[HN Gopher] GNU Health
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       GNU Health
        
       Author : smartmic
       Score  : 302 points
       Date   : 2025-10-11 15:47 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.gnuhealth.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.gnuhealth.org)
        
       | leakycap wrote:
       | Heath centers pay unreal amounts of money for these kinds of
       | commercial products, _but_ in my experience the health centers
       | themselves have very few technical resources. So the real
       | "value" being delivered by the commercial software providers is
       | often the setup, support, and hand-holding provided to customers
       | who pay the crazy amounts.
       | 
       | I imagine there will be a niche but high-paid market integrating
       | these GNUHealth products with existing commercial systems, and
       | ongoing opportunities in supporting health centers using the
       | software with planning, upgrades, and lots of phone & email
       | support.
        
         | gjsman-1000 wrote:
         | The problem open-source, and social media, and everything
         | digital, has never overcome is _accountability_. Who do I sue,
         | and who has insurance, if something goes wrong?
         | 
         | Combine that with most small businesses having more money than
         | time (just pay Gmail, don't spend the required amount of time
         | to self host), and open-source is stuck at being hobbyists if
         | there is no corporate sponsorship.
        
           | leakycap wrote:
           | > _just pay Gmail, don't spend the required amount of time to
           | self host_
           | 
           | Are you seriously suggesting a business put their contacts in
           | the hands of Google, who has reportedly been totally
           | capricious with account actions in the past and is
           | notoriously difficult to contact when problems arise?
           | 
           | > _and open-source is stuck at being hobbyists if there is no
           | corporate sponsorship_
           | 
           | Corpo sponsorship required for success? I guess I better tell
           | all the open-source projects being used by millions that
           | they're just hobbyists now.
           | 
           | > _The problem [...] everything digital [...] Who do I sue,
           | and who has insurance, if something goes wrong?_
           | 
           | I have heard of analog world nostalgia, but you refer to the
           | pre-digital age as if you didn't live through it. It's easier
           | to locate someone today than ever before.
        
             | throw-the-towel wrote:
             | Can you name one open-source project "used by millions"
             | that does not have corporate sponsorship?
        
               | headsman771 wrote:
               | This implies corporate sponsorship is a requirement for,
               | as opposed to result of, a projects usefulness. That has
               | not been the case for most valuable open source software.
        
               | tomrod wrote:
               | Who sponsors curl?
        
               | smj-edison wrote:
               | OBS and Audacity (until recently) are two off the top of
               | my head. Plus a lot of Linux components are run solely by
               | a couple people, and those are run my millions of
               | programmers.
        
               | sokoloff wrote:
               | GNU? Depending on how you want to treat FSF and PSF, gcc,
               | emacs, python (are FSF/PSF/Apache corporations? Does
               | PSF's donations from corporations make python corporate
               | sponsored?)
        
               | leakycap wrote:
               | Never heard of Monero?
               | 
               | Keepass only allows donations, with no benefits for
               | corporate vs. personal sponsors
               | 
               | GIMP is one of the most widely known & its sponsors only
               | lists a few companies as hardware donors
               | 
               | VLC anyone?
        
           | scott_w wrote:
           | The person implementing the system for the hospital is
           | accountable. I don't see why this is difficult because it
           | would be the same if that person built their own product from
           | scratch.
           | 
           | There's no vendor here that they can sue if they were paying
           | for a product and deploying that, but that's a different
           | situation and the hospital, frankly, won't care about that.
           | Who their supplier subsequently sues isn't their problem.
        
           | athenot wrote:
           | You're being downvoted but yes, this is about risk
           | mitigation. The IT department at a health care organization
           | has to balance matching the requirements of payers, admins
           | and clinical staff, do so in a way that fits inside the
           | allocated budget, and de-risk the unknowns as much as
           | possible.
           | 
           | Even if the vendors are only half accurate about the solution
           | they offer, by being paid suppliers, they are on the hook (to
           | varying degrees). These systems are highly customized and
           | serious headaches arise from interoperability and security.
           | If some of that can be shifted to a vendor, it's a net
           | positive _insofar as the IT department and the compliance
           | departments are concerned_.
           | 
           | Some healthcare organization have invested in the technology
           | side and become leaders in innovation but those are the
           | exception.
        
