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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • Here’s my main argument for more private services (I try to make all my arguments short).

    According to a study done by proton, a single company makes a minimum of $200 dollars off of each person, each year. Of course, they probably gain more money via clandestine deals or the government buying data directly to get around the 4th amendment.

    But that money, doesn’t go solely to the companies dedicated to collecting data, or those parts of other companies. It goes to lobbying the government to strip away privacy further.

    And then I have two endings, depending on the situation:

    1. Of course, I recognize that in today’s connected world, I can’t get privacy unless I go live in the woods. But I can decrease the amount of money companies make off my data, which I do like.

    2. Organizations like the EFF, lobby on the other side, for more privacy for us. But they are opposed by when massive companies like google also lobby. So when I deny google $100, that’s money they can’t use to lobby anymore. Rather than thinking of it as denying google money, think of it as making a donation to the EFF, that they use to ensure our rights are in place.


  • Along with the other bits that people like and dislike about it, I have another problem with it.

    In order to deploy software in a manner that is resilient, it’s necessary to deploy it in a “High Available” manner. This usually involves duplicated the service across multiple machines, and then automatically switching from one server to the next if one machine goes down. I consider this necessary for something to be a true alternative to the big proprietary software like discord/slack/etc, for smaller groups or nonprofits who want more reliability. Someone losing internet at their house should not result in the whole service going down. A datacenter going up in flames should not result in that lemmy instance going down (forgot which one this happened to, but I’m referencing a real thing).

    The most common way (and arguably, one of the easiest) to do high availability is Kubernetes. Kubernetes has a sort of package manager, called helm where you can quickly spin up services in a highly available manner. Many services offer official helm charts (Unofficial ones are not going to be maintained reliably, so I don’t like them).

    The helm chart for Synapse and the rest is enterprise only meaning you have to pay. Discovering this is what finally really soured me on Matrix as using it as a discord alternative.

    Of course, I never really considered Matrix a discord alternative. It lacks certain features that people want, mentioned below, like voice rooms (although voice rooms are by definition, metadata leakage, meaning people who dislike matrix for the metadata leakage would dislike voice rooms lol).

    Rocketchat appeals to me because of this. Kubernetes/helm, single sign on, and interestingly, it seems to be able to federate with matrix (although I don’t know if it supports e2ee with matrix). It seems that rocketchat has it’s own e2ee, though I don’t know how it works (or if it’s any good). It also seems to support matrix clients, but doesn’t seem to actually be based on matrix.

    But otherwise, rocketchat seems like a much better discord alternative.




  • This is so horrifically wrong, I don’t even know where to start.

    The short version is that phone and computer makers aren’t stupid and they will kill things or shutdown when overheating happens. If you were a phone maker, why tf would you allow someone to fry their own phone?

    My laptop has shut itself off when I was trying to compile code while playing video games, while watching twitch. My android phone has killed apps when I try to do too much as well.



  • I’m gonna be real: You want kubernetes + gitops (either fluxcd or argocd or the rancher one).

    I mean sure, jenkins works, but nothing is going to be as smooth as kubernetes. I originally attempted to use ansible as many people suggested, but I got frustrated becuase it struggled to manage state in a truly declarative way (e.g. when I would change the ports in the ansible files the podman containers wouldn’t update, I had to add tasks for destroying and recreating the containers).

    I eventually just switched to kubernetes + fluxcd. I push to the git repo. The state of the kubernetes cluster changes according. Beautiful. Simple. Encrypted secrets via sops. It supports the helm package manager as well. Complex af to set up though. But it’s a huge time saver in the long run, which is why so many companies use it.



  • You’re probably going to end up on Jitsi meet, but I’m also going to drop a recommendation for bigbluebutton.

    I recently noticed that it was integrated into the open source Learning-Management-System Canvas, which every school I have gone to so far uses.

    Although bigbluebutton doesn’t seem to explicitly support e2ee (but maybe this counts for something), if you are already using Canvas, BigBlueButton definitely worth looking at.

    I really, really wish people at my school would use the integrated bigbluebutton instead of using zoom, especially given I’ve seen people occasionally have issues with authentication for zoom, but all of that stuff is handled with bigbluebutton because it’s fully browser based and integrated into Canvas.







  • https://help.kagi.com/orion/faq/faq.html#oss

    We’re working on it! We’ve started with some of our components and intend to open more in the future.

    The idea that “open-source = trustworthy” only goes so far. For example, the same tech company that offers a popular open-source browser also has the largest ad/tracking network in history, with that browser playing a significant role in it. Another company with a closed-source browser (using WebKit like Orion) is on the forefront of privacy awareness and technologies in its products.

    So, does anyone here remember when all chromium browsers had a secret api that sent extra data to google? Brave, Opera, and Edge got hit by this one, but I think Vivaldi dodged it. They all removed this after they found out, but still…

    When it comes to things like browsers, due to the sheer complexity and difficulty to truly audit chromium, I don’t really consider chromium to be “open source” in the same sense as many other apps. Legally, you can see and edit the code. But in practice, it’s impossible to audit all of it, and the development is controlled by a single corporation who puts secrets in it, or removes features that harm their interests (manifest v3). Personally, I consider Minecraft Java to be closer to open source than chromium is.

    To say that:

    The idea that “open-source = trustworthy” only goes so far

    is really just a cop-out and excuse for not being transparent with their code and what they are doing.


  • I don’t understand how this comment pertains to F-droid specifically.

    But, in networks that are more locked down, they can use stuff like deep packet inspection to figure out what traffic is happening, and automatically block it. Socks is a protocol explicitly for proxying, and runs over TCP. Depending on the setup, deep packet inspection can catch it.

    On the other hand, disguising traffic as HTTP/HTTPS makes it very, very hard to detect that someone is doing something other than visiting an innocuous website.

    At the high school I went to, they had Deep Packet Inspection set up to such a level that they could automatically detect and block VPN connections. Wireguard and OpenVPN would be caught basically instantly, and then you would be kicked off of the internet for 10 minutes. Although very extreme, a “10 minutes no internet” punishment is nothing in comparison to prison time or any number of extreme punishments authoritarian countries can come up with.

    To get around the school firewall, I set up a web proxy called Metallic: https://github.com/cognetwork-dev/Metallic/ . This is basically a website, that lets me access other websites from within that website, and it’s very, very difficult to block because of that nature.


  • I cannot find anything related to that in their documentation, their about page, or their whitepaper.

    They talk a lot about decentralized computing, but any form of secure enclave or code verification isn’t mentioned.

    Compare that to this project, which is similar, but incomplete. However, quilibrium uses it’s own language instead of python or javascript, like golem does. The docs for golem do not explain how I am supposed to verify a remote server is actually running my python/javascript code.