TheAssassin's blog

Freenode is dead -- Long live Libera.Chat!

Sun, 23 May 2021 01:00:00 +0100

Freenode is dead. That’s the unfortunate truth. On May 19, an event regularly described as “hostile takeover”, in which the control over the biggest IRC network for free, open-source software has been forcefully taken away from the volunteer group called Freenode Staff who have run it ever since it was founded about 20 years ago, has taken place.

Therefore, all the communities I am involved in and/or manage on Freenode are moving or have already moved to the new network which most of the former Freenode staff have founded: Libera.Chat. This includes:

AppImage with the channel #appimage
NewPipe with the channel #newpipe
Blue Nebula with the channel #blue-nebula

I do not have time to provide a nice summary on the topic as I have previously, e.g., for the youtube-dl incident. In the past days, I have analyzed the available resources (i.e., blog posts, pasted chat logs, and other publicly available information from both sides), and I support the former Freenode Staff in this matter. Large parts of their claims can be verified, something I cannot say about claims from the “new management”. The way this “new management” has literally grabbed power and then started to defame the old staff clearly shows that they don’t have the best intentions, not for the users, not for Freenode as a project, not for IRC.

I have curated some links to interesting resources such as summaries, news, blog posts, resignation letters etc., so read on if you want to take a look yourself.

Update: youtube-dl reinstantiated thanks to EFF

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 22:30:00 +0100

In October, the popular and famous archivist tool youtube-dl was taken down by GitHub due to a DMCA request by the Recording Industry Association of America. I posted a detailed analysis explaining the relation between international, US, EU and German law, and showing why this request was very different from what most people know as the “classic” DMCA takedown request. I felt this was necessary since there were a lot of rumor and wrong claims out on the Internet (not just in forums or on the (anti)social media, but also on media offerings), which did not help the discussion at all. The repository is back now, thanks to the EFF and its team. They filed a counter-notice on behalf of the youtube-dl maintainers, which allowed GitHub to reinstantiate the repository.

youtube-dl, GitHub, and a takedown request

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 21:30:00 +0100

On Oct 23, 2020, GitHub Inc. published a takedown notice after taking down youtube-dl’s main repository as well as a number of its forks.

youtube-dl is a Python library which can be used to decode stream URLs of a large variety of services. This allows third-party video players to stream videos, legitimately download copies and much more. It has been used as the basis for many other applications, but also ships with a CLI front end targeting advanced users.

The takedown request is justified with so-called anti-circumvention laws, as well as a German court decision. There are plenty of rumors on the Internet around this case, but a lot of them are apparently wrong. Therefore, in this blog post, we’ll have a glance at the request as well as the German laws and the court decision. We also discuss several third-party responses.

There is one important fact that needs to be stressed: This text was not written by lawyers and does not provide any legal advice. It simply provides a third-party analysis of the situation.

AppImageLauncher: 1000 stars on GitHub

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 00:14:00 +0100

This week, AppImageLauncher’s “stargazer” count exceeded the 1000 mark. To me, this shows how many people appreciate a tool designed for the average Linux desktop user, providing a simple and intuitive workflow to manage AppImages. By the way, did you know you can help translate AppImageLauncher? Please refer to GitHub for more information.

AppImageLauncher 2.2.0 released

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0200

AppImageLauncher 2.2.0 has been released today. Read on to see what’s new in the new version as well as the previous release 2.1.4, for which I forgot to write an article about (yet again).

Please note that there’s a vulnerability in a component contained in releases prior to v2.1.4. An update to v2.1.4 or later is strongly recommended!

DLN Xtend podcast and AppImageLauncher

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:00:01 +0100

Recently, while looking for media coverage on AppImageLauncher which I might have missed before, I stumbled across DLN Xtend, a podcast spin-off of Destination Linux Network. They covered AppImageLauncher in a few episodes. Here’s my story with DLN Xtend!

AppImageLauncher 2.1.3 released

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0100

AppImageLauncher 2.1.3 has been released today. Read on to see what’s new in today’s version as well as the previous release 2.1.2, for which I forgot to write an article about.

AppImageLauncher 2.1.0 and 2.1.1 released

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0100

AppImageLauncher 2.1.1 has been released today. Read on to see what’s new in today’s version as well as the previous release 2.1.0.

Another big milestone: AppImageLauncher 2.0.0 released

Sat, 26 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0100

On Friday, October 18, AppImageLauncher 2.0.0 was released. This version is the first one to feature libappimage 1.0.0.

AppImageLauncher 2.0.0 provides new, innovative features and subtle improvements over the previous 1.x series of releases. Read on to see what’s changed!

libappimage 1.0.0 released

Wed, 03 Apr 2019 08:00:00 +0100

libappimage, AppImage’s core library, has just seen its first stable release after the rewrite. Version 1.0.0 was released on April 1, 2019. Read on to see what’s new!

Big milestone: AppImageLauncher 1.0.0 released

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 08:00:00 +0100

After more than half a year, the first stable version of AppImageLauncher has been released. This marks a big milestone in the software’s history, as up to now, a continuous release scheme was used without any kind of real version scheme.

Within the last weeks, a lot has changed about AppImageLauncher. Read on to see what’s new, and find out how to install it!

AppImageLauncher: Preparing for the first release

Tue, 09 Oct 2018 12:38:26 +0200

In the last weeks, Alexis Zubieta has been working on redesigning and refactoring AppImageLauncher. He’s invested a lot of time into restructuring the code base, designing new dialogs following the established workflow, and we’re almost ready to merge his changes.

Introducing awesome-linuxdeploy

Tue, 09 Oct 2018 08:00:00 +0200

We’ve started a little project on GitHub that shall serve as a central directory of plugins for linuxdeploy. You can find the list on GitHub: https://github.com/linuxdeploy/awesome-linuxdeploy Contributions welcome! Please don’t hesitate to send us pull requests adding new plugins or other linuxdeploy-related projects to the list.

Pext: new and improved AppImage

Mon, 08 Oct 2018 08:00:00 +0200

This weekend, among other things, I was working on improving the Pext AppImage. Sylvia and I were spending quite some hours on making the Pext AppImages smaller, more efficient and provide improved desktop integration. Also, AppImages are now built using linuxdeploy, the universal AppImage creation tool suite, using the conda plugin to set up everything Python related. That plugin was actually inspired by the experiences I made during all the months it took to make the first AppImage build script.

(New) AppImage documentation

Fri, 14 Sep 2018 12:21:56 +0200

The AppImage project has never had a proper documentation. Sure, there were (and still are!) some wikis (most notably the AppImageKit wiki), but wikis, especially the ones on GitHub, lack any sort of structure. Recently, I could finally start to work on this, resulting in the (fairly) brand new docs.appimage.org.

New Blog

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 12:00:03 +0200

I decided to start a blog. It will contain announcements of projects I’m involved. Also, I might be posting about some recent topics or opinions. We’ll see.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to my homepage. Right now, it’s primarily a blog. If you’re here to find out who the person behind this page is, this is the short description: Infrastructure maintainer, privacy advocate, professional software engineer, open source developer and supporter, passionate Pythoneer, and friend of C++. I’m not a fan of the so-called (anti)social media, I don’t own an account on any platform. You can find me on GitHuband on IRC (my nick is TheAssassin on all networks I use).