           | rectang wrote:
           | > _The problem open-source [...] has never overcome is
           | accountability_.
           | 
           | There are lots of organizations that provide a throat-to-
           | choke-as-a-service, e.g. Red Hat.
        
           | dismalaf wrote:
           | This isn't a problem with open source. For many of us with
           | startups that have low stakes (worst we can do is have no
           | users) a lack of support is fine, we can do it ourselves and
           | save the money.
           | 
           | And there's plenty of consultancies which will support OSS
           | and give you support if you need it and be your scapegoat.
           | Red Hat, Suse, IBM come to mind and there's many others...
        
           | jancsika wrote:
           | > Who do I sue, and who has insurance, if something goes
           | wrong?
           | 
           | You sue the Red Hat-like support company with whom you
           | ostensibly signed a contract.
           | 
           | If your question is who does the Red Hat-like support company
           | sue if they want accountability for the code they are
           | leveraging, I guess I don't understand the question or its
           | relevance. E.g., with regard to proprietary code, who does
           | Microsoft microsoft when Microsoft microsofts Microsoft? (Fun
           | to write, but I don't think that sentence really makes
           | sense.)
        
           | jll29 wrote:
           | I'd say if you take software that doesn't cost you anything,
           | either
           | 
           | (1) you carry the risk or
           | 
           | (2) find someone that operates the software for you (on
           | premise or SaaS) and they may also carry the risk for the
           | premium you pay them.
        
           | crote wrote:
           | Do you think a small mom-and-pop dentist can win a lawsuit
           | against _Google_?
           | 
           | There's absolutely no way that dentist will have a well-
           | negotiated contract with SLA's and damage compensation with
           | Google. The extent of their business relationship is that the
           | dentist clicked a checkbox and put in their credit card
           | details. Google does not even know they exist.
           | 
           | If Gmail loses all your email and accidentally kills your
           | entire business, the _absolute best_ outcome is a refund of
           | your $10 /month business subscription fee. The idea that they
           | could in any way be held responsible is ludicrous.
        
           | throwaway173738 wrote:
           | You sue the developers. It's how it works in general. So
           | basically you'd comb the commit history for the project and
           | name everyone in the lawsuit that you could.
        
             | nradov wrote:
             | It's possible that some FOSS developers have been hit with
             | nuisance lawsuits but in general they have no contractual
             | relationship with the users and thus no liability under US
             | law.
        
         | pstuart wrote:
         | Seems like a wonderful win/win opportunity to have the software
         | be FOSS but enable small businesses to provide
         | hosting/support/customization.
         | 
         | The biggest win of all is if we had an
         | open/extensible/maintainable data exchange format so that we
         | could eliminate the need for paperwork. How many times must we
         | fill out the same information, and then require the providers
         | to keyboard it in?
        
           | anjel wrote:
           | Wasn't that in fact apropriated, launched and funded in the
           | US under the Obama administration?
        
             | pstuart wrote:
             | I recall various tech/data initiatives during that admin
             | and my search came up with this:
             | https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/hhs-announces-
             | ne...
             | 
             | I don't work in healthcare but I do use their services and
             | every intake interaction is the same paperwork dance, so it
             | doesn't seem to have impacted providers themselves.
             | 
             | There's another element that needs address as well, which
             | is the controlled dissemination of one's medical history.
             | It should be easy peasy technology wise, with the only
             | blockers being political/entrenched players sabotaging it.
        
