Developers are understandably upset because the upcoming change will apparently break a good number of phone applications on iOS, and Apple is obviously lying through its teeth about why it's making the change, but I find myself scratching my head about one aspect of the complaints.

What is Apple Actually Changing?

According to the very angry article I linked above (I've abandoned my attempts to find any kind of neutral-sounding writeup about this – it's all Apple fanboys and Apple haters with no middle ground ... I'm getting so tired of polarization in modern culture):

But Cupertino can't delay the DMA's other mandate: real browsers, downloaded from Apple's own app store. Since it can't bar them outright, it's trying to raise costs on competitors and lower their potential to disrupt Apple's cozy monopoly. How? By geofencing browser choice and kneecapping web apps, all while gaslighting users about who is breaking their web apps.

What this translates to is Apple is effectively breaking "Progressive Web Apps" – a kind of application that amounts to little more than a tiny web browser bundle and an HTML/Javascript-powered "web page in a box." They're doing this because they're really angry at the EU for bossing them around and they're petty enough to punish users and developers since they can't do much else besides stomp their feet.

Because so many developers have been leaning on the crutch of "just shove it in a browser!" for years now to create their phone "apps," this change is going to break a large number of apps on iPhones and iPads. That'll show the EU bureaucrats!

How Can This Be Fixed?

I have a few ideas, which I'm listing here in decreasing order of "radical"-ness.

1. Stop developing for iOS, encourage users to migrate and discourage new users from adopting the garbage walled garden concentration camp-style "ecosphere" Apple foists upon everyone who touches their stuff.
2. Yell at and/or sue Apple to make them stop this crap. I call this "controversial" because for one thing, it's pointless (they have lots of expensive lawyers), and for another, it's stupid (winning won't change much). They're doing this to be spiteful, and no amount of protests from the peanut gallery is going to change their minds.
3. Develop actual phone applications, not "Progressive Web Apps."

I raise the third option because this whole thing made me sit back and sigh a bit as I realized something. Phone apps aren't even actual applications anymore; they're just web pages running on small screens. It's no wonder so many applications run like hot garbage on phones. They're not even using native APIs!

SDK? What's That?

It's that big pile of tools, libraries, source code and documentation that Apple and Google both provide (for a fee in Apple's case, and free in Google's) for their respective operating systems that let you develop actual, "first-class" applications that can run on them at a decent speed.

These SDKs grant access to an incredible wealth of features that a developer might find useful, such as "user interface elements" (like buttons, sliders, drop-downs, text entry fields, etc.), "data storage" (optimized built-in database systems, secure access to hardware and the filesystem) and remote access (network calls of all kinds, including native support for many protocols like HTTP(S), FTP, Websockets and more).

It's almost as if you can develop software for phones that are nearly as functional and performance as a desktop application written in a native language like C/C++! In fact Android allows direct development in C/C++ now in addition to its Java clone. Apple's iOS has always used Objective-C, so you've got C-like functionality there too.

This ties back to why this change by Apple has a silver lining. Let them do it. Let them hose their users and developers. It'll encourage migrations away from Apple's walled garden and it'll both spur improvements in developer skills and flush out the crappy developers who can't produce anything besides slow, bloated web apps.

Why in God's name are the freemium gacha shovelware game developers leading the pack here in terms of native performance on their shipping products?

I assume part of the reason so many phone app developers stick to the broken web-app-in-a-box design is they think they can use one codebase to produce apps on every platform (including web browsers on desktops). This never actually works. Every platform has its quirks (each phone OS has different requirements to actually get that browser working in each app, and desktops come with the worst possible quirk: users who expect functional, feature-rich systems), and you wind up keeping separate branches (or repos) for each "flavor" you have to work on.

Rip Off the Band-Aid™️!

Note: The jerks at whatever company owns the trademark for brand-named adhesive bandages don't endorse this post or its opinions or its jerkwad author. So there.

One way to immunize yourself as a developer from the stupidity and immaturity of these companies who think they know better than you (or just want to use you and your users as pawns for their political crap) is to minimize your exposure to their ability to wreck your workflow and your output.

