#AndroidAppRain at apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/?radd=1… today brings you 10 updated and 1 added apps:

* De1984 Firewall: Privacy-focused firewall and package manager 🛡️

RB status: 737 apps (57.4%)

Further, 4 #Magisk modules have been updated at apt.izzysoft.de/magisk

Enjoy your #free #Android #apps with the #IzzyOnDroid repo :awesome:

Time to research doorbell camera thingies that aren't Ring. I want to get my parents off of that ecosystem. Have for a while now.

I showed my mother this article, and she agrees.

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/1…

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

That War of the Worlds movie with Ice Cube is kinda low-budget but it actually works pretty well. They had a good team to build out all the interfaces and stuff for their video calls and computer hacking / surveillance camera stuff. You can tell it was basically done during COVID but it's not bad, it's just different.

Steven Conn's book "Americans against the City" is an essential history of American anti-urbanism. It will help you understand why fear and hostility toward people who live in cities runs so deeply in US culture and politics. Good summary:

governing.com/urban/why-we-des…

You don't NEED the uptime, life was just fine with quarterly scheduled maintenance outages. Your t-shirt shop and your blog don't need 7 nines of uptime

What you DO need is control and sovereignty. What happens when AWS pulls a Broadcom an decides to jack up the prices 1000%? They could do this any time. They have the internet by the balls right now

Japan now has their first female PM, who will sway the country further to the right.

Do you know why women who get the most politically powerful roles often come from the right?

Because they're not accepted by default in a patriarchal political structure, and thus have to be more cutthroat and demonstrate a willingness to put forward the most harmful ideas and enact the cruelest political moves. Right wing men love to see women willing to put their face on things so they can claim some degree of progressiveness and deflect criticisms of sexism while still upholding patriarchal values.

It is not "progress" just because a woman is in the driver's seat.

Very excited to announce that @dinum is now a silver member of the Matrix Fdn to support the project backing Tchap, the secure msging app for the French gov. 🚀

Hoping this will encourage others as we start a Matrix for Public Sector working group at the Matrix Conf. 🚦

Check out the blog: matrix.org/blog/2025/10/dinum/

It feels like the major tech companies have followed a Journey of discovering The Hardest Way Possible why quality assurance is so important, gradually ramped up quality assurance, dramatically improved the quality of their software, until the senior engineers who pushed for this retire, and then a guy who thinks he knows everything because he's read both "What They Teach You At Harvard Business School" and "What They Don't Teach You At Harvard Business School" says to himself "why are we paying for all this quality assurance? the quality is clearly fine, we don't need it!"

theregister.com/2025/10/16/win…

I was at a Schnauzer dog group meetup over the weekend and it was a little surprising to meet Giant Schnauzer owners who had no idea what toe cancer is.

And then before we left, I'm pretty sure I spotted toe cancer on another owner's dog. I urged them to get it checked immediately because if you don't amputate it's a death sentence as it will metastasize.

There's not a whole lot you can do about it, it's a type of skin cancer that seems prevalent in black coated dogs that have a blue-ish tint to their skin. The silver and black or pepper-and-salt Giants don't have it.

in reply to feld

I'm also especially on edge right now because my last giant had a toe cancer and my current dog Betty had a nail break badly and the entire nail had to be cut off near the base and getting this healed is a pain in the ass as it does bleed a lot (edit: not really "bleed".. more like a scab that just keeps getting disturbed, but cutting a nail back that far is going to be problematic).

I'm checking it constantly for any strange signs that there could be tumor growth that was misdiagnosed, as a tumor could potentially weaken the nail and cause this. Previous dog had 3 biopsies before they finally confirmed it even though I was screaming TOE CANCER at them the whole time.

HOWEVER

her nail issue started with the side getting badly chipped and then the structure was just weakened which doesn't track with a tumor inside or at the base. But I can't stop thinking the bad thoughts, ya know?

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Matt Campbell

I think it also means we're a long way from expecting nearly everything to be inaccessible except programs specifically written for the blind and no one to care about it. So at least things are going in the right direction and more and more people are thinking everything should be accessible by default, and if you ask a company to make something accessible and they say they don't care, that is considered very bad. Even the fact that some companies try to hide that they don't care by making another excuse is a good sign because it means awareness of the necessity of accessibility is going up.

A funny case study of the 21st century “software engineering” at its best.