             | nradov wrote:
             | You are perhaps thinking of the HITECH Act of 2009? The
             | Obama administration didn't directly fund any open-source
             | healthcare software. There were billions in federal grant
             | funding available to provider organizations to purchase EHR
             | software that met certification criteria for a certain
             | level of interoperability and clinical functionality. This
             | really accelerated the growth of commercial EHR vendors
             | like Epic, as well as some smaller vendors that used FOSS
             | within their offerings.
             | 
             | https://www.hipaajournal.com/hitech-act-meaningful-use/
        
           | nradov wrote:
           | There are in fact multiple data exchange formats published by
           | standards development organizations including HL7 (V2
           | Messaging, CDA, FHIR), DirectTrust, NCPDP, DICOM, and X12.
           | Some such as HL7 and DirectTrust are very open, others may
           | require a paid licensing agreement. Usage of some of those
           | standards is mandated by CMS interoperability regulations
           | and/or ASTP (ONC) Health IT Certification requirements.
           | 
           | Beyond the wire formats, in order to eliminate the need for
           | paperwork provider organizations also have to participate in
           | data exchange networks. These include TEFCA, Carequality,
           | eHealth Exchange, and some smaller regional HIEs. It all
           | works fairly well when used correctly but many provider
           | organizations continue to waste administrative effort and
           | abuse their patients by failing to take advantage of the
           | available technology. Like in many cases the necessary
           | functionality is already built in to their EHR/PMS software
           | but they simply don't turn it on or train their users.
        
           | ranger_danger wrote:
           | https://xkcd.com/927
        
         | Angostura wrote:
         | I could certainly imagine NHS England looking at this and
         | creating something that hospitals and GPs could deploy
        
           | nickdothutton wrote:
           | Sadly, very sadly, I cannot imagine it. I have seen the
           | inside of NHS IT.
        
           | marcusb wrote:
           | In the US, the Veteran's Administration wrote their own EHR
           | (Vista) which was released as public domain. They've been
           | trying (and mostly failing) to migrate to a commercial EHR
           | for the last seven or eight years.
        
             | nradov wrote:
             | VistA has some great functionality and end users generally
             | like it, but unfortunately the underlying platform and
             | developer tooling is hopelessly outdated. It's approaching
             | a technical dead end and there's no practical way to keep
             | it moving forward unless someone steps forward with the
             | funding and resources for a major refactoring / rewrite
             | engineering effort.
             | 
             | https://worldvista.org/
        
             | cyberax wrote:
             | Vista is ancient, and it's written in MUMPS, an evil twin
             | of COBOL.
        
               | mattkrause wrote:
               | For context, many (most?) other EHRs are too, though they
               | call it M now so it sounds less disease-ridden.
        
               | vincent-manis wrote:
               | No, MUMPS (or M) is a remote descendant of JOSS, an
               | interactive language of the 1950s. JOSS has all sorts of
               | variants (DEC's FOCAL language of the 1960s was a
               | dialect), but I think MUMPS is the only living one. MUMPS
               | code is mostly unreadable, as the commands can be, and
               | often are, abbreviated to the first letter. As a result,
               | it looks a lot like line noise.
               | 
               | Regardless of its many warts, Cobol cannot be accused of
               | being unreadable. Verbose, yes.
        
               | nradov wrote:
               | MUMPS was originally developed in the 1960s for use on
               | minicomputers that had maybe 64KB RAM. At the time it was
               | a lot more important to keep code size small, hence the
               | single letter commands. Readability wasn't a concern then
               | but it sure looks like a mess today.
        
               | cyberax wrote:
               | > Regardless of its many warts, Cobol cannot be accused
               | of being unreadable. Verbose, yes.
               | 
               | Hence the "evil twin" comment :)
        
           | jjmarr wrote:
           | I'd love it if my government created a civil reserve for
           | technology workers. Let me volunteer every weekend to help
           | fix infrastructure so I don't have to give up my existing
           | job.
        
             | jonhohle wrote:
             | If it was a volunteer effort without ulterior motives, it
             | would be beneficial to society, but ultimately who is on
             | call? Who pushes for hard, but beneficial changes that
             | might not have immediate obvious value? Who accepts risk or
             | responsibility.
             | 
             | Ultimately that's the point of the market. Incentivize
             | people to take risks for rewards. Allow others to improve
             | on proven models for lower costs. Unfortunately, government
             | does not have any risk/reward or other market pressures.
        
         | newsclues wrote:
         | A good primer from Acquired
         | https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/epic-systems-mychart
        
         | doctorpangloss wrote:
         | No... hospitals use EHR to maximize billing. That is the value.
         | 
         | Private practices are generally shrinking in number, so there
         | IS NO EHR that is growing in the long term to serve them, so
         | there CANNOT BE a trend where hospitals are exceptional, their
         | IT buying trends are the NORM and their purpose is to code for
         | billing. It is NOT about having or not having IT resources
         | strictly speaking.
        
