“Open source has proven itself to be a winning strategy — not recently, but for decades.” — Adriana Groh, Sovereign Tech Agency CEO.
The Final Straw: Why Companies Replace Once-Beloved Technology Brands
What causes a business to abandon hardware, software, or tools it once relied on? Enumerating the common reasons helps you recognize when it’s time to move on.
functionize.com/blog/the-final…
The Final Straw: Why Companies Replace Once-Beloved Technology Brands
Discover the reasons companies abandon once-favored technology brands.Esther Schindler (Functionize Inc.)
thunderbird/thunderbird-android
Thunderbird for Android – Open Source Email App for Android (fka K-9 Mail) - thunderbird/thunderbird-androidGitHub
In 2007 I did a talk about #curl at the FSCONS conference. The video is lost in time but today I realized that FSF Europe is still hosting the torrent file.
Not too many seeders of that content left though... 😎
the original .ogg seems to be lost media, but i have an idea on how you may be able to retrieve it:
- go to studio.youtube.com
- find that specific video, open the details page
- there should be an “original file” field where you can re-download exactly what you uploaded
if it’s the same ogg as in the torrent, can you seed it for a bit? I already added it to my client and i’ll seed it indefinitely (if I ever receive the file)
look up: US Patent 10,249,217. US Patent 10,163,367. US Patent 9,812,033.
miki reshared this.
Cadence put this other video out where they use it. Pin sounds and usage is heard on their video, but I think a bit louder than usually with their microphone closeness to display: youtube.com/watch?v=LQgPhYU2N-…
Cadence Braille Display
In this episode of Double Tap, Steven Scott and Shaun Preece speak with Brian Clark and Wunji Lau, the Director of Marketing from Tactile Engineering, about ...YouTube
I know, you didn't ask for this but nonetheless, these are things I use:
"WhatsApp flaw allowed researchers to scrape data of 3.5 billion users"
Things that can never happen in #ArcaneChat since there is no phone number or any personal data required
cyberinsider.com/whatsapp-flaw…
WhatsApp flaw allowed researchers to scrape data of 3.5 billion users
Researchers uncovered a flaw in WhatsApp's contact discovery mechanism, allowing them to enumerate over 3.5 billion active accounts.Alex Lekander (CyberInsider)
Welcome to the RB family, Zest 🥳
apt.izzysoft.de/packages/com.y…
Zest is a task management system – and Yoshi just got the final pieces into place for the app to build reproducibly.
WTF of the week (yes, it's only Tuesday):
Microsoft warns that Windows 11's agentic AI could install malware on your PC: "Only enable this feature if you understand the security implications"
windowscentral.com/microsoft/w…
hypercentralizers are not having a good day today -- #github has joined #cloudflare to block or slow down millions of folks from doing stuff.
Maybe a good time to checkout out this new ACLU article about the current Apple/Google app-store oligopoly aclu.org/news/free-speech/app-…
TL;dr Google/Apple increasingly wield their world-wide #appcontrol in the political interests of various governments, and not in the interest of user security or privacy. The article lays out three areas of fighting back ...
Your Smartphone, Their Rules: How App Stores Enable Corporate-Government Censorship
Big Tech Oligopoly helps the Trump Administration crack down on free speechDaniel Kahn Gillmor (American Civil Liberties Union)
ArcaneChat reshared this.
Google/Android are starting to retreat on the developer verification, see details under "Empowering advanced users" at link below (still remains to be seen what it will actually look like)
android-developers.googleblog.…
Android developer verification: Early access starts now as we continue to build with your feedback
News and insights on the Android platform, developer tools, and events.Android Developers Blog
ABC News
ABC News provides the latest news and headlines in Australia and around the world.ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
I think the problem is that "AI" scrapers are getting around that by a) ratelimiting themselves and b) botnetting.
IMO it's 100% legit to block "AI" scrapers based on what they're going to do with your stuff, in addition to the whole resource use thing. And as for resource use, it sounds like some of them do botnetting without ratelimiting themselves, so you still get hammered it's just from _everywhere._
@foxbutt@IceWolf In general, you can start by tarpitting. And you can also rate-limit by geographic areas. For example, 99 percent of my visitors are from the US and Canada. But obviously, I don't want to block the entire rest of the world. But I do have all other countries on a much, much quicker rate limit. There are ways around this if you care. But most people don't; accessibility is a sacrifice they are willing to make on my behalf.
