Firefox: We’re the “privacy” browser

Also Firefox: But I’m sure they won’t mind if we shamelessly erode that privacy. Just a little, and we can always gaslight them into thinking people asked for it.

Any legal experts want to weigh in on whether this is even allowed? CC0 by definition has no limitations, but GPL very explicitly has limitations for what the code can be used for, and also applies to derivatives. If it was their own code but was officially submitted to the Linux repo, who owns it and gets to decide how the code can be licensed?

Thank you!

Thank you! I like your writing too! It’s very interesting and definitely parallels how different factions in real religions developed!

Is CBB Forum like a world building forum where people can post their lore? Would you recommend it?

Interesting! How powerful are the Pious Dissolutionists? Does the Bright Way declare them as apostates or anything or otherwise try to suppress them?

Yeah there’s a shot of a fish market in one of the scenes. It wasn’t directly mentioned, but I think the implication is they eat fish.

Very interesting!

Are there more “pure” Bright Way believers in the sense that they denounce the slavery/exploitation industrial complex and preach more grassroots exploration and extraterrestrial contact? Like Christians who spend their lives in relative poverty helping the poor around them preaching the gospel through their own actions toward others, compared to a group like the Conquistadors trying colonise far away lands and force their religion on them all while enriching themselves?

TBH I have only really focused on the small fuzzy woodland creature side of the animal kingdom, but implicitly yes, everyone is spaient.

I specifically intended everyone to be sentient/sapient because part of the reason for me making this world was I hate cop-out “designated food animals” that so many other animals living in harmony stories have. The Lion King and Simba eating bugs for example, or how Zootopia implies that everyone there just eats fish instead of each other. Even when I was a a kid this had always annoyed me because it’s so hypocritical, when it really wouldn’t have needed that much more suspension of disbelief to just say the cats in this world just can digest plants or something. So I specifically chose to have every single animal be sapient so there can be no cop-outs to the predation problem.

I also chose this as to not limit myself in what kind of animals I can have as characters, but admittedly I haven’t developed the lore beyond small fuzzy animals.

LLM scraping is a parasite on the internet. In the actual ecological definition of parasite: they place a burden on other unwitting organisms computer systems, making it harder for the host to survive or carry out their own necessary processes, solely for the parasite’s own benefit while giving nothing to the host in return.

I know there’s an ongoing debate (both in the courts and on social media) about whether AI should have to pay royalties to its training data under copyright law, but I think they should at the very least be paying to use infrastructure while collecting the data, even free data, given that it costs the organisation hosting said data real money and resources to be scraped, and it’s orders of magnitude more money and resources compared to serving that data to individual people.

The case can certainly be made that copying is not theft, but copying is by no means free either, especially when done at the scales LLMs do.

Off topic, I am very intrigued how their ergonomics works. How do tools and architecture in this world account for vastly different body plans, sizes, and sensory systems? Xenoergonomics is one of my favorite aspects of worldbuilding.

Admittedly, I kind of handwave that away as “their paws have evolved to be more dexterious in the millions of years between when humans existed on Earth and their current societies developed”. I mostly visualize this world in a cartoon style so they basically have “magic paws” that things just stick to on command.

However, due to them being four-legged, they can’t really hold things with their paws while walking. So they mostly carry things in their mouths while they walk, either directly or by putting it in a basket and carrying the basket in their mouth. Birds carry stuff in their talons while flying. Some animals are good at balncing things on their heads while they walk. Failing all those, they always have the option to use a bag that they sling over their shoulders and front paws.

However, being a place where animals of all kinds live in relative harmony, size logistics are integral to nearly every part of society, and is regulated quite heavily to ensure accessibility for all. The Universal Animal Access (UAA) Staging Guidelines is a collection of documents and engineering standards with the lofty goal statement of “providing all animals, regardless of species, political affiliation, residence status, or ability, safe and equitable access to all resources offered by built-up, urbanized, or industrialized development; while avoiding segregation and the development of parallel, closed off, scale specific infrastructure, whenever possible.”