           | leakycap wrote:
           | Typing in ALL CAPS does not make your argument stronger, this
           | isn't Truth Social.
           | 
           | > hospitals use EHR to maximize billing
           | 
           | As a person who has worked extensively with hospitals and
           | CHCs helping them integrate technology, this is false.
           | 
           | EHR is being used because it's required - both by payors and
           | regulation/law. I can think of zero instances where an
           | organization switched to EHR without being forced by a
           | deadline from an outside source.
        
             | epcoa wrote:
             | I dunno, QuadraMed that was used by at least NYC H&H for
             | years before their imperiled transition to Epic prominently
             | displayed "Revenue Cycle Management" on the splash screen
             | of its decrepit _provider_ facing frontend.
             | 
             | Both of you are overstating your cases. That said, it's
             | hard to overstate how heavily charge capture and billing
             | are prioritized to the detriment of other aspects.
             | 
             | > I can think of zero instances where an organization
             | switched to EHR without being forced by a deadline from an
             | outside source.
             | 
             | There were major EHR deployments in the 80s through early
             | 00s, before most government mandates. Surely later mandates
             | were an incentive This reflects a lack of tenure.
        
               | leakycap wrote:
               | > There were major EHR deployments in the 80s through
               | early 00s, before most government mandates.
               | 
               | Examples?
        
             | bonsai_spool wrote:
             | > EHR is being used because it's required - both by payors
             | and regulation/law. I can think of zero instances where an
             | organization switched to EHR without being forced by a
             | deadline from an outside source.
             | 
             | Your argument fails in cases where hospitals switch from
             | bespoke EHRs to use one large EHR that has better revenue
             | features. This is quite trivially discovered if one follows
             | the news of large hospital chains who have moved to Epic
             | recently.
        
               | nradov wrote:
               | Revenue cycle issues are important but not the only
               | factor. It's simply no longer economically feasible for
               | provider organizations to maintain bespoke EHRs. The
               | costs have gone up too much. They can't afford to pay
               | developers to build and maintain all of the functionality
               | now required due to federal interoperability rules
               | compliance and escalating user expectations.
        
               | leakycap wrote:
               | > They can't afford to pay developers to build and
               | maintain all of the functionality now required due to
               | federal interoperability rules
               | 
               | Yep, and more and more payors - government and private -
               | are demanding systems that are both interoperable and
               | audiable
               | 
               | Internal, bespoke systems are notoriously nightmarish for
               | auditing
        
               | leakycap wrote:
               | > This is quite trivially discovered if one follows the
               | news of large hospital chains who have moved to Epic
               | recently.
               | 
               | Epic is one of the few providers who can meet a larger
               | organization's overall needs
               | 
               | The competitors, like eClinicalWorks, are a shadow in
               | comparison
               | 
               | No doubt companies increase revenue with more efficient
               | capture of services, costs, labor factors, etc, but I've
               | actually been in the room with people from Epic and have
               | heard the sales presentation. I'm betting I have a decent
               | grasp on both what they're selling and what the buyers
               | are asking for.
        
         | ranger_danger wrote:
         | From what I have seen, the only people seriously using systems
         | like these are in emerging markets or developing countries.
        
         | bjoli wrote:
         | I wonder what would happen if EU harmonized the legislation so
         | that the EU states could go together and develop an OSS
         | journaling system. The amount of money saved would be
         | astronomical.
        
           | ivanjermakov wrote:
           | Spending money is what drives the economy. No diverse
           | expensive healthcare software means thousands of employees
           | don't get paid and don't spend earned money within the
           | economy.
        
             | IsTom wrote:
             | That's broken window fallacy.
        
             | HiPhish wrote:
             | When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
             | measure. Goodhart's law.
        
       | mcny wrote:
       | Here is the link I was looking for. Took me about three clicks to
       | get there so wanted to save you guys the trouble
       | 
       | https://codeberg.org/gnuhealth
        
       | gigatexal wrote:
       | crazy to think that with this you could run the better part of a
       | hospital with...
        
