Group 1: "All these instructions on the internet say I need a computer or sometimes even two; who has that kind of money?"
Group 2: "I have sixteen fully operational laptop computers that I fished out of a dumpster that desperately need a good home, but no one will take them, so they're cluttering up my apartment."
It feels like some problems would be solved if these two groups could talk to each other, but somehow it never seems to work that way : (
I'm getting my ankle xrayed tomorrow and had to fill out paperwork online. It was fine until I got to the end and had to do one of those things where I had to move my finger around a control to give a signature. I ended up asking my sighted roommate to help me, and even then I only managed to make a mark--I had trouble keeping my finger within the control--but it was at least enough to make the next button work. I wonder if there's a trick for blindly handling these. One time, I had to deal with one for the city and somehow got the mouse positioned to where I could type in the control. I might also have issues that aren't necessarily obvious with a screen reader, like a window being covered or not sized properly. Of course, these things are annoying, and I wish I didn't have to deal with them.
After testing github.com/shazow/wifitui, I’m convinced it’s a great alternative to running nm-applet all the time.
For setups like mine (Slackware + Fluxbox + Alacritty + tmux), there’s no reason to keep a GTK applet sitting in memory just to manage Wi-Fi.
wifitui is a fast and friendly terminal Wi-Fi interface written in Go that works perfectly with NetworkManager or iwd — no GUI, no clutter, and full keyboard control.
Now I only open it when I need to change networks, and the rest of the time my system stays lighter and cleaner — exactly how I like it.
Soon we’ll have a SlackBuild for wifitui on SlackBuilds.org :)
Microsoft Removes “AI May Be Incorrect” Warning from Microsoft 365 Copilot — Here’s Why It Matters
The Quiet Disappearance of an AI Warning Artificial intelligence has become the backbone of modern digital work, and Microsoft 365 Copilot stands at the center of this transformation. But a quiet update is stirring debate in the enterprise world. The tech giant has decided to remove a once-prominent disclaimer — the small but important note reminding users that…
THIS is the sort of thing I expected us to learn was the reason the King blind-panic-yeeted Andrew out of the Firm last week. Although it's a bit small-scale—I expect to see something much bigger and smellier come out before the scandal finishes emerging. Something along the lines of a billion pound crypto ponzi scheme and a conspiracy to lean on the government to amend the law to make it legal. journa.host/@fulelo/1154798503…
Andrew Mountbatten Windsor arranged a private tour of Buckingham Palace while the late Queen was in residence, for businessmen from a cryptocurrency mining firm Pegasus Group Holdings, which agreed to pay his ex-wife up to £1.4m, the BBC can reveal.
My money (heh) would be on a financial scam leveraging the Crown to undermine the law on financial crimes. Which would be truly explosive b/c it calls into question whether monarchy is compatible with the rule of law.
monarchy is technically compatible with the rule of law if via the King's Consent they get to secretly lobby the government and get measures they don't like removed or watered down, e.g. how Buckingham Palace is still exempted from racial discrimination law, even if it is ostensibly no longer official policy that black or brown people are unfit for anything more exalted than cleaning toilets.
Then again, I tried to see if any Cabinet Minister or senior official was successfully prosecuted since WW2 for wrongdoing in office. The list goes on: Aberfan, Bloody Sunday, Hillsborough, tainted blood, Horizon, Grenfell, COVID PPE and so on, with no accountability for the Establishment, not just the Royals.
It's a bit like how the US Congress has basically legalized nearly all forms of corruption (the Supreme Court having done the rest). They can then unironically lecture other countries on corruption.
I studied Artificial Intelligence for four years, and I am not touching LLM AIs with a ten-foot pole.
It's not really about the insane electricity demands, the water usage, tho that's a good reason. It's not even, if I'm honest, about the disastrous effect on the sum of all human art and knowledge.
It's because a) I've studied enough AI to know it's a trick, a sort of linguistic illusion, and b) I've studied enough everything else to understand that I'm not immune to such illusions.
Do you know stage magicians say that more educated people are easier to fool, not less?
I think about that a lot.
LLMs are the perfect yes-men, giving the user exactly what they expect to see, making them feel clever and special.
When studying my degree I came up with all these tricks to distinguish in a Turing test whether I was talking to a real intelligence or a fake one. I'm no longer certain I couldn't be charmed into thinking the AI had passed these when it hadn't.
What changed my mind? Broader study? The humility that comes with age and life experience?
Maybe it's that I know I've fallen for stupid counterfactual ideas in the past. For example, for years I convinced myself that I was unloved and unwanted. That was a lie.
And for decades I convinced myself I was a man. And that l, too, was a huge fucking lie.
Human beings generally are just really fucking stupid.
It's the way our brains work, and it's charming in a way. We see faces in leaves, we fall for stage magic and optical illusions, we implicitly believe the Monte Carlo fallacy, we get hypnotised, we feel sorry for a Roomba that gets stuck in a corner.
We're gullible and knowing that we are doesn't make us less so. I can know that the coke can in the optical illusion isn't really red, but I still see it as red.
I grew up an intelligent yet persecuted outsider. I already am very susceptible to believing I'm unique, special, a class apart from other human beings. That's the "cope" that gets you thru that sort of childhood.
