• Aeri@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    I didn’t know that the government was funding these things to begin with, but I don’t know many things.

    • RepleteLocum@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      4 days ago

      Because foss projects like tor are regularly used by the agencies. It’s little money for a lot of work they don’t need to do.

    • aizakku
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      4 days ago

      I also didn’t know this, but really we should all be putting money behind FOSS (myself included). We don’t need billionaires.

  • misteloct@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    If you use these services, please donate once or regularly if you’re able. They are free as in puppy, not beer - dev work costs money. I would guess many people using Tor/privacy tools are tech savvy enough to have financial comfort due to a good career. If you do it you’re doing an everyday act of rebellion for the sake of progress!!!

  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 days ago

    So I guess funds were cut, but then the courts ruled the president doesn’t have authority to do this himself since the funds were allocated by congress, and so as of now they have been restored, although congress needs to approve them every year and there’s concern they might not do so for next year.

    • Midnitte@beehaw.org
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      4 days ago

      Until Trump ignores court orders and cuts funding anyway.

      Supreme Court will probably rule that while congress has the power of the purse, the president has the power of canceling the credit cards in the wallet, because fuck you that’s why

      • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 days ago

        Well, this is what the relevant part of the video says:

        USAGM disbursed $7.5M to these entities, in “what seemed to be an effort to delay the hearing or woo the judge”. Regardless, the latter has sided against USAGM, and just a few days ago, the agency has decided to back off and release the funds for the 2025 fiscal year.

  • Paddy66@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    Urgh this is so backwards.

    Governments need to fund more FOSS not less!

    Hopefully the EU can increase its support to compensate.

    • HurlingDurling@lemm.ee
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      4 days ago

      Foss is free, and this guy is all about making the American people pay more money to his rich buddies

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        4 days ago

        He’s doing a suck job of it. The things he’s gutting are pennies towards his dark-souled oligarch masters. Cutting small government projects like the NEA, PBS or like FOSS grants is only used as an appeal to fiscal responsibility conservatives that aren’t willing to cut into old-people benefits like Social Security and military sacred cows. Not because gutting tiny projects does anything useful, rather it gives the vibe that representatives are doing something.

        This is an appeal to the imbicile MAGA though the tech bros might have specific FOSS projects that compete with their own commercial offerings. Not enough to cut all FOSS grants, though.

        • HurlingDurling@lemm.ee
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          3 days ago

          In essence he’s trying to bankrupt the whole country so he and his circle can buy it all up. He’s trying to do the same thing that was done in Russia when the ussr collapsed.

    • Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 days ago

      Or China! Open source is basically digital communism so maybe they’ll step in and support it like they did with the World Health Organization

      • stink@lemmygrad.ml
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        4 days ago

        They open sourced deepseek and the US government banned it 😭😭 even universities are barred from using it

        • yet_another_commie@lemmygrad.ml
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          Funny reading westoid commenters here bashing China for being “authoritarian” when it literally open sourced a groundbreaking innovation a month ago. Washingtobot crackers

            • yet_another_commie@lemmygrad.ml
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              4 days ago

              Still, all you got is whataboutism.

              We have hundreds of Marxist works. Let me quote some Lenin:

              The “free people’s state” was a programme demand and a catchword current among the German Social-Democrats in the seventies. This catchword is devoid of all political content except that it describes the concept of democracy in a pompous philistine fashion. Insofar as it hinted in a legally permissible manner at a democratic republic, Engels was prepared to “justify” its use “for a time” from an agitational point of view. But it was an opportunist catchword, for it amounted to nothing more than prettifying bourgeois democracy, and was also a failure to understand the socialist criticism of the state in general. We are in favor of a democratic republic as the best form of state for the proletariat under capitalism. But we have no right to forget that wage slavery is the lot of the people even in the most democratic bourgeois republic. Furthermore, every state is a “special force” for the suppression of the oppressed class. Consequently, every state is not “free” and not a “people’s state". Marx and Engels explained this repeatedly to their party comrades in the seventies.

              How much does Pooh pay you to write that stuff?