         | jll29 wrote:
         | ..but then again there is open source ERP, too!
        
       | kristopherleads wrote:
       | That federation piece is super interesting. I'm actually giving a
       | talk in Sweden this week about machine learning/AI training in
       | the age of data sovereignty, and my suggestion was two-fold -
       | better and more widespread adoption of things like Homomorphic
       | Encryption and more federated systems that can distribute access
       | and data in sovereign systems. This is a pretty important
       | evolution in that direction!
        
         | reedciccio wrote:
         | I'm extremely interested in this topic. Would you be able to
         | share your presentation?
        
       | einpoklum wrote:
       | I can't quite understand what is actually part of GNU Health:
       | 
       | > _Social Medicine and Public Health_
       | 
       | > _Bioinformatics and Medical Genetics_
       | 
       | Are these that a piece of software? scopes? Intents?
       | 
       | > _Hospital Management (HMIS)_
       | 
       | Ok, now this is software for sure, but what exactly does this
       | mean? There are many things to manage within a hospital. Is this
       | software for managing inventories? Scheduling? Personnel
       | assignments and organizational relations? Patient flow records?
       | And - is most of this stuff really specific to hospitals? e.g.
       | how is this different from managing, say, a hotel?
       | 
       | > _Laboratory Management (Occhiolino)_
       | 
       | Again not so clear what kind of management we're talking about.
       | 
       | > _Personal Health Record (MyGNUHealth)_
       | 
       | Ok, this I (think I) understand.
       | 
       | > _GNU Health embedded on Single Board devices_
       | 
       | What exactly needs to get embedded? And - what kind of device? It
       | could be a Raspberry Pi, that's a single-board device, right? So,
       | just another general-purpose computer, but on ARM-based silicon.
       | Or - it could be an, I don't know, some kind of scanner, like a
       | portable UltraSound.
       | 
       | Bottom line: I'm sure it's a collection of useful software but
       | very difficult to figure out exactly what, and how it's specific
       | to healthcare.
        
         | dmd wrote:
         | I work in healthcare IT and all of these have very specific
         | meanings, and it's very clear to the intended audience what
         | these all are.
        
           | Ensorceled wrote:
           | The terms are also clarified later on that same home page ...
        
         | dm319 wrote:
         | > Laboratory Management (Occhiolino)
         | 
         | Laboratory Management Systems, or LMS, is laboratory software
         | which handles laboratory orders, retrieving results from the
         | laboratory equipment and sending back the results to the
         | electronic patient record (EPR). It does a lot more than that
         | of course, but basically it's a big database handling thousands
         | of blood tests, biopsies, tissue samples, as well as worklists
         | for staff, in order to get diagnostics results back to the
         | clinicians.
        
         | trenchpilgrim wrote:
         | All of these terms are well understood if you work in a
         | hospital. Even a technician could probably guess at the ones
         | they don't work with directly.
        
       | cseleborg wrote:
       | > The easiest way to get MyGNUHealth is by installing the package
       | from your favorite operating system / distribution. Many
       | operating system distributions already ship MyGNUHealth.
       | 
       | I was actually curious to try this out on my phone, since they
       | claim to support mobile devices.
       | 
       | If running a command-line package manager is the easiest way to
       | install this on Android, I don't want to know what harder ways
       | exist.
       | 
       | I find this is quite typical for open source projects. The
       | community still hasn't really, truly adopted mobile. I guess it's
       | because of the need to have some sort of entity be present in the
       | various App Stores? But if it's possible for servers, why is this
       | so rare to have open source projects as app store vendors?
        
         | holri wrote:
         | This is meant to be used in hospitals. Where I live no hospital
         | personal uses phones to manage healthcare data. They have PCs.
        
           | roxolotl wrote:
           | MyGNU Health looks to be along the lines of Apple Health and
           | is intended to be used by consumers to monitor vitals and
           | track statistics.
        
             | jll29 wrote:
             | It makes sense to own your own medical data rather than
             | handing it over to big tech/FAANG.
        
