Great... yet annother Open OS phone/computer. Not like that's been done before to "great acclaim". Anybody remember Jolla, the SailfishOS, and the Jolla Tablet?
Part of my local NextDoor after I got a card in the mail.
Lots of "Where was that police car that went down my street headed?", "Escaped Animal", "Flea Market swap", "Promoting my home researched Christian eschatology book published on vanity press".
Occastionally there's useful information like City Council issues, major road closures, etc. But As others have said a lot of NIMBYs, armchair patriots, and thinly disguised racisim.
Have you ever taken a Greyhound? Granted I have a n=1 experience, however a Bus leaving Denver (with a final destination of Dallas) leaved much to be desired.
The route-through method means that you'll stop about once every hour for 15~20 minutes for on-off and snacks/restroom. If you're still somewhat wakeful these stops are just at the twilight phase and you don't get truly restful sleep.
Read the article. The employees who want Travis back are people who clicked into the letter/thread and read it. No positive assertion that those who read the letter actually endorse the position. Let's generously say half of the 1000 endorse it. That's 5% of the entire employee base. I'd be interested to see how many of the entire employee base expresses the viewpoint that they don't want him back.
I understand the need to fund things, but could someone illuminate for a end consumer of the software what requires 15k euros a month development for GnuPG? Yes new cyphers/PRNGs/hashes come online, but it doesn't seem to be moving as quickly as other internet infrastructure (GnuTLS, X.org, SSL, NTPD) products.
It seems like things that were sponsored by major organizations because they saw the good in having their name associated with a product or service in favor of getting the "internet at large" to pay for things that have become ingrained as "But it's free so why should we pay for it?"
Useful spending of that money would be UX issues, making the horror that is using this stuff bearable.
Usability is atrocious and if you do not use it all the time you have to google the simplest things (for which the results are mostly outdated or wrong or bad practice so you have to be careful with which explanation you follow) which the software itself could explain to you.
"Useful spending of that money would be UX issues, making the horror that is using this stuff bearable."
100%. Freeze all work on crypto except for fixes for new problems that show up. All rest of money goes to hiring a UX expert for a design that anyone can pick up for common case and then implementing it.
An alternative might just be to expose more of the underlying functionality via non-interactive interfaces, to encourage third-party/FOSS simplified interfaces for specific tasks.
Even trying to use a bash script to automate things is tricky because of gpg2's interactivity. I'm sure it was put there to improve usability, of course :) (which it does, in the interactive case).
I'd generally agree. Although I think this is rather something the people behind Enigmail should figure out. The vast majority of gpg users will never interact with it over the terminal, probably.
You're right. Not only GnuPG but everything around it (mostly email clients) are in dire need of a UX overhaul.
Presenting such a complicated technical topic only in it's purely technical form is not enough imho. Clear and concise explanation for each and every action and item that gets displayed (and the whys!) would do wonders.
The page gives some informations about where the money will go:
> This money will firstly allow us to continue our maintenance of GnuPG. We also intend to use it to fund our work on the Gnuk security token. And, one new project that it will support is a book called "An Advanced Introduction to GnuPG." A book for developers who want to integrate GnuPG into their programs, and need to understand the various concepts, the important security tradeoffs, and common pitfalls; for digital security trainers who need to understand GnuPG to be able to make sound recommendations to users; and, of course, for enthusiasts.
I agree with waldfee that it would probably be a very good idea to invest a chunk of that money into UI improvements. GnuPG is not exactly the friendliest program out there, even for those of us who are very comfortable doing everything from the command line.
Exactly my thoughts. Also, many people have given up signing emails with pgp as most recipients use cloud based service like Gmail making it almost useless. This leaves a small niche community where both ends are outside the cloud based email network like journalist usecase maybe.
signing emails is by far not the only use-case for gpg. The entire package signing infrastructure of all linux distributions is underpinned by gpg. Even if they spend all of the 15K each month on having a single developer audit and improve the code-base, I'd be fine with that.
Creating the group scared United because you didn't have any unifying characteristic other than the event. Having people ruminate together could have been the fermenting grounds for several (or a class action) lawsuit against the company.
If he is so unconcerned with verifying his test results, perhaps luminaries in his discipline should write to the journals where his papers are being published pointing out the uncorrected errors and suggest that the journal's editorial department be supplemented to fine tooth comb his assertions.
It's overreactions to marginally risque content that strip humor from talks.
I'd hate to think what the "PC police" would say to the very tenured college abstract calculas professor who accidentally asked us to derive the tangent to secant z. He paused after writing sec(z) and made the comment in front of the entire lecture hall "I'm sure we all would like to be sexy."
I use it through second level abstracting site hnapp.com
I don't care about the Y Combinator self promotion of their startup incubators, nor do I care about Y Combinator's own blog content. I also don't have time to read the entire firehose of content that comes through daily from the "new" feed. I self limit to posts that have at least a score of 50. I also use a RSS feed so I can dip in/out as needed.