Paradoxically, using their own SDKs instead of relying on a browser-in-a-box actually reduces the risk of having your applications suddenly break because of some idiotic spat with a government bureaucrat or the utterly volatile court systems around the world. Yes, SDKs change and features get deprecated and removed, and I don't deny that companies still break SDKs very suddenly on occasion, but it's far less frequent than they seem to mess around with web browsers.

Generally speaking, SDKs are harder to "break" on a whim, because doing so causes major disruptions. As much as Apple hates Epic over their Fortnite silliness, they begrudgingly realize it's stupid to break their APIs intentionally to screw over every Unreal engine-powered game on the App Store. The knock-on effects aren't worth it. That and the dev tools (i.e. the SDKs) tend to be developed by a different team than the iOS and internal apps teams, and the keepers of the tools tend to be very protective of their projects. Telling a senior engineer to intentionally break something he spent a year painstakingly building and perfecting is going to be a bad time.

Companies are absolutely insane about web browsers and their uses, and it's almost always profit-driven. Apple in particular is worse than a psycho ex-girlfriend when it comes to any attempts (perceived or real) to skirt around their 30% cut of all revenues involving iOS. Beyond their 30% cut of sales, they (rather famously) battled with lunacy dispenser Tim Sweeney about their claim to a 30% slice of all in-app transactions.

The best way to try to sidestep Apple's greed is to use – you guessed it – a browser-in-a-box, shipping your paying customers (and their wallets) off to a website you control where Apple can't see the transactions or take their cut. Because of that, they're constantly screwing with web browser functionality and restrictions. You can't rely on a web browser on a mobile device to be stable or reliable.

Desktop browsers aren't immune either – just witness Google's endless war against ad blockers (you're using an alternative like Brave or Vivaldi, right?) – but so far they haven't been tampered with too much in terms of straight-up controlling third-party "web applications" like they have on mobile devices.

Write Real Applications

You simply cannot trust browser-based application designs on mobile devices. If you try to use the baked-in browser, you're subject to the whims of either Apple or whoever made whatever Android-based phone you're trying to run on. If you try to ship your own browser, you'll meet varying degrees of resistance.

Apple will sometimes refuse to approve your app so it can't even be distributed (free or not) if it thinks you're sidestepping their payment system or doing something else that's not profitable to them. Even if they allow it to publish, their exclusive control of iOS means they are free to screw with your application's functionality in an unlimited, untraceable fashion.

Android is somewhat better, but still not immune to unexpected interference in the name of "security" or whatever garbage excuse they come up with to prevent your custom web browser-based "app" to talk to unapproved remote systems.

The only reasonable way around this is to just built real, native applications for each platform you want to target. You can take advantage of features each platform SDK provides, and the end result is a faster, more reliable application that's not nearly as vulnerable to the whims of whatever grumpy executive decides to target another browser end-run-around the walled garden that morning.

I know this is a scary prospect to a lot of developers because it means stepping outside the "comfort zone" of Javascript. Don't be scared though – there's tons of libraries and frameworks out there for other languages, and you'd be surprised how featureful and powerful they can be.

Qt is a good example of a toolchain that can build native applications for Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS and Android. It has an unfortunate licensing situation (it's "free as in beer" and you can have its source code, but they try really hard to get money out of you), and it's got some warts in terms of how a few of its features are implemented (looooots of macros), but it's still a superb toolkit.

As a sidenote, if you're just writing a desktop application and don't care about mobile platforms, you can use the free/OSS CopperSpice instead to get a significant portion of Qt's functionality without the licensing nonsense and without the macro soup (they mandated a minimum of C++17 and used its new features to implement signals and slots natively, which is a really cool piece of engineering).

If you're desperate to stick to Javascript you still have some options that don't involve using a web browser. React Native comes to mind.

Just please, please climb out of the web browser sandbox. You've got an entire operating system custom-built for mobile devices at your disposal. There's no point in walling yourself off from more of it than you have to.

Once I set up shop on Rumble and Odysee I'll post links here as well.

See you on the flipside!

I'll never understand why people think they can kill sites like Kiwi Farms – which has broken no laws and has actively cooperated with law enforcement in the past when a criminal investigation into someone's behavior leads them to a post on the site – when the copyright cartel has spent nearly twenty years and over a billion dollars trying to kill [The Pirate Bay](https://thepiratebay.rocks/) without success.

