I have a cough and a cold. I followed a recipe for home-made cough mixture. Cider vinegar, honey, ginger, cinnamon, Cayenne pepper. Potent, and rather delicious to someone who enjoys the tastes of vinegar and spices and sweetness. It evokes childhood memories of the silky black-brown Galloway’s cough syrup.
These remedies smell nice and feel like they are doing good. I have no evidence that they are more effective than cheaper and simpler alternatives. Honey and lemon and ginger is good, or just gargling with salt water.
My home-made cough mixture is a light muddy brown and I can see the spice particles floating around in the small ramekin dish. Perhaps if I add black treacle and put it in a dark glass medicine bottle, like Galloway’s, it would have a stronger placebo effect and appear more valuable.
Sellers of Snake Oil long ago touted their concoctions as effective remedies for anything, presumably asking a fortune for each little bottle, until the term became a by-word for a scam. We do not look kindly upon scammers.
Recently I noticed a file named “snakeoil” on my computer. My suspicions were raised at first sight, but it is not a virus. It is a digital certificate created by the operating system. Let’s take a quick look at digital certificates and why this one is so named.
This series is about replacing a MacBook Air with an equally beautiful Freedom Software laptop. It is also about setting up a Freedom Software laptop for the kind of user who wants it to Just Work with the least possible involvement and no interest in how it works.
Part 1 of this series was about the rationale and the hardware.
Part 2 of this series was about choosing and configuring the software.
This series is about replacing a MacBook Air with an equally beautiful Freedom Software laptop. It is also about setting up a Freedom Software laptop for the kind of user who wants it to Just Work with the least possible involvement and no interest in how it works.
Part 1 of this series was about the rationale and the hardware.
Part 2: Software
Our leaving Apple is, fortunately for us, much easier than for someone who has both feet firmly planted in Apple’s walled garden.
This article tells how we replaced a MacBook Air with a freedom-software laptop, aiming to keep it delightful to use and to carry about, while standing up in support of the principles of freedom of the users, freedom from the control and lock-in that Apple wields over its users, its subjects.
The Opportunity: the old MacBook Air dies.
The MacBook Air showing a “panic” message at switch-on and dotted lines across the screen
It’s terminal. The diagnosis is the soldered-on RAM has failed. Technically speaking it could be repaired, but it’s not worth it. We need a new laptop.
This is the opportunity. We have to make an effort to replace this and set everything up again, one way or the other, so can we make the effort to switch to freedom software at the same time? Why should we?
The Choice: Apple or Freedom?
While we should choose our direction according to our values and principles, we all find it hard to see and evaluate the big picture.
Apple promises to sell us a world in which “our” computer systems do what we want and what we need, easily and quickly and beautifully. At first sight, that is indeed what their products look like. Only when we dive deeper into their ecosystem, that is when we begin to learn how controlling they are. Devices we buy from Apple are not “ours”, they are tightly controlled by Apple. Apple restrict both what we are allowed to do (legal controls) and what we are able to do (practical enablement). Let’s see an example of how this works out.
As long as we play along inside Apple’s walled garden, everything smells of roses. Now let’s try to message a friend who has not bought Apple, or share photos with them. Suddenly we hit the wall. Our friend is Outside, and Apple has locked the doors. But it’s OK, we say, they’re not blocking us, look, we just need to install and sign up to Facebook’s WhatsApp or Google’s Photos because that’s what our friend is using. That seems to work. Why? Because Apple chooses to unlock the door for us to install those particular apps, according to agreements with those particular vendors. Apple only lets us install software from their own store, and they only let in software that conforms to strict Apple-centric rules. That’s very strongly enforced on iPhones, with MacOS moving swiftly in the same direction. The marketing message that says this is all to protect us from nefarious cyber threats. Who could deny that there is a grain of truth behind that? Yet the unspoken reality is they are mainly protecting their control over our digital life.
Besides, installing another app to meet a friend outside this garden only “works” in a crude way: it still does not allow us to invite our friend to meet us in our current messaging system. Instead we have to go and visit them in one of those separate, equally proprietary walled gardens, where we can’t share our photos and contacts and messages directly.
It’s not only Apple. Google and Microsoft are doing it too, while Apple and Amazon wield the tightest restrictions over their users. If you were not aware how bad it is, try reading up about how the vendors can remotely install and uninstall software on what they like to call “our” device.
The Future of Computers
Two of the most readable short articles illuminating this sad state of affairs are Your Phone Is Your Castle and The Future of Computers: The Neighborhood and The Nursing Home by Kyle Rankin. The author is the chief security officer of Purism, one of several small companies that are passionately contending to change the landscape by offering a digital life characterised by principles of freedom. Freedom in the sense that we the users are in ultimate control of our digital data systems, not the other way around. “As a social purpose company, Purism can prioritize its principles over profit. The mission to provide freedom, privacy, and security will always come first.”
