mastodon - Link to source

One of my favorite programs for the Mac is from a company called Objective Development -- Little Snitch -- and it's a host-based firewall that alerts you anytime something on your computer tries to reach the Internet for the first time (or you can set to always ask all the time, which I wouldn't recommend just because of the alert volume). I personally like to know what programs and apps are doing and with whom they are communicating, and this app is a useful if imperfect way of doing that.

The most jarring aspect of Little Snitch is how some programs suddenly phone home but you have no idea what's going on because the requested IP is some shared Amazon cloud server or something. Even after spending a few minutes digging on the IP, you probably still won't find a hostname and you're no closer to gauging whether you should allow the connection or not. But most of the time the program is silent, operating the background to block or allow various connections that you have specified previously.

Anyway, what I wanted to share that's neat about Little Snitch is when you install an app that you've had on your phone or iPad onto your Mac, suddenly you have a much better idea of where (if not who) your apps are communicating with, and maybe even a little more info about what these apps are actually doing in the background.

mastodon - Link to source
Paperback 0.21 is out, fixing a few bugs and adding a couple small features. Changelog:
• Added the total number of pages to the page label in the go to page dialog.
• Allow tabbing from the document content to your list of opened documents.
• Fixed the heading keystrokes sometimes opening recent documents if you had enough of them.
• Paperback will now remove unnecessary soft hyphens from text output.
• Fixed heading navigation sometimes putting you on the wrong character.
Download: github.com/trypsynth/paperback…
Enjoy!

Tissman reshared this.

in reply to Andres

pleroma - Link to source

feld

everything having its own complete app is so incredibly Western and capitalist so you can see why China's embrace of the superapp concept is so compatible with their culture/society.

that said, I don't know how we can break people free from the "app fatigue" problem we've created. People just have zero motivation to try anything that will require they spend 30 seconds learning a new app layout.

But they'll spend 6 hours in 30 second increments watching Tiktoks

whole thing sucks and people are not learning from their mistakes because it takes years before their app finally becomes so unusable, intrusive, or finally shutdown. They won't change until they're forced to change, so these companies just boil-the-frog over time.

i hate it

in reply to feld

pleroma - Link to source

feld

someone should create a bot that harvests all kinds of metadata about the chat members, logs all the conversations, etc for analysis and starts cross referencing it with any other data that can be scraped off the internet.

Invite the bot to the chat under an unassuming name.

Wait a while, and then have it start publishing reports about people exposing their lives and habits and stuff. Then when they are shocked about what they're seeing you can say "this is what Facebook/Meta is learning about you but you choose to keep giving them this information instead of switching to a more private communications app"

Perhaps THAT would wake them up.

(probably not though)

in reply to Andres

pleroma - Link to source

feld

pre-Elon takeover I think Twitter could have evolved into that if they really wanted to.

You can't do it if half the world hates you though.

Amazon at one point could have pulled this off. I'm not sure anyone else in the West could do it at this point. We'd need a universally trusted brand and it's not Big MegaCorp, it's not Social Media Behemoth, and it's definitely not Fintech Banking Startup.

Who is left that is not universally hated?

Walmart and Costco?

in reply to feld

mastodon - Link to source

Andres

@feld I think Google probably had the most chance of success, but they can't design a good UX to save their life. If they could, they've have locked down search (and the web in general), messaging, social media, phones (both the physical devices, voip/SMS, and the OS), shopping, etc. But instead they created weird, confusing (and competing) products that with horrible UIs that they then canceled.

Even Android's UI was pretty bad (imho) for the first decade+.

@feld
in reply to Death by Lambda

pleroma - Link to source

feld

nobody's boycotting Walmart.

If you have to choose between America being dominated by Amazon or Walmart who do you choose?

Everyone picks Walmart. Every time. And Walmart is winning the long game anyway. They have a far superior logistics and supply chain, plus brick and mortar presence.

This doesn't dismiss the very righteous hatred for how they've destroyed small businesses in communities.

But nobody's going after Walmart (or Costco) in the same way they attack other corporations for their behavior. It's just not palatable. They like shopping there too much.

in reply to Martijn Vos

pleroma - Link to source

feld

With email we expect a small subset of features. With social media and instant messaging there are so many ways to do things that an open protocol isn't sufficient because you just end up with massive fragmentation. This is why proprietary apps thrive. They can tightly control the user experience and ensure equity across supported platforms.

XMPP tried this and failed. The XEPs and design-by-committee did not work. Inevitably this led to iMessage and WhatsApp being proprietary XMPP implementations.

The same thing is happening on the Fediverse. Sure, ActivityPub is an open protocol, but you can't view the new Pixelfed Stories on Mastodon or Pleroma; many implementations have emoji reactions but Mastodon does not.