The more I believe I have some special level of perceptiveness that would make me immune to LLM persuasion, the more likely such persuasion is to work on me.
So no. Absolutely not. Zero LLM usage for me. It's just not psychically safe.
I'm pretty sure I'd be *especially* vulnerable to all the kinds of psychological damage LLMs can cause. I have OCD. I spent the last decade painfully learning that an ML recommender system can't tell the difference between someone who's developed a cool new interest and someone who's in the grip of a terrible bout of compulsive behaviour. Using the internet *amplified* my illness.
I've seen LLM chatbot use do the same thing to apparently healthy people; I don't even want to think about what it could do to me.
oof, I feel you. I have a tendency towards that style of thinking myself, and even tho it never got bad enough to seek help or a diagnosis, the intrusive thoughts and compulsions can be exhausting at times.
I wish there was some oversight of the harms that internet algorithms can do to people. I'm sorry you were a victim of that. 😞🫂❤️
It sucks. It's one of many things that has me considering getting out of the field I've otherwise spent most of my life on. I got into computers and programming as a tiny kid, but there's so little joy left in computing (and AI companies are doing everything they can to destroy what little is left) that at this point I find myself fantasizing about sending a message back in time, whispering into the ear of that little boy I once was: "Psst. Computers should just be toys. You'll probably be much happier if you focus on ancient history or reptile biology instead! See you in 40 years; hope you don't get as miserable as I became!".
😢 that's sad, that the little boy who was so excited about the (genuine!) potentials of technology was so let down by the capitalist realities of what it was turned to.
I've suffered a similar disillusionment, and am lucky enough to have been able to take a career break and retrain in an entirely different field. But I know that's a privilege of circumstances few share.
Does your past self have any words for you in response?
I think one of the reasons I never really got into retrocomputing - despite nerding out with a C64 or an Amiga sure did feel a lot more fun than computing in the current day - is that what made it feel so great back then was that it felt like I could just make out the contours of the future, and it looked like it would be amazing. So much creativity waiting to be unlocked! We'd make kinds of art not even conceived yet! We'd be making wonderful discoveries!
Now I live in that future, and it fucking sucks. The fruit of all those great discoveries have turned out to be mostly figuring out new ways to spy on people and manipulate them - and now, to declare all-out war against even the concept of human creativity. My C64 still runs (I no longer have a working Amiga), but playing around with it won't bring back that feeling of a promised future of wonders - all I see is that it turned out to become a present full of horrors instead.
I'm sure part of all this - from a purely personal perspective - is just that I've hit the point where I'm supposed to be having my regularly-scheduled midlife crisis. "Did I waste my entire life?" sure does feel to fit the stereotype. I've thought about trying to retrain to do something else, but I honestly have no idea what that could even be. I'm disabled, I'm getting old, and there's not a whole lot I can do that anyone would want to pay me for that isn't related to software development. (I'm currently an embedded dev; prior to that I taught CS at a community college for ten years.)
people should be more alarmed that a huge portion of the software that the world depends on for our daily lives is maintained for free by people who are now in their 50s/60s and there is basically no pipeline to replace them.
This week in 1969, the internet was born, and immediately glitched — only two of the five letters in the first computer-to-computer message were received
The foundations of internet communications were set 56 years ago, when 'LO' was transmitted from UCLA to SRI on the ARPANET. #hardware tomshardware.com/networking/th…
Adding to my list of things that don't make sense.
Most days I make the effort to try and understand the world better. And try to better understand humans. Today I had lunch with a nice fella who is very much a humanitarian and very generous, and yet is a big fan of "what Trump is doing".
It's a wild ride. I'll call him Cam. Not his real name.
Cam has made a lot of money in the construction business in Florida, and as a professional dentist. He and his wife have raised several of their own kids, and adopted a few more. All have been through university. He now spends most of his time in Nepal helping a remote community access education and health care. He taps into various networks of charitable donors to bring money to Nepal, and enable these programs that transform the lives of some of the poorest communities you could imagine.
Flip side, he thinks Trump is doing a great job to tackle the waste and corruption that sucks up tax payer dollars. He says there is some "collateral damage" in the process, but sometimes you have to start over and rebuild to make progress. He thinks socialised health care is wasteful and ineffective and one step closer to communism. He is happy to see the SNAP program shutdown because too many people are rorting it.
He also made a comment about how God blessed his life and he's doing his best to share his good fortune.
If so, can you explain why there are never any handles at the ends of a mattress? NO ONE HAS EVER STOOD A MATTRESS UPRIGHT TO CARRY IT BY THE FUCKING HANDLES ON THE SIDES.
Put some handles on the ends, you fucking sadists.
@Steffen When long clicking @Delta Chat for android allows multi selection. Action buttons are on the top similar to SMS apps or signal. Accessibility actions are context sensitive, so perhaps this design change requires a bit more thinking. CC @Marco Zehe
Thanks for looking into this @Marco Zehe. As I am following @Delta Chat for a few months screen reader #a11y is really improving on all the platforms. Except user feetback it has under gone an #a11y audit. For non accessibility related features, in the 3.22 version which may not yet be available in the apple store there are opt-in one to one video calls available for testing. I assume screen reader users will like such a feature at least I do.