Censors and tyrants do love to flex their muscles and point their dark weapons at people who don't fear them, I suppose. Ah well.

In related news, I'm brewing up a project of my own that may well attract some unpleasant attention. All the wrong people have gotten away with truly disturbing and dangerous behavior for far too long and hidden behind self-assigned labels to protect themselves from criticism. I've decided it's time to start holding their feet to the fire for a change instead of watching them try to silence sites like Kiwi Farms. As the Excelsior's captain said in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: "alright, now we've given him something else to shoot at."

This is a fascinating concept to me. User A posted a comment somewhere on the site. User B upvoted the comment (but did not post a reply to it). Later, someone was offended by the comment and reported it to reddit's administrators, who determined User A's comment was "abusive" for some reason (probably for pointing out that only women can get pregnant or something equally reality-affirming), deleted the comment and then undoubtedly banned User A for posting it.

Then they punished User B ex post facto for upvoting the offending post, as if to indicate that merely agreeing with a post that offends someone is itself an offensive action.

Go home reddit. You're drunk. Why anyone still uses that garbage web site is beyond me.

Also, this was just too special to not share:

We truly live in clown world.

The affected models are:

• RV110W Wireless-N VPN Firewall
• RV130 VPN Router
• RV130W Wireless-N Multifunction VPN Router
• and RV215W Wireless-N VPN Router

These are all models explicitly designed for security applications, one of them EOL'd as recently as 2017, but if you're protecting your networks with these things, you're running on swiss cheese with a door.

Sure, some of these devices were first sold in 2011, but Cisco was selling them (and touting their security features) as late as 2017. Cisco seems to think five years of unscrewing their garbage gear is "good enough," since they expect you'll obediently get back in line for the next iteration of their 5-year-shelf-life hardware.

Screw that noise. Go buy some MikroTik gear. Their oldest hardware from over a decade ago is still receiving software updates and patches today, since they know what they're doing and actually care about repeat business from people who want more of their gear instead of being maneuvered into buying more because they have to if they want to stay secure.

From Kiwi Farms' operator Joshua Moon:

I don't like addressing Twitter retards but I love this tweet because it's so mask off.

This has not a single thing to do with the purported causus belli: swatting, irl harassment, or 'justice' for anyone - these are all lies.

It's about deranged perverts memory holing their tweets where they said they wanted to rape women.

Cancel culture always gloats and celebrates its wins, no matter how fleeting, and almost always prematurely. Kiwi Farms will survive this (because it always has), and the people who know the truth about it are still out there paying close attention to who's taking an active role in dismantling what's left of free discourse on the internet.

Remember, people are watching this who don't post (or even browse) Kiwi Farms. They remember things like this and they quietly support and contribute to "off the grid" efforts (that I won't detail here) to replace this crippled infrastructure with something a child molester can't silence no matter how many politicians and Silicon Valley companies he has in his pocket. Significant progress is being made and there is hope yet that good will still triumph over evil. It won't be televised and the censorship brigade won't be invited.

And they have long memories. When this 1984-esque machine turns on you, and you come crying to anyone who will listen about how unfair this "censorship" suddenly is, they will politely remind you that you were warned, and they will turn our backs on you and leave you to wallow in the moat you helped dig.

Enjoy your soak with the pigs, censors. I personally can't wait to relish the squealing when it comes.

Not to worry though, Kek has spoken:

All sixty Texas Democrat representatives have fled the state on a chartered private flight in order to deny the Republicans (who all actually showed up for work) in Texas "quorum" to prevent a vote on voting law reforms. To my understanding, without at least 50% of the state's representatives present for a vote on a bill, the vote can't actually be done. The fleeing Democrats flew to Washington D.C. to proclaim victory (from a safe distance).

Meanwhile Texas Governor Greg Abbott has stated they'll all be arrested once they return to Texas, but since aristocrats rarely suffer any consequences for their actions, I find his threat less than credible. The law does indeed allow him to do this. It also allows him to call an emergency session, take all the representatives to the legislature (by force if needed) and lock the god damned doors until they've done their jobs. I'll be pleasantly surprised if he actually makes good on it. Seeing Texas state police drag their lazy asses back to the legislature and locking them in would be a delight.

