It's happening again!

If you have interest, passion or need around the diverse range of topics collectively described as “sustainability of free and open source software”, we invite you to join us for the SustainOSS Virtual Forum, taking place on Thursday 13 March 2025.

At the SustainOSS Virtual Forum, we will survey the challenges, evolution, and surprises that are recurrently navigated but rarely documented or collectively validated in the process of running open source projects, program offices, or policy networks populated by researchers, developers, and policymakers. Above all, we invite you to share your experiences, ideas and concerns around sustainability across a range of scales, engage in respectful discussion, and envision goals and partnerships we can collectively embrace in order to sustain our open source ecosystems.

The interactive agenda will be co-designed in collaboration with confirmed participants in the time leading up to the event.

We encourage you to join us as we explore the who, the what and the how of realizing a sustainable present and future for open source. And we thank you for helping us spread the word!

opencollective.com/sustainoss/…

RT for awareness if you could!

SustainOSS Virtual Forum - Open Collective

A virtual three-hour event bringing together developers, researchers, and policy makers

^{opencollective.com}

I leader della tecnologia hanno un piano per proteggere Bluesky da Elon Musk

Free our Feeds, un collettivo di leader della tecnologia tra cui il fondatore di Wikipedia Jimmy Wales e il presidente della Mozilla Foundation Mark Surman, vuole raccogliere 30 milioni di dollari per proteggere Bluesky

thelogic.co/news/quebec-ink/bl…

@informatica

Tech leaders have a plan to protect Bluesky from Elon Musk - The Logic

Free our Feeds, a collective of tech leaders including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Mozilla Foundation president Mark Surman, wants to raise US$30M to protect Bluesky.

^{Martin Patriquin (The Logic Inc.)}

Draupnir 2.0 is finally out 🎉
github.com/the-draupnir-projec…
github.com/the-draupnir-projec…
the-draupnir-project.github.io…
hub.docker.com/r/gnuxie/draupn…

#Matrix #Moderation

GitHub - the-draupnir-project/Draupnir: A Matrix moderation bot

A Matrix moderation bot. Contribute to the-draupnir-project/Draupnir development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub

#AndroidAppRain at apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid today with 16 updated and 1 added apps:

* IPTV Mine: Watch 500+ live india TV channels 🛡️

3 #Magisk #modules were updated at apt.izzysoft.de/magisk

Enjoy your #free #Android #apps with the #IzzyOnDroid rep

IzzyOnDroid F-Droid Repository

This is a repository of apps to be used with your F-Droid client. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).

^{IzzyOnDroid App Repo}

VO/desktop bug via @elly:
adrianroselli.com/2017/12/twea…

Using this pen:
cdpn.io/aardrian/debug/rNRxZmP

We both experience VO ignoring the start of most sentences when using read-all.

Is this a known issue?

#accessibility #a11y #Safari

Tweaking Text Level Styles

It’s a bit of a pain to pepper updates within the sections of the post, so just scroll down to the latest update and work your way back up. Considering how much I charge for this site, I am hoping my readers will accept the extra effort.

^{Adrian Roselli}

#catima 2.34.4 is out!

This reverts Catima to targetSdk 34 (Android 14) for now, to fix the UI regressions introduced in Catima 2.34.3.

It also includes the fixes in 2.34.3 and a new little feature to sort your cards by the "valid from" date, useful for things like train tickets.

Coming soon to an app store near you!

github.com/CatimaLoyalty/Andro…

#IzzyOnDroid #GitHub #FDroid #GooglePlay

Release 2.34.4 · CatimaLoyalty/Android

Ability to sort cards by start of validity Temporarily revert to targeting Android 14 to fix some UI issues

^GitHub

If you have a personal Google Account, Google is making the "Gemini" AI default on.

Pardon my language, but fuck that noise.

Go to gemini.google.com/extensions and turn everything off ("learn about my choices").

‎

^Gemini

Copilot AI Added to Microsoft 365 Apps Alongside $3-Per-Month Price Hike
https://www.pcmag.com/news/copilot-ai-added-to-microsoft-365-apps-alongside-3-per-month-price-hike?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into PCMag's Top Stories @pcmag-s-top-stories-PCMag

Copilot AI Added to Microsoft 365 Apps Alongside $3-Per-Month Price Hike

Subscribers will receive 60 AI credits per month. For more, you'll need the Copilot Pro add-on.

^{Jibin Joseph (PCMag)}

Here's the new 2025 reset.css:

h1 { margin-block: 0.67em; font-size: 2em; }

Thank you for adopting this on all your sites!

See github.com/whatwg/html/issues/…

Remove UA style for h1-h6 in section (et. al.) and hgroup · Issue #7867 · whatwg/html

If/when #7829 is merged, the following UA style doesn't make sense. Can it be removed? In the following CSS block, x is shorthand for the following selector: :is(article, aside, nav, section) @name...

