mastodon - Link to source

Wow, relying on Signal might actually be a Very Bad Idea™

In below longread there's a lot to unwind, but the essence is this: it is a state asset for American imperialism built on the infrastructure of Big Tech.

So... uh... @delta it is then?

counterpunch.org/2025/03/07/th…


The Revolution Will Not Be Signaled - CounterPunch.org

We are constantly told that the messaging platform Signal is totally secure and benevolent. While Signal may be preferable to the dominant alternatives
The Mapping Project (CounterPunch.org)
@Delta Chat
in reply to feld

pleroma - Link to source

ltning

@feld I think we have diametrically opposite preferences for how to manage things. I find that having stuff install outside of /usr/local and without using pkg or ports is generally a bad idea. If I need stuff from pip/npm/whatnot, it should be installed locally to a given user, not globally like suggested here. My biggest concern is the lack of maintainability.

But I'll see if I can give this a go, somehow. There's nothing in this bundle that, apart from some custom-built packages, should need anything special, so converting to a base-package approach should be mostly a matter of "getting it done".. :)

@feld
in reply to johnny peligro

pleroma - Link to source

ltning

@mischievoustomato @feld I don't quite understand this concern. If stuff is broken in the OS package repo then you're screwed anyway and I certainly wouldn't trust a config mgmt tool to "fix" anything. But I'm sure there are pains I have not experienced, so what do I know ;)

And regardless of all this: chatrelay depending on custom patches to upstream software is bad enough; that it seems hard-to-impossible to manage it using standard tools (even on the recommended platform) seems to me to be unfortunate. Each individual part looks fairly straight-forward from a cursory glance..

All that said: @feld - thank you for making the effort. You've made it much easier for me to understand how it all works, and potentially getting my own relay off the ground.

@feld @johnny peligro
in reply to ltning

pleroma - Link to source

feld

@ltning @mischievoustomato

> chatrelay depending on custom patches to upstream software

It's actually zero. The only patch they have is a dovecot change that removes an unnecessary sleep/debounce that slows down message notification/delivery by 500ms

github.com/dovecot/core/pull/2…

everything else is just the specialized configuration and some custom python (later: rust) services that filter emails, lua scripts for dovecot and opendkim.

@ltning @johnny peligro

mastodon - Link to source

The U.S. this morning seized oil tankers in international waters... just south of ICELAND.

Nothing to do with drugs.
Nothing to do with security.
Just straight-up theft.

If you think the U.S. does not plan to take Greenland, Canada, and other countries (by military force if it deems it "necessary"), you are now living in a fantasy world.

STOP 👏🏻 BUYING 👏🏻 AMERICAN 👏🏻 PRODUCTS

(Yes, this is a real tweet from the U.S. State Department. See for yourself: x.com/StateDept/status/2008221…)

Screenshot of a verified U.S. State Department post on X. The text reads, “This is OUR Hemisphere, and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened.” Below it is a black-and-white photo of Donald Trump looking stern, overlaid with large text that says “THIS IS OUR HEMISPHERE,” with the word “OUR” in red.
in reply to johnny peligro

pleroma - Link to source

feld

@mischievoustomato I can't call myself a programmer, never really been paid to "build something" as my primary job description.

I'm a sysadmin/network guy who has been up to his eyeballs in Linux/BSD for a long time and spent a lot of time reading code and fixing things.

I'm not fluent in PHP, but I've fixed customers' PHP apps before.

I've reworked a patches to C/C++ projects to make them compile again on newer OS or library or whatever

Give me a targeted error or problem and I can probably figure it out.

Ask me to build/design something from scratch and even though I have a lot of ideas in my head about the right way to do things because I try to pay attention to best practices, security, performance and have a pretty wide range of knowledge... I'm more likely than not to produce an amateurish pile of garbage

If someone else provided me with a complete technical design to follow of how it should work, there's a much better chance I can be successful or at least not waste so much time

@johnny peligro

mastodon - Link to source
I dunno how to properly ask Gnome about this sort of thing, but I'm really hoping they retain middle-click paste: discourse.gnome.org/t/please-r…

Please retain middle-click paste

Hi there! I see over in Disable primary-paste by default (!119) · Merge requests · GNOME / gsettings-desktop-schemas · GitLab that Gnome is considering removing middle-click paste.
GNOME Discourse

mastodon - Link to source

OK so I've been talking about The End of UX for a while now.

I want to shoutout the @firefoxwebdevs account for *not* ending UX. They are engaging with some pretty heated feedback regarding LLM-related UI and having a genuine dialogue. I may be pretty much on the side of the heated feedback, but I also want to give credit where credit is due.

