@movq@www.uninformativ.de I don’t have much family and I talk to them on the phone but I’ve been there on two occasions with friends and Jabber.

They attribute unrelated things to it, like “I can’t send messages to you, I don’t reach you! It doesn’t work!”

This scenario has played out the same way for me multiple times. It’s uncanny.

I have some friends on Jabber now but it took time to make that happen. It helps that Conversations on Android is really good. I just hand them $5 cash and have them buy it on the Play Store so I don’t have to answer questions about F-Droid and APK files.

On iOS, I recommend Siskin IM which works most of the time but I need to set it up for them because it doesn’t handle captcha registration very well (fields are shown that shouldn’t be and it’s confusing) and it doesn’t enable OMEMO by default (iirc).

I also used to refer to it as “XMPP”, but I think that made it worse for me. “Jabber” is much less technical-sounding and some people remember hearing others talk about it.

@slashdot@feeds.twtxt.net Great, now your car can slam the brakes randomly in addition to jerking the steering wheel randomly, i.e. lane keep assist. All these “safety features” add a fun new challenge to driving. You need to constantly be aware of your car’s computer misinterpreting something and respond to its reaction or you’re going to end up in a ditch or in the front of a 10 car pileup.

mitmproxy is not un-escaping for readability:

I swear I copied a URL from an address bar one time and I noticed it was percent encoded on the clipboard when the text in the box wasn’t. It was showing me something easy to read, but when I was going to use that URL for something else it was properly encoded so it wouldn’t cause exactly this type of problem.

Do browsers not percent-encode URLs automatically? They did in the past, right? For some reason I thought they still did, but they showed the original URL in the bar for readability.

I just used mitmproxy and pasted that URL and it didn’t escape it at all.

One more point, not necessarily for @bender@twtxt.net but for anyone else reading this. If you don’t want to use the command line, Arch probably isn’t for you. Linux Mint is much closer to a command-line-free distribution. Don’t be afraid of the command line, though. The command line is good for you.

@bender@twtxt.net Yes, that one. It’s not a big deal unless you use Arch on a remote machine. You can expect some minor issues like this, but the Arch team does a good job of smoothing these things over with prompt updates and announcements like that if they can’t.

EndeavourOS is alright, better than Manjaro in my opinion. If you’re going to use an Arch based distribution, I would recommend just installing regular Arch. They have an install script now that makes the installation very easy if you want an average setup, but the manual installation isn’t that hard if you want something more specialized.

The Arch manual installation also gives you valuable knowledge on how to fix the system if it breaks.

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club That would be really useful. I can’t train myself to do yay -Syuw and I don’t like having one package name on each line when confirming the upgrade.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I actually had to hook a monitor and a keyboard up to my server. This is the instability they talk about on Arch, which I’ve been experiencing a little more lately.

@prologic@twtxt.net Regardless, Sentz looks really sketchy to me and I wouldn’t trust it at all. I think it would probably function properly; they probably aren’t going to outright steal your money (for now), but I have reservations about the confidentiality of transactions and what might happen to the ecosystem in the long-term.

Any “cryptocurrency” created by a for-profit company cannot be trusted. Plus, I’m not seeing a link to any source code from the home page either.

It reminds me of this episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHYX0HFJoG4

@prologic@twtxt.net Looks like any other payment service except it’s intermingled with some sketchy cryptocurrency. I would just bypass all that and use Monero instead.

@prologic@twtxt.net I use Redirector by Einar Egilsson. It works great. You can even import and export your rules with JSON files.

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/
  
• https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/redirector/ocgpenflpmgnfapjedencafcfakcekcd

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club A huge effort. Andreas Kling is the lead of the SerenityOS project and he makes great videos on his YouTube channel. It’s mostly been monthly updates lately on SerenityOS and Ladybird but he also has a lot of programming videos where you get to see his process, fixing a bug or adding a feature from start to finish. I highly recommend his channel.

@prologic@twtxt.net There is JavaScript, but not everything is implemented (properly). They’re writing everything including the JavaScript engine from scratch.