How does an open protocol solve this issue on its own?

see also: Mastodon limitations on polls and post length

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to feld

mastodon - Link to source

Andres

@feld @mcv I'm not sure that I agree that a) embrace & extend is a feature, and that b) open standards can't define a minimum featureset or result in fragmentation. Xmpp being a good example here - fragmentation is huge not due to committee, but by the very idea of a tiny core with a million extensions.

Every jabber server has optional extensions. Every client has a mix of supported extensions. A boon for proprietary users, who use it as a base for their closed systems (googlechat, zoom...)

@Martijn Vos @feld
in reply to Andres

pleroma - Link to source

feld

I'm not saying it's a feature, only that if you have the capability to control the clients on all platforms and the server you can guarantee people have a good experience and never run into weird compatibility issues. You also get the same app/branding on each platform too, so there's no confusion.

Somehow people can figure out that "Outook", "Mail.app", "Gmail" etc are all "email" and compatible with each other, but once you try to get them to use some other open source service where the clients on each device they own are completely different in design and features they just can't figure it out.

"Why can't Flupple on my Mac make a video call to Dogwag on my friend's Android? It says something about incompatible encryption? Why are we bothering with this, why can't we just use Whatsapp" is essentially what you end up with

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to feld

pleroma - Link to source

feld

I will say though, this is why I think DeltaChat will persevere and has a high chance of wide adoption vs other open source secure messengers.

They've made a cross-platform Rust core that implements ALL the core functionality and you just have to put a UI on top of it. So they did, and they have 99% feature compatibility across Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iPhone, Ubuntu Touch, cli/terminal.... there's even a feature phone (flip phone!) implementation, but it needs to be refreshed as it was mostly just an experiment...

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to Andres

pleroma - Link to source

feld

Matrix has so many weird issues people don't even realize, like first party clients that have existed for years not implementing all the crypto.

And yes, the server is a dog. It's basically a git repo or a blockchain. The data will grow and grow forever. Deletes don't actually exist; they just get hidden from users with tombstones. And this has a whole nest of other problems from a security perspective: if your Matrix server has open registrations someone can make an account and join a room from another server which imports ALL the data.

Like illegal data. Images and videos you never want to be associated with. But now your server has a permanent copy of them in its database. Forever, or until you nuke the entire server and make a new one.

Good luck trying to explain that one to the Feds doing a no-knock raid on you at 3am.

Matrix IMHO is suitable only for situations where you *need* the data to be permanently stored as an audit trail // immutable, like corporate and government internal communications.

It doesn't make sense for IoT like they tried to advertise. And it is not a good fit for regular people's needs.

hometown - Link to source

Another cool nextcloud data loss issue closed with the remark that it is the "responsibility of the user" to prevent that case from happening.

I'm being responsible by telling you to avoid using nextcloud unless you're in a fully managed computing environment. 👍

github.com/nextcloud/desktop/i…

Data loss: troublesome interaction with other cloud file services

Different cloud file sharing services fight for control over files I provided nextcloud services for a few ad-hoc groups that needed to collaborate for a limited time on a project. These groups wer...
despens (GitHub)

mastodon - Link to source

what is your preferred abbreviation of/keyword for "function" (in a programming language context)?

(unfortunately i can't make a poll with more than 4 choices so if you like `def` or something else feel free to reply)

  • func (0 votes)
  • fn (0 votes)
  • fun (0 votes)
  • function (0 votes)
Poll end: 1 week ago

mastodon - Link to source
I remain a fan of consuming my news via RSS feeds. There are #accessibility and time-saving benefits to getting all your news in one accessible app, and there are no naughty algorithms trying to filter your view of the world.
For many years, I've used Lire as my RSS reader on my iPhone, in conjunction with a feed aggregator service called The Old Reader. Sometime last year, The Old Reader hit a rough patch, but it seemed to have come right, until a couple of months ago.
At that point, I began experiencing serious issues accessing The Old Reader from Lire. Most of the time, Lire would time out. I worked out that if I tried to access the service repeatedly, it usually succeeded on the third or fourth attempt, but that was time-consuming and frustrating. One other person contacted me to let me know he was experiencing the same problem.
I contacted The Old Reader, and they seemed uninterested in pursuing the issue, apparently because they weren't receiving many reports of it.
I contacted the developer of Lire, who couldn't have been more helpful. He asked for my credentials for The Old Reader so he could test with the app, and he duplicated my findings right away. He was able to identify the issue with The Old Reader API that was causing the time-out, and gave this information to The Old Reader, who didn't even acknowledge his message, let alone commit to resolving the issue.
So over the long weekend, I resolved to find a better service. After doing some deep research with ChatGPT, I settled on Bazqux Reader. The website has a few rough edges from an accessibility point of view, but I was able to export my feeds from The Old Reader, import them into Bazqux, and log in via Lire.
The one thing that is very different is the speed. Retrieving article from Bazqux is way faster than The Old Reader ever was, something that my deep research told me I should expect.
So, sadly I can't recommend The Old Reader anymore, but so far so good with Bazqux. Lightning fast and simple setup.
There is a cost for this service, I think about $39 per year, and Lire does support using iCloud to store your feeds. I find that for the large number of feeds I have, a service like Bazqux adds value, but if your requirements are more modest, using iCloud may be sufficient. However you choose to use it, RSS is worth using.
#Accessibility