              Millions of xibucks

                • yet_another_commie@lemmygrad.ml
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                  4 days ago

                  The Scheidemanns and Kautsky’s speak about “pure democracy” and “democracy” in general for the purpose of deceiving the people and concealing from them the bourgeois character of present-day democracy. Let the bourgeoisie continue to keep the entire apparatus of state power in their hands, let a handful of exploiters continue to use the former, bourgeois, state machine! Elections held in such circumstances are lauded by the bourgeoisie, for very good reasons, as being “free”, “equal”, “democratic” and “universal”. These words are designed to conceal the truth, to conceal the fact that the means of production and political power remain in the hands of the exploiters, and that therefore real freedom and real equality for the exploited, that is, for the vast majority of the population, are out of the question. It is profitable and indispensable for the bourgeoisie to conceal from the people the bourgeois character of modern democracy, to picture it as democracy in general or “pure democracy”, and the Scheidemanns and Kautskys, repeating this, in practice abandon the standpoint of the proletariat and side with the bourgeoisie.

                  Marx and Engels in their last joint preface to the Communist Manifesto (in 1872)[A] considered it necessary to specifically warn the workers that the proletariat cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made (that is, the bourgeois) state machine and wield it for their own purpose, but that they must smash it, break it up. The renegade Kautsky, who has written a special pamphlet entitled dictatorship of the proletariat, concealed from the workers this most important Marxist truth, utterly distorted Marxism, and, quite obviously, the praise which Scheidemann and Co. showered on the pamphlet was fully merited as praise by agents of the bourgeoisie for one switching to the side of the bourgeoisie.

                  It is sheer mockery of the working and exploited people to speak of pure democracy, of democracy in general, of equality, freedom and universal rights when the workers and all working people are ill-fed, ill-clad, ruined and worn out, not only as a result of capitalist wage slavery, but as a consequence of four years of predatory war, while the capitalists and profiteers remain in possession of the “property” usurped by them and the “ready-made” apparatus of state power. This is tantamount to trampling on the basic truths of Marxism which has taught the workers: you must take advantage of bourgeois democracy which, compared with feudalism, represents a great historical advance, but not for one minute must you forget the bourgeois character of this “democracy”, it’s historical conditional and limited character. Never share the “superstitious belief” in the “state” and never forget that the state even in the most democratic republic, and not only in a monarchy, is simply a machine for the suppression of one class by another.

                  The bourgeoisie are compelled to be hypocritical and to describe as “popular government”, democracy in general, or pure democracy, the ( bourgeois ) democratic republic which is, in practice, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the exploiters over the working people. The Scheidemanns and Kautskys, the Austerlitzes and Renners (and now, to our regret, with the help of Friedrich Adler) fall in line with this falsehood and hypocrisy. But Marxists, Communists, expose this hypocrisy, and tell the workers and the working people in general this frank and straightforward truth: the democratic republic, the Constituent Assembly, general elections, etc., are, in practice, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and for the emancipation of labor from the yoke of capital there is no other way but to replace this dictatorship with the dictatorship of the proletariat.

    • pyre@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      ikr, i can’t believe this administration did something backwards this time.

    • NOPper@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 days ago

      We need them here now more then ever unfortunately. But yeah, stay safe and spread out for sure.

      They’re the only thing I wear tee shirts for, have stickers all over my gear, and talk about way too often. Underappreciated champions of the people and nobody outside of these kinds of circles knows who the hell they are.

  • SpiceDealer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 days ago

    While it sucks that FOSS projects will have their funding sapped, let’s remember why the open source model is used in the first place: it can’t be bought. If it goes down, someone will just fork the last known repository and have it up and running again.

  • rumba@lemmy.zip
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    4 days ago

    Lets encrypt could run a patreon and stay funded. Plenty of people with money depend on them.

  • Alex@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    FLOSS projects can only be sustainable if their are enough shared interests able to support it through contributions of all kinds. Fortunately the code is free so that constellation of support can change over time. It’s a shame this particular line of government funding is coming to an end but others can help.

  • Zoop@beehaw.org
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    4 days ago

    I really appreciate that there’s a text version for those of us who can’t or won’t use videos! Thank you so much for sharing it, too. 💙

  • novacomets@lemmy.myserv.one
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    4 days ago

    That would be good for government to cut funding. Users should give away their own cash to support the projects.

    Funders of any project can influence decisions, but users giving from their own personal money can keep open source software free from any influences.

  • HiroProtagonist@lemmy.ca
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    3 days ago

    Does this government funding really ever result in a hands off approach. In the case of Tor I wouldn’t be surprised that funding comes with backdoor access.

    • rbesfe@lemmy.ca
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      3 days ago

      TOR fundamentally cannot be backdoored. The US government funds it because more traffic on the network helps mask the traffic coming from CIA agents and the like

        • KeenFlame@feddit.nu
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          1 day ago

          No system can be proven to have no exploits, but a backdoor is when there is a hidden prepared exploit planted on the inside (in this case presumably because they were funded by the government they assume they would get this in return, even though if that was the case they would do a crypto transaction and not openly fund them)

      • HiroProtagonist@lemmy.ca
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        3 days ago

        The last reply I will make.