The End of UX would be to say "we'll design this however we want and you'll just love it” rather than engage. FF isn't doing that, which is commendable!

@Firefox for Web Developers

mastodon - Link to source
We're already well into 2026, but here's a recap of what the #LibreOffice community did in December last year: blog.documentfoundation.org/bl… #foss #openSource #freesoftware
Happy New Year 2026 banner

LibreOffice project and community recap: December 2025 - TDF Community Blog

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last month of last year – click the links to learn more… At the start of December, we announced a new Code of Ethics and Fiduciary Duties for The Document Foundati…
Mike Saunders (The Document Foundation)
#FreeSoftware #foss #opensource #libreoffice

mastodon - Link to source
Yes! Yes yes yes, Hallelujah! #Slack added the Copy Message option by my request to the context menu. Now you blindies don't need to turn off and on your virtual cursor, browse/focus mode or whatever, you just press Ctrl+C or go to the context menu and select Copy Message! 🕺🏻
#Accessibility #Blind #JAWS #NVDA #Windows
#Accessibility #blind #Windows #slack #nvda #jaws

Tamas G reshared this.

mastodon - Link to source

It is absolutely *wild* to me that media organizations still do not put RSS/Atom :rss: feed info front-and-center on their websites.

One needs to dive into HTML code or use external tools to discover their feeds.

It is wild because this is one of the easiest, least-effort ways to reach their audience. Encouraging RSS/Atom use is a phenomenal way of becoming less reliant on gatekeepers like huge social media platforms.

Come on! :angrycat:

in reply to Kevin Beaumont

mastodon - Link to source

Kevin Beaumont

If you're wondering what consequences X has faced: none. At all. A few months ago when Grok called itself MechaHitler, the service was shut entirely for days, the same day. When this women issue happened, Elon laughed.

Grok is still outputting non-consensual deepfake pornography and sexual abuse material at a rate of 1 post per second. Example search:

from:@grok filter:media

Direct link:
x.com/search?q=from%3A%40grok%…

I hope Cisco enjoy directly funding sexual abuse material.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

mastodon - Link to source
I love how I still hear stuff like "And you really understand this?" "How do you even understand this?" When using a screenreader in public. No actually I don't understand this, I just let it babble and magically know what I'm focused on, every blind person has that super power. But seriously, it's just practise, it's not that deep. Why do you still ask or talk about this? Is it really that ultra remarkable?

mastodon - Link to source

Just figured out (out of necessity) that I have a better way of OCRing my vm's screen than using Seeing AI. If I specify a monitor when starting qemu, then I can telnet into the monitor, and there's a screendump command that will dump the screen to a file, and then I can use tesseract to OCR the image.

Unfortunately, none of that is helping me right now. I get "Guest has not initialized the display (yet)." So I'm just as mystified as before. Reminds me of the children's song I used to listen to where a climber went over the mountain to see what he could see, but the other side of the mountain was all that he could see.

in reply to Mike Gorse

mastodon - Link to source

Mike Gorse

Now I have this function in my .bashrc (I have the monitor on port 4444):

ocrvm()
{
rm -f a.png a.txt
echo screendump a.png |nc -N localhost 4444 >/dev/null
tesseract a.png a >/dev/null 2>&1
more a.txt
}

It isn't very polished--it creates files called a.png and a.txt in the current directory, but, meh, it does what I need.

Edit: I found my original issue--something was wrong with the virtual drive that I have set for the UEFI image. And I love having this little OCR scriptlet now--it makes it really easy to monitor the status of a vm while it's booting up and I don't have a screen reader available yet.

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

Khronos reshared this.

snac - Link to source
long, long post
#wordpress hates all #blind people, hates innovation.
#drupal is clunky and GPL v2 only which makes me unable to extend it the way I want.
#grav has unlabeled buttons everywhere.
#classicPress is a damn old version of #wordpress
did I skip anything?
ah, yes, #joomla, the 403 monster.
starts installation, looks nice, until it eats itself mid install.
really graceful.
#cms #cmsBattle or everything sucks or I missed some random cms that I'd probably want to support but didn't found I even ask #ai
it found garbage.
I thought that accessibility will be treated well at least in one place, but sadly it's drupal which is really clunky and don't get me started on random breakages.
this is my rant
sorry for it but I had to get it out of my chest
#technology #accessibility
#Accessibility #blind #technology #wordpress #AI #drupal #joomla #cms #grav #classicPress #cmsBattle

André Polykanine reshared this.

mastodon - Link to source
Everyone hates OneDrive, motherfuckers boingboing.net/2026/01/05/ever…

Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsoft's cloud app that steals then deletes all your files - Boing Boing

OneDrive is Microsoft's cloud-based storage service, and it's aggressively pushed on users of Windows. They want your files on their servers, and are willing to use dark patterns to get…
Rob Beschizza (Happy Mutants, LLC.)