UAA categorizes animals into four rough size categories. They are officially denoted as either size groups 1, 2, 3 and 4, with 1 being the smallest or and 4 being the largest, and are more colloquially referred to as Micro, Small, Medium, and Large, often abbreviated as Mi, S, M, and L. These categories are qualitative and on a spectrum, but generally:

• Micro animals: Insects, Worms, up to Hummingbirds

• Small animals: Most songbirds, most rodents, up to rabbits and hares.

• Medium animals: Canines, Vulpines, Most Felines, Raptors

• Large animals: Ungulates like deer and cows, the largest birds, all the way up to whales.

What is often referred to as the “UAA paradigm” of engineering and civil planning has the following principles:

1. Wherever possible and safe to do, animals of different sizes should be allowed to occupy the same space and be free to interact with each other, as opposed to being separated by barriers. Example: A corridor where animals walk through should accommodate both large and small animals in the same space, this generally means ensuring the ceiling and wall clearance can accommodate large animals, while the floor and any inclines must be flat enough for even the smallest paws to navigate.

2. Redundant fixtures that are more efficiently suited for each size group should be installed close to each other. Example: A door will have a button to open it or an access control device low to the ground for small and micro animals, to reach without having to climb, and a separate button higher off the ground so medium and large animals don’t have to hunch over, as well as for smaller flying animals. And the buttons will most likely be capacitive touch based instead of a mechanical switch, so small animals don’t have to worry that they can’t apply enough force to activate it. Also, personal items like books, computers, paw-held tools, and anything else one is expected to have to themselves should be produced in a variety of sizes, each accommodating a different size group.

3. Oversizing is better than undersizing. This is due to the fact that in nature, smaller animals exist in a world with a lot more empty space in relation to their bodies, and therefore will feel more natural and comfortable than, say, a large animal being squeezed into a space that can barely fit in.

4. The safety of animals must be prioritized. For example, you’ll never see a conventional airplane in the Unified Territories, as for an aircraft to be sky legal, it must be able to stop anywhere, including hovering in place, and be able to fly arbitrarily slowly when low to the ground. So as to not smash into any flying birds or bugs. Tires rolling across the meadow is also unacceptable. For this reason, hovercrafts are the preferred motorized vehicle, as are trains with complete grade separation and active track intrusion detection.

So this is well and good on paper, but do the actual infrastructure follow these guidelines? The answer is one part “meh” and one part “it depends”. The Unified Territories is the most comprehensive single jurisdiction in terms of implementing UAA, but even then it is only totally comprehensive for small and medium sized animals, with accommodation of micros being almost as good with a few yet unaddressed woes, but limited consideration for large animals. This is mainly because the vast majority of the UT population are micro, small, and medium sized animals, and the argument is often made that because there are no large sized member species and it is unclear if there will be in the foreseeable future, it’s unreasonable to size everything for the largest animals when the extra space is unlikely to be used before the infrastructure reaches end of life and would have to be renovated or rebuilt anyway. Though this is controversial as some large animals do pass through the Unified Territories.

Feline territory is mostly designed for medium animals, having lost nearly all the big cats to extinction ages ago, but after they signed that treaty saying they won’t eat other animals anymore, they have been making strides in implementing UAA in their infrastructure for the influx of small and micro animals who are now welcomed in their territory. There are still other territories that do not implement UAA in any appreciable sense, be it because most of the residents are about the same size and they therefore do not see a reason to spend their limited resources implementing something that hardly anyone will take advantage of. But other territories are far more intentional in their refusal to implement UAA, as they do not want other species there at all.

One last thing, when it comes to medicine, medical practitioners have to be certified to treat specific size groups. Most doctors are certified to treat their own size group and taxonomic group, maybe also the adjacent groups. For example, you can have a doctor who is certified for small and medium mammals, or one who treats large avians, or a medicine bug that handles micro insects. Obviously this is waved for emergencies where the “correct” doctor is unavailable, and there is a line somewhere between “a cat and a mouse is trapped in a cave and the mouse goes into cardiac arrest, and the cat had to give chest compression even though they could accidentally squish them or dig their claws into them” and “your feline clinic is the closest to my burrow and come on I’m not that small!”, but that’s up to the malpractice courts to decide. There have also been problems with when a large animal has a medical emergency in a place where most of the residents are small, the medkits nearby might literally not contain enough medicine to reach a therapeutic dose. This is remedied by simply having larger stocks of critical, life saving medicine like epinephrine and insulin when putting together a first aid kit.

