The #38C3 presentation about the massive #Volkswagen data leak is over and the leak was as bad as it sounded. 100,000s of cars could be located down to cm precision. Also a lot of metadata that is NOT supposed to be public. Disturbing.
The main takeaway was that the real problem here wasn't the leak itself, but that this data was collected in the first place.
I agree. It's not a good idea to create mountains of very personal data and then pray it never leaks.
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Today is the day. Welcome to THE charger!
USB-C is officially the common standard for charging electronic devices in the EU.
This means:
🔌The same charger for all new phones, tablets and cameras
⚡ Harmonised fast-charging technology
🔄 Reduced e-waste
🛑 No more “Sorry, I don’t have the right cable”
One charger to rule them all.
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In case you missed it, the hackers who reverse-engineered DRM on Polish trains got sued by the train manufacturer…
…multiple times.
You can donate to their defense fund:
ccc.de/en/updates/2024/das-ist…
Context:
Their original talk from last year
media.ccc.de/v/37c3-12142-brea…
My piece about the first lawsuit against them
rys.io/en/175.html
Breaking "DRM" in Polish trains
We've all been there: the trains you're servicing for a customer suddenly brick themselves and the manufacturer claims that's because you...media.ccc.de
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does anyone know of a
blog-like cms with features:
- self-hostable
- subscribe to posts with email
- rss
- activityPub
- supports images upload
- posts in markdown in webUI
- smolweb/minimalist
- no nodeJS
- no SSG
plz boost 
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Gajim’s port to GTK4 is almost finished. 🥁 Currently we’re testing thoroughly to make the switch as smooth as possible.
We went ahead and made lots of small improvements, e.g. writing messages while offline, better styling for image previews, improved chat filters and more.
Gajim also improved its spam fighting toolkit: The next release will allow you to moderate all messages of a spammer at once. 🤖
If you like to support Gajim, please consider making a donation: liberapay.com/Gajim
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When I spent a year with the DotPad and now 6 months and going with the Monarch, besides the fact that the Monarch is the only Multi Line Tactile display still available in Australia, here are some of my advantage points for the Monarch over the DotPad.
Can be used as a stand alone device,
20 hours battery life,
On/off, USBC, USBA, HDMI, 3.5MM ear phone jack, and volume up/down buttons,
Users used to the Braille Note, Brailliant, and Mantis will pick up same concepts used on the Monarch (its KeySoft),
Plug in a QWERTY keyboard and/or portable HDMI display,
Braille input keyboard,
10 line by 32 cell tactile display,
Removable metal template to replace membrane over the pins,
Speech output,
Navigation and Zoom keys, Point and click to move cursor or Zoom tactile graphics,
Button to refresh tactile array at any time,
Tactile horizontal and vertical scroll bars to let user know where they can scroll,
Easily jump around tactile graphic with keyboard short cuts,
increase line spacing when reading Braille,
Easy to identify cursor in menus, and place focussed line that contains cursor to the top of the display,
Access various file formats,
Various applications including web Browser (beta), email (beta), Tactile Library (APH), Maths graphing calculator, Word Processer, Braille Editor, Book Reader (victor Reader),
2025 WingIT app for iOS drawing, and Terminal screen reader support.
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Inspired by Google's move to remove @organicmaps from the Playstore without warning, I finally decided to move my > 3,000 Google Maps saved places to Organic Maps. To facilitate doing this for others' benefit, I made a quick webpage to convert your Google Maps GeoJSON data to GPX and KMZ files that render well in Organic Maps.
rudokemper.github.io/google-ma…
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Did you know that you can configure custom notification sounds per contact or group chat in #Conversations_im?
Apparently not many people knew that so the next version will make, what essentially is a native Android feature, easier to access via the overflow menu of contact or group chat details.
gultsch.video/w/8wZSkoad1bv4VH…
Conversations: Custom notifications
Conversations 2.17.7 makes it easier to configure custom notifications for contacts and channelsPeerTube
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This is really cool, it has an early '90s vibe to it.
