Consoom.Soy

A new year is at the doorstep, unfolding like a blank page. New Year’s Eve – bleak, cold, and noisy as it may be – invites us to turn inward and reflect upon the past year.

Buried in the depths of our consciousness, we find more than just fleeting illusions. Quite the contrary: Those who engage sufficiently may discover a deeper, profound truth. It is the only truth we truly know. It is deeply personal. It is the foundation of life. It is the ego in the third person.

This is a fascinating idea, to be quite honest. Exploring the idea that humanity tends to devour itself has always been quite interesting, and now I get to write about it. The inspiration came to me after I talked to an 84-year-old gentleman in the subway, and we exchanged some philosophical views.

“Stop making movies about your political agenda!” This is a popular sentence, often uttered by many right-wing talking-heads at modern movies and TV shows. Citing the good, old times, they often remark how modern media is laced with a toxic liberal agenda. But are they in the right? And can they cite older movies to prove their point? Here we’ll see if politics in movies is a modern invention, or if the right-wingers are being overdramatic.

Take a good look at our current leaders. The western ones. Did you notice something? Exactly, they’re all old. Like, really old. If you look at them, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Could it be “This guy’s going to bite it soon”? Or do you think something along the lines of “Wow, what a pathetic person we elected”? Here we’ll analyze the line of thought that calls western leaders weak.

“It’s the same fucking rock, just closer!”

The given quote has caused quite a stir within me. On one hand, I wanted to tell that person that they understand shit about the beauty of nature and that they need to open themselves up, on the other hand I didn’t want to spoil my own appreciation of said beauty by quarreling with someone who just doesn’t live on the same wavelength as myself.

The internet loves raving about so-called Nice Guys. From their misogynistic views to their unrealistic expectations of receiving sexual favors for doing the bare minimum, it can clearly be deduced that they are not the people they think they are. But what about the other side of the coin? Are the greatest critics of Nice Guys really better than the people they oh so generously drag through the manure every so often? And is every Nice Guy (i.e. the ones that are insanely resentful) born out of sexual frustration? In this article, I will delve into one of the more toxic parts of the internet, and clear up some biases that one might have accumulated over the years.

We all know and hate the GNOME desktop environment. It’s the dreaded “anti-user” human interface guidelines, that, quite frankly, make Windows and macOS look perfectly usable. But what if I told you that our criticism stems from the wrong reasons, and that you should give GNOME a second chance, or at least, a try? In this article, I will make a case for using GNOME and explain why it is by far the most unique desktop environment there is.

I often take the time to think about the things that are important to me. Stuff like family, programming, life, philosophy, psychology, free software and Linux, among many. And it made me wonder: What makes Linux so special? What makes it stand out from all the other Operating Systems? How does Linux take effect on your life where other systems don’t? Of course, the GOTO argument would be all the technical aspects, its respect of privacy, and the user’s freedoms compared to proprietary systems. You could also argue that the thing that makes Linux outstanding is its general system security, as in being basically the safest system you could use.

Every developer has at least heard of JavaScript. The dreaded language that runs most of the World Wide Web’s logic. But did you know that it harbors great peril not just for developers, but also for regular end users, no matter which system they use. This danger comes from so-called “non-free JavaScript code”.

Non-free JavaScript performs a lot of functions. Among the most harmful are telemetry, espionage, and other intrusive practices that harm the end user in many different ways.

The Internet is a peculiar place. On one side, it is the gateway to an immeasurable amount of information, open to anyone curious enough to look for it, and a community that is often friendlier and more forthcoming than most of your real-life friends. On the other hand, it opens us up to mass surveillance and scrutiny from anyone whose opinion you so blatantly defy. But something around 2015 changed the internet drastically, and made it lean toward the latter evil.

Let’s say, you are the average man. You spend a lot of time on the internet, playing video games or watching porn. Are you happy? I don’t mean do you feel good right now, I’m talking about true happiness. So, let me ask you again: Are you really happy? If your answer is yes: Congratulations, you are a liar. If it is no, let me tell you something:

I was there once. I know what it feels like to be deeply unhappy. Rotting away in a smelly, messy room, with no work to your name, no apparent purpose and using porn and video games as a crutch. In fact, I still do. It’s been quite a while since I discovered self-improvement, but only recently did I decide to take it seriously.

We all know that nonfree (or proprietary) software is bad for you. With all the closed code and all the pleas for trust, there is not much else that you can say about it. But not many people talk about the lock-in that nonfree software creates with many different practices, and it is really spooky. In this article, I will further elaborate on this spook, and how to counteract it with free and freedom-respecting software.

Coraline Ada Ehmke. As a free software activist, this name only means one thing: Trouble. But what do I mean by that? I mean that the self-proclaimed “open-source troublemaker” could be the greatest threat to free software as we know it. And you’ll see why it is as dramatic as I make it out to be.

But what does a single programmer have to do with the death of free software? Well, she is the original creator of the Hippocratic License, a so-called “open-source” license, that, in short, only allows the use of software for “ethical purposes”. Now, the problem with ethical software is that it is non-free in its nature, since the use of software for unethical purposes is prohibited under this license. Another problem arises when we try to determine ethics in conjunction with software. What even is “ethical”? Is it some form of law? Or are you appealing to common sense? Or do you want to go the “liberal” route and say that it’s only ethical as long as it agrees with your agenda? Now, what I want to say is that the definition of ethics is muddy at best.

Nonfree software is everywhere. And it really shows. At this point in time, I’d argue that there is more nonfree software in the wild than there is free software. This raises some important questions. First of all, why all the fuss about it? Shouldn’t we just let nonfree software exist? And secondly, why advocate for free software, when the most popular products based on proprietary licenses make up the bulk of the so-called industry standards? In this article, we will go through the pitfalls of nonfree software, and why it is bad for you, the end user.