The UK government is out campaigning for its mandatory online age verification with the slogan, "Verifying your age keeps a kid safe." bsky.app/profile/jsrailton.bsk… This is quite daft and dangerous... Let's complete that thought:
Verifying your age creates wonderful, poorly protected, centralized databases of your government ID and sensitive browsing history, just waiting for the next massive data breach. ...
Verifying your age shows tech-savvy kids how to use a VPN to bypass the system completely, while creating a honeypot of personal data from the adults who actually follow the rules. ...
Verifying your age conveniently links your real name and financial data to your most private online activities, creating a lucrative new product for data brokers to sell. ...
Verifying your age tells a 25-year-old that they can't access legal content because a notoriously biased facial recognition algorithm believes they look too young. ...
Verifying your age means that when your face scan is inevitably stolen, you can't just reset it like a password. You end up with a new, permanently compromised biometric identity! No thanks, UK.
Another #Fanfiction that I've seen in progress over a number of years finally got finished a few months ago:
Harry Potter's life was not a very good one, but then one day that all changed, one day he found a snake in his cupboard. Slytherin Harry, dark/grey. There will be bashing. HarryxDaphne/Tracey/OC pairing. Rated: Fiction M - English - Adventure/Romance - Chapters: 111 - Words: 361,394 - Reviews: 8,839 - Favs: 12,797 - Follows: 13,635 - Updated: Jan 30 - Published: Sep 3, 2020 - Status: Complete - [Silver King by JustBored21 ](fanfiction.net/s/13688226/1/Si…)
Amsterdam is the heart of open source community this week!
#OpenSourceSummit brings together open source developers, technologists, and open source community leaders to share the latest know-how, collaborate in real-time, and grow the existing skills and network.
The #EOSA President Daniel Stenberg @bagder , has taken the stage as the keynote speaker of the first day of #TheLinuxFoundation OS Summit!
Really enjoyed the talk by @bagder : He told the story of the hard work of maintaining a popular open source project, within the short time of a keynote presentation, and doing so in a fun and entertaining way while getting all his points across. Well done!
To NVDA users: Is anyone else having a problem with the NVDA+D keystroke to read additional details on something. Specifically, I went and tried to read the long description on a table in Word and while the long desc was in the description field, the file was a .docx, I am using 2025.2 of NVDA, Word365, and nothing I have tried returns anything but "No Additional details." Just reaching out in case there is something I missed. Tagging the professionals too. NVAccess@fosstodon.org #NVDA #screenreader #word365
You needed an @ in front of our handle to tag us - but I found it :) I did reply to your message in the user group this morning: groups.google.com/a/nvaccess.o…
Long story short: We're aware of the issue, and in the user group I linked to a couple of related issues.
running and dancing barefoot through the woods also sounds very romantic to those ignorant of raspberry bushes. not being able to walk for a month not so romantic. lesson learned too.
@Wen I suppose it depends on the sand. Here on Kos the sand isn't particularly smooth. And also on distance. It was OK for 3 km, then I started feeling my feet.
Bill C-11 included a Broadcasting Act change emphasizing the right to privacy. But two months after it became law, the government deleted the provision. My post on legislative incompetence that left a non-sensical clause without intended privacy safeguard. michaelgeist.ca/2025/08/privac…
The Online Streaming Act, the government controversial reform to the Broadcasting Act, continues to attract attention given an ongoing court challenge and backlash from the U.S. government.
Hear me out: what if, instead of maintaining a roster, we just send directed presence to every open chat and tell everyone #XMPP doesn't have a server-side contact list anymore? Obviously, the server could still infer the exact same information, but that's true for Signal as well, and nobody seems bothered by this either.
@Daniel Gultsch would this allow in some way for sharing contact lists and bookmarks between different clients, as long as they stay connected for a while at the same time?
AFAIK, Signal does not have presences or any "last seen"-type information. But I guess "contact list" can be inferred server-side with messages passing through anyway. Maybe there is a mitigation in Signal servers about that too? It's still centralized and Signal servers are a massive single point of failure operated by an org in an authoritarian country, so I don't care enough to actually investigate any of it anyway.
Digital Public Goods - Incentivizing Collaboration Mike Gifford, Open Source Summit Europe 2025, August 25, 2025 2:25-3:05pm CEST Elicium 2A (Elicium Level 1) https://sched.
NVIDIA posted 69% revenue growth to $44B, eyeing $45B next quarter. But sky-high expectations, chip export bans to China, and AI market uncertainty keep shares volatile despite 1300% gains in 5 years.
NVIDIA's 70% revenue growth is impressive, but with high expectations and geopolitical risks, its stock is at risk of a sharp drop. Will the AI hype continue?
