Matthew Garrett

https://nondeterministic.computer/@mjg59

Former biologist. Actual PhD in genetics. Security at Nvidia, OS security teaching at https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu. Blog: https://codon.org.uk/~mjg59/blog . He/him.

Blog: https://codon.org.uk/~mjg59/blog
Signal: @mjg.59

Public Key

npub1jpfx7gvwn68l9rw8def53lkljwg0yv7fn99tqdzxyn68k29p8gmq9qvqhj

NIP-05 Address

mjg59_at_nondeterministic.computer@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsfq5n0yx8farlj3hrku56glm0e8y8jx0yejj4sx3rzfarm9zsn5dsprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntqyxhwumn8ghj77tpvf6jumt9td65zh

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relay.momostr.pink

yabu.me

Author Public Key

npub1jpfx7gvwn68l9rw8def53lkljwg0yv7fn99tqdzxyn68k29p8gmq9qvqhj

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Last Notes

2026-04-18 08:29:36 UTC

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Personally I'm not going to literally copy code from a codebase under an incompatible license because that is what the law says, but have I read proprietary code and learned the underlying creative aspect and then written new code that embodies it? Yes! Anyone claiming otherwise is lying!

2026-04-18 08:14:40 UTC

Free software people: A major goal of free software is for individuals to be able to cause software to behave in the way they want it to
LLMs: (enable that)
Free software people: Oh no not like that

2026-02-03 00:11:56 UTC

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Ah! https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/hadess/iio-sensor-proxy/-/issues/216 ok I'll dig into this

2025-11-28 05:51:38 UTC

Poll for people from the UK and US only sorry I am being restrictive there is actually a reason

2025-09-06 21:54:04 UTC

A fun thing you can do right now to test whether your system will stop booting next week because of a secure boot certificate expiring!
1) Does your system currently have secure boot enabled? If not, go to step 5
2) Download Fedora 42
3) Does it refuse to boot with a secure boot violation? If not, go to step 5
4) This is interesting and unexpected! Please let me know, you will literally be the first
5) Nothing is going to happen to you next week

2025-08-11 05:00:03 UTC

I suddenly need to care about Amiga DMA cycle timings and this isn't an improvement in my quality of life

2025-06-09 10:23:27 UTC

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It's storing the phone number/XMPP ID, and it claims that the app will periodically re-query, so if you run the server you can just log the lookup

2025-03-21 16:10:30 UTC

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If the membership chose a candidate that the board refuses to appoint, the membership deserves to know that.

2025-03-21 16:07:14 UTC

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There is a well defined process for how elections are run (https://opensource.org/about/board-of-directors/elections). This year, several candidates were removed from the election results for supposedly refusing to use proprietary software to sign the board agreement. The requirement to do so is not stated anywhere in the election process. The bylaws allow the board to ignore the will of the electorate, but removing candidates who didn't violate any election rules is just fucking ridiculous.

2025-03-21 16:00:25 UTC

Like many nonprofits, membership of the @npub1djq…zj5f board of directors is technically down to the existing board choosing to appoint new directors. OSI "membership" (in the sense that donors can become "members" of the organisation) isn't a thing that's defined by the by-laws, it's a process that the directors have chosen to adopt. As such, the elections that members participate in are just guidance for the board's decisions, rather than anything they're obliged to respect.

2025-03-18 03:19:08 UTC

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Nobody is going to try to make money on a proprietary fork of an MIT Coreutils. Nobody is hiding their trade secrets there. This isn't the 80s.
What is a bigger issue is the more symbolic nature of things. People had the opportunity to pick a copyleft licence and chose not to. We can view this as an attack on copyleft (albeit one that's likely symbolic at best), or we can accept that the copyleft community has been doing a poor job winning the hearts and minds of new generations of developers

2025-03-18 03:14:06 UTC

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What Coreutils-adjacent GPL enforcement there has been centred around Busybox, a GPLed implementation of many POSIX and Unixish tools, commonly used in embedded devices. Busybox-related enforcement has been an effective tool in obtaining compliance, to the extent that it's been reimplemented under a permissive licence with the explicit goal of reducing enforcement risk. Coreutils has simply never been subject to enforcement in the same way, so there's no significant impact.

2025-03-18 03:05:47 UTC

I'm a huge proponent of copyleft licensing, I'm in favour of using the GPL as a tool to ensure users have the ability to modify the software on their devices, and I'm just having trouble getting too worked up about the Rust reimplementation of Coreutils being MIT. Philosophically? Yeah, it sucks. Practical outcomes? Almost certainly none. The GPL violators aren't going to change coreutils implementation to avoid being sued, the FSF wasn't going to do that anyway

2025-03-08 18:46:45 UTC

The discovery that lifepo4 power banks are now at the point where they can switch from AC fast enough that they're usable as UPSes is about to change my life in a short term expensive but long term cheap way

2025-03-02 05:13:49 UTC

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You see a transphobe in your mentions? You reject them, just like you'd reject a nazi. A bar that accepts transphobes is a transphobe bar.