The only thing I would add to this is a bit of saturation, for example via tape or some analog color box for a bit of warmth and harmonics.
I finally turned off GitHub Copilot yesterday. I’ve been using it for about a year on the ‘free for open-source maintainers’ tier. I was skeptical but didn’t want to dismiss it without a fair trial.
It has cost me more time than it has saved. It lets me type faster, which has been useful when writing tests where I’m testing a variety of permutations of an API to check error handling for all of the conditions.
I can recall three places where it has introduced bugs that took me more time to to debug than the total time saving:
The first was something that initially impressed me. I pasted the prose description of how to communicate with an Ethernet MAC into a comment and then wrote some method prototypes. It autocompleted the bodies. All very plausible looking. Only it managed to flip a bit in the MDIO read and write register commands. MDIO is basically a multiplexing system. You have two device registers exposed, one sets the command (read or write a specific internal register) and the other is the value. It got the read and write the wrong way around, so when I thought I was writing a value, I was actually reading. When I thought I was reading, I was actually seeing the value in the last register I thought I had written. It took two of us over a day to debug this. The fix was simple, but the bug was in the middle of correct-looking code. If I’d manually transcribed the command from the data sheet, I would not have got this wrong because I’d have triple checked it.
Another case it had inverted the condition in an if statement inside an error-handling path. The error handling was a rare case and was asymmetric. Hitting the if case when you wanted the else case was okay but the converse was not. Lots of debugging. I learned from this to read the generated code more carefully, but that increased cognitive load and eliminated most of the benefit. Typing code is not the bottleneck and if I have to think about what I want and then read carefully to check it really is what I want, I am slower.
Most recently, I was writing a simple binary search and insertion-deletion operations for a sorted array. I assumed that this was something that had hundreds of examples in the training data and so would be fine. It had all sorts of corner-case bugs. I eventually gave up fixing them and rewrote the code from scratch.
Last week I did some work on a remote machine where I hadn’t set up Copilot and I felt much more productive. Autocomplete was either correct or not present, so I was spending more time thinking about what to write. I don’t entirely trust this kind of subjective judgement, but it was a data point. Around the same time I wrote some code without clangd set up and that really hurt. It turns out I really rely on AST-aware completion to explore APIs. I had to look up more things in the documentation. Copilot was never good for this because it would just bullshit APIs, so something showing up in autocomplete didn’t mean it was real. This would be improved by using a feedback system to require autocomplete outputs to type check, but then they would take much longer to create (probably at least a 10x increase in LLM compute time) and wouldn’t complete fragments, so I don’t see a good path to being able to do this without tight coupling to the LSP server and possibly not even then.
Yesterday I was writing bits of the CHERIoT Programmers’ Guide and it kept autocompleting text in a different writing style, some of which was obviously plagiarised (when I’m describing precisely how to implement a specific, and not very common, lock type with a futex and the autocomplete is a paragraph of text with a lot of detail, I’m confident you don’t have more than one or two examples of that in the training set). It was distracting and annoying. I wrote much faster after turning it off.
So, after giving it a fair try, I have concluded that it is both a net decrease in productivity and probably an increase in legal liability.
Discussions I am not interested in having:
- You are holding it wrong. Using Copilot with this magic config setting / prompt tweak makes it better. At its absolute best, it was a small productivity increase, if it needs more effort to use, that will be offset.
- This other LLM is much better. I don’t care. The costs of the bullshitting far outweighed the benefits when it worked, to be better it would have to not bullshit, and that’s not something LLMs can do.
- It’s great for boilerplate! No. APIs that require every user to write the same code are broken. Fix them, don’t fill the world with more code using them that will need fixing when the APIs change.
- Don’t use LLMs for autocomplete, use them for dialogues about the code. Tried that. It’s worse than a rubber duck, which at least knows to stay silent when it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.