Another player is /e/ Foundation (“Your data is YOUR data!”), bringing us de-Googled Android phones. These phones can run without any dependence on or control by Google: instead the user is in ultimate control. The irony of Android being marketed as an “open source” operating system is that only parts of it are open source and people have had to expend a huge amount of effort to build replacements for Google’s proprietary parts. But now the huge efforts of many volunteers over many years, now beginning to be augmented by some small companies including /e/, are paying off and these alternatives exist. Read more in, for example, a late-2020 interview in The Register.
These companies are formed from small groups of people following their beliefs. Together they are building the next wave of the freedom software movement that is perhaps most widely known as the Linux world. Taking the idea far beyond freedom to re-use and re-mix just individual software programs, they are bringing freedom now to the world of connected digital services that we use to store our family memories and to communicate with one another.
Freedom Software Laptops
Back to laptops.
A few big-name manufacturers make a few of their models available to buy with Linux pre-installed. Sadly they hide rather than promote this option, seeming to consider it merely a necessity to satisfy certain business customers, and offering little beyond a basic default installation which could easily be done at home.
The best way to support freedom software, and to get a machine that is already properly set up for it, is to buy from one of the small companies that specialise in it.
A DuckDuckGo web search for “Linux laptops” found plenty of starting points, some articles listing the favourite mainstream laptops that people like to run Linux on, others listing the specialist companies that sell Linux laptops.
I ended up looking at both alternatives: buying a mainstream laptop, likely second-hand, or buying a new laptop from a specialist. The category I am looking for this time is slim, ultra-light or “ultrabook”, around 14″ screen size, to replace the feel of a MacBook Air.
Best liked mainstream laptops this year seem to be first Dell’s XPS 13 series, and second Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon series. Each range covers a wide range of specs.
Specialist linux laptop vendors include System76 (such as their Lemur pro), Purism (e.g. Librem 14), and Pine64 (e.g. PineBook pro), along with several more. Some make their own hardware, and others buy mainstream or OEM hardware and customise it. Most offer a choice of operating system, all based on well known open source OS’s (the GNU/Linux or *BSD families), sometimes customised or own-branded.
Then I found Laptop with Linux.com, a trading name of Comexr B.V. in the Netherlands. They sell a range of laptop styles, all based on the OEM brand “Clevo”, and have a lovely set of customisation options ranging from hardware components to setting up disk encryption, choosing installed applications and choosing my user login name. None of that is anything I couldn’t do at home, but it shows they go further than a basic default installation of the OS and it genuinely will save me some time and effort. For me, they offer the extra advantage of shipping with UK tax and duties already included.
Second-hand? Tempting. New? Sensible.
To begin with, I could not accept the cost of buying new, as machines I considered decent spec were available for hundreds of pounds less. Eventually, I re-balanced my assessment in favour of buying something that is intended to last for years, and I mean ten years. The hassle of changing from one computer to another, setting everything up and getting used to the differences, can be realistically valued at tens of hours. From that point of view, it made sense to buy something new and high spec so that it doesn’t seem too terrible after many years.
So it is that I am ordering the Clevo L141MU 14-inch Magnesium Laptop. I will go for a mid-to-high hardware spec, particularly focusing on speed because I want it to be pleasant to use, and mid-level RAM and SSD capacity because this is an upgradeable computer and the prices of those will come down. RAM in particular can be upgraded later with no hassle. Upgrading the SSD later would require externally copying its contents to the new one which might be an evening’s work.
It is even lighter than the MacBook Air it replaces, and just fractionally less thin.
Many of us want to support green energy. We keep hearing we can play our part by switching to a “green tariff”, and we can.
Sadly there is a big trap that we need to learn to recognise: the “green tariffs” advertised by many suppliers are a deceptive marketing ploy known as “greenwash”.
Look for explanations and advice from independent organisations to identify the (very few) good green options. Price comparison and switching web sites can be misleading. Some good resources are:
The core of the explanation is this. When we ask our mixed-source energy supplier to switch to a “green tariff”, the main things that happen are trivial accounting exercises that do not result in any less brown or any more green energy being bought or sold or produced.
First, let’s be sure we understand that our electricity is supplied by pouring all the sources into the National Grid, and delivering a portion of the mix to our home like from a tap on a water pipe. There is no technical way to separate out which bit came from which source.
Therefore any claim like “we deliver 100% green energy to your home” is already misleading. The only thing we can potentially achieve by switching is to redirect the money from our bills away from brown sources and into green sources.
