Cisco's site for selling company-themed merchandise is currently offline and under maintenance due to hackers compromising it with JavaScript code that steals sensitive customer details provided at checkout.
Added a "2 month update" section to my blog post about #Amazon bricking my kindle and reading at least 26 books on the Kindle Paperwhite I bought to replace it.
tl;dr: I regret buying a paperwhite instead of the Kobo Libra Color.
What a total pain. I unDRM my Kindle books so I can read them in Braille, but to do that I have to download and transfer via USB then use calibre. Presumably my device will also stop being supported soon.
@cachondo wait.... you unDRM them still? Like present day? I haven't figured out how to do that for the latest kindle DRM.
Please tell me your secrets!!!
I used to use calibre for that, but I'm pretty sure it can't do the latest anymore. I tried 2 paid apps too. They could extract the content but they lost all the formatting and things like bold and italic.
To be honest I'm still using the old setup. I had to add the serial number of the physical Kindle into a Calibre plugin somewhere for it all to work. Doesn't work on the newer KFX files, but every book I've acquired is still downloadable as an AZW file from the website. It's a paperwhite 10th gen.
@cachondo ahh i didn’t know you could still download the AZW files. That was the piece i was missing.
As far as i know there’s no good decryption for the KFX files although the paid ones may work for you, unless braille readers do something useful to designate bold and italics
Long story there. They do now, but didn't when I learned Braille as a kid so I don't miss the formatting. In fact many of the Braille books from the 80's in the UK didn't have capital letters in them either!
@cachondo why do people keep making such half-assed accessibility accommodations? Like, i get that it can be hard but “fuck-it. I did the bare minimum” and then wandering off is just a dick move
and will fix a blocker that is hurting adoption of JPEG XL.
The reference implementation has unfortunately been written in C++ just as browser vendors started looking into migrating away from C++ for security reasons, and saw the C++ codec primarily as a big new attack surface.
Cybersecurity course: 𝗢𝗻𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲, 𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘀-𝗼𝗻, 𝗽𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲! Czech Technical Univeristy's "Introduction to Security" class opens online for free! 14 weeks of deep attacking and defending. Join us and register for free. Starting on Sep 26th. cybersecurity.bsy.fel.cvut.cz/ #cybersec #infosec #blueteam #redteam #education #security
Microsoft announces a Copilot: Wave 2 event on September 16 at 8:00 AM PT, where it is expected to announce a Copilot rebrand and new features (Tom Warren/The Verge)
Does anybody still remember the scandalous headlines about how AI companies are killing themselves because AI-generated data appears on the web, and training AI on its own data destroys model performance?
Now it turns out that *basically none of this is true*.
This problem happens only when the new model is trained exclusively with the synthetic data, and when the old, human-made data is removed. Nobody actually does this in practice. What people do instead is adding synthetic data to the pool they already have, and then the problem does not occur.
As I understand it, it's about ratios. Obviously they would still have the human data there, the trick is when the synthetic data, since there is so much of it and it can grow at a rate far faster than human written, approaches or eclipses the volume of human data. Right now, it likely won't happen. A few years down the line in one possible future, when everyone uses AIs on their devices to write social media posts, when article writers have been fired and replaced with LLMs etc? Who's to say.
Heute ist #WSHD2024! Der 4. September ist dem Bewusstsein für die Bedeutung sexueller Gesundheit gewidmet. Das Motto für 2024: Positive Beziehungen.
Die World Association for Sexual Health hat den Tag 2010 ins Leben gerufen.
Im Fokus der Arbeit am RKI stehen sexuell übertragbare Infektionen und deren Prävention, doch sexuelle Gesundheit geht weit darüber hinaus. Sie umfasst ebenso Aspekte wie Lebensqualität, Wohlbefinden, Rechte und zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen.
@kimvsparrentak Hi Kim, I guess I can assume the greens are opposing this chat control again. No idea if and how we can get a signal out and have the Dutch vote be a firm "No!".
Obviously as we have a useless government where certainly the VVD already earlier went really bad and now they are in the extreme right coalition where certainly one other will like the Stasi methodes for sure.
@johnkavs @ScottLucas Hi there! Yes, we will be keeping up to date and spreading as much awareness and updates on the matter. Please join the fight to stop this.
¡Las postulaciones para GNOME Latam 2024 ya están abiertas!
¡No pierdas la oportunidad de ser parte de este evento que une a la comunidad #GNOME en América Latina! Regístrate ahora y asegura tu lugar en Medellín, Colombia, o en línea.
As inscrições para o GNOME Latam 2024 já estão abertas!
Não perca a oportunidade de fazer parte deste evento que une a comunidade #GNOME na América Latina! Inscreva-se agora e garanta seu lugar em Medellín, Colômbia, ou online.
Oh, thank goodness not having a fully functional screen reader isn’t a blocker for Fedora 41. We wouldn’t want them to miss their 10th anniversary of shipping an operating system without a fully functional screen reader, after all.
