Here's to getting added to a secret government chat one day 🥂

Explanation for newbies:

• Shell is the programming language that you use when you open a terminal on linux or mac os. Well, actually "shell" is a family of languages with many different implementations (bash, dash, ash, zsh, ksh, fish, ....)

• Writing programs in shell (called "shell scripts") is a harrowing experience because the language is optimized for interactive use at a terminal, not writing extensive applications

• The two lines in the meme change the shell's behavior to be slightly less headache-inducing for the programmer:

  • set -euo pipefail is the short form of the following three commands:
    • set -e: exit on the first command that fails, rather than plowing through ignoring all errors
    • set -u: treat references to undefined variables as errors
    • set -o pipefail: If a command piped into another command fails, treat that as an error
  • export LC_ALL=C tells other programs to not do weird things depending on locale. For example, it forces seq to output numbers with a period as the decimal separator, even on systems where coma is the default decimal separator (russian, dutch, etc.).

• The title text references "posix", which is a document that standardizes, among other things, what features a shell must have. Posix does not require a shell to implement pipefail, so if you want your script to run on as many different platforms as possible, then you cannot use that feature.

Screenshot sources:

• https://lemmy.world/post/21863843?scrollToComments=true
• https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/4997189

It's funny when armchair experts insist that the fediverse won't catch on because "federation is too hard to understand" when arguably the most widespread communication system on the internet follows the same model

Update

Apparently this is patched out by Brave, but it is enabled by default. See u/Engywuck@lemm.ee 's comment below!

Vanilla chromium gives google's websites special treatment by offering detailed CPU info, among other things. This is implemented through a hidden browser extension. You can prove this by yourself by running chrome.runtime.sendMessage("nkeimhogjdpnpccoofpliimaahmaaome", {method: "cpu.getInfo"}, (response) => {console.log(JSON.stringify(response, null, 2)); }, ); on google.com through the browser console. For me, it gives the following info:

{
  "value": {
    "archName": "x86_64",
    "features": [
      "mmx",
      "sse",
      "sse2",
      "sse3",
      "ssse3",
      "sse4_1",
      "sse4_2",
      "avx"
    ],
    "modelName": "Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2620M CPU @ 2.70GHz",
    "numOfProcessors": 4,
    "processors": [
      {
        "usage": {
          "idle": 28238205,
          "kernel": 827581,
          "total": 32762960,
          "user": 3697174
        }
      },
      {
        "usage": {
          "idle": 1455131,
          "kernel": 743391,
          "total": 6209241,
          "user": 4010719
        }
      },
      {
        "usage": {
          "idle": 1448653,
          "kernel": 769970,
          "total": 6068506,
          "user": 3849883
        }
      },
      {
        "usage": {
          "idle": 1450274,
          "kernel": 744886,
          "total": 5948597,
          "user": 3753437
        }
      }
    ],
    "temperatures": []
  }
}

Note that this doesn't work on other websites like lemmy.world, only google.

What I am confused about is that I can replicate this behavior in Brave. Why does brave reveal this information to google, and to google only? From what I understand, it can be used for fingerprinting and tracking. Shouldn't this be patched out? Is my testing methodology flawed? Will this be fixed?

Brave version: Version 1.67.123 Chromium: 126.0.6478.126 (Official Build) unknown (64-bit) running on linux via flatpak

Context:

Permissive licenses (commonly referred to as "cuck licenses") like the MIT license allow others to modify your software and release it under an unfree license. Copyleft licenses (like the Gnu General Public License) mandate that all derivative works remain free.

Andrew Tanenbaum developed MINIX, a modular operating system kernel. Intel went ahead and used it to build Management Engine, arguably one of the most widespread and invasive pieces of malware in the world, without even as much as telling him. There's nothing Tanenbaum could do, since the MIT license allows this.

Erik Andersen is one of the developers of Busybox, a minimal implementation of that's suited for embedded systems. Many companies tried to steal his code and distribute it with their unfree products, but since it's protected under the GPL, Busybox developers were able to sue them and gain some money in the process.

Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn't seem to mind what intel did. But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.