           | nradov wrote:
           | You seem to be living in the past. While EHRs are still
           | primarily used from desktop PCs, all of the major ones have
           | native mobile apps now. Clinicians appreciate being able to
           | review patient charts and action alerts while away from a PC
           | cart.
        
             | tomrod wrote:
             | Better to make it a web app, so you don't have to mess with
             | Apple or Google's broken economics.
        
               | nradov wrote:
               | You're really missing the point. The EHR vendors aren't
               | charging customers for those apps through the Apple or
               | Google app stores so "broken economics" are irrelevant.
               | The app stores are only a distribution mechanism and work
               | fine for that.
        
         | BeetleB wrote:
         | > I guess it's because of the need to have some sort of entity
         | be present in the various App Stores?
         | 
         | This, and the fees, and dealing with weird App stores' rules.
         | On Android, we had F-Droid - an alternative store where one
         | didn't need to deal with this. And as has been reported
         | recently, Google is making changes that will essentially kill
         | F-Droid.
         | 
         | The reason there's not much good open source stuff on phones
         | compared to PCs is because the hardware is hostile to it. The
         | few phones out there that aren't are the ones almost no one
         | uses.
        
       | zkmon wrote:
       | Nice to see support for Open source. I have seen selling of
       | healthcare data, including medicare and medicaid data to private
       | companies which sliced and diced it and sold to academic and drug
       | research institutions via data marts. ETL jobs would run for
       | months. The data included prescriptions, scans, visits, employee
       | plans etc, for about ~200 millions of American patients. It is
       | anonymized data, but still I always wondered why this was
       | allowed.
        
         | nradov wrote:
         | HHS publishes clear guidelines for de-identifying healthcare
         | data (PHI). Once it has been properly de-identified
         | (anonymized) it is no longer subject to any special controls. I
         | am aware that some researchers have claimed that it could be
         | theoretically possible to re-identify certain records but so
         | far no one has been able to do so in practice so concerns seem
         | to be overblown.
         | 
         | https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/d...
         | 
         | As for Medicare, only a very limited set of data is publicly
         | available. Larger sets are available to certain contractors and
         | researchers but the access agreements prohibit sale to third
         | parties. So you must have misinterpreted the content or source
         | of the data you saw.
         | 
         | https://www.cms.gov/data-research/cms-data/types-data-files
        
           | zkmon wrote:
           | https://ghdx.healthdata.org/record/united-states-
           | marketscan-...
           | 
           | It shows some medicare data as owned by a private company.
        
             | nradov wrote:
             | That doesn't look like Medicare data. It comes from
             | Medicare Supplement health plans offered by commercial
             | payers (not a government program).
        
       | unleaded wrote:
       | There was a guy on reddit a few years ago who started a dental
       | practice with entirely open-source software and his own EHR
       | system. Really interesting stuff, don't think anyone's posted
       | about it here. Can't view his reddit history but he must still be
       | using it, last commit 1 week ago.
       | 
       | https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/p5phju/progress_repo...
       | 
       | https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/x2mls1/update_starti...
        
         | omnibrain wrote:
         | > Can't view his reddit history as I'm in the UK
         | 
         | What does this mean?
        
           | unleaded wrote:
           | It's tagged as NSFW for some reason and I can't be bothered
           | verifying my age
        
             | Imustaskforhelp wrote:
             | just change from www.reddit.com to old.reddit.com and then
             | it doesn't ask you to sign up.
             | 
             | Does this work in the UK or do they still ask you to
             | verify?
        
               | coffeeaddict1 wrote:
               | No, but just put something like rl.bloat.cat instead of
               | reddit.com. That'll direct to an alternative community
               | maintained interface for Reddit that will work.
        