^GitHub

Hahahahahahahahahha

Hahahahahahahahahha

Hahahahahahahahahha

Good.

mastodon.social/@MugsysRapShee…

Daniel weekly January 17, 2025

lists.haxx.se/pipermail/daniel…

curl talks, next curl talk, HTTPS RR, HTTP versions, TLS, Coverity, snprintf horrors, Hackerone

Tuta Mail revoluciona la organización del correo electrónico con su nueva función de etiquetas

La eficiencia y la privacidad son prioridades, Tuta sigue marcando la diferencia. Esta reconocida plataforma, famosa por sus servicios centrados en la seguridad como Tuta Mail y Tuta Calendar, ha dado un paso más hacia la excelencia con una innovación que promete transformar la experiencia de sus usuarios: las etiquetas. @Tutanota

computekni.com/2025/01/tuta-ma…

Okay, so Cory Doctorow published his take on the #freeourfeeds thingy, all about "billionaire-proofing" the Internet (or more accurately, billionaire-proofing social media), and I have some thoughts...

pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/con…

His main argument is this --> yeah, Bluesky isn't perfect, but it's what's fun and popular right now, and if we can billionaire-proof it, then we should, rather than getting people to adopt the existing, already proven, billionaire-proofed Fediverse ecosystem.

Okay, that's fair I think. I have no objection to this on its face. The "Fediverse" has been around for a while and though it has never been more popular than it is now, it has struggled to really gain mainstream appeal. (Perhaps that will change more drastically this year as fedi platforms like #Pixelfed gain more attention though). So though he admits that Mastodon/Fediverse is ideal, would be perfect for what they're trying to do ("Free our Feeds"), it's just not the clearest solution because the difficulty of getting people to adopt it en-masse seems somewhat insurmountable at this time.

Fine.

He goes on to say that the answer is, as he puts it, "installing our own fire-exits in Bluesky", or in other words, standing up a second Bluesky relay/infrastructure that "federates" or otherwise interoperates with the main Bluesky infrastructure - similar to how distinct Fediverse instances can communicate with each other. This too makes sense. If the main Bluesky enshittifies, or goes down, or is subject to hostile/billionaire takeover, than people have the choice to switch over to the other relay, the "good" one. Now here is where his argument starts to fall apart...

First, "FreeOurFeeds" is asking for 30 million dollars to do this. Wow. That's a lot, and doesn't speak well to how easy it is to stand up and maintain a second instance of the entire bluesky infra. Second, the FreeOurFeeds website speaks nothing of how they will keep that infra alive, i.e. pay for ongoing operating costs. Even the main Bluesky company doesn't have a realistic monetization strategy, they are kept alive by VC money alone pretty much.

Finally, what Cory fails to address, and in my mind, the biggest issue with his whole argument is that having just ONE single other relay/instance of Bsky as a whole is not the robust "fire exit" he thinks it is. Let's say FreeOurFeeds succeeds and they stand up a fully interoperable, yet fully isolated instance of Bluesky, and they manage to get a sizable portion of the existing Bluesky userbase to move over there. Like, 5 million of Blueskys ~30 mil or w/e. Let's say then that Bluesky sells out to Elon Musk or Bezos or whomever. This triggers another mass migration of 5 million, or 10 million or even everyone over to the FreeOurFeeds relay. (Though we all know that they'd be lucky to get half of regular people to figure out how to "Switch" relay providers). Now they are RIGHT BACK to where they were to begin with. A single provider, just as vulnerable to hostile takeover or enshittification as the original Bluesky was.

So you might say, okay? well then stand up ANOTHER relay. Crowdfund another 30 million. Right? ... What?!? Bags of 30 million dollars don't just grow on trees ya know? It's hard enough to get people to pay for these types of services, and I just don't think having one, or two or even 5 other relays is enough redundancy, enough resiliency to combat the billionaires and the governments of the world that want to control what we see, what we talk about, and who's allowed to speak.

That's why the Fediverse works. It's made up of literally thousands of servers, of all different sizes, some Mastodon, some GoToSocial, some Lemmy, some I mean w/e. Theres tons of different platforms that all interoperate, and they don't cost 30 million to run. I'm typing this out on a GoToSocial instance that literally costs $3.75/mo. You heard that right. Less than $4/mo. To put that in perspective, I could run 8 million GoToSocial instances at this price if I was given 30 million dollars. I'd like to see Musk try to buy all those out 😄.