The one place Copilot was vaguely useful was hinting at missing abstractions (if it can autocomplete big chunks then my APIs required too much boilerplate and needed better abstractions). The place I thought it might be useful was spotting inconsistent API names and parameter orders but it was actually very bad at this (presumably because of the way it tokenises identifiers?). With a load of examples with consistent names, it would suggest things that didn't match the convention. After using three APIs that all passed the same parameters in the same order, it would suggest flipping the order for the fourth.
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that very much matches my own experience. (I've not specifically used copilot but the jetbrains built-in local thing 🤷)
It helped with boiler plate code and then introduced subtle bugs that took multiples of the time saved to find.
I've been thinking about this for ages, but never had the time to craft the words around it.
People keep saying that "Maths should be fun" ... and I push back with "It should be engaging ... 'fun' is a different thing.
So @rakhichawla has posted pretty much exactly this, but better than I ever could.
I'm copying it here with permission.
Please read this, then as it says at the end ... let's have a deeper conversation about this ...
1/n
(PS: I'd love this to get boosted to get outside my bubble ... you're all amazing, but there will be other opinions, and other thoughts that could be helpful or valuable)
Hashtags: #MathEd #MathsEd #MathEdChat #MathsEdChat #MathChat #MathsChat #MTBoS #TMWYK
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Continuing a decade-long tradition #Conversations_im is currently available for free on Google Play.
play.google.com/store/apps/det…
Merry Christmas 🎄 Happy Holidays ☃️ and have fun at #38C3
Conversations (Jabber / XMPP) - Apps on Google Play
An encrypted, user friendly XMPP instant messaging client optimized for mobileplay.google.com
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This is also free from trackers!
reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/…
And you can get it on #fdroid too!
f-droid.org/en/packages/eu.sia…
#Conversations_im
Conversations | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
Encrypted, easy-to-use XMPP instant messenger for your mobile devicef-droid.org
Yesterday, I made a silly production for a group of friends. We like to sometimes welcome each other to the start of whatever week number of the year it happens to be.
In 2023, week 52 started on Christmas Day, so I made a little "Merry Weeksmas!" production using Elevenlabs, featuring the Ssanta voice, and a guy called Lars, who likes gongs.
Lots of inside jokes that will be somewhat familiar to those who listened to my show, Things and stuff, quite a while back, on a now-defunct internet radio station called TBRN.
I had every intention of doing something short and sweet, but what actually came out was an 18 minute, 25 second long pretty much full-on audio drama thing.
Santa ends up in a car accident and misses Christmas. Lars has a fight with his wife. Is Christmas ruined, or are you just being welcomed to week 52 in a ridiculous way?
Again, lots of inside jokes, including amateur radio references, but hopefully you'll enjoy even if you don't get them, or know that they are there to be gotten. I'll admit, I had way too much fun putting this stupid thing together. I don't get to do creative production much anymore.
Featuring a few tracks from @Onj. my Ableton Move even gets a short cameo. So does my old Yamaha Motif Classic.
I should also mention that I don't speak German. Some things may not make sense. I'm OK with that, personally, because this is a silly production.
If you're bored, click here and hear what this is all about, I guess...
borris.me/audio/w52.mp3
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I looked up the enterprise management features of the Firefox and Chrome browsers and wrote down how to turn off the advertising features once by installing the right config files in the right places. Not hard and affects all accounts and profiles, so a big time saver
blog.zgp.org/turning-off-brows…
Linux paths so far, but I know there are some Mac OS command line users on here -- anyone have this set up on your system? If so and you have instructions posted anywhere I'll link to them
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# smartctl -l selftest /dev/sdb
smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [x86_64-linux-6.12.4-arch1-1] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Extended offline Completed: read failure 90% 29550 3432497913
# 2 Conveyance offline Completed: read failure 70% 29550 3432490825
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Rebuilding much of my infrastructure in NixOS again because I'm sick of shit breaking and being hard to fix. In the process I've been revisiting services I run to ask whether they're worth maintaining or whether a simpler alternative would do.