@pvagner The desktop app is quite decent, although it's an Electron app. The one thing it is mising is a quick way to move between the panes, like the message pane and individual chat message history, and the entry field, via the keyboard, and a more efficient way than pressing tab a zillion times. Arrow key navigation within those lists and chats is already there.
S IM se roztrh pytel. Klasickěmu XMPP dnes konkurují služby jako Matrix, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp a další. Je tu však jedna služba, která v této záplavě komunikátorů vyniká - DeltaChat.
Včera jsem naším pomáhal se zahradou. Přebýral kompost, rozvážel kompost a oral. Ne nadarmo záhonu říkají "políčko". Střídal jsem se u terry s bratrem a stejně jsme skončili až za tmy. Dnes jsem rozlámaný a vidím to na teplý čaj, drobnou práci na počítači a sledování OpenAltu na @vhsky. Kluci to dělají skvěle, velké díky ...
Přehrávač na #VHSky teď drží kvalitu rozlišení stabilněji — upravili jsme nastavení segmentů v #PeerTube, takže už by nemělo docházet k přepínání na nižší rozlišení při živých streamech.
I only have 2 mastodon accounts. Any mastodon account that claims to be me which isn't this one (KaraLG84@dragonscave.space) or my original one (KaraLG84@tweesecake.social) needs to be reported and removed.
I agree, #Deltachat is awesome for superfast account creation, then sharing the account by QR code. No password set or stored, no phone number or email given, no password manager grumbled about necessitating
I considered myself "tech-savvy", but DeltaChat was my first software of that kind (e2e private messenger) and my contact was far from me, and not a "tech-savvy" person. So it was not obvious for me that I had to instruct my contact who is far away about additional "off-the-band" actions need for us to add each other to contact. Now i aware of all that, but my contact got discouraged with that complexity and don't want to try again. Have to keep using whatsapp (it sometimes get blocked).
servce choice is a tricky question right now and one which we carefully avoid confronting initial users with, during the default onboarding experience. Right now, we regard it as safe to use any of the listed chatmail.at/relays (manually curated). We are working towards "randomized" onboarding by further minimizing metadata seen by relays, and introduce multi-relay support so that choices don't easily leave you stranded in case of blocking/failure.
Chatmail provides FOSS infrastructure for interoperable, secure, speedy and reliable end-to-end encrypted messaging. Check out clients as Arcane Chat, Bots or Delta Chat today!
we hear you but it's the truth: by onboarding to #deltachat today you are diving into an experimental testrun of "the future of email" , also known as #chatmailchatmail.at
Finally we, as app distributors, want to fully disentangle from any "default" server. Testrun will become history :)
Chatmail provides FOSS infrastructure for interoperable, secure, speedy and reliable end-to-end encrypted messaging. Check out clients as Arcane Chat, Bots or Delta Chat today!
I did create the profile but I honestly don't understand so much how it works. As for accessibility, I didn't find it so easy to learn. I am a blind user and would like to learn more and help others join in.
@Elena Brescacin Thanks for asking. I am screen reader user too and the @Delta Chat is verry appealing to me. What platform are you on? Perhaps I might be able to give some hints on how I am using it. I am on linux, android and I know windows to an extend.
On iOS, and Windows. I have also Matrix as instant messaging protocol but I don't love its way to verify access, based on emojis which if you're blind, you must remember like the Simon Says game However, the most important "bug" remains on both: lack of interoperability. Or, better, they would like to be interoperable, but competitors aren't. I'd seriously like to use delta or matrix and talk to whatsapp and/or telegram folks without them knowing what I'm using..
@Elena Brescacin For matrix and XMPP there are some decent so called puppeting bridges for telegram, facebook messenger / instagram. I am using these and the other party even doesn't know I am using matrix behind the scene. Then there are other bridges such as whatsapp and discord working reportedly well. For @Delta Chat there is telegram relay for groups github.com/simplebot-org/simpl…
@Elena Brescacin Okay, so you are with your @Delta Chat app running on windows and you are about to start a new chat.
You have these options:
Press ctrl+n or find a new chat button.
Once the dialog comes up you can search your existing contacts. You have just started so most likelly you have the list empty.
You can then use tab and shift+tab to navigate and find New contact button.
As the new contact dialog comes up it's ready to take a photo of a QR code. So if this is an initial contact with a friend sitting next to you you can just point your camera to his phone and it will beep once the QR code is captured properly.
Or if you have no one around you can paste an invite link (use tab or shift+tab key to navigate to find a paste button) and paste the link someone has given to you.
Or you can visit the link anyone has shared with you in your web browser without using deltachat new conversation / new contact features. If delta chat is installed on your system, you will be prompted to open it to join a chat someone has invited you into.
Conversely if you are about to invite someone else to chat with you on deltachat, you can invite them like this:
Use tab and shift+ tab key to navigate on the main screen of the deltachat desktop app until you find the button saying Scan QR code.
It opens a tabbed like interface with two features viewing your QR code and allowing to scan QR code from your chat partner.
If you have no one else to scan your QR code with their camera, use tab or shift+tab to navigate and look for copy link button. Pressing that will allow you to generate an invite link you can share with someone you wish to chat. You can make this initial contact details exchange through SMS, through email or any other platform.
