thomaszander

This is a bit of a simplification, one that indeed not many will disagree with.

The wider problem is that when governments and (non-profit) organizations did create alternatives for Microsoft products, the governments themselves ended up showing they are corrupted and the internal rules quickly changed to stop allowing the competing (open source) offerings.

A good example here is the Munich Linux desktop efforts a couple of decades ago. The actual workers were much happier, the sysadmins were ecstatic (much less work) and there wasn't really anyone that had problems with Openoffice and kmail at the time.

Yet, the funding to companies supporting the features they wanted dried up. Requirements got written that disallowed upgrades to "dangerous" new open source releases and after some time they went back to Microsoft because problems were not getting solved. (duh!).

So, sure, we'd need a set of alternatives. But what we really need is not the end-products. What we really need is more honest bureaucrats that actually work for the benefit of the people. And those I have not yet found.

Hi,

co-author of the ODF spec (2006 ISO) here, I also got involved via NLNet to work with my local standards office to improve OOXML.

The OOXML spec was offered to the ISO standard along an unusual path, a fast standardization lane. Where there was no option for any of the people reviewing it to actually change anything. It was rubber-stamped in other words.

That fact alone doesn't mean it is a bad, but it is a bit of a red flag. The fact is, it is a really bad specification. It is a full 7000 pages long with lots of conflicting details. On top of that it is full of references like "this works like wordperfect version-n". While references are useful in specifications, they need to be to existing open standards to be meaningful. Wordperfect has never standardized its format, so referring to it is meaningless.

To implement a competing application that can use this format you'd not be able to do that from this specification alone. Next to that it is so massive that it is essentially an undertaking that makes no sense. Compare it to ODF which is 1/10th of the size. Has a lot of reuse of concepts and was written under OASIS, a standards organization, unlike the OOXML spec which was written by Microsoft and the full 7000 pages dropped on the world.

I stopped looking at the OOXML stuff for some years, so the next part may be outdated. I noticed that after MS got this ratified by OSI, and thus they dodged the threat of law requiring governments to switch to ODF, they never did an update to the spec even though the applications have seen plenty of new features.

You can wait for the Librem 5 for a very long time, they haven't shipped any significant software update for a long time for mine and its in the state that if you turn on auto-suspend (i.e. don't always go at full 100% CPU) it freezes and needs a hard reboot.

Linux on phone is still very much in the enthusiasts-only phase. Not for me, not for most. And I'm saying that as someone that is a KDE/Linux geek!

Maybe that will change, but for now the e.foundation OS has most definitely a large potential audience that those phones are not going to be able to fill just yet.

Surprised this one hasn't been pointed out yet; "Passman" which is part of nextcloud and has plugins for all major browsers.

open source, encrypted-while-at-rest and a cloud service allowing you to use it from all your machines and even while traveling on public machines.

Reuters has been biased in their news telling for some time now.

Not entirely unlike the rest of the mainstream media, I would suppose.

> the cryptographic (in)security of Yggdrasil addresses.

Fair enough, I didn't catch that one.

The addresses generated has changed already from 0.3 to 0.4 (which is the series we see today), I expect that something will change again in future to make brute forcing harder.

Notice that in all cases the same IPv6 range was used, reusing the same space as upgrades change the individuals' IP address.

If you are interested, I suggest you stop by on the matrix room and chat about the different topics. Its rather large and I'm not a developer on the project, just someone learning from those better than me. Mostly in that room.

#yggdrasil:matrix.org

> their approach still spends 7 bits on the prefix.

The Yggdrasil people are very clear that this is a research project. Not to be used in production, to be used at your own risk etc etc etc.

In that light I find it unfair to claim it spends addressspace. Which, I might add, is pretty darn huge and we are not going to run out of addresses any time soon. If ever.

Maybe pedantic, but needed to point out that the 7 in `0200/7` of the usage is the opposite of being spent. The 7 first bits are the mask you need to apply to indicate that it is INSIDE the yggdrasil address-space. Which means that they only 'spend' 1 bit from from the first byte. Not 7.

The design behind yggdrasil is to keep as much the same as possible. I have some projects running on ygg using simple, existing, TCP-socket tech. Works great. So, to get the big issue out of the way. There is a lot of compatibility already there.

The gateway possibility is there, someone needs to do it, is all. There are instructions on the website on how to setup such a gateway on your local router, so you do not need to install the binary on each device to access ygg services.

The main reason why there isn't really anyone really doing this is that this is a research project and most people that use it, use it for their own usecases. Not to offer some websites which aren't already on mainnet.

Using. Can't squat something that is officially discontinued.

What is yours?

The protocol does not add peers, you will have to look for nearby ones yourself and add then in the config.

If you add more than one, you might start routing between those nodes. Probably Ok on desktop, not so much on mobile.

For next steps, it picks one 'main' peer for your outgoing traffic, based on speed. (once an hour).

On a higher level, the system builds a tree out of the peers that are connected and you send data from one node to the other by directions. Think "left at church, right at heardresser". Or in yggdrasil it is "Go to node 10, then from there to node 1, then to node 5, then to node 6".

In short; a tree is built based on the elected root sending out a package and which peer sends it to you first. Indicating that that is the fastest.

You send data the shortest route though the mesh using local directions only.

Actual traffic is encrypted for the destination peer, so other than some headers needed to route, everyone in the middle will just forward an unreadable blob.

First of all, its is a research project. The owners are very clear about that and love to repeat its lack of any guarantees ;-)

Personally I've been using it for a while and its indeed living up to its promises, but ymmd.

It is indeed an overlay network by the simple rule of that being something that people can use. Technically the guys require the underlying protocol to keep order (one after another) in the packages for the stuff to work. Which is why building it on top of tcp/ip makes sense. Note that the ordering requirement is likely to be removed in a future iteration, again this is a research project.

Ideas like doing a mesh using antenna's in your city are thus, for now, out of reach. But the core concepts and approaches will likely map very nicely to such a usecase and the lessons learned as an overlay will help such a future design.

The public network is currently around 4000 nodes, which is why "scalable" is indeed meant to be vague. Tests of a million nodes are going to be required, probably in a future protocol iteration, to make clear statements about how scalable it really is. Signs are good, DHT usage is still very low while we saw a doubling of network size in the last 6 months.

In short, I use it daily. It works for me.

> So it's effectively Host Identity Protocol?

The software is essentially a 'node', doing the routing. Whenever it starts it reads the config file to see if there is a private key in there. If no, it will generate a new one for you and that is your identity on the network.

> Just perhaps with something other than IPsec underneath?

That is correct, it uses standard, but not ipsec, encryption based on public key cryptography. A host that saves its private key will thus forever have the same IP address and if it runs services you connect to them using the encryption to its public key.

A node that is configured to connect to the wider yggdrasil public network will thus be reachable on a single IP with an identity that is based on public key cryptography, even if the machine is moving from network to network or even another continent.