Hi! Is there any chance we can encourage you to trend #NVIDIA when that's the company you mean, please? I know what their NASDAQ handle is, but #NVDA is much more widely known as the name of the screen reader we make and the #NVDA hashtag is very widely used for the screen reader. It will save both our communities polluting each other's feeds. If you'd like to find out more about the screen reader, our website is nvaccess.org/ - Thank you!
Excellent news for Mac users! OSARA is now signed and notarized. Installing/updating should be much easier. This is all thanks to a Herculean amount of research and effort undertaken by Marc Mulcahey, with Jamie getting the final pieces of the puzzle worked into our continuous integration. I'll grab like 1% of the credit for gee-ing smarter people along whenever Apple left them feeling confused/annoyed.
LibreOffice 25.8: a Strategic Asset for Governments and Enterprises Focused on Digital Sovereignty and Privacy Overview In a time when geopolitical tensions, data localization laws, and compliance risks are reshaping the IT landscape, LibreOffice 25.
Is the irritating recovery mode thing fixed? Even though I have autosave turned if something happens to my computer, I have to click like six things to reopen OO and the document that was open.
@MylesRyden You can see what's fixed and changed here: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Re… – If there's something else you wish to see, you can submit an enhancement request at bugs.documentfoundation.org – But of course, we're a volunteer-driven project with very limited resources, so your help in implementing changes would be very welcome. Thank you 😊
@MarcusMASTO You didn't say what operating system you're using, so we can't really answer. But you can download for Linux, macOS and Windows from libreoffice.org/download/
Please, for the love of Haile Selassie, just get rid of the endlessly long list of uninstalled languages from the spell checker. I switch daily between Swedish and UK English, those are the only ones I usually want to see.
@mrundkvist Hi! You can submit enhancement requests here: bugs.documentfoundation.org – But of course, we're a volunteer-driven project with very limited resources. To get a change more quickly, you can consider helping our volunteers, or funding a developer. Thank you ☺️👍
It's a bit frustrating that there isn't a tick box list in the language settings. Because I will never need a separate spelling dictionary for English (Belize) or English (Israel). Ever. I only need 2 of the 18 Englishes, I should be able to hide the other 16.
(And making regular users sign up for an account to submit bugs is one of FOSS culture's major problems. Just admit you don't want non-technical people to communicate with you.)
@herzleid @mrundkvist If it's not very hard, then can you help us to do it? We have extremely limited resources and a ton of requests, and very few people offering to help. They just say "it shouldn't be hard" but don't do anything to make it happen. We can't do everything I'm afraid – not without more help. And re: Bugzilla needing an account, that's to stop spam. We get huge spam attacks but again, have extremely limited resources so need logins. We're really doing all we can.
On one hand I get that, on the other I've actually tried participating in projects (a long time ago, not LO specifically) and I had a terrible experience every time (bc I don't code? bc I'm a woman? who knows?)
I do appreciate Libre Office immensely, but being encouraged to file bugs when I know they will likely be dismissed bc they're "formulated incorrectly" or considered duplicates etc etc, is grating. Why bother?
But sincerely, sorry you're stretched thin. Sorry I can't help.
Congratulations to the developers and everyone who supports this important project. LibreOffice is incredible after the last update, and I'm sure it will continue to amaze in future updates.
And that's the idea, it would give a first implementation of the extension (client side) in the same time. The developer of mox, which can be used with DC is interested in the extension too
It's a really hard concept to understand though. To my mind, there are no good videos which really break it down, such that an average person could appreciate it, let alone want it. Like breaking it down the way Chris Barnatt breaks things down on ExplainingComputers
This weekend project (yes, another one instead of finishing the 100 others) is a #fastcgi handler to implement xep-0070, alnowing to use an #xmpp account to log in to a website. Writing it in #rust as a learning exercise.
I hope to replace "login with google" and the other things I had to add to my website ovwr the years in order to not store people's passwords. This should allow to do it in a decentralized way without forcing any specific provider.
this seems a bit different, as it would only identify users of that specific server? I'm using xep-0070 which allows to send a confirmation to the xmpp user. I just need to identify people, after that the permissions are handled separately (by Trac in my case). There is already an implementation as an xmpp component, but that either means running my own xmpp server, or someone sets up the component on their server and it becomes a centralized entry point to xmpp.
with it done as a fastcgi script, all you ned is an xmpp client account for your http server, and you can send identification requests to anyone on the xmpp network.
That's similar to the original OpenID, and not quite like the current OAuth and OpenID connect, where you get more than identification (possibly access to the user email address, avatar, and more depending on what the OAuth provider wants to share). And OAuth is not really generic and requires each website to add specific support for each auth provider, resulting in centralization (log in with google/facepook/github/gitlab things)
You are right, this only works for users of a specific prosody instance. My use-case is "I'm scared of LDAP so let's use prosody to authenticate users of my small-scale self-hosted stuff". =)
Your weekend project indeed sounds more interesting.