The other problem, of course, is all of these solutions will block legitimate scripts. For example, The Internet Archive, scripts that mirror resources on physical media to ship to underdevelopped countries, and that thing that I use to download multi-page articles for offline reading on my phone because the subway doesn't have internet access.
agreed that blocking real bots ends up being an issue sadly. i kinda just allowlist some user agents since the bots i get are more interested in faking old browser user agents.
i do agree with the alt text comparison to an extent. i dont know if this is entirely true but i feel like images with alt text would be more valuable to ai scrapers building image generation tools. HOWEVER, despite that, i want to have alt text on my site and fedi posts for accessibility.
...So you're feeding everyone's posts into some sort of LLM without their consent? That sounds kinda shitty.
Unless it's local-only, of course.
Fortunately, fedi's decentralized nature provides a little bit of defense against this
if they get access to mastodon.social's federated timeline, a) that only covers stuff mastodon.social sees, and b) that's a normal account that can be banned if the mastodon.social people find out (and actually have moderation)
and you could absolutely spin up your own instance to scrape fedi, but someone tries that every few months and everyone blocks the hell out of them. :3
You can't just scrape the activitypub API without being a legit server (and hence blockable), that's what authorized fetch is for.
Fortunately, "it" isn't one single thing. :3
Sure Google and Facebook could totally spin up random instances. But getting people to _federate_ with their instances might be tricky!
(also Facebook's pretty blatantly doing this with Threads, and fortunately a lot of servers blocked them on sight.)
Like, to federate, you'll need to have people on your instance worth talking to. That kinda requires actual users.
Well now I'm curious about our instance (basically single user, though technically not since we're plural and different people have different accounts!).
> select count(*) from statuses;
> count
> ---------
> 1856225
> (1 row)
Okay, so we don't federate quite as widely as you. :3
Yeah, relays are kinda weird.
Huh on backfilling. "Most implementations" being "anything that's not Mastodon" I take it, just like with all the other useful features Masto doesn't have?
Masto actually added backfilling super recently with 4.5 or something, I gotta backport it because we're running a patched Masto 3 but ugghh it's gonna be a pain.
@IceWolf@foxbutt Nah, it depends on how your implementation is configured. Some server owners turn off backfilling because they want to save disc space and don't care about search. And some server owners configure things so that there server will only show your server a certain subset of posts from a user, rather than all of them when it asks. And then authorized fetch and how it interacts with blocking and post privacy adds another layer of complexity.
And, of course, none of this stuff is (or can) be enforced by any kind of technical server. Someone could easily write/patch an "evil mastodon" to suck up as many posts as it can, while fooling the other server into thinking the requests are legit. Kind of like how some torrent clients are written to upload as little as possible.
like, this is absolutely a thing that happens and it's also a problem but it's a cultural problem rather than a technical problem
I don't want my stuff to wind up in a Slop Machine database, because it's just creepy to have things mimicking me (along with everyone else) like that
but of course I can't technically stop you from doing that to my posts. But I can still ask people, hey please don't do that.
But yeah, detecting the ones that are ratelimiting themselves (or botnetting to spread the source IPs) is tricky.
Anubis does it with proof of work, "do a small thing that's inexpensive for any single person but a botnetting scraper would have to do it thousands of times". But that all falls over without javascript.
It'd be nice to see an alternate challenge for if JS doesn't work, some kind of actual question form that asks you a thing that LLMs are bad at. Maybe a randomized simple math problem or something, I dunno. A thing that isn't difficult to solve, if you're an actual person with reasoning and logic instead of a statistical word-slapper-together. (Though that doesn't help cognitive-deficiency people...)
What I got from Anubis is that it was inexpensive for a single machine. So what diference does it in a bot net?
Specially with AI scraping malware infected computers.
donc, si vous dites que « #Linux simplement marche », souvenez-vous toujours que… pas pour tout le monde.
La traduction de l'article merveilleux écrit par un expert aveugle qui sait vraiment ce qu'il dit :
pad.public.cat/s/MWnoZL4hW#
#Accessibilité
J'aimerais aimer Linux. Ce n'est pas réciproque. Épisode 1 : Conçu pour le contrôle, pas pour les gens. - HedgeDoc
# J'aimerais aimer Linux. Ce n'est pas réciproque. Épisode 1 : Conçu pour le contrôle, pas pour lespad.public.cat
В связи с широким распостранением вещей, работающих через пень-колоду, а также с целью внедрения русизмов в международную анлоязычную среду, к ранее придуманной аббревиатуре "G&P technology" предлагаю ещё одну - "TPK technology" (Through Pen-Koloda, через пень-колоду). Расшифровка понятия "by TPK technology" для чисто англоязычных (и толковых словарей): "through ass", "ass-backwards", "it was maked through ass", "it work like ass-backwards".