There are other legal options available to the governor as well. He could simply vacate all sixty seats and call an emergency election to replace them all. That'd be pretty funny too.

The voting reforms in question are naturally deeply offensive to Team Blue since they routinely abuse our current elections process to cheat. The simple concept of requiring photo ID in order to vote (to prevent one person from voting multiple times) is considered a cardinal sin, which always cracks me up since states often require photo IDs for things as benign as fishing permits and nobody seems to be too concerned about that.

Still, I have some questions about this peculiar political maneuver.

• Who paid for that cushy chartered flight on a private jet and the (undoubtedly lavish) accommodations for sixty state congresscritters during their stay in DC? Since nobody in the press seems to have asked that question, I suspect the answer is "the taxpayers." I'm sure the average Texan is happy to be footing the bill for this excursion.
• Since they outnumber Republican representatives 60 to 40, why couldn't they have just voted "no" on the bill instead of literally fleeing the state to block its passage? It just seems so bizarre. They could have literally waited for the vote to be called, voted "no," and easily defeated the bill. Why didn't they do this? Maybe they just wanted to take a vacation on the taxpayers' dime.
• Why are they so openly arrogant and smug about this? This is mostly a rhetorical question – they're beaming because they legitimately think they're "winning" and they're mugging it up for their constituents – but seriously, who actually brags about ditching work? Anyone who isn't an aristocrat gets fired if they blow off work to take a vacation (even if they don't openly brag about doing it). It's good to be a king, I guess.
• Why are Democrat politicians elsewhere – including in DC (and including White House officials) – endorsing, supporting and even celebrating this behavior? Another rhetorical question. The answer is obvious – Republicans bad, Democrats good. When Republicans in Oregon did something similar a couple of years ago to stop actual corruption by the state governor, everybody booed and jeered. Now it's totally awesome. Hypocrites.
• Why weren't they wearing face masks on the flight? We lowly plebs have to; why don't they?
• How sad is it that very few people actually seem to care? We're so accustomed now to our elected officials being total scumbags that we aren't even surprised anymore when they pull stunts like this. We just sigh and go on with our lives because somebody has to get the real work done.

Sigh. I should just develop a drinking habit so stuff like this doesn't bother me anymore. It's not like anybody's ever going to fix it. 😢

Audacity, a long-established, high-quality and immensely popular cross-platform sound editor was recently "acquired" by Muse Group for, I'm sure, completely altruistic and not-at-all greedy, underhanded and privacy-invading reasons. Naturally the very first thing the new owner of the formerly free software ("free as in freedom," not "free as in beer" which is its current status) was to add "anonymous" data collection functionality and restrict usage of the software to people aged 13 or older (sorry kids, no audio editing for you; get rekt skrubs). Notably, there's no option in the user interface to disable this data collection. It's auto opt-in, and they ain't lettin' you opt-out.

Understandably (and justifiably) this upset quite a few people. I'm among them. When I record or edit audio, I want to record or edit audio, not transmit anonymous usage statistics to some random asshole on the internet for analysis. There's a quick-and-dirty technological fix for this stupidity – block network access (completely), inbound and outbound, for the Audacity executable and processes in your firewall. But we shouldn't have to do that.

Fortunately, GPL-licensed open source software affords us a better technological solution to software takeovers by openly hostile actors: we can just fork the last legitimate version of the software and carry on developing it separately. Several people have done exactly that.

The fork that appeared to be gaining at least a little momentum and a germination of community support was called Tenacity. Unfortunately, one of the people ostensibly in charge of the project is an absolute drama queen with an old axe to grind (he, like many boring people, hates 4chan because he has no sense of humor). He's got a track record going back years of saying absolutely insane things, and he's demonstrated extraordinary incompetence in his development efforts to fork Audacity:

• CMake builds are broken now
• Some locales/translations have vanished
• After installation, only English is available in the application
• They appear to have broken CI/CD for now
• The default build configuration crashes on Linux
• They've somehow broken auto-detection of ffmpeg

He's much more focused on politics (both in general and in this software project, because apparently your audio editor needs you to know that Trump is bad for some fucking reason) than he is on software development, and it shows.

