cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 25 Posts
  • 170 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • Great article, BTW

    I disagree, the headline is clickbaity and implies that there is some ongoing conflict. The fact that the Fedora flatpak package maintainer pushed an update marking it EOL, with “The Fedora Flatpak build of obs-studio may have limited functionality compared to other sources. Please do not report bugs to the OBS Studio project about this build.” in the end-of-life metadata field the day before this article was written is not mentioned until the second-to-last sentence of it. (And the OBS maintainer has since saidFor the moment, the EOL notice is sufficient enough to distance ourselves from the package that a full rebrand is not necessary at this time, as we would rather you focus efforts on the long-term goal and understand what that is.”)

    The article also doesn’t answer lots of questions such as:

    • Why is the official OBS flatpak using an EOL’d runtime?
    • Why did Fedora bother to maintain both their own flatpak and an RPM package of OBS?
    • What (and why) are the problems (or missing functionality) in the Fedora Flatpak, anyway? (there is some discussion of that here… but it’s still not clear to me)
    • What is the expected user experience going to be for users who have the Fedora flatpak installed, now that it is marked EOL? Will it be obvious to them that they can/should use the flathub version, or will the EOL’d package in the Fedora flatpak repo continue to “outweigh” it?

    Note again that OBS’s official flathub flatpak is also marked EOL currently, due to depending on an EOL runtime. Also, from the discussion here it is clear that simply removing the package (as the OBS dev actually requested) instead of marking it EOL (as they did) would leave current users continuing to use it and unwittingly missing all future updates. (I think that may also be the outcome of marking it EOL too? it seems like flatpak maybe needs to get some way to signal to users that they should uninstall an EOL package at update time, and/or inform them of a different package which replaces one they have installed.)

    TLDR: this is all a mess, but, contrary to what the article might lead people to believe, the OBS devs and Fedora devs appear to be working together in good faith to do the best thing for their users. The legal threat (which was just in an issue comment, not sent formally by lawyers) was only made because Fedora was initially non-responsive, but they became responsive prior to this article being written.











  • Probably that’s when it does online connection?

    since the help says it is downloading “partial language files” automatically, and the button never changes from “Download” to “Remove” if you don’t click Download, logically it must sometimes need to download more of a language which you have previous downloaded a “partial language file” of.

    i am curious if the choice of which parts of the “language file” (aka model) it is downloading really does not reveal anything about the text you’re translating; i suspect it most likely does reveal something about the input text to the server… but i’m not motivated enough to research it further at the moment.


  • Wow, thanks for the about:translations tip - I was wondering how to do that!

    Besides “Translate page” there is also a “Translate selection” option in the right-click menu so you can translate part of a page.

    However, unless you download languages in the “Translation” section of Firefox preferences, it doesn’t actually always work while offline:

    screenshot of Firefox Translation preferences showing downloadable languages

    As you pointed out, the help page explicitly says there is “no privacy risk of sending text to third parties for analysis because translation happens on your device, not externally”, but, after I translate something in a new language I haven’t before, it still doesn’t appear as downloaded (eg having a “Remove” button instead of a “Download” button) in the preferences.

    The FAQ has a question Why do I need to install languages? with this answer:

    Installing languages enables Firefox to perform translations locally within your browser, prioritizing your privacy and security. As you translate, Firefox downloads partial language files as you need them. To pre-install complete languages yourself, access the language settings in Firefox Settings, General panel, in the Language and Appearance section under Translations.

    I wonder what the difference between the “partial” language files and the full download is, and if that is really not leaking any information about the text being translated. In doing a few experiments just now, I certainly can’t translate to new languages while offline, but after I’ve translated one paragraph in a language I do seem to be able to translate subsequent paragraphs while offline. 🤔

    Anyway, it probably is a good idea to click “Download” on all the languages you want to be able to translate.




  • security updates are for cowards, amirite? 😂

    seriously though, Debian 7 stopped receiving security updates a couple of years prior to the last time you rebooted, and there have been a lot of exploitable vulnerabilities fixed between then and now. do your family a favor and replace that mailserver!

    From the 2006 modification times, i wonder: did you actually start off with a 3.1 (sarge) install and upgrade it to 7 (wheezy) and then stopped upgrading at some point? if so, personally i would be tempted to try continuing to upgrade it all the way to bookworm, just to marvel at debian stable’s stability… but only after moving its services to a fresh system :)