What really happens? When we switch to a “green tariff” from our mixed-source energy supplier, they may “allocate” to us (on paper) a portion of the existing green energy supply that is really shared among all their customers, thereby deeming the non-green-tariff customers a corresponding bit “browner”, not redirecting our bills towards green supplies, and not changing the overall supply or demand at all. Or they may claim “offsetting” or “matching”, cheaply buying up certificates that prove a green source generated that amount of energy. Indeed it did, but not for us, not because of our switching.
They may round it off with talk of tree planting to help us forget about questioning the technicalities.
Companies’ marketing material, price comparison websites, staff on the phone, and even rules from energy regulator Ofgem aren’t helping customers understand…
The “green tariff” has been advertised for so long and so widely that it is hard to believe it does not mean what it ought to, hard to believe the industry has got away with such misrepresentation, but this has been going on for years and still is the case in 2021.
If we have already switched or were planning to do so, we might feel deceived. But there is something we can do.
What Can We Do?
The conclusion is simple. Search for articles like those linked above, that list the few suppliers that directly buy or produce renewable energy, investing their customers’ bills into increasing renewable generation. The way for a consumer to make a difference is to switch to one of those suppliers.
I first mentioned this issue years ago in some notes on Wind Energy when I lived in sight of a wind turbine and decided to make the switch.
Disclaimer: I have no connection to the industry besides being a customer and bond holder of Ecotricity.
Teckids e.V. held their annual summer camp for kids between 9 and 15 years. This year, after we started introducing Matrix and Element as a chat platform … Some got really excited that they could even change or add features to Element … Unfortunately, Element is developed on GitHub, so the potential young contributors are locked out by the exclusive Terms of Use there. We are trying to reach out to Element HQ to find a solution.
Ironic but all too common: a Libre/FOSS project falling foul of the very issue it is trying to overcome. For this post, however, let us not focus on this particular situation. Let us instead learn from it how we can better explain why we need Matrix and other Libre systems.
GitHub only allows users over a certain age. Initially when we adults sign up, this seems like no big deal: it sounds like quite a young age (13) and it says it’s to comply with the law of the USA, which sounds obvious and unavoidable.
This is a great example of how we restrict other people’s freedom every time we choose a silo. We start off thinking the silo is reasonably inclusive and gives enough freedom for what we need. After all, it’s one we use, so by definition it’s good enough for people like ourself. But:
everyone we want to connect with has to obey the same terms, and
we don’t have any control over those terms.
Even when it’s “our project”, we can’t choose who we are allowed to collaborate with.
What if our situation changes, perhaps a long time later? Perhaps our friend has children who under the supervision of their parents are competent and keen to code. We might ask them to use their parent’s account. GitHub’s terms forbid that too. Anyway that would mean they couldn’t keep a record of their contributions linked to their own identity.
GitHub, being a silo, restricts the freedom of its users and the freedom of our collaborators and would-be collaborators.
By contrast, when we have control of our own Libre system, such as a self-managed GitLab, then we can set our own terms and conditions.
That’s a key benefit of using a Libre system.
It’s the same in any Silo-vs-Libre domain: Zoom vs Jitsi, WhatsApp vs Matrix. When we use the silo, we restrict not only our own freedom (which we may not immediately care about) but also the freedom of those we contact. We probably care more about the freedom of those contacts who are our real-life friends, family, and colleagues, who in turn care about their own friends and family.
In trying to convince people to switch to Matrix and other open tech, it can be hard to find “selling points” that resonate with ordinary people who are not already familiar with these freedom issues. As above, they think the silo they are using gives them as much freedom as they need. This point about how it impacts those they care about is one that the general public may be able to relate to, and recognise as important.
I am leaving my latest job and moving on to my new passion, Matrix.
Recently I have become passionate about the need for modern communications systems that are Open in the sense of freedom to talk to anyone. The currently dominant silos like WhatsApp only let me talk to the friends who are willing and able to subscribe to that company’s terms and restrictions, with no way to get around them when they decide to display advertising to me or stop supporting my mother’s not-terribly-old iPhone. To me, that is like some historical feudal system in which I live as a tenant and I must obtain agreement from the lord of the estate if I want to invite any of my friends to visit me. We need and deserve better than that: an Open way to communicate to our friends and business contacts. Email served that role for the first part of the 21st century, and Matrix now serves that role for the era of instant messaging.
My software development in recent years has been mostly on the open source Subversion version-control system, and I have particularly enjoyed helping to create something so widely used and appreciated. Nowadays its popularity is eclipsed by Git in small to medium sized projects, while Subversion still enjoys a strong following in certain fields such as games development due to its strengths in versioning large data sets and simplicity of usage. Participating in the development of Open Source software has given me the greatest satisfaction in my professional life, and I intend to keep it that way. That is why developing the Matrix communication system is so exciting.
p.s. I am still contracting on Subversion support work, so get in touch if you need any bug fixing or problem diagnosis.