Naturally the moment people began asking even the easiest, most gentle questions about his qualifications and motives, he exploded into full victim mode and proclaimed he was suddenly receiving death threats, hundreds of phone calls and even claimed someone showed up to his house to try to kill him.

... lolwut ...

One poster from Kiwi Farms summarized the "controversy" succinctly:

This CookieEngineer person has clearly had a bug up their arse about 4chan for years and gleefully exploited the opportunity to be the victim.

Crazy person does crazy shit. Whatever. What really bothers me about this is ... that it actually worked. The claims are ridiculous and exaggerated: 600 phone calls? Someone trying to kill you? Really? Over some stupid trolling about a name? 6 phone calls I could believe. Someone putting a box of shit in your mailbox I could believe. But this? Extraordinary claims require at least some evidence.

He really wants us to believe that some trolling over a stupid name escalated to a murder attempt because 4chan people are in fact not people at all but being of pure evil and malice, sent by the dark lord of hell Trump himself, with hearts blacker than the blackest black times infinity. FACT!

This does not pas [sic] my sniff test at all, and I'm sick with 16 corona mutations. And even the most casual of looks will reveal it's full of shit.

Yet many people seem to gobble it up uncritically, even smart people. It's not even that I like 4chan: they're a bunch of idiots. But this is just stupid.

While I disagree with the assertion that 4chan is a bunch of idiots (they are a bunch of skilled idiots, thank you very much), this otherwise hits it on the nose.

"CookieEngineer," having made his grandiose claims of unimaginable abuse at the hands of ... somebody? ... with no proof provided of course, made a dramatic exit from the project because he just couldn't handle the immense stress ... of forking an open-source project and renaming it. And he blames his failures on "the trolls" and "the naht-zees." Because of course he does.

In response to this hilarious stupidity, some 4channers spun up their own fork of Audacity and called it Sneedacity. And they're making decent progress on it too. This is hilarious. If you don't find it hilarious (or at least gave it a sensible chuckle), go away and get a sense of humor. It'll help you get through life a lot less painfully.

The whole "sneed" thing inexplicably infuriates a bizarre cross-section of humorless people, and I genuinely don't understand why on this one. It's a fucking Simpsons reference, and an old one at that! Despite that, people are screeching at maximum volume about the name itself being "hate speech" (lolwut). In response, Github has "hidden" the project – it doesn't show up in searches even if you explicitly search for it by name. You have to know its URL to reach it. Idiots.

Furthering the stupidity, Arch's "AUR" repository – a pile of community-managed build scripts for software that Arch itself doesn't include in its own curated repositories – has decided to ban Sneedacity for "hate speech."

I'm sick of this. And I'm looking forward to switching to Sneedacity at the first opportunity and encouraging everyone I know to switch to it as well. Because fuck these humorless dolts who try to tear down everything they hate (which is pretty much everything). Maybe they should focus on getting Tenacity to actually fucking build and run properly before they start slinging mud at other forks that are blowing them out of the water.

And shame on Github and Arch for aiding and abetting censorship.

• Source code repository
• Latest release (installer, standalone, and source tarballs)

AltDrag is one of those "so obvious in hindsight" tools that implements functionality that really should be built into Windows – the ability to move and resize a window by holding [ALT] and dragging it with the mouse. It makes managing lots of windows so much easier (and faster) and can really speed up a lot of workflows. Lots of Linux desktop environments support it natively, and I've always been surprised that Microsoft never added it to Windows.

Thankfully, AltDrag came along as a free, open-source tool to bring this functionality to Windows. It was originally developed for Windows XP and updated for Windows 7, but eventually the developer's real life obligations started to encroach on his free time and the tool ended up on "life support" as he no longer had time to keep it updated.

When Windows 8 came along with Microsoft's first genuine attempts to handle high-DPI displays (i.e. 4k monitors), AltDrag ended up having trouble with non-100% scaled windows (which ends up being pretty much every window on a 4k monitor) because of how it works. A workaround was eventually found, and even after Windows 10 broke it again, another workaround was found that kinda-sorta fixed it. The tool itself didn't get updated; the workarounds both involved using various settings in its Explorer properties "Compatibility" tab.