It worked! I can’t reply to a message (this was posted from the conversation view) and the hamburger menu when the screen is narrow doesn’t work, but it’s getting much closer.

If you’re reading this, it is now possible to post on twtxt.net using Ladybird!

@jsreed5@jsreed5.org I had a public network block my personal Wireguard connections on port 51820 but my VPN service using Wireguard on port 1637 wasn’t blocked. I don’t know what they think they’re accomplishing. It was at a hotel, where people might feasibly need to connect to a VPN for work.

To everyone reading this, please make sure the elderly people in your life know to be very skeptical of unsolicited messages from companies, banks, government institutions, and pop-ups that say their computer is infected.

I would recommend getting them the hell off of Windows as well if you can, installing uBlock Origin in their browser, and disabling all browser notifications. Linux Mint is a great distribution for non-technical people. Just tell them to only install software from the Software Manager application and to think of it like the app store on their phone.

@bender@twtxt.net These sorts of scams are a huge problem and gift cards are an easy way to move money around anonymously. There are a few different common types of scams, but they usually involve someone logging into the victim’s computer using a remote desktop utility like TeamViewer and asking him for money under some false pretense. If the victim won’t pay, the scammer will sometimes lock down the computer so they can’t use it.

Usually, it’s nothing a reinstall won’t fix but if they can change the password/recovery of the Microsoft account and the disk is encrypted (which is the default if you sign in to a Microsoft account on Windows 11) it can be impossible to get their data back without the help of Microsoft support, who will treat you as if you’re the one trying to steal the account. It is important to remember that the people running these types of scams don’t have much deep technical knowledge (if they did, they could get a real job) so I’ve never heard of that happening but it is a serious risk.

It’s been known for some time that AI actually stands for “A lot of Indians”.

@prologic@twtxt.net No

@muayboranacademy@twtxt.net Huh, a twtxt feed hosted on Google Drive.

A careless rm -rf just got me, big time. I realized what had happened and stopped it in less than a second, but it had already deleted ~3000 (70 GiB) of files I didn’t want to delete. Luckily I had backups in Restic.

Fun fact: This is the first time I’ve had to restore more than a file or two from any of my Restic repositories.

@bender@twtxt.net I see you host your own relay. Which implementation are you using, and how did it go setting it up?

@bender@twtxt.net Maybe I’ll get back into it at some point. I think it would be a little excessive to have a standard twtxt, a rich twtxt, and a Nostr feed, not to mention a regular blog and a separate “notes” section on my website.

@bender@twtxt.net I don’t have one. When I was looking into Nostr, I couldn’t find a client I liked so I put it on the back burner. Which one are you using?

@prologic@twtxt.net No pain here. There’s no important data on them, and the first portion of the drives work reliably enough that there weren’t any issues before I had to shelf it. This is just for fun. I don’t even think I’d consider it a war game.

@mckinley@mckinley.cc It booted. I was going to do more but I had actual work to do so I shelved it. Maybe I’ll come back to it another time. These drives are in really bad shape, though. They hold up udev by 30-60 seconds on every boot, even when booting the Arch install ISO, covering the console with lots of SATA errors and timeouts I don’t really understand.

Badblocks via mkfs.ext4 -cc was taking too long on the full 1+1 TB array so I made new 250 GB partitions and neither drive had bad blocks in that range so it was just a waste of time. Maybe if I come back to it I’ll do the full array and have the EFI system partition in RAID 1 just for fun. I didn’t know that worked with software RAID.

The key part is to use –metadata 1.0 in order to keep the RAID metadata at the end of the partition, otherwise the firmware will not be able to access it.

I had the ESP on a USB stick for simplicity’s sake.

@prologic@twtxt.net I can’t really commit to that. Don’t plan anything around me.

@shreyan@twtxt.net Same here. I work relatively late so I’m never up that early.

@prologic@twtxt.net Nice! Save some marshmallows for me.

@prologic@twtxt.net Any of the above

#QOTD : If you could redesign a fundamental internet protocol from scratch, which one would you choose and how would you improve it?

