BRB. Building a wearable that sends out an ultrasonic screech to blow out nearby microphones.

Going to call it "Blow Me."

Edit: looks like they already exist: newscientist.com/article/23286…

archive.ph/unmYO

Also, paper with more detail: arxiv.org/pdf/1904.08490v1

Voice jammer stops anyone from recording you speak

An artificial intelligence voice jammer can unobtrusively block microphones recording a single voice in an area, avoiding causing wider disruption that might tip people off

^{Matthew Sparkes (New Scientist)}

Why even spend the effort to collect data? We can just ask Trump what the data is. Since he's a clairvoyant and all.

This country is going to be such a shithole by the end of his term.

So when he does this for other cities we gonna just roll over and let him.

Morons. This is part of the plan to gradually get people accustomed to him using the military in other cities. Just watch the next fake big balls one singular event trigger a mass deployment.

Well, on þe one hand, BSD, which already has overlap wiþ GNU core but under þe BSD license. Þere's even already a Linux distro built around þe BSD core - it's a distribution Stallman can't insist is GNU/Linux.

OTOH, Ubuntu is one of þe big, influential distributions.

OTOOH, Ubuntu failed to make everyone use Upstart, and has failed to make everyone use Snap... þe former is dead, and þe latter is almost exclusively used by Ubuntu. Even Ubuntu forks don't consistently base þeir software distribution on it.

OTOO_O_H, þe Rust fad is at its peak, so þey'll undoubtedly sucker a lot of OSS developers into contributing free labor building tools, which þey can - wiþout FOSS licensing defense - co-opt and commercialize.

I'm not really worried about þis, but I wasn't really worried about Trump, and yet he just kicked off his coup, so I'm clearly not a good judge of bellwethers.

Trump declares 'Liberation Day' in DC: Deploys National Guard, MPD under federal control

President Donald Trump on Monday officially invoked Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act

^{Ida Domingo (WJLA)}

Absolute trash article.

The first thing that I noticed back then

When is ‘then’? Because that affects the meaning of the rest of the paragraph.
Prior to Rust 1.0 a lot of things changed in backwards-incompatible way.
Currently, if you learn something, you can continue applying that knowledge.

I don't want to learn something that does not last - that feels like a wasted
time when I could also learn skills that remain usable to the far future.

Then software engineering is not a career for you. Maybe you could become
a bricklayer because pretty much everywhere technologies changes and if you want
to be at the top of the game you need to learn new skills.

That was long before I even noticed how disgusting people many Rust
programmers are.

So are many C programmers. Or Python programmers. Or Heskell programmers.

If you go to the website of the Rust programming language nowadays, one of the first things you'll notice is that their primary communication platform is Discord.

This is blatant lie. The first thing I see when I go to the website is that
Rust has official Mastodon, Blueksy and YouTube channels. And if you go to
Community page you’ll see the main
communication channels are self-hosted forum, and Zulip.

Another thing that you notice immediately if you use an independent web browser is that their developer forum does not work. If you use a "non-supported" browser, or have JavaScript disabled, the webpage body has a CSS property "overflow-y: hidden !important;" which prevents the user from scrolling the page. On top of the page there is a banner that tells you to download one of the "supported browsers", which are Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

What is the issue exactly?

Which leads me to the next point. Rust people are clearly hostile towards or generally against free software.

So let me get this straight, you’ve poisoned the well with lies and irrelevant
information to prime readers to hate Rust and accept your point. Got it.

There will surely be small incompatibilities - either intentional or accidental - between the Rust rewrite of coreutils and the GNU/C version.

Why are you so sure that there will be incompatibilities? The stated goal of
the project uutils is ‘to be a drop-in replacement for the GNU utils’ and
‘differences with GNU are treated as bugs’.

If the Rust version becomes popular […] the Rust people will start pushing their own versions of higher level programs that are only compatible with the Rust version of coreutils. They will most probably also spam commits to already existing programs making them incompatible with the GNU/C version of coreutils. […]

This is pure speculation aimed to support a conclusion that the author has.
uutils aims to be fully compatible and there are no indications that this goal
isn’t sincere.

Rust's licensing is also problematic. The license has been worded in such a vague way that it may or may not allow forking or re-implementation. It may or may not require deleting all references to the word "rust" from a fork or re-implementation.

All of that is fully compatible with FSF and OSI definitions. There is nothing
new in requirement that forks use a different name.

The rest seems to be just ‘Rust people’ generalisations and lies.

Community

A language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

^{www.rust-lang.org}

That was long before I even noticed how disgusting people many Rust programmers are.

His entire argument is rather undercut by his grandpa-level ranting about "discord" and the use of JavaScript on rust forums.

some untested stuff controlled by proprietary software of Microsoft?

AFAIK, Rust is mainly funded by the Rust Foundation, which not only includes Microsoft, but also includes comrades from Huawei and alike.

Rust people seem to be focused mostly on identity politics and dividing people into groups that are then supposed to fight each other.

Yeah, this guy can eat my entire ass. This is the same language that fascists use to delegitimize anyone who isn’t straight and white.

So the narrative is that Rust somehow, through being released only through one distro, is going to use that influence to force incompatible changes into other codebases. Despite the fact that any change to shell scripts that isn't posix compatible brings opinionated people out the woodwork. And then they're going to pivot to releasing a proprietary version of coreutils that somehow has killer features that the open source version lacks despite coreutils being 30 years old.

