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Copyleft vs non-copyleft.

Copyleft is a practice that subjects the software derived from other software to the same terms of license as the original.

There are two types of copyleft software. The traditional one that covers the whole derivative work and a weak-copyleft that covers only individual files.

A famous example of the traditional one is GNU GPL. It is the first formalized copyleft-style free software license. The software licensed under it is Linux Kernel, GNU libc, GNU GCC and others.

This is a review of the article “Onions can make people cry”.

The article title choice is poor. Jumping ahead, it never reveals why the onion router is called that way. And in this case, when authors say “Onions can make people cry”, they don’t really hint anything. This might be confusing for an uninitiated reader.

The simple goals that are set in the beginning should prepare for what the article is supposed to cover. So is the structure outlined in the table of contents. At first, the three webs. The surface web. the deep web and the dark web. Then the history of Tor. The outline of how the onion router works. And legality issues. Followed by the conclusion.

Not sure if I understand the task correctly. But I’ll try to explore the topic and talk about a device that helps people with limited mobility play video games.

It is an Xbox Adaptive Controller. It was developed by Microsoft to help people with limited mobility play video games. Developed primarily for Windows and Xbox, Microsoft does not restrict its use on other platforms. The device identifies itself as a regular Xbox controller and supported by every platform with support for that controller.

I would like to compare two big Linux distributions, Ubuntu LTS and RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Here I specifically chose LTS version of Ubuntu as comparing regular versions with RHEL would be inappropriate.

Both distributions are backed by companies, Canonical and RedHat.

Their commercial interest largely defines the direction that those distributions take.

For example in 2011 Ubuntu switched the default user interface from a popular Gnome to a home-grown Unity, which sparked a major controversy in the community. This fueled migration towards Debian, Linux Mint and others.

Since hackers ideals first emerged, they’ve found support by a wide audience and have now mostly been accepted universally.

Information should be free. This idea is alive and well in wiki-based projects, most notably Wikipedia. This collaboration also prevents duplication of effort so that “problem should ever have to be solved twice.”

Decentralization and fight misuse of authority. Private social networks such as Facebook and Twitter now play the role of such authority. They acquired their position due to natural network effect of isolated networks. This is a step-back towards a centralization. Recently those networks started abusing their position to crackdown on online communities which it led to increased interest towards decentralized, federated systems such as Mastodon and Matrix.

My favorite example of online censorship is Russias ban of video “Dumb ways to die”.[1]

The video is an Australian public service announcement made by Melbourne Metro. It lists various dumb way of dying in a form of a song, and in the end contrasts them with ways of dying around trains. It wend viral and received a warm critical acclaim.

It was banned for “Призыв к самоубийству”, “Suicide encouragement”. I don’t know how to comment it. Enough said.

I will try to analyze Russia according to Mitnik formula. In terms of technology, training and policy.

Russia has a good technology expertise. A lot of different software and hardware products are developed to be consumed internally and some of it is later exported. There’s a famous antivirus vendor Kaspersky. Lesser known networking gear vendor Eltex. Due to local regulation all Russia’s lawful interception gear is developed in Russia. Out of fear of sanctions for the past 5 years development of general computing software was greatly accelerated. There are companies that produce various Linux distributions, office suites, web browsers. And it’s not just a repackaged FOSS products. A good example is Postgres Pro company. They produce a downstream proprietary distribution of PostgreSQL. While doing so they actually are employing 2 PostgreSQL maintainers. Many changes are later upstreamed.

In 2014 Joyent, a public cloud operator, had an outage. The us-east-1 region, an entire datacenter went offline. It happened because of an operator error. It was also revealed that the poorly designed command line tool has contributed to the error. During a scheduled maintenance, a reboot command was mis-typed and instead of rebooting just one server, the entire data center was rebooted.[0]

Later in 2017 at the GOTO conference in Chicago Joeynt’s CTO Bryan Cantrill shed some light on what exactly happened and shared some internal IRC logs.[1] Joyent’s entire stack is open source so I was able to locate the tool in question and the commit that fixed the issue.

There are 10 Core Rules of Netiquette. These rules cover common courtesy online and informal “rules of the road” of cyberspace.

The rule no. 2 says “Adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life”. The use of “in real life” got me thinking.

In 2013 I saw a movie “TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard” about The Pirate Bay trial. I remember how Peter Sunde debated the prosecutors about their use of the phrase “IRL, In real life”. He said that he doesn’t use this term, but uses “AFK, away from keyboard” because “the Internet is for real”[1]. I remember how strongly it resonated with me.

This is a short overview of different types of copyleft in FLOSS licenses.

Essentially there are four types of copyleft. No copyleft, weak copyleft, strong copyleft and very strong copyleft.

No copyleft, a permissive license, that does not require derivative or compilation work to retain a license. There are many examples of such license. Apache 2.0 a very famous one. This license is developed by The Apache Software Foundation for their projects. It also gained significant adoption by others. In particular, Android Open Source Project, LLVM, Apple’s Swift projects are using Apache 2.0 license. Another example is a BSD-style license which also includes ISC and MIT licenses.