Looks to be really interesting, similar to the Everquest or WoW private servers with bots, or FFXIV's NPC dungeons, but actually designed from the ground up to be a single player experience where the bots actually play with you. Sounds neat.
My issue with these is that my use case is public transport, for that it seems like GMaps is still unbeatable, i hope to find an alternative as good or better based on OSM soon because it's the one tool i still have no alternative to
According to software engineer and blogger, Paul Biggar, however, one key detail on the methods employed by the Lavender system that is often overlooked is the involvement of the messaging platform, WhatsApp. A major determining factor of the system’s identification is simply if an individual is in a WhatsApp group containing...
So I joined a new gym last year and was pleasantly surprised. They gave me a smart card to get in and out, that's it, no app, no accounts, no nothing. Well, today I got to the gym and saw the announcement that they are phasing out the access with the smart card and starting to use, you guessed it, an app....
First time i hear of this, sounds handy, although I've seen some of those "loyalty card" thingies with chips for hands-free usage, i tend to avoid them as a general principle as they're the opposite of privacy-oriented but for the few that you do want (like the store where you always buy your groceries from, to get extra discounts) might be handy
Given that the XMPP contingent is around, is there a comparison between a typical 2024 XMPP server (with all the recommended extensions and whatever), and Matrix?
Yeah, i was not necessarily looking for a hosting by the project devs, just seeing if there was some company offering managed hosting like masto.host and others do for Mastodon and so on, i have a general idea how much would it cost to have managed Mastodon and was curious about other Fedi options for this
Looks like another Have I Been Pwned, at least at a glance they're looking for email addresses, and given that you have your email with them if you're using this service they kinda do have it already
All these discussions turn into that because WE KNOW that no one will convince MS to stop doing whatever they want, specially after investing literally billions on this kind of technology, the idea of MS "being held accountable" is something that realistically will not happen, and literally the only leverage people have against them is to just stop playing their game. Oh yeah, it's not easy, but given the fact that MS have made it so that you'll HAVE to fight the tech and relearn stuff every time they unilaterally decide to change things you might as well put effort where it will make a difference and free you from their BS
Oh yeah, this MUST be done too, but expecting that to be the solution to MS apps getting worse all the time is for the moment not a solution for the random user of the day complaining of yet another MS enshittification escalation.
Switching to Linux gets you completely out of that mess and has lasting results, continuing to participate in the MS market might change things if the anti-monopoly forces taking encouraging actions the last few years continue advancing but will take years IF it happens, along with any class-action lawsuit, anything else in the meanwhile (patches, debloaters, secret policy rules or registry entries, etc.) is nothing more than a band-aid treating the symptoms.
So, these discussions always devolve to this because it's a proven and effective solution that works today and lasts, unlike any other patch that can be broken next time MS forces an update or catches you unaware, it's hard and imperfect and "not the CORRECT way to solve the problem", but works.
If the owner of the standard notes will now be a proton, doesn't that contradict this principle? I have a proton email account but I don't want it linked to my standard notes account. I don't strongly trust companies that offer packaged services like google or Microsoft....
I've mentioned this issue a few times, then "But Proton has proven to be good! It's OK" is the usual response, that's when i remind them of how Google also used to be good. I don't really use a notes taking app, but in general after Google, the idea of "one login, a gazillion apps" is something i dislike in principle because even if the one central authority doesn't go evil, one login incident and you're locked out of everything you depend on.
Yeah, I'll continue using Protonmail but that's likely all I'll use from them and diversify on the rest.
Proton said the Standard Notes app, which is available for both mobile and desktop, will remain “open source, freely available and fully supported”....
Even from the "all your eggs in one basket" kind of perspective it does feel worrisome, not to mention that i am unsure about this dilution of their focus on many apps being helpful, I'd rather have them focus on very few but rock solid and maintained services instead of going with the Google "we do everything" way to do things
Bought by Automattic? After they non-consensually took all of Tumblr and hosted Wordpress to train AI? And after their big boss revealed his transphobia? I guess i'll skip this one
Had a longer answer that went away for some reason 😭
Your criticism is fair, but:
Using the email as a seed on the generator goes halfway there, here's an example, although of course it could never change
Centralizing the avatar opens that service up to be grabbed for tracking like Gravatar did, or breaking the security of a site by injecting code without the consent of the site owner. The usual tradeoff between security/privacy and convenience.
Would be good to have a good user-managed way to do the same (well, beyond using an image on your own hosting, i guess)
On the Reddit thread people, at least one of them tagged as a KDE dev, mentions that widgets NEED to be able to run arbitrary code. I am absolutely baffled by this.
A couple weeks ago Discord announced their plans to go down the IPO route. This means that there is now a ticking clock until the platform goes full-on enshittified like so many others before them....
A good idea i have been spreading around relevant people lately is to use ShellCheck as you code in Bash, integrate it in your workflow, editor or IDE as relevant to you (there's a commandline tool as well as being available for editors in various forms), and pass your scripts through it, trying to get the warnings to go away. That should fix many obvious errors and clean up your code a bit.