Also the guy pushing for it once worked for a government so that means he can't be trusted ever again.

It's just a fucking bunch of programs that act as thin wrappers around C functions. There's nothing novel that needs protecting or is hard to implement.

I don't really buy the "small incompatibilities" argument. The project strives for total compatibility, even down to the most esoteric parameter that nobody has ever heard of. And even that seems like overkill to me - there are alternative implementations of core commands on Linux and other *nix systems like BSD, Solaris etc. where the compatibility is way worse. For example, busybox is used in embedded Linux, and a containerized images like Alpine Linux.

It also seems a bit rich to complain that uutils might get extended. GNU coreutils came into being because of dissatisfaction with the commands that came with the default *nix. Same for bash (vs sh), GNU cc (vs cc), GNU emacs (vs emacs) and so on. Was there somebody back then complaining about devs "spamming commits" that extended functionality?

And other Rust applications won't only work with uutils. That's absurd. They'll test the capabilities of the OS they're built to run on either at build time with feature flags or at runtime by probing commands. Just like any other high level application.

As for license, MIT is used for plenty other things in a typical Linux dist, e.g. X11.

The biggest point of concern for a Rust rewrite is dependency integrity. Rust uses cargo to manage dependencies and absolutely everything in the Cargo.toml/Cargo.lock files has to be reviewed. The crates.io repository is beginning to support package signing and The Update Framework initiative but every single dependency of uutils would need to be carefully reviewed and signature validated for it to be considered trustworthy. Basically everything needs to get locked down, and wherever possible dependencies expunged altogether.

Finally, some legitimate critique of Rust, that does not revolve around "DEI bad" or "memory safety bad"!

Both can be criticized within reason. Yes, there's that infamous Rust dev, who likes to sabotage projects she's involved with the moment things don't go the way she wants it, thinks the word "cancer" is somehow a slur, and of course loves to send her followers after people for various reasons, often while purposefully misinterpreting people's words. All while spreading either the evopsych "extreme female brain theory of borderline personality disorder" nonsense, or the "cluster B abuse" nonsense made up by far-right theologists masquerading as psychologists to explain trans people on the terms of christian fundamentalism and without allowing them to live life as they want. This (nor other similarly bad Rust devs, nor callout culture in general, nor other things like the whole "master" branch fiasco with Github) does not mean we need to throw out the baby with the bathwater, like Brian Lunduke and other far-right adjacent people want us to do, all while pretending their position is the "centist" one, because "real fascists did those things for the sake of pure evil, but we have good reasons to do those very same things, like crime statistics and IQ tests".

Same with memory safety. We usually get the "skill issue" type of critique, meaning "just write better code". I personally prefer D's approach to memory safety with its multi-level solution alongside with the much nicer code for the unsafe stuff. And I guess Rust also have something similar to D's --noboundscheck compiler flag as a way to disable boundschecks in times it's needed.

This all creates a situation I've first seen unfolding during the whole gamergate culture war fiasco. Thanks to burnt out atheist YouTubers making bad faith critique of Anita Sarkeesian's videos lead to the rebrand of Morality in Media to NCOSE and the formation of Collective Shout, which ultimately lead to the whole payment processor censorship issue. Thanks to alt-right chuds constantly misgendering and sending death threats to Brianna Wu enabled a racist abuser to hide within our circles. And thanks to chud developers wanting to "give real treatment to gender confused people" and wanting to "gatekeep" software development from newbies, actual critiques of the Rust language, such as a heavily OCaml-influenced language being sold as a C replacement (if not a C++ replacement - all without true built-in OOP support), or the fact a functional programming language is being sold as a general purpose language, all because "you can opt out" (Java also technically allows you to opt-out from most OOP features).

The article is clearly mostly manipulative bullshit. The arguments about "incompatibilities" between uutils and coreutils being used as an "extend" strategy is just bonkers, the point of uutils is to be a 1-to-1 compatible toolset, and there's no reason to doubt the developer's intention there. Even if they do introduce some extra features, most software projects that actually matter will not be using them, because compatibility with coreutils will remain important for decades to come.

The kernel of truth hiding in there is that Rust's "preferred" licensing under MIT/Apache is indeed a problem, and it should have been GPL (or at least MPL) everywhere from the beginning, especially for libraries. This is probably the worst aspect of Rust indeed, but not enough to outweigh all the awesome technical parts of it.

I'm struggling to connect the dots between "X person used to work in electronic surveillance" and an immediate risk to the open source software being developed by a different employer. Is there some reason to think this person is still working for their old employer? Or is the speculation that they are a idologue out to destroy Linux from the inside?

If there's something unsafe in the code, especially a rust rewrite of the coreutils I'd expect it's going to be found immediately. People are going to go over that code with a fine toothed comb.

If the central idea of the article is "I don't think there's a place in the FOSS community for people with different ideas/beliefs/history than me" then the author should come out and say that (many have in the past). Claiming we're at risk because of some wild speculation about a nefarious plot between the military and Microsoft to attack Linux and privacy... it really does require something more firm than this.

These comment make me curious. How many of you have read Microserfs by Douglas Coupland?

I'm sure most of you haven't, but just curious if anyone has