FLOSS virtualization hacker, occasional brewer

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • There is a very large corpus of FLOSS software out there serving everything from individual itches to whole industries. Any project that is important to someone’s bottom line is likely to have paid developers working on it but often alongside hobbyists.

    The project I predominately work on is about 90% paid developers but from lots of different companies and organisations. Practically though the developers don’t care about the affiliation of the other developers they work with but the ideas and patches they bring to the project.






  • Alex@lemmy.mltoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    It depends what they want to do. They can fork and take on the burden of maintaining the whole tree in which case good luck with that, linux is too much of a fire hose to enable a 3rd party to assemble something similar making different choices about what they merge. Otherwise they can maintain a re-based fork that tracks the Torvalds tree and then congratulations you’ve just invented a feature tree that can do contribution with extra steps.






  • Absolutely - modern pirates are extracting the digital streams with the DRM removed. However they closely guard the methods of operation because once the exploits or compromised keys are known they can be revoked and they have to start cracking again. They likely have hardware with reverse engineered firmware which won’t honour key revocation but still needs to be kept upto date with recent-ish keys.

    For example the Blu-Ray encryption protocols are well enough known you can get things working if you have the volume keys. However getting hold of them is tricky and you have to be careful your Blu-Ray doesn’t read a disk that revokes the old keys.

    For streaming things are a little easier because if you get the right side of the DRM you can simply copy the stream. However things like HDCP and moving DRM into secure enclaves are trying to ensure that the decryption process cannot be watched from the outside. I’m sure their are compromised HDCP devices but again once their keys get leaked they will no longer be able to accept a digital stream of data (or may negotiate down to a sub-HD rate).






  • They are pretty focused on reducing the cost of launches by aggressively re-using components that would normally crash into the sea. Previous launches landed on floating sea platforms but yesterday’s heavy was so big it needed a more stable landing zone. So after boosting the Star Liner the rocket returned down the trajectory it had followed up and then hovered briefly before being caught by two pincers on the very launch pad it had left five minutes before. That’s pretty cool.