Can't say i feel like i have fully wrapped my head around this solution, but having migrated Mastodon instances before i see the need for it, this could help a lot as mentioned. And in addition, lots of people usually have multiple accounts across Fedi ("Here's my main Mastodon one, here's a Lemmy one, here's one on Bookwyrm to rate books, here's a Pixelfed one, etc.") and this could help unify them which is good, "I'll log in with this account on this server i had never seen before and it just works".
That said, having either repeatedly seen (or occasionally, personally had) TERRIBLE experiences in the past with linked accounts on commercial platforms (like when somebody gets their Gmail account banned for whatever reason and suddenly their whole online life is halted down to banking, or when linking two unrelated accounts lets one company access to spy on the person much deeper than before, or many other cases) i have to say that i feel a visceral level of discomfort at the possibility of this coming to Fedi, even if i feel this might just be paranoia I'm still not sure what kind of power would bad actors gain over you in this setup, like admins of rogue instances, Big Tech spy-happy corporate entities once they do fully arrive here, hackers who suddenly have a magical key over everything yours, etc.
Just earlier today i saw this phrase about cryptocurrency: "price discovery for bitcoin happens on an exchange that admitted a few months ago to being a criminal conspiracy". Yeah, there's HUGE problems with central banks, but by this point it should be very clear that a wild west casino full of scammers will not save us from that, it doesn't matter what were the initial ideals of people about crypto, it's main function now and for many years since it's beginnings has been scamming real money out of people.
So, let me see if i understand the argument: Discord, a piece of closed source software which is very popular at the moment because they hit first (user inertia) and haven't yet ramped up the enshittification (but sooner or later will because they already announced the intention to go the IPO route), wins over free software alternatives because of a 100% unofficial bot designed to help with one tiny niche user case most users of the platform haven't even heard about, which is itself free software and therefore could be migrated and/or adapted to other free software?
I dislike when they say in news clips that Signal represents the “current gold standard” for E2EE chats, it doesn't, Signal is a helluva lot better than the commercial stuff that mines user data but there's stuff like SimpleX Chat that doesn't leak even metadata because it doesn't have it.
Still, this is a good thing, these megacorps have their iron grip on people because they have raised walls around their services making it painful for people to move to a different service, tearing down those walls can only help us all.
this could not be timed worse for Tumblr which is in huge hot water with its userbase already for its CEO breaking his sabbatical to ban a prominent trans user for allegedly threatening him (in a cartoonish manner), and then spending a week personally justifying it increasingly wildly across several platforms. the rumors had...
Direct link for the lazy: Wafrn, a Tumblr-like Fediverse platform, and the code: frontend and backend. Seems VERY* early in development, so hopefully some of the masses fleeing Tumblr will be devs to contribute to it
The AnimeBytes outage from yesterday was because of this, DNS registrar seems to have gone down with all it's .tv domains, and this has taken down lots of sites
The AB people seem to be gearing to either move to another domain or to fully nuke the site if they suspect they're being directly targeted (at this point it feels like too much paranoia but it's understandable in their position), the old domain is likely to be abandoned no matter what though.
For the past few years, a growing number of users, analysts, and experts raised alarms about a truth that feels obvious to a lot of people who surf around in web browsers: the quality of Google results is in serious decline. Google disagrees.
TL;DR: They became partners with Brave, when people pointed out Brave's objectionable politics they responded... poorly (still read the thread, it has much more info)
Quick edit: Was pointed at this, looks like it's even worse and the Kagi owner himself might be very objectionable too
I've been just not updating Nova as I haven't had a ton of time to research this, I really like the GUI, what are my privacy friendly/FOSS options for an android s21 5G?...
Simple Gallery got removed when people found it had non-FOSS Google libraries linked in while checking the Fossify rebrand/rework, just export your preferences and import them on Fossify Gallery (BE AWARE: There's a bug in some launchers when an app uses custom icons like Simple Gallery and Fossify do, which breaks them, you'll notice it if you import the preferences and you can no longer launch the app and have to uninstall/reinstall it to be able to even launch it again, in that case edit the exported Simple Gallery preferences and remove the icon line)
Tibor betrayed us and sold the Simple Apps suite to a sleazy adtech company a while ago, there were multiple posts on this suggesting replacements, then one of the most active devs forked it into Fossify, removing all the branding and references to the original, work is still ongoing on this, already some of the apps have been rereleased, here's a handy matrix of the progress on the rerelease from somebody on Github
Erenshor is a game that seeks to condense the MMORPG experience into a fully single-player title. ( massivelyop.com )
Looks to be really interesting, similar to the Everquest or WoW private servers with bots, or FFXIV's NPC dungeons, but actually designed from the ground up to be a single player experience where the bots actually play with you. Sounds neat.
Telegram Reportedly "Ready to Fight Piracy" According to Govt. Official * TorrentFreak ( torrentfreak.com )
Image...