Started poking Nextcloud today and oh wow is its app ecosystem extensive. I thought it was just a nerdy contact/calendar/file-syncing app but no, you can really build out your own household-specific portal with it.
Right now for instance I'm playing with the Cookbook app. So far I've pasted in a few recipe URLS and have gotten back nicely-accessible, no-fluff copies of those recipes, saved locally, linking back to the originals, with spinners that seem to scale them by serving size. That's really neat.
So I don't think I'll be replacing it with Radicale quite yet. It can apparently somehow parse emails and extract travel itinerary data into calendar events with kitinerary but I'm not sure how. That's one more proprietary service down.
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K vanocum jsme vam pripravili maly darek. Videa z konference jsme nahrali na peertube, takze muzete svatky vyuzit k jejich sledovani bez reklam.
vhsky.cz/c/openalt_konference/
Muzete je taky sledovat primo pres mastodon @openalt@vhsky.cz
Konference OpenAlt
Kanál s přednáškami z konference OpenAlt, která se koná tradičně v listopadu v Brně a zaměřuje se na otevřený software, data, IT bezpečnost, DIY a IoT.VHSky
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Jeseň ubehla rýchlejšie než som plánoval, ale to nie je to podstatné, čo som chcel povedať. Dosť som totiž uvažoval, ako poňať pokračovanie môjho predchádzajúceho blogu, a teda ako by mala vyzerať lekcia 2.
Nakoniec som sa rozhodol nenosiť drevo do lesa a prichádzam iba s prekladom článku z eff.org - How to: Understand and Circumvent Network Censorship licencovaného pod otvorenou licenciou CC-BY takže to čo teraz budete čítať, nie je moje dielo, iba môj pokus o preklad.
herrman.sk/home/ako-sa-priprav…
#eff #cenzura #blog #vladamrzkejluzy #dns #vpn #proxy #tor
Ako sa pripraviť na cenzúru za čias vlády mrzkej lúzy 2.0 – lekcia 2 | Ľuboš Moščovič o bezpečnosti
Informačná bezpečnosť sa týka každého!www.herrman.sk
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So a crazy thing happened. In a crime thriller film called Les chambres rouges (Red Rooms, 2023) there is a scene where the hacker protagonist is attempting to purchase a snuff film in online auction. The auction happens via IRC or IRC-like chatting environment and to my surprise there's actually me @rolle and my wife @mustikkasoppa who are one of the bidders.
1) The nickname of my wife is mistakenly written as "mustikasoppa" (with one k) but if I recall correctly she has used a mistakenly written nickname in the past
2) We are both operators and on the same IRC channel as we've been for the past 17 years
This is not a coincidence. One nickname can be made up by accident but not two with these features and definitely not in a French movie. My wife's nick "mustikkasoppa" is Finnish and means "blueberry soup".
Our IRC logs are more or less public because of open source and statistics so I presume the scene has been made with chatgpt which has scraped our nicks from the Internet so that they ended up in the movie. We still chat via IRC every day together.
The era of AI... Do your background check, folks. I'm glad this wasn't a dramatized documentary film but a complete fiction. However my wife and I are real. Mixed feelings.
#OpenAI #Privacy #Movies #IRC #GenerativeAI #ChatGPT
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Ableton: Kinda sounds like an assistive tech product.
Logic Pro: Maybe a coding IDE, or a strategy game.
Kontakt: The brand new messenger that has the whole world talking.
Reaper: An epic dystopian story-driven game. Or some kind of cybersecurity tool.