If you enter the chat, as an addition to standard navigation shortcut keys such as tab, shift+tab, arrow keys, applications key, deltachat has some usefull shortcut keys on its own and those are:
ctrl+m: chat text input entry
ctrl+f: conversation search
ctrl+shift+f: message search in an conversation
ctrl+slash: key commands reference
If you like to try this right now, here is an invite link to screen reader users chat I have created a few months ago when other screen reader users were interested in trying out deltachat.
I am alone lurking in this chat for now, so bear with me if I won't be able to respond in real time.
@pvagner The fact is this about invitations. No way to search for a person by their name. And it's since the very old ICQ that you had a precise handle to search for someone. Then, there's the other side: how could we push our buddies to install deltachat rather than others?
@Elena Brescacin For me there are multiple reasons why to prefer @Delta Chat over other similar apps and platforms.
It's free, open-source, self-hostable, respecting privacy, giving control to users rather than to someone else who might have the whole platform under his control.
However most prominent reason why it's so appealing to me is that screen reader #accessibility is being taken so seriously and actionably from the dev team. They have no contracts, no investors, no one time opportunities pushing for accessibility features and they are working on these features from the bottom of their hearts.
Do you think so called gate keepers would care to implement some of their accessibility if they have not been pushed to do so? Why do you think it takes so long to fix some accessibility related discrepancies in the most popular messaging apps?
I think this invisible message should be warmly understood by the blindness community and other communities where it makes such a significant impact.
Aren't you happy you do have verry accessible messaging app at your disposal you can freely use to its maximum?
XMPP is good however it's not yet screen reader accessible on the major platforms. Matrix is also good it's even fully accessible technically however it still can be improved in this regard and it's more difficult to adopt. Further accessibility improvements are more difficult to get implemented when I am comparing to delta chat.
There were other attempts at a messaging app such as tox in the past that were verry promising however screen reader accessibility has never been recognized like this.
@pvagner I completely agree, it is the difference between community-based and marketing-based. But it's like the crocodile chasing its tail: could we have a voice to speak, if someone didn't create screen readers (even closed ones?) Btw, I really would like to use this Delta Chat. But I feel it can be an obstacle for non-users, to click on invitations "yet another profile, wtf".
@Elena Brescacin Well, to say a metaphor, I understand it looks as we are standing on the opposide side of the bridge. Verifying your mobile phone and your email address with facebook / whatsapp / telegram / fill in other platform of your choice is not an issue for you, but exchanging a QR code or a link is. If you like you can even print the QR code on your t-shirt and get your chat partners to scan it from there. Of course I am trying to joke here, but @Delta Chat does allow such a flexibility.
@pvagner To be clear, links aren't an issue for me. Verifying mail/number means privacy loss. This is out of any discussion. A chat link can be shared in so many ways: fediverse profile, link collector (such as linkstack or LinkTree for folks needing commercial platform), e-mail signature, the classic "link in bio" or whatever. The issue isn't for me. But for my contacts who would ask: why should I install yet another app, to chat just with you? What can I find better? I am referring to folks whose interests in privacy and stuff, are zero. Wrong. It's the basics of digital life. But how can I make them aware if they spend their days in "good morning banana" groups?
> They have no contracts, no investors, no one time opportunities pushing for accessibility features
I am afraid this is not true. Most of the accessibility work in the past ~year has been funded by NLnet, as part of nlnet.nl/project/DeltaTauri/ project. Of course the developers were the ones to request a grant for that, but the work wasn't done for free. I think Delta Chat wouldn't be where it is right now without the money.
What is Delta Chat? Delta Chat is a reliable, decentralized and secure messaging app, available for mobile and desktop platforms. Delta Chat feels like Whatsapp or Telegram but you can also use and...
@WofWca Oh, I've idealized it too much. Please accept my apologies for spreading inaccurate info.
The other feelings from my previous post are still true, it's very usefull, I like it and the screen reader accessibility is improving even further beyond that project.
Let's see if your dedication pays off and more people will be able to adopt using it and motivate you to keep up with the accessibility related work.
Delta has funding and funding is absolutely crucial for the project to be able to keep people focused on the work instead of $DAYJOB. But none of the funding has strings attached where undesirable features or backdoors can be foisted upon the users.
Some of the funding in the past was by the Open Technology Fund who also funded Signal, Tor, and others.
#deltachat has reliable and audited end-to-end encryption but reliable message delivery is equally crucial in times of shutdowns and increasing Internet fragmentation.
@Delta Chat this likely won't help much against censorship but is certainly welcome for other reasons. So I get it right that it will be possible to migrate between servers?
@shuro As I understand, there are non-disclosed chatmail servers in Russia? But if the server addresses were to be disclosed, they could be shut down by the authorities? This is obviously a dilemma...
@kallekn @shuro publishing existence of relays and someone using them for a block is a tricky issue, indeed. We have preliminary discussions mostly around learning about new relays during chatting with others, and then being able to automatically use those, without any central list anywhere. IOW, the information which chatmail relays exist should be distributed across the planet with no central oversight.