Why Creators Shouldn't Own their Creations (And Why its Good for them too) ( invidious.perennialte.ch )
Telegram founder and CEO alledges signal has backdoors, they don't provide reproduceible builds, etc.
Here's what he said in a post on his telegram channel:...
Why people don't talk about Google Maps' privacy issues ( www.youtube.com )
Title is editorialized because the original is, frankly, clickbait garbage
Israel using Meta's WhatsApp to kill Palestinians in Gaza through AI system ( www.middleeastmonitor.com )
According to software engineer and blogger, Paul Biggar, however, one key detail on the methods employed by the Lavender system that is often overlooked is the involvement of the messaging platform, WhatsApp. A major determining factor of the system’s identification is simply if an individual is in a WhatsApp group containing...
Got annoyed by my gym
So I joined a new gym last year and was pleasantly surprised. They gave me a smart card to get in and out, that's it, no app, no accounts, no nothing. Well, today I got to the gym and saw the announcement that they are phasing out the access with the smart card and starting to use, you guessed it, an app....
any xmpp user ?
Started using xmpp recently because messaging apps sucks . I want to see if anyone use this thing .
GoToSocial is a new ActivityPub social network server for the Fediverse ( github.com )
This service is still in Alpha release but is already deployable and usable, and federates with other Fediverse servers....
Microsoft is silently installing Copilot onto Windows Server 2022 ( mastodon.gamedev.place )
https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/51faa0ca-2b47-4eba-bc8c-d9edabba5ca9.png
Chromium Manifest V3 Explained for Toddlers ( youtu.be )
Most people still haven't heard of Manifest V3, so if you are one of those not using Firefox, this is for you....
Standard notes: what about don’t put all your eggs in one basket rule?
If the owner of the standard notes will now be a proton, doesn't that contradict this principle? I have a proton email account but I don't want it linked to my standard notes account. I don't strongly trust companies that offer packaged services like google or Microsoft....
Proton picks up Standard Notes to deepen its pro-privacy portfolio ( techcrunch.com )
Proton said the Standard Notes app, which is available for both mobile and desktop, will remain “open source, freely available and fully supported”....
Beeper is now available, no waitlist! ( blog.beeper.com )
Mozilla just ditched its privacy partner because its CEO is tied to data brokers ( www.theverge.com )
Malicious KDE theme can wipe out all your data ( www.reddit.com )
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13397700...
Current situation on FOSS Discord replacements?
A couple weeks ago Discord announced their plans to go down the IPO route. This means that there is now a ticking clock until the platform goes full-on enshittified like so many others before them....
General Advice for shell scripts
What do you advice for shell usage?...
Oh, Zot! Nomadic Identity is Coming to ActivityPub ( wedistribute.org )
Gumroad no longer allows most NSFW art, leaving its adult creators panicked ( techcrunch.com )
Discord’s secret weapon against open source competitors (it’s PluralKit) ( medium.com )
Why are FOSS platforms like Matrix having such a hard time getting users to migrate from Discord? Because of PluralKit.
Should Caddy and Traefik Replace Certbot? ( www.eff.org )
To comply with DMA, WhatsApp and Messenger will become interoperable via Signal protocol ( techcrunch.com )
Firefox plan to show ads and shopping in the near future in the browser as an opt-out ( bugzilla.mozilla.org )
First focusing on AI and now this, already cancelled my donations, do we have a good fork to move to?
Tumblr and Wordpress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools ( www.404media.co )
this could not be timed worse for Tumblr which is in huge hot water with its userbase already for its CEO breaking his sabbatical to ban a prominent trans user for allegedly threatening him (in a cartoonish manner), and then spending a week personally justifying it increasingly wildly across several platforms. the rumors had...
100s of Pirate Sites Go Dark as .TV Domains Placed on ServerHold * TorrentFreak ( torrentfreak.com )
The AnimeBytes outage from yesterday was because of this, DNS registrar seems to have gone down with all it's .tv domains, and this has taken down lots of sites
Signal Blog: Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames ( signal.org )
Finally, we can have usernames in Signal instead of giving our phone number to everybody.
Disney invests $1.5bn in Epic Games and announces major Fortnite partnership ( www.gamesindustry.biz )
‘There is no such thing as a real picture’: Samsung defends AI photo editing on Galaxy S24 ( www.techradar.com )
Voice Input Privacy Concerns on GrapheneOS?
Any privacy concerns with using the futo-whisper open source voice library?...
Inventor of NTP protocol that keeps time on billions of devices dies at age 85 ( arstechnica.com )
You're Not Imagining It: Google Search Results Are Getting Worse, Study Finds ( gizmodo.com )
For the past few years, a growing number of users, analysts, and experts raised alarms about a truth that feels obvious to a lot of people who surf around in web browsers: the quality of Google results is in serious decline. Google disagrees.
Nova Launcher Alternative?
I've been just not updating Nova as I haven't had a ton of time to research this, I really like the GUI, what are my privacy friendly/FOSS options for an android s21 5G?...
New Advertisement and Internet connection permissions for Simple SMS Messenger on Google Play Store... ( lemmy.ml )
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