               | Imustaskforhelp wrote:
               | I know that alternative frontends for reddit were a huge
               | thing which I used to use before the api fiasco
               | 
               | There are still some alternatives but most of them now
               | scrape or have extreme rate limiting from what I know.
               | 
               | They use redlib but If I remember correctly that's
               | similar to libreddit but patched to work without api but
               | still, its a very finnicky solution.
               | 
               | Like these solutions can work but I think at that point,
               | just use a VPN but oh boy reddit detects those VPN's from
               | what I know.
               | 
               | WOW UK censorship law is really something huh, can people
               | living in the UK somehow vote to repeal that or
               | something?
               | 
               | I was thinking on the scary part of as to what if many
               | countries can seemingly connect together these pieces to
               | genuinely have internet authoritarianism and what if they
               | have such eggregious fees or just even a threat of it,
               | have a little mixture of getting sanctioned if you try to
               | move around it but damn, this is so weird, if they really
               | want, they can genuinely escalate this more and more to
               | block VPN's and more and more to effectively soft-lock a
               | person from the internet. This needs to stop. Right now.
               | Otherwise I am scared if what if multiple countries come
               | together to stop something like tor nodes by somehow
               | putting them in such a law. Once tor stops, all hell can
               | break loose on the internet, its _certainly_ _possible_ ,
               | I never expected this but the only thing stopping UK
               | censorship might be hopefully their incompetence of maybe
               | not removing VPN's or this goose chase or just the fact
               | that this is the beginning, not the end. They are testing
               | how much they can get away with which is increasing a
               | lot... This really made me pessimistic actually.
               | 
               | The only hope is that such websites can spring up more
               | quickly than UK can take them down but what if UK sets a
               | dangerous precedent by suing them, its definitely
               | possible to track them down by the UK govt.
               | 
               | They say on their blog that
               | https://bloat.cat/blog/updates-may-25/ that Redlib is the
               | most resource-hungry service. The traffic figures run
               | into terabytes a month
               | 
               | Some % of these could be for bypassing the UK as well
               | 
               | though I suppose that not even govt. can catch them,their
               | Opsec is genuinely really good, they use monero for the
               | servers and etc., its fascinating to see their Opsec be
               | so secure.
               | 
               | Edit: I got so curious and found out that they run some
               | servers on senko.digital which is in fact UK based but
               | they won't still get much (I hope) because senko.digital
               | supports monero so their opsec is secure but if they had
               | slipped up, it wouldn't have been hard to see them being
               | framed as they get terabytes of data and some % of data
               | can help loop around UK censorship evil laws and they
               | could've tried to frame him and senko being a UK company,
               | it isn't hard to follow that they would've complied. But
               | they use monero and I am sure that they use a vpn as well
               | but it was certainly fun reading their Opsec and I think
               | that its sort of perfect, I need to learn more from it
               | actually.
               | 
               | So I guess its still possible to run websites without
               | incurring the hefty fine in UK but its certainly very
               | hard / borderline impossible and I just hope that this UK
               | thing / similar things in other countries doesn't get any
               | further and gets banned/repealed otherwise the internet
               | might die.
               | 
               | Edit 2: maybe I gave them too much credit since either
               | its saying Reddit is blocking redlib as always... when I
               | try to click on any username or it just gives a flat out
               | nginx 502 bad error... I really gave them too much credit
               | but it was fun learning something about opsec.
        
           | eterm wrote:
           | It means you can't view people's reddit profiles in the UK.
           | 
           | ( Yes, seriously. )
           | 
           | Many many profiles are tagged NSFW, its' not clear why, I
           | can't imagine the majority of those have done so
           | deliberately, perhaps it's automatic for anyone who's posted
           | any NSFW posts ever. ( Which includes people doing so to be
           | funny such as someone posting a huge loss in a sports sub as
           | NSFW. )
        
             | Imustaskforhelp wrote:
             | As I said it on the OP's comment but I will type it here as
             | well, sorry if it counts as spam but
             | 
             | just change from www.reddit.com to old.reddit.com and then
             | it doesn't ask you to sign up. (atleast this works in my
             | country)
             | 
             | Does this work in the UK or do they still ask you to
             | verify?
        
               | gjm11 wrote:
               | It does not work for me in the UK.
        
             | perching_aix wrote:
             | Recently Reddit also made it possible to private your post
             | and comment history, which I found a surprising number of
             | people already do too (default for new accounts maybe?), so
             | this is about to become a very worldwide experience anyhow
             | :)
        
               | kaladin-jasnah wrote:
               | I've been seeing a lot of profiles have their post
               | history invisible, and thought it was a bug. I tried to
               | search for whether or not this was possible and couldn't
               | find it. I'm elated to hear that this is a thing, as it
               | protects my privacy. Just enabled it (:
               | 
               | Only thing, shame you can only set these things in new
               | Reddit.
        
