Joe

It typically takes a small core team to build the framework/architecture that enables many others to contribute meaningfully.

Most OSS projects get bugger all contributions from outside the initial core team, having limited ability to onboard people. The biggest and most active (out of necessity or by design) have a contribution friendly software architecture and process, and often deliberately organized communities (eg. K8S & CNCF) or major corporate sponsors filling the role.

Free Software and resulting ecosystems seem to have a better chance of contributing to the common good over the long term. This is simply because most companies are beholden to their shareholders, and at some point the urge to squeeze every last cent out of an opportunity comes to the forefront, and many initially well intentioned efforts get poisoned.

Free Software licenses like the GPL help to protect our freedom and to set open standards, and are essential for the core technology stack.

When someone can get annoyed with some shitty software or its license-terms and reimplement the core functionality in a few days/weeks/months … eventually someone will get annoyed and create some decent free software that will kill off the shitty alternatives, or even just a better commercial alternative. This only works because of the open platforms & protocols.

One of the major challenges for consumers is finding good software today in the grey goo of projects and appstores. This harks back to OP’s point about curated collections of software. It’s also where the various foundations add value (CNCF, Linux Foundation, Apache) … along with “awesome X” gitlab repos, which are far better than random youtube videos or ad-riddled blogs or magazine articles.

The true strength is in the open interfaces and common protocols that enable competition and choice, followed by the free-to-use libraries that establish a foundation upon which we can build and iterate. This helps us to stay in control of our hardware, our data, and our destiny.

Practically speaking, there is often more value in releasing something as free software than there is to commercialising it or otherwise tightly controlling the source code… and for these smaller tools and libraries it is especially the case.

Many bigger projects (eg. linux kernel, firefox, kubernetes, apache*) help set the direction of entire industries, building new opportunities as they go, thanks to the standardization that comes from their popularity.

It’s also a reason why many companies release software as open source too, especially in the early days, establishing themselves as THE leader…for a while at least (eg. Docker Inc, Hashicorp).

And don’t forget a wearable faraday cage ($39.99 @ amazon.com)!

It would be naive to think this isn’t already in widespread use.

It also makes for a waste of ink, for those judges and lawyers who are more comfortable with hard copies.

Challenge accepted.

Did you find a solution?

Congrats for waiting this long - many parents don’t.

Honestly, this will depend on your child. If they are prone to addictive or obsessive behaviour, a smart phone will only amplify the tendancy. We already know how hard it is for adults to put down their phones for any length of time, and kids typically have less will power.

That said - digital communication is an important part of most people’s lives now. If all her friends are using a particular app to communicate, they will “need” it too. Some parental controls would be good for the first phone – which apps get installed, etc. Just be prepared to unlock most of them. ;-)

You might want a phone “lockbox” at home to ensure they turn off. Hopefully the school is strict about phone usage and etiquette too - it can help.

What is the typing experience that you want, and for which language(s). It’s not clear to me, sorry.

It is possible to map keyboard input in various ways. For more complex use-cases, many programs support character substitution as you type (eg. gx could become ĝ automatically).

It feels more like a dance game to me. Boring and awkward choreographed moves in response to predictable monster moves. Once you’ve learned the moves, then you can pay and play!

Some civilized countries have a process whereby partial rent can be legally withheld/deducted, incentivising them to fix it quickly. Less civilized countries require you to engage a lawyer and risk having your rental contract terminated unilaterally.

Nothing like a good pillory to brighten your day!

Nokia Jaws was the best.

You have an opportunity. Give him a pre-installed Linux and a terminal, along with a page of commands that he can run to do neat things… including starting the GUI to watch his favourite (ideally pre-downloaded) videos, running some demos, etc.

Don’t make it too easy, but not too hard (2 you said? Can type a few characters though…)… Add to it over the years, unlocking the power, and guiding him to discover more by himself.

Kids won’t become tech savvy if we hand everything to them on a silver platter, with touch screens, controllers, and flashy games. It can be bland and boring, until they do something.

It might just be the most life changing gift they ever receive.

They are not even using right hand peek for an advantage. Original Amateurs.

Not A.I, just a terrible system that incentivises (and even demands for public companies) abusive behaviour.

It truly is a shame that this behaviour is considered acceptable in many games. I still report racist comms, but it’s sometimes hard to manage as (a) it’s near impossible to report 5 people chanting n****r all at once (b) they rarely get banned when you do.

It is incredible to me how little imagination these people have, acting like primary school children who just learned a bad word and now use it all the time.

In the EU, it is primarily russians and americans who engage in this behaviour (as far as I can recognise the accents). A downside of the sanctions is that many games no longer have russian servers.

I would like to see some legislation that “encourages” large multiplayer game server operators to police their online environments properly.

An apparmor profile is associated with an executable, based on its filesystem path. I think distributions tend to support either SELinux or Apparmor, but some (like Arch) support both.

Apparmor profiles are easier to reason about than SELinux, I find.

I have two apparmor profiles targeting shell scripts, which can run other programs. One is “audit” (permissive with logging) and the other is “safe” (enforcing).

The safe profile still has a lot of read access, but not to any directories or files with secrets or private data. Write access is only to the paths and files it needs, and I regularly extend it.

For a specific program that should have very restricted network access, I have some iptables (& ip6tables) rules that only apply to a particular gid, and I have a setgid wrapper script.

Note: This is all better than nothing, but proper segregation would be better. Running things on separate PCs, VMs or even unpriviliged containers.

Ha, mia samideano! Tre bon’!