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Santa Reads Braille is back! Sign your child up to receive a braille or large print letter from Santa. brailleworks.com/santa-reads-b…
#BrailleWorks #SantaReadsBraille #Braille
Santa Reads Braille - Braille Letters from Santa - Braille Works
Santa Reads Braille - Parents & teachers can reach out to receive a letter from Santa in braille & large print for their child.Braille Works
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@FeatherWiki Just sent a PR for a Hungarian translation for FeatherWiki and extensions. The Japanese translation finally made me sit down and do it 😀
codeberg.org/Alamantus/Feather…
Translation to Hungarian
This adds a Hungarian translation to Feather Wiki, along with the extensions that currently needed translating.Codeberg.org
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I figured might as well do it, especially the data import/export so people can migrate.
FeatherWiki is honestly a dream come true, especially after seeing how inaccessible and convoluted TiddlyWiki is, I keep finding more people I can recommend it to and they love it too.
Mám pro vás dvě zprávy. Jednu dobrou a jednu špatnou.
Dobrou zprávou je, že ČT už o existenci Mastodonu ví. Špatnou zprávou je, že jediné, co nám to přináší, je, že musím zrušit zprávobotíky ČT.
Během víkendu účty ukončím jejich smazáním.
P.S. Rozhodnutí kde a jak bude ČT publikovat mám prý nechat na nich, říkal pan doktor.
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:" title="
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@danielsnor @cynik_obecny
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The first text message was sent on this day in 1992 by then a 22-year-old engineer Neil Papworth to wish "Merry Christmas" to his colleague.
"It didn't feel momentous at all. For me it was just getting my job done on the day and ensuring that our software that we'd been developing for a good year was working OK."
history.com/this-day-in-histor…
#OTD #OnThisDay #technology #history #phone #TextMessage #MerryChristmas
First SMS text message is sent
On December 3, 1992, the first SMS text message in history is sent: Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old engineer, uses a personal computer to send the text message “Merry Christmas” via the Vodafone network to the phone of a colleague.Missy Sullivan (HISTORY)
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latex3.github.io/tagging-proje…
#TeXLaTeX #accessibility #TaggedPDF
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E. g. how I don't like C errors in comparison with, say, Rust...Peter Vágner likes this.
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For your online community you need two venues. An office for informal conversations, and a city center for more structured, long-lasting ones.
In this short tutorial @thibaultamartin shows you how to make sure people at the office still hear about what is happening in the city center!
youtube.com/watch?v=UNIUIpH-MC…
Matrix Tutorial#14 – Bridging Discourse to Matrix
Not every conversation has to happen on instant messaging, but you want to make sure you reach people where they are. Let's learn how to bridge Discourse to ...YouTube
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Release v2.0.0 · codeofdusk/gptcmd
Welcome to the 29 November 2024 release of Gptcmd! This is a very substantial release that introduces multi-provider and multi-account support, adds the ability to attach images to messages for use...GitHub
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As of macOS Sonoma, remotely controlling a Mac using Screen Sharing is actually very much accessible using the High Performance Mode connection option. VO needs to be enabled on the Mac being controlled, which will result in VO, as well as any other audio being routed over the network to the controlling Mac. @AppleVis
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I want to write my own cross-platform and accessible for blind users #Mastodon client.
There are no #a11y friendly clients for Linux (only some TUI software) and there are only one buggy and unstable proprietary client for Windows called #tweesecake.
I already know the stack I'll use but I have one problem.
I don't know Mastodon well enough to be sure that I implement every feature which is supported there.
For sure I can read the whole API reference but maybe there are easier ways, maybe some list of features, maybe some feature guide for developers, etc.
As a blind user I can't just install any popular and cool client and take all features from it... That's the problem: they are not accessible at all or not accessible enough for every day use.
So, maybe someone helps me with some sort of docs or I don't know :D
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[Request]: When describing status item for screen reader users include the text content · Issue #1164 · GeopJr/Tuba
Describe the request Hello @GeopJr Huge thanks for taking screen reader accessibility seriously. It's working fine for me. When using up and down arrow keys to navigate in the list of toots the ite...GitHub
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in reply to Paweł Masarczyk • •Some university students tried to rip it off and burned it to multiple DVD discs they were then able to use as a gift for other people who have no internet access at that time.
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