It looks like someone who has an axe to grind and is picking apart everything that the Debian team do and showing it in the worst possible light, in a conspiratorial finger-poking style.

Are there actually threats on there? Corruption, threats and blackmail seem to be the site’s main allegations, so I wouldn’t expect it to contain threats as that’d be hypocritical.

Yes there are, but I think the worst are political types who thrive in the shadows, hiding behind good decorum. I think the current climate of feigning offence tunes technical organisations so that the best manipulators of people rise to the top rather than the best technologists. But that might be my own personal bias speaking.

But I think I found one of the websites they’re talking about. https://debian.community/ - it seems to be filled with hit pieces against the Debian team, accusing them of all sorts of ills.

I ran it for a bit a few years ago when I had very bad internet on holiday - I could never get it working. It hogged all my battery for ages and couldn’t send a message to my gf who was right next to me.

IMO the way for mesh messaging tech to gain a foothold is by being useful when there’s a bunch of people in a location where there’s no internet, so they should be targeted at those people first:

• Holiday destinations where people are charged for WiFi and the mobile network is either under heavy pressure or not available (campsites, cruise ships, holidays where roaming charges hurt)
• Hiking, where people have intermittent internet but other people are sometimes in range for relaying messages
• Music festivals, where huge numbers of people gathered in one place overload the network.
• Nightclubs and warehouse parties where you’re in a metal box with no signal unless you go for a smoke
• A device that doesn’t have a network subscription, like tablets, but wants to get messages while away from WiFi networks

Then build a public mesh that has utility, not this crazy one-hop fundamentalism but something that actually works.

How come? It all seems very vague. Was it this?

https://danielpocock.com/debian-debconf-diversity-harassment-abuse-expulsion/

Edit:

Also it seems very weasely for a person to make accusations (I assume this was posted by an individual), without any links to back it up, anonymously via an official press release.

This sort of thing doesn’t sit right with me, and makes me lose faith in Debian as an organisation.

Is there not a Docker image for this? It usually takes all the pain out of this sort of thing, otherwise you’ve got a server that’s a pet when you should be treating them like cattle.

if we accept quantum theory, the basic precept is that energy is transferred in discrete packets (thus, quantum). If we accept that there are fundamental properties, such as spin, isospin, and charge, and that particles can be generated with opposite properties, such as an “entangled” pair of photons, then what exactly is the magic in measuring them both to have opposite properties?

I was looking at it from my very pedestrian, layman programmer perspective, that all the theories that we have are really just models. They have predictive power but are unlikely to ever describe what actually “is”. But information theory seems to have good rules of thumb, and so until quantum supremacy is actually shown to be a thing I’ll err on the side of things that seem to violate established rules as quirks of the current model. Not sure if this makes sense, I am quite ignorant of the physics.

I guess PostmarketOS could see some decent penetration with this in the kernel.

As a side note, quantum computing is entirely bunk and just a way for companies to bilk the government out of billions in funding.

I’ve thought this for a long time, but don’t have the physics background to grok why. I’d love to hear your take on it. As a layman my guesses are:

1. If you can make exponential problems into linear ones then there would be tons of examples of that sort of thing in nature as it’s a path of little resistance, and so it would have been discovered at the start of the last century before digital computers were a thing, and
2. The universe doesn’t let us cheat other fundamental laws like the speed of light, so if information theory is fundamental then it’s unlikely that you can cheat that either. Maybe you’ll need exponential time to set up the quantum computer, or it’ll take exponentially more attempts to get a correct answer, or become exponentially more sensitive to noise.

As for the reasons we’re doing it, I think they might be a military intelligence thing:

1. If your enemies think quantum computers have cracked their secrets, they might start acting like you already know them, thus showing their hand by changing their behaviour where they were bluffing before.
2. It might force enemies to adopt different, less understood encryption schemes that have different attack vectors or are susceptible to asynchronous backdoors (like the elliptic curve NSA fiasco)
3. Your enemies might waste resources on perfecting technology that seems fruitful at first but is actually impossible to perfect, with quantum supremacy hovering just out of reach no matter how much money you throw at it.
4. Perfecting quantum processors might lay the groundwork for provably secure networking - entanglement has some really good privacy features but might never be commercially viable without multiple decades of investment by technology giants.

What are your thoughts on it being a scam?