While their dislike for the Bright Way (Focus’s historically dominant religion) is somewhat understandable given the Partisans are descendants of former ecclesiastical slaves

I’d love to learn more about this religion! Does it specifically mandate slavery or is it more of a “the slavers happen to believe in this religion” thing?

Also, do the Partisans exhibit any traits commonly found in religion/cults even though they’re atheist? Like do they have their own rituals and customs that could be mistaken for parts of a religion even though their whole thing is that they have no religion?

Why Linux Mint specifically, why not just Linux? Or if they want to pick a specific distro, why not Trisquel or another FSF-endorsed distro?

Thank you so much! I tried my darndest to incorporate my own experiences in software development into this! Though I definitely have way less experience than you.

The question I have now is, if they actually tried to rip the bandaid off and replace the whole thing, would it be a political problem?

I’ll let dev kitty respond to this!

Context: the Unified Territories is an alliance of many small to medium sized animal species, ranging from mice and songbirds to dogs and foxes; who all subscribe to an ideology called Unitism (hence unified territories), which is basically like “vegan socialism” where former predators and prey live in peace. The Felines are Unitist as well.

Fortunately there’s not really much political issues that would get in the way of that. The Feline Ministry of Transportation has full authority over the transportation infrastructure in Feline Territory, especially the implementation stuff like which ATC system to use.

Though, changes to the flight control standards (as opposed to the internal implementation of those standards) might require consultation with the Avian Government over in the Unified Territories because we want to ensure that naturally flying animals are kept safe when flying near hovercrafts. Even if the flight is entirely within Feline Territory, a lot of birds live here and they are still represented by their own taxonomic government, because all the Unitist taxonomic govs talk to each other and uphold Freedom of Migration between their territories. Generally, we would send our changes to them and they’ll let us know if they have any concerns.

However there probably won’t be a rewrite of FDTMS specifically, because we’re starting talks with the Unified Territory to develop a combined ATC standard so pur hovercrafts can more operate in each other’s airspace, and improve things like scheduling of cross-border flights, easier passenger connections between UTMT and FMT flights, allow an FMT aircraft to fill a UTMT scheduled flight and vice versa, and just generally try to make a system that combines the advantages of FDTMS and their UniFlyControl system. These are reeealy early stage talks so none of the technical details have been set yet, but it does seem like it will go through eventually.

I would hope it would be written in a completely memory safe language.

Thank you!

but what would happen if a new dispatch needed to be issued mid-flight (e.g., due to weather or airspace disruption)? Would a different system handle that?

That would go through no problem, and since the hovercraft keeps track of what entry ID it’s currently executing, you can give it extra steps by rearranging/adding entries after the current one (ATC would also be able to poll the hovercraft for its current entry ID)

In the worst case scenario, ATC can call up the pilot, ask them to disconnect the autopilot, stop the hovercraft in midair, and tell the hovercraft to wait for a brand new dispatch message. Once it has received such a message, the pilot can manually select which entry ID it should start at, and then reconnect the autopilot.

awestruck horror that they would let such a critical system exist without checking or validating inputs.

I have also written a post from a cat working for the Feline Ministry of Transportation, think of it as something that would be commented on their equivalent of /c/programming under a link to this report. Thought you might enjoy!

FMT/FTDMS dev here, thought I’d shed some light on what happened on our side.