        From September 19 2024

        “In response, the Tor Project acknowledged that one user of an outdated application called Ricochet was likely deanonymized through a “guard discovery attack.” However, they emphasized that this vulnerability has since been patched in current versions of Tor software.”

        https://cybersecuritynews.com/tor-claims-network-safe/

        • KeenFlame@feddit.nu
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          Excuse me? Are you saying using guard discovery is a backdoor someone gave to the government? I mean, you can think whatever, but the technology isn’t really… backdoorable? It doesn’t make sense in the context. Where will the backdoor lead? It has no where to go.

          • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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            3 days ago

            (I am a different person, not arguing anything about this particular vulnerability or the government’s funding of Tor.)

            I think you’re defining backdoor too literally. I get your point, but colloquially it just means to get something nefarious in. If someone is saying “the government has a backdoor in an encryption algorithm” it would mean they believe the government has a vulnerability in that allows them to easily break the encryption, not necessarily a separate “door” or something.

            • KeenFlame@feddit.nu
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              1 day ago

              Yeah the government has an institutional thing I forget what it is called, with massive amount of known exploits. That’s not backdoors. A backdoor is a “planted” exploit, not a discovered exploit. It makes no sense to call all exploits backdoors.

          • HiroProtagonist@lemmy.ca
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            Okay buddy keep it going as long as you need to. You might enjoy Reddit more, it’s a safe space for people who cannot change their opinions. Bye.

            • KeenFlame@feddit.nu
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              1 day ago

              Why? I am trying to understand what you mean so I can change my opinion. I’m not changing it because you are fuming and escalating the aggression, in fact, that has the exact opposite effect

  • shalafi@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Why was the US funding FOSS projects? That strikes me as weird, inappropriate and suspicious.

    • Metz@lemmy.world
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      Not that unusual. e.g. TOR started as a governement project. it was invented in the U.S. Naval Research Lab.

    • RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
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      If US uses FOSS software in its operations (it does, everyone does) it has a vested interest in keeping these projects alive.

      Also many of the sponsored projects help people circumvent authoritarian government overreach, which is something that until recently has been considered “good” for the US. The more freely information can flow the harder it is for authoritarian regimes to exert control.

      • Zerush@lemmy.ml
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        4 days ago

        FOSS is already stale for a long time by large corporations (Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, X, etc), all of these with own developments of FOSS, these are not affected by this cuts for OpenSource proyects, but small startups, individual devs and small companies and oprganisations. It’s not against FOSS, it’s about control and clear against freedom.

        Fuck the US https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/eu-oss-catalogue

        • RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
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          Use it? The US invented it. The US has historically funded it as part of their human rights initiatives. Like I said:

          Also many of the sponsored projects help people circumvent authoritarian government overreach, which is something that until recently has been considered “good” for the US. The more freely information can flow the harder it is for authoritarian regimes to exert control.

          Given the nature of the Tor network, it’s likely any “official” use within the US government would probably involve things like communicating with people working undercover / informants, etc., and not be something broadly discussed.

    • Why was the US funding FOSS projects? That strikes me as weird, inappropriate and suspicious.

      A mixture of the elements within the US that actually believed the stuff about personal rights and democracy still existing behind the more sinister realities, as well as it being in the same pot of funded projects like Radio Free Asia, Radio Liberty and the likes, which always were a mix of just outright propaganda organs, but also providing the scaffolding of free media access for some regions in the past.

      So, it’s complicated, ultimately rooted in a mix of the cynical US wanting to support dissidents in other countries, and the idealist US also having people actually believing in personal freedom and privacy, even within their government/state structures.

      Also, just in general, a lot of FOSS projects get funding from governments, US or otherwise. If I remember correctly ReactOS got a lot of funding from Russia, for example, because they saw a potential way to get away from Microsoft in it.

      From what I gather, there was no open influence wielded over those projects, I at least don’t remember the OTF forcing a backdoor onto Tor Browser for the CIA or something like that - thankfully the open source structure makes that easier to control - but the weakness becomes apparent now, of course, because funds could now be withdrawn, as the government turned fascist.

    • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
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      4 days ago

      If it makes you feel better (or worse), thr NSA has contributed a great deal of work to the Linux kernel. In fact, they created SELinux, which you may be using at this very moment.