As result of #AWS failure, a number of commercial products stopped working that relied on AWS hosted services. Such as the Eight Sleep Pod beds.

Yes, physical beds for sleeping relied on AWS to work. And it was not some kind of extremely sophisticated “AI” processing, but simple schedule “make warmer”, “make colder”, “raise/lower” etc. All that was controlled through AWS.

When AWS stopped working users started complaining that their beds got stuck in weird positions and users were unable to control them. So yes, a bed say in Netherlands stopped working because it could not retrieve instructions from US server which were sent there by the person physically present on said bed.

And the bonus: each bed sent 20 GB of telemetry data to AWS each month.

Source: x.com/zimm3rmann/status/198049… (on Twitter, sorry)

#aws
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

reshared this

Not taking Venture Capital money means:

- No pressure to maximize monetization of usage (for every million of VC funding you need to find ~100+ Million in value later).

- No prioritization of growing fast with PR campaigns that promise the moon and stumble on the ground

- No billionaire who ultimately profits

Instead, we seek public funding and private contributions for #chatmail #deltachat and #webxdc developments.

Thanks to everyone who is helping and already test-driving things :)

feld reshared this.

El PP monta escándalo por los contratos de Huawei con el Estado.

🤝 Mientras, donde el PP gobierna, contratan y ensalzan a Huawei constantemente.

Su demagogia esconde servilismo a Trump...para que España contrate productos de peor calidad y más caros de empresas de EEUU.

I've got weirdly specific news for you if you're reading this and:

- work in cybersecurity
- really like birds
- need a job

RSPB is hiring a cybersecurity head , remote UK £70-84k app.vacancy-filler.co.uk/sales…

#FediHired

Good morning! I am looking for contract work. If you have 10-15 hours a week of work on a well defined technical project (‘we need to move 6 websites by this date’, ‘we need to hire a team to do an infra migration’, ‘we need to complete an accessibility audit and figure out next steps’, ‘we need to improve our docs / our onboarding process’), let me know.

I am a technical product manager who likes to be the ‘glue’ in sticky technical situations and figure out how to come out of it with useful and usable software. I’m based in San Francisco but I also have years of experience working in Asia and Europe, and can navigate time zones / remote teams / cultures / communication styles. I have experience in working in open source.

Send me an email: adrianna@futureethics.ai

If you also need help getting to ‘well defined technical project’, I can also help!

#GetFediHired #Califorrnia #Asia #europe

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

reshared this

I'm a bit late to this, but as always, @pluralistic is a crucial and clear voice on the issues we face today.

These anti-jailbreaking laws were designed as a tool of economic extraction, a way to protect American tech companies' sky-high fees and rampant privacy invasions by making it illegal, everywhere, for anyone to alter how these devices work without the manufacturer's permission.


pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/pos…

"Introduction to Web Accessibility" is a free course designed for people of all roles and all experience levels, so regardless of your background, there's something you can learn here.

edx.org/course/web-accessibili…

"Today, another mad dictator is threatening the world's infrastructure. For the rest of the world to escape dictators' demands, they will have to accelerate their independence from American tech – not just Russian gas."

As you might have come to expect and astute as ever, @pluralistic laying down the facts on American tech subservience.

pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/pos…

#tech #technology #FOSS #policy

I'm very sad. My Bi40X won't connect over its stupid HID protocol over Linux and Debian and Bluez and BRLTTY 6.8. I'm so, so sad, I could cry over this. Mostly out of frustration, as it's just a mounting things on Linux that keep me away, so really I wouldn't be crying over it but over all of it. Linux, you thwart me once again. How the heck will I use you as a fulltime OS if it means giving up HID Braille over Bluetooth? Ugh.
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Tamas G

May I know, how can we fix it? I'd love to learn linux and use it as a primary, as I love free things and transparency is cool because I learn from watching others do things. That's why I like good people because I can use the good things people do as influince when bettering myself or doing something in my life. I love learning and I do it every day, and it's sad that the BRLTTY is broken for you. I hope apart from this though, that you are having a good day, and that you manage to somehow sort out this problem. Are you on I'd presume arch linux? That's how You're on latest BRLTTY unless your not? Maybe you're one of those smart folks who gentoo your way through life? Maybe you're a roling rocker and you prefer solid Debian? I should've used the roling rocker reference for arch, but rock solid, roling rock, yeh. Have a great day, and thanks for sharing this saddening news.