Now this is a first for me. Seeing #NVDA read absolutely nothing from a program. this is me in the StemRoller program, and as you will hear when I tab threw it, all you hear is the NVDA sounds addon playing the different sounds for things like an edit box, or a button. when I attempt to use the arrow keys, you will hear nothing at all.
I'm not familiar with Steamroller, do you have a link? And have you or would you consider filing an issue with them and / or us please? github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issue…
(I just had a look and can't see it mentioned in any of our issues)
I would have to figure out how to do the issue thing, as I am really new with that. I just looked in my favorites, and don't have it there surprisingly, so let me see what I can do about getting you a link for it.
@NVAccess it is actually called StemRoller. the interface looks like a web page kind of, it is a program you can use to take a song apart into files like vocals, bass, drums, ETC. here is the URL for it. stemroller.com/
StemRoller isolates instruments and vocals from any song using advanced AI and machine learning techniques. Make karaoke (instrumental), vocal, drum, and bass tracks from any recording in one click!
I had a look, and tabbing through first takes you to the download and donate links, then a bunch of split buttons. It seems to indicate you can search for any song / artist and I assume if you do that, you can then move through matching songs to split them.... but the search doesn't seem to take focus at all (even physically clicking on it with the mouse) - in any browser. Press E for edit box says "Search edit unavailable". Seems to be an issue with the site?
@NVAccess actually my demo was the actual app. where it says download on the site. you can download the zip file to your computer of the program and run it from there. sorry for all the confusion. smile.
Ah ok, I didn't get that far - I'm still not sure why the site has an edit field which is disabled and what appear to be results which look like they are loading - either let me use it or put dummy data there for me to see roughly how it works :)
@Tutanota Unsure why, and I already sent an error report of this a while ago, but it's impossible to have Tuta start at system start right now. It always gives me an errror when I try to set it to "Yes". Formerly this would work perfectly fine, then I realise even though it was on "Yes" it didn't start anymore. I'm on Windows 10.
I think yesterday was a new record for me. I've been working on an app for two platforms, I published both yesterday, and published two other app updates. That makes 4 app submissions in one day. That is kind of awesome!
I wish Canadians were more familiar with the Amazon Antitrust Paradox and the Curse of Bigness. Allowing Bell, Rogers, and Telus to enter new markets is market dominance disguised as competition.
The upcoming version of monocles chat will introduce several enhancements, including support for XEP-0118, enabling you to optionally share the music you're currently listening to with your contacts. This feature enhances social interaction by allowing users to discover new music, share their tastes, and connect over shared interests, fostering a more engaging and collaborative experience within the app. A big thank you to the developer who contributed to this feature!
The #Panoramax instance for #MapComplete might have some downtime tonight as @thibaultmol will be changing some configs and stuff. It might only take 5 minutes. it might also take an hour. Should start around 19:30 Brussels time.
This means that image uploads will temporarily fail, but the images you take should be re-uploaded automatically on your next visit to MapComplete.
It's done btw. some recent images might not be available yet, are being transfered, should be good in a couple hours. but everything is up and working again now
@Tutanota Hi! Why are you blocking Mullvad VPN? I can't access my calendar without disconnecting. This is a deal breaker for me. I can't remember it ever happening when I used Google's calendar.
Could you let us know the IP at hello@tutao.de? Unfortunately, spammers try to abuse VPNs... we'll look into this. For now, please use a different server.
📣 Do-It-Blind (DIB) online Besprechung am Montag, 25. August, um 19:00 Uhr. Du bist eingeladen! bbb.metalab.at/rooms/joh-szv-o… Wöchentlich am Montag besprechen wir neue Formen der digitalen und inklusiven Zusammenarbeit. Mach mit! 🛠️ #make #blind #inklusion
Learn using BigBlueButton, the trusted open-source web conferencing solution that enables seamless virtual collaboration and online learning experiences.
Techbro "inventions" seem to all be pretty much someone trying to replace a glass of water with an app-controlled subscription-based intravenous water drip.
I wonder if any of the brave souls on my timeline ever attempted to run either “Shades of Doom" or “Tank Commander” using Wine on Mac OS? I think I am running out of options. Whatever drivers I throw at it, both GMA games claim that they cannot initialize Directsound and that perhaps the sound card is not present. At the same time the sound card is present and is playing the sound.
Bug fix for responsiveness issues with SAPI 5. We think we have fixed most of the SAPI 5 bugs now - PLEASE test this version if you use SAPI 5 and let us know. Bug fix for Turkish Braille tables
Joseph Lorenzo Hall, PhD
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