@Kalle Kniivilä sadly our censors are not completely dumb and run device farms to detect even undisclosed servers which apps connect to one way or another. This way they managed to render Tor practically non-functional without private bridge servers as all public ways to distribute them eventually lead to blocks. So it doesn't matter much :(
@shuro @kallekn fair points but there is one key difference with Tor: people already form social private contexts in their messaging groups. Using chatting between actual people for distributing relay knowledge can not be replicated by having thousands of device robots in some cellar because the app will only give you the same initial relays. New information comes in through chats, and not even we, as developers, see those relays.
@shuro It would be nice to have a very large amount of relays, of course. But if I lived in Russia I would be very wary about setting up my own relay, because eventually the authorities could find it and I could be charged for whatever crime they make up, like aiding terrorists.
Onboarding is cool until step 4. People don't like scanning QRs: when people add my Signal, even if the username is shown on my screen right below a QR code, nobody scanned the QR yet. Everybody just typed the username. Scanning QRs kinda sucks. And it's rather impractical when the person is not next to me. At which point sending a long link also is meh (or, depending on context, just not possible).
@kbruen Scanning QR codes is a pretty well known UX metaphor these days but indeed not well suited for setting up a chat with a remote person (unless in a video call). We are certainly going to circle back to this UX issue. Meanwhile in reality it's often the case that two people start to chat, then do a group chat, and invite others to join that group which allows to instantly get access to all people in the chat without having to do the qr/link dance with each member.
@kbruen indeed it's generally true probably that a lot of us don't have lots of friends that are also friends with each other. Wherever groups do something together (parent/school councils, sports associations, political groups, all kinds of shared hobby groups) Delta can more easily help, probably.
@koteisaev sorry it didn't work out. IIt's clear there is room for improvement, and to make it more obvious how to setup contact. Currently, it helps a lot if someone guides the process for a group aka "Now click this link/scan this QR to join our group" after which the person immediately has secure contact to everyone in the group. Already, we spent hundreds of hours to arrive at where we are. Will be some effort to improve it further across all platforms.
@koteisaev no worries, we already discussed several possible improvements. It will take some time to get around to tackle them. Onboarding and getting in contact are topics worth getting back to.
1) there are bridges ("matterdelta") which provide interop with Matrix, XMPP, Telegrram, ssh and anything that Matterbridge provides. It doesn't preserve end-to-end encryption and so bridging bot choice is tricky.
2) There are growing efforts around 3rd party #chatmail clients chatmail.at/clients. Interoperability is "free" between all chatmail clients (#deltachat being the prominent one). Unlike #Signal we welcome third parties to the party :)
Chatmail provides FOSS infrastructure for interoperable, secure, speedy and reliable end-to-end encrypted messaging. Check out clients as Arcane Chat, Bots or Delta Chat today!
@ratcatcher @crazy_pony in terms of core functionality there is no difference between ArcaneChat and Delta Chat -- both are chatmail clients using the same core library which performs all networking/encryption/contact/group/chat/realtime-setup etc. ArcaneChat is maybe a bit more of an experiments-pushing client, and some of its features made it back to mainline, and arcanechat is continously rebasing on mainline, in turn.
I was going to rant "another mobile only"... but then I did look first and found there's also AppImages, deb/rpm/FlatPak/Snap packages, and even .tar.gz - so one does NOT need to "1. Install app".
@rootnode yes, you can use email addresses from any modern email service that provides a certain level of security. Just make sure you use a *dedicated* address. Using email addresses that are simultanously used by non-chatmail clients are not supported, however. In prior times we tried to make it work but it detrimental to security outcomes and easily gets confusing for users. So email addresses are fine but need to be dedicated for chatting via chatmail clients.
@rootnode self hosted email address is fine as long as it's exclusively used by chatmail clients (who were setup using the 'add second device' work flows or exporting/importing a backup file)
from a UX perspective “add second device” doesn’t sound like “enter alternative address”. It sounds like “Inwent with one of the big ones and am entering a second device”. Unless there is a clear guidance on which requirements need to be fulfilled to self-host, Inwould not call it decentralized.
@rootnode "add second device'" is found in settings of an established chat profile. It's about setting up multiple devices for the same chat chat profile.
To use a different email address it's "create new profile" and then "use other server". If you have further questions or suggestions maybe better use support.delta.chat
so, when I tried to first start the app, it only allowed on your server, no other systems. Then when I try to change it it tells me that changing accounts is not supported yet and I should check back in a few MONRHS. Sorry, but this is fishy at beet6.
@koteisaev I appreciate all your work on the onboarding process, especially for groups. I have a group of very non technical people who are committed to WhatsApp which makes me 😬 so I am slowly preparing to shift them one at a time to Delta Chat. :)
@lexinova @upofadown FWIW there are some non-electron clients chatmail.at/clients and an upcoming post about an experimental Tauri one. The current #deltachat desktop electron-based client tries to both size-bloat/ram wise do better, and also e.g. bars the frontend rendering process from doing any Internet connections which are purely done via the Rust core library, for all #chatmail clients.
Chatmail provides FOSS infrastructure for interoperable, secure, speedy and reliable end-to-end encrypted messaging. Check out clients as Arcane Chat, Bots or Delta Chat today!