One of my favourite open source institutions is considering replacing their use of an open source tool with a proprietary service “donated” for “free” by its vendor.
It’s time I just said what I think: Encouraging open-source contributors to adopt another proprietary sponsored service is against the principles I want the institution to uphold.
Pootle is an open source tool that assists with human-language translation. Contributors to a project use it to write and contribute translations of open source software into their local language. As with many open source projects, it is under-resourced. Proprietary services look more attractive, if we look as measures such as the immediate user experience and the maintenance burden.
Yet, when we ask contributors to use any “donated” proprietary service, we make those users and the FOSS community bear its cost in the domains of lock-in and advertising. I am disappointed to hear that my favourite institution is seriously considering this. (This is not about translation tools specifically; I feel the same about all the user-facing tools and services we use.)
Don’t get me wrong: I am not suggesting this goes against the institution’s policies, and of course there are hard-to-ignore benefits to choosing a proprietary service. I can’t imagine exactly how much pain it is trying to maintain this Pootle instance. On the other hand I do know first-hand the pain of maintaining a lot of other FOSS that I insist on using myself, and I sometimes wonder if I’d like to switch to a commercial this-or-that. At those times I remember how much I value upholding the open source principles, and I choose to stick with what is sometimes less immediately convenient but ultimately more rewarding.
Time after time I observe the FOSS community suffering from getting sucked in to the traps of commercial interest like this. A FOSS project chooses to use a commercial service for its own convenience, and by doing so it feeds the commercial service, increasing familiarity with it and talk about it (forms of lock-in and advertising), decreasing the development going in to competing FOSS services, making it more likely that others will follow. I observe FOSS people tending to concentrate on the short-term benefit to their own project in isolation, even when they are peripherally aware that their field would benefit in the long run from working together with others on the tools and services that they all need.
What could be the cultural process led the institution to this place?
“Current tools are poor… Let’s try another ‘free’ service to quickly overcome our problem.”
I feel like there’s a cultural step missing there. Where is the step that says,
“We are hundreds of open source developers needing a good translation service. Other open source developers are trying to develop good translation services for people like us. What a great fit! Let’s work together!”?
I would rather join and contribute to a new project group whose purpose is to provide an Open service (in this case for translation) for the institution’s projects to use, doing whatever development, customization, maintenance and IT infra work it needs depending on the state of the available open solutions.
To fill in the missing step, I feel we need to introduce a culture of speaking out at a membership level to say, “Here’s a challenge; who can volunteer to form a group to solve it?” and encouraging members to think of working together on communal service provision projects as a normal part of the institution’s activity.
By working closely with the FOSS people who want to provide a service that we need, our contribution to the upstream software projects would benefit others for the public good, and more generally we would foster mutually beneficial growth and normalization of adoption of FOSS technologies.
I’m not saying it isn’t hard to get the necessary contribution level to make a difference, or that folks haven’t tried before. (Some communal service projects are used in this institution, but they tend to be small scale in-house projects rather than collaborations with other FOSS projects.)
How can we drum up support for doing it the FOSS way?
my email spell checker stupidly flagging the name of a recipient who is in my address book.
WARNING: VERY HOT WATER
in a disabled toilet in Sheffield Teaching Hospital. I’m reluctant to scald my hands, so what will I do? Or a disabled person or a toddler? So much for teaching hand wash hygiene. (An old thermostatic regulator is visible in the pipework. How hard would it be to repair or replace it?)
I received an invitation to click to petition MPs to reject the Brexit deal.
What happens if we try to stop it now? I couldn’t find an answer in the linked material. I was quite persuaded during Any Questions on Saturday by a panelist’s argument that although the whole thing was and is a bad deal, at this point getting it over and done with so we can get on to more important things is better than dragging it out.
In all likelihood, […] a majority of ordinary Britons would vote for Remain if a second referendum were to be held today. So, should there be a second vote, once the terms of the negotiated Brexit are known? Six months ago, I thought a second referendum a good idea. Today I don’t. There isn’t time, and making that kind of a decision isn’t the public’s job. It never was.
but then he seems to be saying recently that our politicians might choose to “throw the question back to the people” because they themselves aren’t willing to make that decision, and that that might be “very winnable”.
Exactly what kind of relationship we have with the EU isn’t the most important thing. We can work with it one way or another. The more important thing is how all the anger of polarized opinions divides and hurts people and diverts us from more positive and urgent pursuits.
But never try another referendum. Haven’t we learned that lesson the hard way? A crude question divides a nation, driven by emotions not on the ballot paper, paralysing politics for years to come. If your confirmation bias draws your eyes only to stories that tell you the tide is turning, cast your eyes occasionally at how Murdoch, the Mail and the Telegraph still ply their venom. They would still be there, poisoning the air, in a second referendum.
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