This was found during a Ministry of Security audit as part of their Safe Infrastructure initiative. All of this was legacy code that hadn’t been touched in ages, the oldest of which dates back to before the Felines had even signed the ISPA and stopped eating prey. Yes, FDTMS as a protocol only became an official thing after the Feline Revolution (and by extension us signing the ISPA), but before that was a dozen different ad hoc ATC standards used by different parts of Feline Territory, and some of the source code from those (namely parts of Flight Dispatch Protocol, the old standard used in Moonpeak where all the government ministries are headquarted) were reused for FDTMS because it seemed easier and faster than writing everything from scratch.

All four points in the official root cause analysis can be boiled down to “cats are lazy” and/or “cats are bad at communicating with each other.”

1. Parsing the message before checking message signature: The message parsing and cryptography teams didn’t adequately consult with each other and failed to make sure their components were executed in the correct sequence. Both teams worked on their own thing and assumed that as long as both were done between receiving the message and prompting the pilot to accept the final dispatch table, there would be no problems. What happened was that the message processing and signature checking happened simultaneously on different threads. In theory, the cryptography thread could stop the message processing as soon as it detects an issue, but in practice, the message processing was way faster so by the time the cryptography thread finished and returned a result, the message had already been parsed and has overflowed the buffer. This was changed to a synchronous system where the cryptography thread executes first, and it is now the one responsible for triggering subsequent data processing threads if and only if it doesn’t detect any issues.

2. Failing silently on an invalid dispatch and reverting to the previous one: This was actually intentional because cats in the flight deck/ATC centre didn’t want to have to click two extra buttons whenever a dispatch message got corrupted during transmission. So the system was designed to be as automatic and “paws off” as possible. In theory, the pilot is supposed to check that the reversion to the previous valid dispatch is the correct action when they get a dispatch rejected message, and also report the error to ATC, but in practice that pretty much never happens. This was part of the code that was reused from FDP, and this whole thing was a really stupid idea and we only realized that after we found this issue.

3. The parser being more tolerant than the the actual FTDMS protocol: The standard originally treated TerritoryChange and RegionChange as completely different entries, but it got changed to a single entry fairly late in development because we realized that crossing a territorial border always implies crossing a regional border since the other territory would have its own regions. So buildDispatchTable had already been implemented and had to be updated. The cats who updated it figured that they only had to implement support for including the region information in TerritoryChange and didn’t need to completely remove support for two separate entries (because that would have been more work). But they also forgot to test that the changes made to TerritoryChange didn’t affect the ability to safely accept two separate entries (because the standard was being changed to disallow that anyway) and this is actually where the buffer overflow originated.

4. All of FDTMS-Client being run in privileged context with no Secure Mode protections that could have detected the buffer overflow/prevented privileged memory from being overwritten: WhiskerOS Secure Mode is really strict and honestly a pain in the tail to deal with, especially in terms of getting privileged and non-privileged code to talk to each other. So in classic cat fashion, we said “screw it” and made the entire codebase privileged so we wouldn’t have to deal with that. Actually, now that we’ve had to transition to a more restrictive privilege model, we’re getting a lot of issues with interprocess communication as expected. I actually got reassigned to a team specifically for dealing with complying with Secure Mode’s restrictions.

I also want to say that things are getting better, and from my experience, the Feline Government actually has way superior work culture than most other software development places in Feline Territory. But a lot of that old fashioned, counterproductive, least-effort Feline culture is still present especially in legacy code or massive codebases where many teams have to collaborate.

FOSS is not American. Foss belongs to literally everyone.

Good license. If you want to mod the game, your code will need to be open source (in theory), so there could end up being open source modding communities around them.

Why do they keep allocating land to wildfires if they’re so destructive? /s

In my world with intelligent, non-anthro animals trying to live in harmony, a lot of the terrible takes revolve around the banning of predation in some territories while other territories legally enforce predation. Or, even in the territories where different species do live in peace with each other, there are bad takes on the roles of different animals in society. Here are a few common ones:

“In Feline Territory, which explicitly bans predation but neighbours several territories that encourage it, the most common source of predation related criminal charges come not from cats themselves breaking the law and eating other animals, but from animals living in other territories getting caught trying to bring meat (usually referred to as ‘prey’ but not to be confused with ‘prey animals’ which are species that a territory considers to be food) with them when crossing the border. So why don’t the Felines just provide a trash can at their customs facility where animals can get rid of their prey and avoid getting arrested?”