@rrraksamam@twtxt.net I’m looking forward to my all-SSD Btrfs RAID5 NAS. I think it’ll be a while, though. I just paid $6.92/TB for a couple of used 12TB HDDs.

@prologic@twtxt.net They’re shutting down after 7 years. It was a great place to buy Monero with cash by mail. https://localmonero.co/nojs/blog/announcements/winding-down

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Nice. Compiling problematic software is my #1 use of containers on my PC. I use a handful of them on my server.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Same here. Where does it not work, @movq@www.uninformativ.de?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de People just don’t ask these questions. It’s really a serious privacy issue, and I don’t see it brought up very often. Not even in privacy-minded circles. If you’re using a proprietary operating system on any Internet-connected device, you need to assume that the vendor can see everything you do on it and maybe even what you do on other devices as well..

Actually, it looks like notifications using Google’s service can be encrypted end-to-end. I don’t know if this is used much in practice or if you can tell if the notifications on your device are encrypted. There seems to be some conflicting information out there.

Even if the content is encrypted, though, you’re still giving quite a bit of metadata to Google by using their notification service.

It looks like ntfy.sh can work either through the OS’s notification service or by maintaining its own connection to the server in the background. For privacy, you definitely want to use “Instant Delivery” and self-host the server.

https://docs.ntfy.sh/faq/#how-much-battery-does-the-android-app-use
https://docs.ntfy.sh/faq/#what-is-instant-delivery

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I haven’t done any app development, but I know notifications on phones are indeed dependent on cloud services run by the OS vendor which talk to servers run by the app vendor on your behalf. This is supposedly better on battery life, but it conveniently lets your OS vendor read all your notifications.

Mobile XMPP clients usually implement notifications using XEP-0537 and it goes like this:

Your XMPP server -> Client vendor's notification server -> Client OS notification server -> User's device

It’s not end-to-end encrypted so servers will usually just send a dummy message through (You received a message from juliet@capulet.lit!) so you have to open the app to see the (hopefully) encrypted message.
It’s a similar flow on both iOS and Android and I assume Matrix clients work the same way.

@prologic@twtxt.net I know, right? It’s a very elegant solution to the problem using standard command line utilities. It was too hard to find. I went through 3 or 4 Stack Exchange threads from my Web search before I found somebody linking to this answer. People were misunderstanding the question and suggesting all kinds of crazy methods including weird, proprietary, GUI Windows software.

How To Efficiently Copy Files To Multiple Destinations: https://mckinley.cc/notes/20240508-copy-multiple-destinations.xhtml

@prologic@twtxt.net I can’t recommend it enough.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de

$ units -t '500 gigabytes per 9 hours' 'megabytes per second'
15.432099

That’s a very unfortunate speed in the year 2024.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s no fun at all. I don’t like to throw away working hardware either, but I wouldn’t wait 7 hours (CPU-bound!) for my manual backup to complete if it could be done faster on a 10 year old laptop with AES-NI. How much data did you add?

Speaking of which @prologic@twtxt.net, have you heard from @ocdtrekkie@twtxt.net lately? He’s active on mastodon but I haven’t seen him around here in a long time.

@prologic@twtxt.net I agree with @movq@www.uninformativ.de. Good documentation is better than an interactive setup process. My difficulties (#isyb2aq) were because I was just doing it for testing and I wanted it running as quickly as possible. If I was running it in a production capacity, I would read through the documentation.

If you’re trying to make non-technical people set up their own Yarn pod, that’s probably (unfortunately) impossible. Management software like Sandstorm make it “as easy as installing apps on your phone” (direct quote from sandstorm.org) and most people still pay Google to store their photos.

I remember you were trying to do paid hosting for Yarn pods in the past. That could work, but as I’m sure you know it’s difficult to convince people to use this over X or Facebook, let alone host their own pod. I think it’s going to stay a small community of fairly technical people for the foreseeable future.

I did it again… #cm7e3ya #s4nbfta

I edited it because I started the line with 500., which the Markdown parser took as the start of an ordered list and made it number 1.