I'd love to see something like this for Rust. That is, targeting application processors unlike embedded Rust, with a port of std, possibly with some things stubbed out, rather than no-std. I don't want to start a language flame war, but IMO, Rust has stronger safety guarantees in safe code.
Wichtiger Artikel beim @Volksverpetzer - auch wenn es letztlich alle wissen: Bund und Länder horten zahlreiche sensible Bürgerdaten. Ein pseudo-demokratisches Fascho-Regime kann diese Daten für vielfältige Zwecke nutzen. Vor allem natürlich für die Verfolgung "unerwünschter Personen". volksverpetzer.de/analyse/digi…
Can any of the #libreoffice spreadsheet users out there tell me if there is an "import JSON" extension available at this time, or if there are any plans to add the function to Calc any time in the near future. Thanks in advance :)
@DoKo @FreieSoftwareOG Well, OpenOffice's last big update was in 2014, and it's had repeated problems fixing security holes on time: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_O… – But LibreOffice is the properly maintained and actively developed successor project 😊
@FreieSoftwareOG the point was noch using OO or LO (this was just the small "joke" to not use MS Office), the point is the question who utilizes who...
Now's a great time for people to get into the free Kontakt library scene, even if you don't own a Komplete Kontrol keyboard. Since loading a Kontakt library without OCR is accessible on both Mac and Windows, you can avail yourself of some killer freebies such as this new drum kit from Fracture Sounds. Reaper users especially take note. There's a plethora of free-to-use instruments that run in Kontakt player, so you can enjoy pianos, strings, drums, bells, a fantastic Rhodes plugin, all sorts of goodies. The free landscape has honestly never been as good as it is now.
You are using #LibreOffice but don't want to create or modify a complex citation style for your needs? Thanks to our #GSOC contributor, you can now choose from the vast amount of #CSL styles in JabRef and use them together with LibreOffice.
(i will keep banging the drums that most of the FOSS "supply chain" fear could be handled by investing more in programming language tooling, as Rust demonstrate, and that it would be a small overall cost for massive pay off...)
@Di4na possibly: I believe Rust is generally a good thing for most things, but I believe the Rust ecosystem with cargo and bazillions of always-updatiing tiny dependencies risk adding friction and at least complicates the equation quite a lot
This is my biggest worry too: they essentially copied the NPM package management model and practices. Good for short term productivity, but I worry that it causes significant long-term maintainability problems.
And everything is version 0.x, in part due to technical limitations of Cargo: moving out of 0.x is a breaking change, so if you have users on 0.x (which Cargo encourages by adding semver compatibility rules which make 0.x.a compatible with 0.x.b), moving out of 0.x breaks them.
yeah, kinda puts into perspective all the 'negative feedback' the Chrome team received for removing JPEG-XL support. I wouldn't want to have such a monstrosity in my code base either, no matter what advantages the actual encoding might have over existing formats.
Well, it seems that your point is "Firefox consists of bad code", whereas I believe that the conclusion from the post should be "The library is bad code, which is why we are not using it in production. We'd be happy to look at their rust implementation, when it's possible"
(footnote: "bad code" being an abbreviation of "100k multi-threaded C++")
and "uses" in this case means "has it available behind a feature flag in their nightly builds, and does not ship it to normal users because of this very issue"
It's a good hot take, but what amazes me most is the replies so far immediately jumping to conclusions with biased gut reactions as if their identity is tied to one or the other camp.
And, just wondering: How many of those lines are for handling security issues such as boobytrapped JPEGs? How many lines do the other HTML rendering engine use for the same function? The graphical web has many sins to make amends for!
I really don't envy the people who'd have to rewrite that monstrosity. See flak.tedunangst.com/post/on-bu… by @tedu for the current state of the art method of decoding jpegxl safely, which is both hilarious and sad.
Wait, so JPEG XL isn't completely dead? That's probably not what you meant to communicate but I'm so happy to hear that
fwiw I think that LOC of the reference implementation doesn't really say anything about anything - even if Firefox "adopted" it, which feels like a sensible choice given the state of things
browser vendors should coordinate which subset of JPEG XL they want to support, and only this part of the standard needs to get implemented.
I remember JPEG and that you could never use progressive JPEGs. Some programs even offered an “export for web” feature so that you wouldn't use any unsupported JPEG features.
To put in perspective: - JPEG: libjpeg 6b encoder+decoder: 24,200 lines of C - JPEG: libjpeg-turbo encoder+decoder: 127,000 of C and ASM (multi architectures) - JPEG2000: openjpeg encoder+decoder: 50,000 lines of .C - JPEG2000: Kakadu commercial encoder+decoder: 214,000 lines of C++ (only coresys component) - libjxl: 150,000 lines for the core library, encoder+decoder (deps excluded) (All above includes blank lines + inline doc) So this is pretty much standard for a modern codec
I think it is a bit misleading (and arguably unfair) to attribute this to Firefox specifically: this is the reference jpeg-xl implementation, originally created and maintained by Google, and in widespread experimental use across all kinds of browsers, including Chromium, Safari, Edge and more
because we don't get to talk aboutmore positive, more accessible app redesigns often, @bitwarden just released a major update to their apps which ditches the cross platform code base they were using in favor of native apps (on iOS being SwiftUI) and this update is so much more accessible and pleasant than the previous version if you use voiceover.