In Windows 10, even with the workaround, it was still flaky, and for a good long while, it seemed like it was never going to be fixed. Thankfully a mad lad going by the name RamonUnch on Gitlab decided to fork the tool and update it for Windows 10, resurrecting it and bringing it back from life support. You can get the new up-to-date version of AltDrag from GitHub.

Go grab it and improve your Windows experience with one key and a click!

NOTE: Windows 10 might flag altdrag.exe as malware after installation (it calls it a "severe" threat and automatically quarantines it). It gets pissy because AltDrag does fun things with keyboard & mouse inputs and messes with, well, potentially every program running on your system based on your actions. For once, I actually don't object to Windows presuming that it's malware, because generally speaking you don't want programs to be doing this sort of thing. But since you're installing AltDrag deliberately and know what it's doing, you can safely use the security panel to restore it and grant it an exception.

It should come as no surprise then that the company has also engaged in some revisionism. Reddit was founded by three people – Aaron Swartz, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman. But if you look at Reddit's About Us page and scroll down to the "Founders" section, you'll notice they only show two people now:

They've "erased" founder Aaron Swartz from their history. Scumbags. Their motivation for this is pretty simple – Swartz was a strong proponent of Free Speech as an absolute ideal and right, and a fervent supporter of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America which recognizes the natural right to free speech as one of America's most important legal protections. Reddit routinely spits on the notion of free speech, so it makes sense that they'd try to memory hole him and his role in creating the site its current owners have worked hard to "sanitize" into yet another boring "safe space."

Swartz took his own life in early 2013 after MIT and the federal government embarked on an absurdly overzealous prosecution against him for supposedly "hacking" MIT's systems to "steal proprietary and confidential information." Remember this whenever you hear MIT (or one of its sycophants) claim that it's pro-free speech or boast that "hey, we make lots of our lectures available online for free!"

What did Swartz actually do? He plopped a little PC in a cable closet at MIT and used it to retrieve academic papers hidden behind paywalls owned by private companies trying to gatekeep academic research, and then he released those papers to the public (which paid for the research in the first place) for free. What a monster, right? In the words of his own family:

It is the product of a criminal-justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s Office and at MIT contributed to his death.

He stood up for free speech when most people would crumble under the pressure, and his contributions to the world shouldn't be forgotten or whitewashed by his former partners. He deserved better. Shame on you, Reddit.

renameutils is a fantastic little set of tools that make it disturbingly easy to bulk rename or copy files and directories. It's free, open source and easy to use once you get the hang of it. It uses GNU Autoconf and GNU Automake to handle compilation. This is pretty common, and the typical process for building such a package looks like this:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

I wanted to use this tool set on my Synology DS2419+, but unfortunately the custom Linux distribution it runs doesn't include it or any compilers or build tools, so it became necessary to build it on a different Linux box and copy the binaries over by hand.

This led to another problem – the DS2419+'s custom distro also doesn't include some of the libraries that renameutils needs, so I needed a static build of the tools. Unfortunately, the renameutils package doesn't include a --static option for its configuration script.

Autoconf to the rescue! I'd forgotten about this (it's been awhile since I've messed with this, gimme a break!) but it's possible to add custom arguments and settings to various steps of the build process. I just needed to set an LD_FLAGS environment variable when running configure, like this:

$ LD_FLAGS=-static ./configure
$ make

Note: Some autoconf-based packages use LDFLAGS instead of LD_FLAGS for this; if you end up with a dynamic build despite running the above, try setting LDFLAGS. It's also safe to just set them both:

$ LD_FLAGS=-static LDFLAGS=-static ./configure

I didn't need to run sudo make install here since I'm just copying the final binaries over to the target system by hand.

The result? Static binaries that happily run on my DS2419+! They complain about setting their locale, which is a bit odd since the locale is set just fine in the environment, but the tools still work anyway. I might need to recompile the tools again with additional settings to handle locales, but for now, this does the job!

On a side note: the scary thing about this is I just used the Debian build that's available for Microsoft's WSL2 environment to build these binaries, and it still worked. Natively-compiled Linux binaries built on a Windows box, and they worked on a target host running Linux on bare metal. Scary, crazy times we live in!