• The customs facility of a given territory is entirely within its own borders, so by the time you get far enough to throw something in one of their trash cans, you’ve already broken the law by smuggling prey past the border.

• The Feline Ministry of Security wants to catch you with prey so they can secure a criminal conviction. Why should they give you any leniency when the very first thing you do upon entering their territory is break one of their most fundamental laws? This is especially true for animals like the Felines where they used to be predators, which means they have more to prove to the other non-predation species by having absolutely zero tolerance for predation in their territory.

• It would put non-predation territories in an extremely awkward position by forcing them to dispose of your prey for you.

• How fucking hard is it to just not bring prey with you when you intend to cross into a non-predation territory? It’s not like they keep their non-predation status a secret.

“How can you convict me of predation when it’s my hunting instinct talking and I can’t resist it?”

• Because you can. You chose not to. Science is very clear that all animals are sapient in this world, and sapience to them is defined as being able take control of your instincts and not letting them control you. If the Felines, once infamous for being the best hunters, has become one of the most anti-predation territories in the world, what excuse do you have?

• And if you really can’t resist your instincts, then you’re defective and absolutely should be locked away for public safety. Or another way of looking at it, you’re not considered sapient and not capable of participating in a society of sapient animals.

• (For context: The response to this is particularly harsh in their society because it’s almost always the first excuse an animal tries when they get caught for predation, and everyone else is sick of hearing it.)

“There are a lot of small songbirds working as pilots in Feline Territory, but I noticed that they are almost always scheduled to fly during the day while cat pilots are scheduled to fly at night. I thought that when the Felines signed the interspecies peace treaty, they officially became a multi-species society and any other animal living in their territory has the same rights as any cat! So how is their pilot scheduling fair? Shouldn’t every animal rotate between working every shift? Are the Felines racist?”

• They are a multi-species society and any other animal living there does have the same rights as a cat. Including the right to a work schedule that fits your natural bio clock if your job is safety critical, like flying a hovercraft.

• Most Felines are noctournal and most Avians are diurnal, and the point of a multi-species society is to take advantage of different species’ natural advantages while having other species cover their natural disadvantages. It’s also why there are a lot of avian pilots in Feline territory, a lot of them apply for that career because they are already naturally suited for it, and the Feline Ministry of Transportation isn’t allowed to discriminate between species and only hire Felines. The only requirement is that you live in Feline Territory.

• What wouldn’t be fair is if they did force every animal to do every shift, including ones that go against their bio clock. That’s also a fast track ticket to a fatigue related hovercraft crash killing hundreds or thousands of animals.

• If you want to go against your bio clock in your work schedule, you’re still allowed to do that, just not for safety critical jobs where accidentally dozing off can mean literally fucking dying and killing others.

“Felines are obligate carnivores and normally has to eat meat, but there is a pharmaceutical called a Dietary Enzyme Supplement which supplies artificially engineered enzymes to their digestive tracts, which allows them to digest plant based food and directly synthesize nutrients only found in meat in their own bodies. The Feline Ministry of Health manufactures these pharmaceuticals, and you can’t live without them without breaking the law if you’re a cat, so obviously the Feline Government is forcibly drugging their citizens!”

• No one is forcing you to take Dietary Enzyme Supplements. The Feline government bans predation but has no laws saying what alternative you have to take.

• They’re not even the only way for a cat to not eat prey, they’re just the easiest and therefore most common. You can also get regular nutritional supplements that directly supply nutrients not found in plant based food. You can even get fully synthetic meat analogues that contain all the nutrients found in meat. You can also intentionally starve yourself to death if you were determined to do that, the government can’t stop you.

US doing exactly what they accuse Communist China of doing exhibit 420

Why do that when you can just score a deal with the government to give them whatever information they want for sweet perks like foreign competitors getting banned?

I think weekly or monthly prompts would go a long way to making this community more active!