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source

#XSF Announcement

The XSF is considering to participate the #Google Summer of Code 2026!

If you are interested as a contributor or mentoring #XMPP project start reading here:
wiki.xmpp.org/web/Google_Summe…

#GSoC #chat #messaging #jabber #standards #opensource #interoperability #rtc #specifications

The XSF Announcement Banner
#xmpp #google #opensource #Jabber #chat #gsoc #interoperability #standards #messaging #xsf #rtc #specifications

mastodon - Link to source

Hey @FreakyFwoof, I've just started this one. Interested to know if you think it's worth carrying on!

Harry Potter and the Hero's Path, By TheJackOfDiamonds
AU Ritually abused by the Dursley's, young Harry Potter learns to count on himself. After discovering magic at a young age, he practices to become stronger to protect those weaker than him.
March 2006-November 2025.
323493
words in 52 chapters.
fanfiction.net/s/2869936/1/Har…

@Andre Louis

johann reshared this.

in reply to Gerhard Hallstein

friendica - Link to source

OldKid ⁂

@Gerhard Hallstein willst du damit RSS Feeds importieren? Wenn ja dann schau mal auf opml.sekbaer.de/ vorbei (hab da mal ein kleines Script schreiben lassen) da kannst du deine OPML Datei hochladen und die wird dann in eine CSV Datei konvertiert, die du dann herunterladen kannst. Auf Friendica gehst du dann unter Einstellungen ---> Kontakte importieren. Dort auf "Durchsuchen" klicken die csv datei auswählen und auf "Einstellungen speichern" klicken.
Du solltest dann die RSS Feeds in deinen Kontakten.
@Gerhard Hallstein

lemmy - Link to source

Vanadium version 143.0.7499.192.0 released

Changes in version 143.0.7499.192.0:

  • update to Chromium 143.0.7499.192
  • fix obscure crashes from removing Google service related settings identified by the Chromium test suite (not happening for users in practice)

A full list of changes from the previous release (version 143.0.7499.146.0) is available through the Git commit log between the releases.

This update is available to GrapheneOS users via our app repository and will also be bundled into the next OS release. Vanadium isn't yet officially available for users outside GrapheneOS, although we plan to do that eventually. It won't be able to provide the WebView outside GrapheneOS and will have missing hardening and other features.


Comparing 143.0.7499.146.0...143.0.7499.192.0 · GrapheneOS/Vanadium

Privacy and security enhanced releases of Chromium for GrapheneOS. Vanadium provides the WebView and standard user-facing browser on GrapheneOS. It depends on hardening in other GrapheneOS reposito...
GitHub
#grapheneos

mastodon - Link to source
cd#436 Sara: Liberation EP *
Olin 1990-luvun alkupuolella siinä määrin aktiivinen erityisesti pohjoismaista indiemusiikkia käsittelevillä internet-alustoilla että pari ruotsalaista levy-yhtiötä erehtyi luulemaan minua jonkinlaiseksi influensseriksi ja lähetti muutaman promolevyn täysin pyytämättä. Tämä artisti ei olisi kuitenkaan missään tapauksessa saanut hyväksymismerkintääni: Saran lauluääni on yhtä kimeä ja yksisävyinen kuin Kate Bushia esittävällä japanilaisella animaatiohahmolla, eikä sitä pysty kuuntelemaan 30 vuotta myöhemminkään paria minuuttia pidempään. #musadontti #musiikkimastodon #cd-maraton
discogs.com/release/22784633-S…

Sara – Liberation – CD (Promo, Sampler), 1996 [r22784633] | Discogs

View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 1996 CD release of "Liberation" on Discogs.
Discogs
#cd #musadontti #musiikkimastodon

mastodon - Link to source
Me Getting some blindness-specific stuff in for my latest post for the Squeaky Wheel thesqueakywheel.org/audio-desc… #Disability #Humor #Comedy #Blind #blindness

Audio Description Ruins Family Movie Night During Unexpected Sex Scene - The Squeaky Wheel

A recent family movie night at the household of 14-year-old Sarah Mason ended abruptly when the audio description began to vividly relay the details of an unexpected and lengthy sex scene.
Sy Hoekstra (The Squeaky Wheel)
#blind #humor #Disability #blindness #comedy
⇧