But isn't this part of the point the author of the article is trying to make? In case of Superfish it was United States Department of Homeland Security who advised uninstalling it and in case of Sony's rootkit, a class-action lawsuit. In both cases higher authorities hired by people to protect them, protected them. Not FSF, nor the fact that the code wasn't GPL.
Even if Superfish was GPL licensed, the issue would've persisted. As article mentions even laptops coming with Linux pre-installed hardly come with the Kernel and userspace tools source code and you need to download them separately. Should Lenovo have preloaded Superfish as Linux kernel module and shipped it to its consumer laptops, United States Department of Homeland Security would have still advised removing it.
In both examples, a higher authority may have also acted but if they had done the same with free software things either would have been caught immediately or a lawsuit would have been possible for breach of license if they tried to hide it.
>In both cases higher authorities hired by people to protect them, protected them. Not FSF,
The FSF did a better job of protecting them with their unwavering stance. Neither would ever have caused an issue if you followed their advice to never use non-free software.
A bit unrelated but I wrote https://github.com/amir/hepccn to list TCP connections by domains rather than just IPs. It filters connections to port 443 and 8443, downloads the peer certificate and then extracts the subject name (pretty sure I learned this trick from an article on Julia Evans' website but can't find it now). I wanted to add more functionalities to it but I stumbled upon an issue and that's for when SNI is enabled. I guess there's no way for me to recover the hostname the client has sent at the start of the handshaking process without introducing MITM, right?
You won't be able to recover it after the fact, but the SNI is cleartext on the wire as part of ClientHello even in TLS 1.3. Work to encrypt this is an ongoing effort (called eSNI).
I don't think enough credit is given to how Functional Programming as a paradigm has shifted and changed over the years. It's grown and developed a lot.
There was definitely a time when having first class functions and functions as params was a big focus of Functional Programming. It opens the doors to a lot of expressive idioms. The inclusion of closures was an important part of this. This wave was definitely all about expressability more than structured reasoning. I'm talking lispy homoiconic macroy goodness.
Later Functional Programming thought was focused in the direction of ML/Haskelly/OCamly languages with a stronger focus on function purity, immutability, side-effect management, type inference, abstract algebra, and static guarantees of program structure and correctness.
Sure the ideas existed before, but they're hard to reason about until they're distilled into a paradigm/doctrine. And Functional Programming did that.
Like OOP, I think both waves of Functional Programming had a big impact on the programming landscape by introducing and popularizing a new vocabulary to a broader audience. The situational application of them will always come with experience and so every "fad" has the baggage of over application once it goes mainstream. OOP with Java, Javascript's framework explosion, 500 blog posts about monads, etc.
> Editor tooling is sub-par (especially compared to language communities like Java and C#) and finicky - we often end up just compiling in a separate terminal.
I'm a subscriber but I don't look at it as a subscription to a weekly magazine but an investment. Enabling knowledgeable people to write in-depth analysis of various patch sets or subsystems of Linux kernel—which rarely change dramatically—ensures that, later on, there'll always be an article in Google search results that'll explain the reason behind certain behaviours in a more approachable manner than reading the source code or doc.txts—they're invaluable but a bit intimidating.
As an occasional writer for LWN, thank you for supporting them and helping make it possible for LWN to pay for articles. (I don't write about the kernel, though.)
I felt the same way and subscribed for years, but lately most of the content seems to be links out to external sites, and many of those seem to be reposts from HN or proggit....just not worth it anymore to me
I don't see the behavior you describe. A lot of the content references external sites, to provide additional information and context, but that's a good thing: it means more people in more places are having knowledgeable discussions that are worth referring to. I don't think it has turned LWN into a content-free link farm.
Don't be afraid of hyperlinking; it's the reason the Web was created, after all.