@lexinova Message retention more or less negates the benefit of forward secrecy. If an attacker gets your secret key information they for sure are going to get your old messages. Since most people want to keep their old messages around forward secrecy is not very important for encrypted messaging.
the last step can be challenging. You need to be close and have working camera (yes, people have broken cameras) to scan QR, or have an already established communication channel to send the link, which in slme situations defeats the purpose.
There should be some human readable / easy to memorize or pronounce "nickname", "username", "ID" or something, so than you can tell someone "just type John Doe once you install DeltaChat to find me".
@vort3 you have a point and it's kind of funny that even though #chatmail uses the email system, one can't just give out an email address. The challenge is to establish automatic end-to-end encryption while maintaining identity privacy (in Delta Chat we want chat profiles to be fully private and decentralized so can't just do some central registry). There are some ideas on how to bring back the ease of telling your address and people contacting you. Just more involved than it sounds :)
throwing a random idea in: if your camera doesn't work, how about sharing the invite through NFC? I believe LINE does this, not to mention it's similar to how you can exchange contacts between iPhones.
@scott @koteisaev we think we know pretty exactly what you mean and why you hesitate. It's a healthy approach! Also some of our own contributors hold off on introducing it into some of their groups and for good reasons. It's important to understand and read the room before suggesting. There usually is only one try. An interesting related read ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welc…
"if it does not break it secure it", so if it does not hinder the convenience of normal people and do not prevent the system to work it must be added.
and for why the answer is simple, i was born and lived in the russian federation before comming to EU freedom so security and privacy is non negociable for me.
@adbenitez No self deleting message and PFS, also protect from the crap of a phone many contact have by making sure it's deleted after a time, and not brokable later on with PFS, so your example fail both thing i'm protected from with autodeleted message + PFS
But i will stop to answer as you don't understand that your threat model cannot work on everyone
@lexinova glad you have such a privacy conscious family, most people don't want to put the efforts of saving every family photo or important message in Saved Messages, and then you are not protecting those with PFS anyways
also, for PFS to work your enemy needs to control or have access to the server you use, which is easier with a centralized server but not so much with decentralized platforms like Delta Chat,
@adbenitez never say never, and again because you don't need it does not mean it's not good.
Also you put a little too much trust on the operator of your decentralized server of the one that relay it.
operator can go rogue, or the server can be seized and run (many federal agency trough the world take over and run the server to catch as much as possible).
@lexinova I didn't say it is not good to have, I say it is not a reason for you to upfront reject any solution if it doesn't have the typical fusswords out of context
about the operator of the relay I use, yes, I trust him, it is MYSELF, I don't need to trust a 3rd party...
if I would need to do some dangerous business I would create a new account which takes 3 taps and use that then easily delete it with all its chats and contacts, you never replied to this point of using multi-account, well
@lexinova you don't need perfect forward secrecy... first of all, it is useless if you don't use short-term disappearing messages, second, it is useful if you can have only a single profile like on Signal, where you mix sending memes to your mom with planing a government boicot in the same account, any serious activist will use a dedicated profile they can just throw away, together with all its suspicious chats, this is super easy to do in Delta Chat, impossible with Signal
@lexinova (and by "you don't need" I mean this shouldn't be the reason for you to not use Delta Chat, PFS is appealing on paper but hardly ever useful in practice, more in chats with family and friends where you want to keep chat history, not everything to disappear)
even if you had a state level attacker coming after you they're more likely to compromise the software supply chain and backdoor your virtual keyboard or be able to screenshot and exfiltrate without you knowing. Then they don't need your key anyway because capturing the traffic is so much harder
With delta, your client to server is TLS 1.3 with PFS anyway so they gotta break that first
@abolitionmedia Hello, I was just appreciating your work. Maybe we should set up a couple of these servers. I have an extra vps and will test one this week. Thought it worth a mention. I installed this, and it looks pretty good. The fact it's not fully p2p seems a disadvantage, but it looks like the server is not hard to set up. Hopefully not. chaos.social/@delta/1154793927…
@frankiezafe default onboarding currently has 700MB per user but that's rarely ever reached and might be lowered again. Messages are removed server-side unconditionally after 20 days. More info nine.testrun.org/info.html Other relays have different limits (often higher) chatmail.at/relays and people can onboard through the respective relay website after installing delta chat.
Chatmail provides FOSS infrastructure for interoperable, secure, speedy and reliable end-to-end encrypted messaging. Check out clients as Arcane Chat, Bots or Delta Chat today!
@frankiezafe messages are stored on the device, the relay which transfers the message stores it only temporarily. So the disk space on your end device is more relevant. If you run out of local storage space, you can configure Delta Chat so it deletes all messages after a year or so.
I work in a marketing department. Because of what I have learned about how QR codes can be used/abused, I absolutely will not scan a QR code. I would rather type a random 40 character string than expose my device.
@BoloMKXXVIII If the QR code contains no invite details or other @Delta Chat related data, you are notified to the fact and the content of that QR code is ignored. Scanning with the deltachat client apps is not malicious or vulnerable to attacks I think.
it doesn't parse or load anything else; it's completely safe.
QR codes are not inherently dangerous. They just hold text. No different than a link you click on, but we aren't going out of our way to avoid sharing links to things either
if some flaw like that appears, it's not me that's cooked -- it's the entire internet, corporations, governments...
encryption HAS to withstand being in the hands of an adversary. Otherwise what good is full disk encryption? If they have their hands on your disk and you really think that it could get cracked in a week or a year, why waste your time? It would be better to just take extreme caution to physically protect access to it.