Можно также использовать маркировку соответствующих вещей " [Producted by] [Maked with] TPK™ ". Со временем можно также учредить фестивали наподобие Каннского для законного присвоения маркировок " G&P™ " и " TPK™ ". 😁️Шутка (?🤔️)
#словотворчество #лингвистика #дуркую
We need more than 2 popular and accessible types of mobile OS 📱
We need more than 2 popular and accessible types of desktop OS 🖥️
We need more than 2 popular and accessible types of browsers 
We need more than 2 popular high-capacity cloud services ☁️
We need more than a 2 popular and secure end-to-end encrypted email services 📧
We need more than a few popular and secure end-to-end encrypted messaging apps 💬
We need SO much more diversity in tech!
There seems to be a tendency to just pit projects against each other (or buy each other) until we only get 2 options in the end. This is horrible for consumer choices, for security, for privacy, for resilience, and just leads to more enshitification everywhere once people are locked in systems without viable alternatives.
We need much more options, everywhere.
Celebrate and encourage diversity.
In tech, and everywhere else.
#Tech
reshared this
#AndroidAppRain at apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/?radd=1… today brings you 14 updated and 1 added apps:
* mpvExtended: a powerful media player built on mpv with an improved user interface 🛡️
RB status: 751 apps (59%)
Enjoy your #free #Android #apps with the #IzzyOnDroid repo 
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
Systemd ate everything because they have developers working on it and addressing issues. And they do it all under a single flag, the project called systemd.
I don't understand the hate.
It's just software, that is pretty useful. It's useful for distros, because it's well supported and works well.
It's useful for developers because it provides quite a lot of useful and stable tools to create logging and services, that are much more flexible and stable than any home grown solution.
Is it a governance issue? You don't like who is managing the project?
I don't know.
Or is it change that you don't like?
I assure you this is a good change from whatever was there before. It's not change for the sake of change.
You think it's not perfect and it could be marginally better? You have two paths ahead: join the project and help it improve or start your own. You will soon realize that the second option is actually a LOT of work, so please respect the work of others when they deserve it.
Complaining does not help.
The #GNOME Asia 2025 summit registration is officially live! Join us for three full days in the electrifying metropolis of #Tokyo #Japan, from December 13-15, 2025. Participation is available for everyone, both in-person and remotely.
discourse.gnome.org/t/registra…
Registration Now Open for GNOME Asia 2025
Registration Now Open for GNOME Asia 2025 Registration for GNOME Asia 2025 is now open! This year’s summit will be held from December 13-15, 2025, in the electrifying metropolis of Tokyo, Japan, with both in-person and remote participation options.GNOME Discourse
While my experience isn’t the same as this woman, I absolutely feel it. Everything is an uphill battle (and it’s worse if you’re multiply marginalized!) and every issue makes you feel like it is all your fault.
The tech industry has not made the kind of progress I had hoped when I started doing dei activism 15+ years ago.
toot.cafe/@baldur/115570002490…
Baldur Bjarnason (@baldur@toot.cafe)
“Can I vent? All of the emotions from my now former tech career. : r/womenintech” https://www.reddit.Toot Café
Left the big pc running the native drive freebsd but from within Nixos since I was going to become a serial killer if I continued any longer dealing with setting up Bluetooth headphones, something that should be the simplest thing on earth in 2025 and finding no whcess and a thousand lines in multiple places none explaining what each thing does.
You need to do better regarding Bluetooth FreeBSD, A LOT better.
It's been around more than 25 years !!
Anyway moved onto accessing it via xrdp (KDE for that) so I can do other stuff on my laptop while vscode is compiled piece by piece for the next decade.
@feld as I undersand it to run in FreeBSD you need hccontrol, hcsesc (no idea what this is for) and vissomething_oss to create a virtual device.
All i need in Nixos is
hardware.bluetooth.enable = true;
services.blueman.enable = true;
🤯
I'm not kidding, that's all it takes.
well all of that could probably be automated with a devd rule so as soon as the device is attached it Does The Right Thing
but someone needs to actually write these rules and test with a bunch of hardware, and then get those rules into base or into a port so someone can just "pkg install bluetooth-devd" or something...


André Polykanine
in reply to Alex Hall • • •Tamas G
in reply to Alex Hall • • •Alex Hall
in reply to Alex Hall • • •Martin
in reply to Alex Hall • • •Andrew Hodgson
in reply to Martin • • •Borris
in reply to Andrew Hodgson • • •