@nick That's a matter of taste, I assume. I had to rearrange a dozen of entries recently in my KeePass database, and it was a breeze to do with a normal tree, context menus and keyboard shortcuts. Honestly, I would self-host BitWarden and keep at least family passwords there, but the Windows experience is just not my piece of cake. virtual cursor on, virtual cursor off, no tree view… no, not for me.
@nick It's a staged rollout that started either a few weeks ago or just now, I didn't see any specific dates. But before that the new app was a separate beta and when I got the update this morning in the app store the changelog very clearly mentioned the rewrite.
And on top of that, if I'm not mistaken, it looks like they have removed HCaptcha as well, if the last few times I've been through the sign-on flow are any indication.
I'll look out for that one. Have you experienced the issue with Edge where in a fairly recent update when using a screen reader it announces that Bitwarden auto fill has options for this website? This keeps interupting the reading flow. I did contact Bitwarden about this but didn't hear back.
@andrew I'm not an Edge user, but perhaps it's coming from the inline autofill feature of Bitwarden if it's on their end, try turning off "show autofill menu on form field" to off. I turned it off in Safari because it kept steeling focus
While I personally use 1Password, I'm very happy to hear that BitWarden is accessible as we need as many password manager options as we can get. I've found them to be a liberating tool.
I wrote a @TPGi blog post last year on 20 #DigitalAccessibility books. Since then, quite a few more have been published, so I've blogged about 19 more.
Thanks to everyone who has sent messages of appreciation for Living Blindfully following the announcement of its pending closure at the end of this month. I have kept a number of them permanently as they were very touching. Now it’s time for talk of the future. I have published episode 299 of Living Blindfully, featuring a conversation with Mark Riccobono, who is President of the National Federation of the Blind, @nationsblind, about my exciting new role with NFB. The episode is available in your podcast player now, or on the web at: LivingBlindfully.com/299. The transcript can be found at LivingBlindfully.com/lb0299tra…. I'm getting to work right away with the organized blind movement to progress a range of important technology, accessibility, and communication issues, many of which we have discussed over the years on Living Blindfully. Just as important as ensuring that current and future technology is accessible is keeping people informed about all that is possible. This includes helping to make sense of the increasingly complex choices we often have to make when it comes to choosing the right tool to live the life we want. That’s why, as part of my new NFB role, I am pleased to be working with the Federation on some new podcasting and information dissemination initiatives. More about those in due course. This is without question the proudest day of my professional life, and I look forward to staying in touch as I work with a committed, capable, determined group of people building a better future for us all.
Congratulations Jonathan! They've got the right guy to do the right job! Thank you for everything you are doing for the community and good luck in your new role!
@vick21 Thanks for your very generous comments Vic. Never fear, episode 300 is out this weekend. We are continuing production until the end of this month.
EXTR240903_ZATOKA Je tam nahoru strašný kopec, ale ten pohled stojí za to. Na zpáteční cestě jsme trochu zmokli, ale v ochlazeném vzduchu večeře chutnala nadmíru dobře... 😉
We're pleased to report that Matrix has performed well in the BSI audit, conducted by mgm security partners, under the CAOS initiative. The audit found only three low-severity issues.
We're proud of the results and grateful for the BSI's support of open-source security.
Here's the (excellent) official GOV.UK guidance on progressive enhancement — in short, try very hard to avoid using JS at all, and especially avoid large frameworks.
Apple II - colino.net/wordpress/en/mastod…
Commodore 64 - github.com/Havoc6502/MOStodon
Commodore Amiga - github.com/BlitterStudio/amido…
MS-DOS - github.com/SuperIlu/DOStodon
MVS - github.com/mainframed/BREXXTOD…
Palm OS - github.com/knickish/heffalump
Windows 95 - github.com/meyskens/mastodon-f…
Sean Randall
in reply to masukomi • • •I unDRM my Kindle books so I can read them in Braille, but to do that I have to download and transfer via USB then use calibre. Presumably my device will also stop being supported soon.
masukomi
in reply to Sean Randall • • •@cachondo wait.... you unDRM them still? Like present day? I haven't figured out how to do that for the latest kindle DRM.
Please tell me your secrets!!!
I used to use calibre for that, but I'm pretty sure it can't do the latest anymore. I tried 2 paid apps too. They could extract the content but they lost all the formatting and things like bold and italic.
Sean Randall
in reply to masukomi • • •masukomi
in reply to Sean Randall • • •@cachondo ahh i didn’t know you could still download the AZW files. That was the piece i was missing.
As far as i know there’s no good decryption for the KFX files although the paid ones may work for you, unless braille readers do something useful to designate bold and italics
Sean Randall
in reply to masukomi • • •masukomi
in reply to Sean Randall • • •