I trust the math. And I also don't have any faith at all in quantum CPUs. Until I can order one and it does EXACTLY what they claim it can do, it's a fantasy. I say this all the time: the quantum CPU is the new cold fusion.
why not just wrap even more layers around everything then? You already suggesed that if it doesn't break it you must add it. So let's do AES-256 inside EC inside Twofish and sprinkle some ROT13 in there with a little ML-DSA on top to appease the people afraid of the boogeyman
> making 2 encryptions without making the ridiculous thing you just said ...
ahh, but that's exactly what we're doing! They've standardized PQC as a hybrid, not as a standalone. It's two layers of encryption when one should be sufficient if it's any good.
Normally when we do backup you have the data backuped (encrypted), and we make a file (or multiple if the compressed file is cut in multiple file), that himself is encrypted before being send on external infra..
making 2 encryptions without making the ridiculous thing you just said ...
> And the reason why some people are freaking out about quantum computers is because there are known algorithms that can potentially break RSA far quicker than regular computers and cut security of AES by half at best.
but ONLY if quantum computing can leave the "theory" stage and we can produce a real CPU with enough qubits to do the work and store the state duplicated across enough other qubits for error correction purposes. And keep them in the state we want. Which will require extremely clean and reliable power.
> New research: RSA-2048 encryption keys can be broken with single qubit and 3 oscillators. The catch? You’ll need about 10 followed by 45 million zeros joules of energy—roughly comparable to several medium-sized stars, or 10^44,999,986 Hiroshima bombs. Good luck! arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13164
And people think AI is a waste of fucking energy? I'm not holding my breath.
Look at it this way, if AES-256 wasn't random enough, banks wouldn't use it to secure connections your TLS sessions and likely communications between them. There are known attacks against AES-128 which leak information in a few rounds and are very far from working at full 10 rounds. They don't completely break the encryption. There are known attacks against Chacha20 which leak information at ~6 rounds, far from the full 20 rounds.
The reason why you can blindly trust modern-enough encryption is because it is known how hard the math problems are. Same with large primes (like in RSA) and EC cryptography. It is approximately known how difficult the discrete log problems are.
And the reason why some people are freaking out about quantum computers is because there are known algorithms that can potentially break RSA far quicker than regular computers and cut security of AES by half at best. But quantum computers capable of running those algorithms are at best 5+ years from even potentially existing. If they will ever exists, nobody knows yet.
Ugh, I’m old. The Eagles released “Desperado” 52 fucking years ago. The western that they made in England. And wasn’t a hit for the Eagles until Linda Ronstadt covered it.
@ferrex you are right. #Olvid is pretty well done regarding UX for boarding and getting in contact, largely similar to how #deltachat does onboarding, with interesting differences. Something to learn from (we think in bot directions). Thanks for pointing this out to us! Do you happen to know any olvid people in the fediverse? It's not an open source project and work with a central transport server, no federation etc, but still interesting to engage with from a UX standpoint.
Una cosa que me gustaría. Que foobar 2000 fuera como notepad++ u otros programas así, lo cierras y se queda con lo que estabas haciendo, con los cursores donde estaban, etc.
A mí me funciona de esa forma. No sé si se enfoca en la playlist exacta, pero si pausé un tema lo puedo volver a reproducir desde ese punto. Le configuré unos atajos de teclado globales que funcionan en cualquier ventana y con esos sí se guarda la reproducción.
Yo a lo que iba es que imagínate que estás escuchando un archivo en el minuto 2 segundo 18, y pulsas alt-f4. Pues que cuando vuelvas a abrir esté ahí, y lo puedas reanudar.
Flux 1.0.1 has just been released. Changelog below. Changes in version 1.0.1 * Fixed hard crash when stopping a stream and playing a new one. * Added proper YouTube channel support. * Enables the ability to request more search results in the YouTube tab. * You can now edit saved radio stations. * Fixed issues in the registration flow that caused some Windows users to experience serious lag. * Correctly shows audio vault status and controls if you have stored credentials. * re-enabled spotify app configuration. * Fixed internet radio search. * Refreshing a podcast now shows last refresh time. * You no longer have to restart the application to show audio vault content. * Audio library tab now populates content when moving focus to a different folder. * Greatly improved podcast parser. Descriptions should populate for all feeds now. * Added basic updater. Get the new version at ims-productions.com/flux
Flux
Do you stream a lot of content on your computer but are tired of dealing with clunky and constantly changing web interfaces?
If so, Flux was made for you.
Flux brings your audio and media experie
Spotify still isn’t working. I created the app, entered the client ID and secret, and even enabled all the available APIs, but it didn’t help. I can load lists like “New Releases” or “Recommended,” but when I try to play a track, I get the message: “Failed to start playback. Please check your Spotify connection.” Spotify is, of course, open.
@miki Per spotify policy...they recently(as early as May of this year) have gotten very agressive when it comes to allow developers to register their app for the public. Too many spotify apps were abusing the API to download content without paying for it. Once I hear back from them this should no longer be a requirement. As always, bad acters screwing it up for everyone else
How did that even work? Does the spotify API give you access to raw audio? Or was this just the "fake" Spotify Downloaders that only used Spotify for metadata and actually downloaded from YT?
