, and now I’m using a lot to translate Japanese webpages to plan a holiday there, so I’m very happy that Mozilla has invested time abd collaborated with universities to make this feature, I wish other people were less flippant about it just because it has “AI” in its name.
[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/06/training-efficient-neural-network-models-for-firefox-translations/
There’s a relatively new latex replacement, which is much easier to use, although its ecosystem is not as complete (obviously)
(The CLI tools are OpenSource and independent from the GUI thing they sell)
Actually, scratch that, I think it really started with the non-consensual updates:
At first I ignored it, and carried on as normal. Sure, I’d get mad from time to time and I’d complain.
But hey, nothing beats the convenience of being able to have all of your applications in one place
It really started there for me as well, and where it ended: Windows 10 was hellbent on making me use newer, broken GPU drivers. So it was better to lose the ability to play some games rather than all of them. And I also was able to get all the updates from one place :)
pd: at the time this happened Microsoft still hadn’t released the tool to allow to rollback drivers.
Still not a substitute for a decent IDE, though.
It is with plugins, however. I’ve used neovim for years at work and it has LSP capabilities and grammar-based syntax parsing. So it provides lots of IDE-like features on top of its excellent text-editing features. Nevwrmind that it integrates with the terminal much better than IDEs.
So I couldn’t disagree more with your statement
I’ve used Wayland exclusively for years, but here’s an example: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2026-01-04-wayland-sway-in-2026/
tl;Dr the Wayland ecosystem has still not caught up in all edge cases, the weirder setup you have the more likely you’re affected
Translation: they want to stop paying Denuvo for their DRM system
While it performs well nd has fancy new features, it’s still lacking one that I use every day: find words on the already-printed text: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189
It looks like it’s going to take months until it’s available
I know, yes. But I’m talking about virtualization, not containerizarion
Personally, I want to properly isolate the services with virtualization. The main reason is I expose some of the services online, and I don’t t want to only rely on keeping all software up-to-date at all times. This allows me to limit the damage if one of the services is compromised.
I wouldn’t use MacOS as the virtualization platform, and instead use something else, like BSD, Linux, or xen-based for my servers
As a software engineer that works on virtualization and is interested in software freedom, this law terrifies me because it’s a trojan horse for something much much worse than the already shitty status quo: remote attestation.
No, it’s the last place you want to do this check. Let me explain: because users control the PCs they buy right now, meaning they can install any OS and programa the so wish to install; governments at some point will decide that they cannot trust the results given by any OS.
The only way for governments will be to actually trust third parties (again) that will check properties in your computer through a module that controls the whole computer and users don’t have access to.
This is called remote attestation: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/your-computer-should-say-what-you-tell-it-say-1
With this technology, users don’t decide what programa they can install and run, they can’t even decide what websites can they visit.
It’s a brutal encroachment on the computer freedom you have enjoyed up to now, and the perfect tool for an authoritarian government to enforce what can you watch and in general, can do with your computer.
If this law is approved, I guarantee you it will spread and will have expanded versions requiring remote attestation. (Don’t worry, lobbyists will find a way to sell remote attestation preserves privacy to make it go down easier)
The end result is a nightmare-fueling scenario where someone like Peter Thiel through Persona not only has your information because it needed to verify to create the account in your computer, but Microsoft also has it, and governments through Microsoft may decide to limit which platforms you can access (X or something worse), if also if you’ve been a bad citizen, if you can run programs in any computer that can be legally sold.
All in all, this law is incredibly dangerous in the current political climate where even supposedly democratic governments are pushing for more authoritarian controls to digital life. And I’m surprised organisations like EFF haven’t seen this yet