Street Fighter 2: Spin when you can't

Street Fighter 2: Subtile accurate animation

Sustainable creativity in a world without copyright

I don’t believe in copyright. I argue that we need to get rid of copyright, or at least dramatically reform it. The public domain has been stolen from us, and I want it back. Everyone reading this post has grown up in a creative world defined by capitalism, in which adapting and remixing works — a fundamental part of the creative process — is illegal. The commons is dead, and we suffer for it. But, this is all we’ve ever known. It can be difficult to imagine a world without copyright.

When I present my arguments on the subject, the most frequent argument I hear in response is...

Street Fighter 2: The World Warrier

Following Street Fighter 2 paper trails

2021-12-22

libgrapheme 1.0.0 released: download

On commercial forks of FOSS projects

The gaming and live streaming industry is a lucrative and rapidly growing commercial sector with a unique understanding of copyright and intellectual property, and many parties with conflicting interests and access to different economic resources.

The understanding of intellectual property among gamers and the companies which serve them differs substantailly from that of free software, and literacy in the values and philosophy of free software among this community is very low. It is then of little surprise that we see abuse of free software from this community, namely in the recent (and illegal) commercial forks of a popular FOSS streaming platform called OBS Studio by companies like TikTok.

These forks...

Status update, December 2021

Greetings! It has been a cold and wet month here in Amsterdam, much like the rest of them, as another period of FOSS progress rolls on by. I have been taking it a little bit easier this month, and may continue to take some time off in the coming weeks, so I can have a bit of a rest for the holidays. However, I do have some progress to report, so let’s get to it.

In programming language progress, we’ve continued to see improvement in cryptography, with more AES cipher modes and initial work on AES-NI support for Intel processors, as well as support for HMAC and...

Impressions of Linux Mint & elementary OS

In a recent post, I spoke about some things that Linux distros need to do better to accommodate end-users. I was reminded that there are some Linux distros which are, at least to some extent, following my recommended playbook, and have been re-evaluating two of them over the past couple of weeks: Linux Mint and elementary OS. I installed these on one of my laptops and used it as my daily driver for a day or two each.

Both of these distributions are similar in a few ways. For one, both distros required zero printer configuration: it just worked. I was very impressed with this. Both distros are...

Stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability in UDP packet handling in Toxcore (CVE-2021-44847)

A stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability was discovered in Toxcore’s networking code that allows a remote attacker to crash the Toxcore process or potentially execute arbitrary code by sending a specially crafted packet. The vulnerability was assigned CVE-2021-44847 identifier.

All users of Toxcore that don’t have UDP disabled are affected. An attacker, knowing the target’s DHT public key, IP and port, can easily craft a packet exploiting the vulnerability. DHT public key, IP and port are all public information, publicly available on the DHT, so an attacker can target any and all Toxcore users by scraping this information from the DHT. This...