               | perching_aix wrote:
               | I'm fairly mixed about it, personally.
               | 
               | Being able to inspect post and comment history allowed
               | for finding people who are absentmindedly lying, or are
               | otherwise intentionally and persistently abusive. I
               | believe this was the whole original motivation about such
               | a history being available, even.
               | 
               | On the flipside, it does lessen the potency of various
               | avenues of abuse. Some people would get harassed and
               | stalked thanks to this history feature for example, and
               | it trivialized targeted information extraction too. It
               | also allowed for petty censorship, i.e. some subs would
               | auto-ban people who commented in various other subs.
               | 
               | One might also criticize it for being a minor bandaid
               | over a gaping hole. Your username and user avatar you
               | still carry across subs and are not autogenerated. This
               | means that with sufficiently wide scraping, your posts
               | are still perfectly correlatable, collectable, and
               | subscribeable. Within subs, the same applies to your user
               | flair. This has benefits, i.e. it allows you to block
               | users who you identify as inherently malicious, but it
               | also means that all the aforementioned benefits apply
               | only in limited ways.
               | 
               | Trust requires the sharing of information, privacy
               | requires the obfuscation of information - and so I think
               | these concerns run contrary to each other, resulting in
               | the many solutions of the world not committing fully to
               | either, as they are extreme and unrealistic positions in
               | isolation. Difficult world.
        
         | Imustaskforhelp wrote:
         | Hm they had an AMA recently going on, so I asked them some
         | questions if they are still using it or what not (on reddit)
         | mentioning this HN comment.
         | 
         | https://old.reddit.com/r/Dentistry/comments/1o3hawd/prison_d...
         | 
         | Surprisingly it had 100 comments but no open source questions
         | iirc so that was a bit of surprise from what I could check.
         | 
         | Also Offtopic or not but its sad that you can't use reddit
         | because you are in UK but just for the sake since I want you to
         | see the comment, I perma-linked it and uploaded it to wayback-
         | machine/archive.org and here's the link so that you can view
         | what I wrote
         | 
         | I am going to archive the whole reddit page later for you to
         | read as well
         | 
         | https://web.archive.org/web/20251011181833/https://old.reddi...
         | 
         | Wait why is this not working wtf, Dentistry: page not found for
         | archive wtf?
         | 
         | Edit: I archived the whole page as I said, here it is.
         | 
         | https://web.archive.org/web/20251011182126/https://old.reddi...
         | 
         | Hope this helps OP and maybe I will keep the archive updated
         | for few days or give ya updates if that's something you are
         | interested in I suppose I am not sure, just like many other
         | things in my life.
        
         | rancar2 wrote:
         | That's from the founder of Clear.dental, Dr. Tej Shah:
         | 
         | https://clear.dental/
         | 
         | https://gitlab.com/cleardental
         | 
         | https://www.linkedin.com/in/tej-shah-17829195
        
           | nja wrote:
           | And the 2.0 source:
           | https://invent.kde.org/desiotaku/cleardental
        
       | IshKebab wrote:
       | No offence but GNU is not an organisation I would associate with
       | health, usability and practical software. Noble effort no doubt.
       | Misguided perhaps.
        
         | righthand wrote:
         | No offence but IshKebab is not a person I would associate with
         | someone who knows anything about health, useable and practical
         | software. No matter how noble their intentions are about
         | criticizing software they've never used nor never attempt to
         | use because of unfounded stigmas. Misguided indeed.
         | 
         | Automake, bash, emacs, gnucash, gnuhealth, coreutils, gnupg,
         | gimp, grep, make, etc. are all great pieces of GNU software.
         | Don't take my word for it, here is a list of all the too-many-
         | to-name gnu software used out in the world extensively:
         | 
         | https://www.gnu.org/manual/blurbs.html
        
       | phkahler wrote:
       | Text is too dark for my old eyes.
        
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