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gotosocial - Link to source

Estoy metido en una idea un poco rara. Hacer tutoriales de mates accesibles a personas ciegas. Los principios:

Notación en ASCII lo más puro posible.
Explicaciones desde el principio, y desde los principios, magia mínima, todo lo que se pueda probar se prueba.
Una guía de notación en cada página donde venga toda la notación que se usa.
Accesible. Libre. Gratis. Para siempre.

De momento solo tengo configurada la plataforma para hacerlo realidad, pero tengo curiosidad por saber si a alguien más le puede interesar, como usuario, contribuyente, o ambas cosas.

Mi primer ejemplo: definición de límite a que converge una secuencia: mates.isonomia.net/conceptos/l…

Se admite, y aprecia, cualquier tipo de crítica.

conceptos:limites [Mates sin ojos]

mates.isonomia.net

mastodon - Link to source
Seems like a good day to revisit this post about privacy-preserving age verification. (tl;dr -> you can't have it) techdirt.com/2025/08/19/privac…

Privacy‑Preserving Age Verification Falls Apart On Contact With Reality

Here we go again. Whenever policy makers insist that there’s some “nerd harder” solution to tricky societal problems, actual experts have to spend a ridiculous amount of time explaining basic reali…
Techdirt

mastodon - Link to source

So, I later learned that posts don't transfer, which is unfortunate. We had some banger posts on there.

Anyway, I just want to make some observations upon setting up our homepage:

  1. Federated timeline is WAY more busy, wow. I was hoping it was, but this is a lot.
  2. Images break a lot faster. Only a few minutes in and I'm seeing a cascade of gradient images, which... I don't know how to fix that? I mean, they eventually load, but I imagine it's because the federated timeline is filling up that fast.After further mucking about, it seems like some images just... stop loading and stay stuck partially loaded, which, yeah, that's unfortunate.
  3. The usuals we're used to seeing in the federated timeline are now gone.

I'm sure we'll get used to it, but this is definitely a change, but hopefully a good one.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
in reply to Talon

mastodon - Link to source

Luigi.exe (Dragonheart System)

@talon Yeah, it's really weird. For example, on the federated timeline, this person's post contains one of those half-loaded images: wandering.shop/@silvermoon82/1…

But if I go on their page, the image loads just fine, but even that's not 100% consistent.

I tried clicking a specific account with these half-loaded images and it seems like they're still not loaded, but it's not consistent. One image that was partially loaded then became blurred when I refreshed the page while another half-loaded image stayed half-loaded. It's really weird.


Mx. Eddie R (@silvermoon82@wandering.shop)

Attached: 1 image Pretty!
The Wandering Shop
@Talon

mastodon - Link to source

> Be GNOME foundation
> Huge potential, clout, possibilities to take Linux to the next level with proper planning and community organising
> kick out board member for trying to actually improve things and ruin his reputation on the way
> huge shitshow
> executive director fails to secure enough funding to even pay her own salary and leaves
> eventually find someone new to be ED
> also kick him out after 4 months for trying to actually change things for the better

i think something needs to be done about the 20+ year GNOME veterans on the board who aren't willing to adopt change

i'm not a foundation member and don't plan to be, but i do care about the future of GNOME and despite the best efforts of many wonderful people it's not looking good rn

mastodon - Link to source

The simple solution to crashing birth rates is to tax billionaires and make basic living affordable. It's not that difficult, but the rich are more worried about their own bank balance than they are about birth rates. As usual they want to blame everyone but themselves for the problems they create.

> beige.party/users/HG/statuses/…

Human Ghostwriter (@HG@beige.party)

I am sharing this link but only because it makes me so goddamn angry: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/28/birth-rates-plummeting-space-might-be-best-hope-cure/ No, the fuck it is not.
beige.party

mastodon - Link to source
Passkeys are incompatible with open-source software (was: “Passkey marketing is lying to you”) – Smoking on a Bike smokingonabike.com/2025/01/04/… #opensource #passkey #souveraineté_numérique #souveraineténumérique #cybersécurité #authentification #open_source

Passkeys are incompatible with open-source software (was: “Passkey marketing is lying to you”) – Smoking on a Bike

www.smokingonabike.com
#opensource #Passkey #souverainetenumerique #souverainete_numerique #cybersecurite #authentification #open_source
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