2025-03-02 05:11:48 UTC

Free software is about granting people rights, and as such it is incompatible with racism. It is incompatible with homophobia. It is incompatible with "gender critical" ideology. Those people all reject the idea that all humans have rights based on who they are are ideologically incompatible with free software and deserve to be sidelined. We can replace anyone's contributions, we can't replace all those they drive away.

2025-01-22 00:16:07 UTC

Who's going to be the first security conference to be explicit that Ross Ulbricht is persona non grata and who's going to be the first to have him keynoting

2025-01-10 19:13:07 UTC

Me fucking about with an LTE hotspot ended up helping enable an EFF project that's then turned into a Wired story about mass surveillance around the DNC, so never stop fucking about with things: https://www.wired.com/story/2024-dnc-cell-site-simulator-phone-surveillance/

2024-12-13 13:04:32 UTC

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Microcode in an Intel CPU is not hardware circuits - it's software. Pretending otherwise is dishonest. When you power on an Intel CPU it runs code out of ROM that performs a series of operations (including performing cryptographic validation of other blobs) before jumping to the reset vector. And, well, good luck making the argument that there's no license associated with that - would you argue that a copy of Linux in ROM creates no GPL obligations?

2024-12-02 07:48:23 UTC

Over a decade ago I wrote a thing about Gamergate that included a footnote along the lines of "You are free to disagree with me in comments, but if you attempt to argue that Gamergate is not a misogynistic hate movement I will replace your comment with 'Fart fart fart fart'". And I did. Encourage your enemies to spend hours writing 3000 word essays on why you're wrong and spend 5 seconds replacing it with "Fart fart fart fart". It's time they can't use against anyone else.

2024-12-02 05:59:39 UTC

My PhD in genetics has been useful for getting me jobs at startups with fruitfly infestations and criticising people using the term "Biological sex" and I'm all out of startup interviews

2024-11-26 09:27:13 UTC

Having had a fucking Ars Technica article written about Linus abusing me on LKML I have no fucking sympathy whatsoever for someone actually suffering consequences for doing the same

2024-11-12 21:33:28 UTC

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Did meet some excellent people and see some amazing t-shirts though, so can't be all that sad

2024-11-12 21:29:14 UTC

Sad to have missed Purplecon, was unfortunately at another conference over the weekend and now need a different excuse to get back to Australia :(

2024-10-13 08:38:30 UTC

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Yes... Yes! A-ha ha ha yes!
https://nondeterministic.computer/system/media_attachments/files/113/299/206/798/425/909/original/b93c88d796e6835d.jpg

2024-10-13 08:19:35 UTC

I'm on a boat
https://nondeterministic.computer/system/media_attachments/files/113/299/130/958/059/818/original/b39534f730a0cf43.jpg

2024-09-23 09:45:00 UTC

How do I debug hotel wifi where my laptop gets about 10 seconds of packets and then about 40 seconds of nothing but my phone works fine (ath11k)

2024-09-02 09:14:07 UTC

I appreciate the modern world where sending my lawyer an email containing nothing other than 👍is an entirely reasonable thing to do

2024-09-02 02:37:37 UTC

My enthusiasm for Fediverse remains massively constrained for one very simple reason: when I click on someone's post I don't see all the replies unless I click a different button, and if I click that one it becomes much more difficult for me to reply to any of the replies, and I am *not* going to reply to anything without checking that I'm not repeating something someone has already said so I simply don't reply

2024-08-31 03:35:05 UTC

Rust advocates should demonstrate the viability of the language by replacing an entire kernel. One that meets accepted architectural goals. One that is at the core of the free software movement.
Rewrite Hurd in Rust, you cowards.

2024-08-14 02:28:54 UTC

Cursed PSU that's fixed 12V but has a USB-C connector

2024-08-01 03:41:01 UTC

Anyone using the Feeld dating app should be aware that it performs client-side filtering - returned responses that are marked "Status: HIDDEN" will be invisible in the UI but visible in the UI response. I reported the original and most egregious example of this over 90 days ago and that was fixed, but there's at least one remaining case where data is leaked that shouldn't be.

2024-07-09 00:39:58 UTC

Ikea seem to have reduced the quality of Blahaj, given how quickly the puppy has torn through a new one compared to one from a few years ago