I'll try to put it another way here. I'm in cybersecurity, and one thing we're taught is that attackers, with enough time and resources can literally get into anything. So our jobs as defenders, on top of all the usual stuff (e.g. defense in depth, blah blah), is to just slow them down. Make it impractical (from a time-spent perspective) to achieve a reasonable return on (time) investment. It wouldn't be hard for a billionaire or a hostile government to take down one, two, three or maybe even 10 Bluesky relays. But it seems wholly impractical for a billionaire, or a team of billionaires to snuff out thousands of Fediverse instances. And hell, these are just instances that exist now, in a very fledgling model where Fedi only has like a couple million MAU. Imagine a timeline where Fediverse got REAL world-wide adoption, and we went from a few thousand instances, to hundreds of thousands, or millions of instances. Taking that down would be like taking down the Internet itself, and if that could happen, we might have bigger issues.

Oh and I forgot to mention, that FreeOurFeeds can't even stand up another relay. Bsky devs have already stated that's impossible at the moment (shellsharks.com/notes/2024/11/…). Though theoretically this will be addressed in time...

Alrighty, let's wrap this up. I get it. Bluesky is hot. It's popular. It's got steam. It's got gobs of cursed VC money. It's got some admittedly cool tech behind it. But it just isn't it. Not unless it can find a way to solve for the whole it's-insanely-expensive-to-run-another-relay issue. If FreeOurFeeds succeeds, stands up another instance and figures out a way to run it on the cheap, then I'll be the first to say "congrats" and "I was wrong". Until then, I will remain skeptical, and I'll keep saying that this sort of money would be better thrown at building out the proven solution, the Fediverse.

Cloudy with a chance of not enshittifying

Cybersecurity Research and More

^shellsharks

V říjnu loňského roku jsme dali dohromady Výzvu za strategický přístup k digitalizaci. Podpořilo ji skoro 700 z vás, díky!

Včera jsme ji odeslali na Úřad vlády. Budeme se také ptát premiéra i předsedů stran, současných i budoucích, co pro digitalizaci dělají a budou dělat.

Я сейчас делаю себе умный дом на Home Assistant. Устал от закрытых умных домов типа Гугла — они работают плохо и мало устройств поддерживают.

Купил себе Frient Electricity LED 2, который считает вспышки светодиода на эл. счётчике и отдаёт их в Home Assistant. Очень доволен.

🌟 Představujeme přihlášení pomocí Mastodonu na Pixelfed! 🌟
Pixelfed nabízí funkci: Přihlášení pomocí Mastodonu. Tato integrace usnadňuje registraci a přihlášení pomocí vašeho Mastodon účtu.

1️⃣ Zrychlená registrace

Automaticky se předvyplní váš avatar, bio, uživatelské jméno a sledující z Mastodonu.
Jednoduché a rychlé připojení bez zbytečných kroků.

2️⃣ Snadné přihlašování

Přihlaste se na Pixelfed pomocí svého Mastodon účtu.
Žádné komplikace, jen plynulé připojení.

3️⃣ Propojení komunit

Sdílejte své příspěvky mezi Pixelfedem a Mastodonem.
Podpořte interakci a spolupráci napříč platformami fediverza.

Pixelfed a Mastodon sdílejí společnou vizi: decentralizaci, soukromí a otevřenost. Tato funkce posiluje propojení komunit a usnadňuje tvorbu kreativního a propojeného ekosystému.

💡 Zkuste to na pixelfed.cz a užijte si výhody snadného připojení pomocí Mastodonu!

Polyhedral incelmobile seized by police in Greater Manchester (pic via Adam Tranter on bsky).

UK residents with massive personality defects will just have to keep expressing them in more traditional ways.

Tired: Instagram

Wired: Pixelfed (any instance)

Admired: "Charge your battery and take some photos"

(it's a very long and excellent thread that started in 2022 and is still active to this very day on discuss.pixls.us/, an excellent forum for Free Software photography software and techniques)

discuss.pixls.us/t/capture-cha…

discuss.pixls.us

Discussion forum for PIXLS.US

^{discuss.pixls.us}

If you're a European who sometimes charges for support of your Open Source:

github.com/orcwg/cra-hub/issue…

So I "monetise" on an open source project, what does it mean for me? · Issue #16 · orcwg/cra-hub

should be considered to be making available on the market only if the component is monetised by its original manufacturer Assuming I make such source code available and I have charged money for ser...

^GitHub

The Nature Of Things: Ultraprocessed Food

Bottom line is keep it to a minimum as best you can.
#UPF #Food #Canada #Diet

youtu.be/LLwoCraBZdw?si=u6LmGW…

How these foods trick you into loving them

Why ultra-processed foods are irresistible – and how they impact our health. Sarika Cullis-Suzuki and Anthony Morgan investigate.#UltraProcessedFoods #Food #...

^YouTube

I mean, Jack Dorsey speaking about "Infusing Open Source Culture into Company DNA" when not a single soul has ever heard of him in relation to Open Source before this talk title would have worked as a joke to me.

fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event…

FOSDEM 2025 - Infusing Open Source Culture into Company DNA: A Conversation with Jack Dorsey and Manik Surtani, Block's head of Open Source

^fosdem.org