@miki Yeah exactly. People were using the api to get things like your library, and match it to youtube, using Youtube dl to download the actual content.
@miki Apparently, this stems from Spotify’s updated policy, @ivan_soto mentioned it when talking about the new version of Flux. Creating my own app and generating the necessary credentials isn’t a problem for me; the real issue is that it simply doesn’t work.
Hello sir. Thanks for fixing the radio portion. Just as an FYI. This radio station will not play in your player, but it does when you put the address in a browser. Not sure why. This is a 48k feed for 680 news: rogers-hls.leanstream.co/roger… And here's a feed for CBC Radio One which also happens to be a 48k feed. Again, works fine in a browser, but not in the player: cbcradiolive.akamaized.net/hls…
@mcourcel The links you provided have one thing in common — they’re HLS streams. I assume Flux doesn’t support this type of stream and only works with standard ones served via Icecast or Shoutcast, @ivan_soto am I right?
@DavidGoldfield No problem David. There are more updates coming. Many fixes to Mac OS. I'm currently trying to get python to work with VoiceOver again, as the current modules that we use no longer support it. That has been the main slowdown today
@tardis @DavidGoldfield Python is just what we started with and I didn't feel like having to maintain 2 different codebases. I solved the problem though, had to create a bridge that can hook into apple's accessibility frameworks and just call into the bridge with ctypes. Was a headache, but it's done
@tardis @DavidGoldfield OH man, Mac and I just have a love hate relationship. Cool operating system, sort of. Apple just loves kicking your ass when you don't do things *their* way.
On the other hand, I'd love to support you, but I has no money in certain terms. We're going to transition to Eur next year, which is in 2 months, and it'll be interesting. I only keep my iCloud subscription. For now, only.
This Sunday I find the need to repost "Dear anonymous internet user asking for help". If you want help with the open source software I provide freely, and you are a giant corporation, do not hide behind a fake name or email address: berthub.eu/articles/posts/anon…
Dear anonymous internet user, dear corporate employee hiding behind a gmail.com address, dear “GitHub account with a single issue”,
Thank you for your interest in my free software, my project or the documentation I wrote for you.
I’m visually impaired, and I actually pay for my iPhone monthly because it’s the only way I can afford it. For me, it’s not a luxury — it’s essential. I’ve tried Android, and while it’s usable for some, it just doesn’t work as smoothly with screen readers. The iPhone’s VoiceOver feature reads my apps, texts, and labels on products — I can scan a box from my cupboard to find out what it is. It’s my eyes, my weather alert system, my way to stay connected.
It’s all about priorities. My fiancé and I don’t have cable TV or a landline. We have internet and a couple of low-cost streaming services, and even those we’ve cut back on. For us, the phone stays — because without it, a lot of daily life simply wouldn’t be possible. For many of us with disabilities, technology isn’t an extra; it’s independence.
Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection Update Announced, Here Are The Patch Notes
Online Arcade is also "coming soon".Digital Eclipse launched its Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection this week, and while it's a good history lesson, there are already plans to improve certain aspects of the game.This starts with a patch dropping today on Steam, with "other platforms" to follow next week. It will come with audio improvements, ...
Finally got round to watching #SlowHorses season 1 with @BlindTimeLord yesterday. I'm looking forward to starting season 2, but did not foresee the theme tune, Strange Game by Mick Jagger, to be on repeat in my head constantly from last night until now!
I mentioned to some people on here that I was going to get to see yet another demo of Glide by Glidance in edition to the one I got to test out back in April of this year. I have hesitated to post my thoughts because of some of the posts I've seen on this platform. So after much internal debate, I'll just say this. As someone who is mostly blind as well as Hard-of-Hearing, Glide even in the current, remote-controll-car-sounding like prototype state that was being demoed because very latest ones are with early Beta Testers in Seattle, is incredible. I find it very difficult to maintain a straight line without something to follow with either cane or hand. I got to feel Glide guide me smoothely in a straight line just like a person doing sided-guide and paying attention would, even getting to have the somewhat surreal experience of seeing it guide me around Luke (since he was on my right side) who purposely stood in front of me. It's not a scam and this team really cares about solving a real problem for many of us that don't want a Guide Dog, not just something well-meaning sighted person(s) dreamed up without actually getting community input. I have more thoughts on the performance of the Prototype but given feedback on Community Calls, I don't feel them worth posting since the development is so very rapid.
I have not seen this tech yet. I'm not discounting it until I do, or passing snap-judgments either. Can't judge a book by it's cover and I stand by that wherever possible. I hope it's good, I really do. I'd like it to be so I can ditch a cane in huge spaces like train stations etc. I'm 0% interested in a guide dog. Very much not my bag.
@FreakyFwoof Yes, I too hope it continues to progress forward in development and it works as well as they seem to think it will. I'm also not interested in a Guide Dog for lots of reasons but service denials are definitely a big one.
A man with a large knife is believed to have been shot with a Taser by police after going on a bloody rampage on a high-speed train after it left Peterborough station in Cambridgeshire.
Fish/Meercat 😷
in reply to NoiseBox • • •