Giver of skulls

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Joined 102 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 1923

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  • I’ve seen a coworker use one of those Remarkable tablets and they’re easily the best device I know of for taking notes. It won’t show you Netflix or Youtube, but the e-ink makes its battery last ages, the texture on the screen is excellent, and the responsiveness is pretty great.

    I find them a bit expensive, though. I think there are a few Remarkable knock-offs around these days, maybe those will deliver a better bang-for-the-buck, you’l have to look for reviews.


  • Mastodon is just one of many applications that uses AP for their own custom purposes. MissKey and derived software has some kind of emoji response feature to posts that’s basically unimplemented anywhere else. Lemmy’s boosting trick to make comment sync make interoperability with timeline based social media a spamfest.

    Maybe I should check again, but last time I looked into it there were no commonly used ActivityPub compliant servers. Everyone does their own thing just a little different to make the protocol work for their purposes. Even similar tools (see: MissKey/Mastodon, Lemmy/Kbin) took a while to actually interoperate.

    As far as I can tell, the idea behind the original design, where servers are mostly content agnostic and clients decide on rendering content in specific ways, hasn’t been executed by anyone; servers and clients have been mixed together for practical reasons and that’s why we get these issues.


  • Building trust is hard. It’s easier to trust a few companies than to trust a million unknown servers. It’s why I prefer Wikipedia over amazingnotskgeneratedatalltopicalinformarion.biz when I’m looking up simple facts.

    Furthermore, Facebook isn’t selling data directly. At least, not if they’re following the law. They got caught doing and fined doing that once and it’s not their main mode of operation. Like Google, their data is their gold mine, selling it directly would be corporate suicide. They simply provide advertisers with spots to put an ad, but when it comes to data processing, they’re doing all the work before advertisers get a chance to look at a user’s profile.

    On the other hand, scraping ActivityPub for advertisers would be trivial. It’d be silly to go through the trouble to set up something like Threads if all you want is information, a basic AP server that follows ever Lemmy community and soaks up gigabytes an hour can be written as a weekend project.

    Various Chinese data centers are scraping the hell out of my server, and they carry referer headers from other Fediverse servers. I’ve blocked half of East Asia and new IP addresses keep popping up. Whatever data you think Facebook may be selling, someone else is already selling based on your Fediverse behaviour. Whatever Petal Search and all the others are doing, I don’t believe for a second they’re being honest about it.

    Most Fediverse software defaults to federation and accepting inbound follow requests. At least, Mastodon, Lemmy, GoToSocial, Kbin, and one of those fish named mastodonlikes did. Profiles are often public by default too. The vulnerability applies to a large section of the Fediverse default settings.

    I’d like to think people would switch to the Fediverse despite the paradigm shift. The privacy risks are still there if there’s only one company managing them, so I’d prefer it if people used appropriate tools for sharing private stuff. I think platforms like Circles (a Matrix-based social media system) which leverage encryption to ensure nobody can read things they shouldn’t have been able to, are much more appropriate. Perhaps a similar system can be laid on top of ActivityPub as well (after all, every entity already has a public/private key pair).


  • I don’t believe you can do it natively. However, I have managed to convince my phone to swap from slow 2.4GHz to 5.2GHz by using the Fritz! Wlan app, which exposes some more WiFi control.

    I can imagine recent Android versions having patched that out, though. WiFi permissions are usually only granted to system apps these days.

    I believe there’s also an ADB command line way, but I don’t remember it. Furthermore, you could try looking into developer options to see if there’s a toggle in there, or perhaps a method to select the WiFi country so you can pick one that won’t connect to your 5.2GHz band.

    As long as the SSID and password are the same, and both are routed to the same network, IoT apps shouldn’t struggle to connect, though. You can try temporarily disabling 5.2 GHz in the router but I kind of doubt that it’ll fix your problem unless you have a really uncommon setup. Even with my weird guest network setup, cheap tuya IoT seems to connect just fine. Tuya all goes through the cloud anyway.


  • I don’t think dansup was in the wrong here. Yes, it’s a security issue I suppose, but the problem lies within the underlying protocol. Any server you interact with can ignore any privacy markers you add to posts, you’re just not supposed to do that.

    Whether this is a 0day depends on what you expect out of the Fediverse. If you treat it like a medium where every user or server has the potential to be hostile, like you probably should, this is a mere validation logic bug. If you treat it like the social media many of its servers are trying to be, it’s a gross violation of your basic privacy expectations.


  • This is exactly why ActivityPub makes for such a mediocre replacement for the big social media apps. You have to let go of any assumptions that at least some of your data remains exclusive to the ad algorithm and accept that everything you post or look at or scroll past is being recorded by malicious servers. Which, in turn, kind of makes it a failure, as replacing traditional social media is exactly what it’s supposed to do.

    The Fediverse also lacks tooling to filter out the idiots and assholes. That kind of moderation is a lot easier when you have a centralised database and moderation staff on board, but the network of tiny servers with each their own moderation capabilities will promote the worst behaviour as much as the best behaviour.

    But really, the worst part is the UX for apps. Fediverse apps suck at setting expectations. Of course Lemmy publishes when you’ve upvoted what posts, that’s essential for how the protocol works, but what other Reddit clone has a public voting history? Same with anyone using any form of the word “private” or even “unlisted”, as those only apply in a perfect world where servers have no bugs and where there are no malicious servers.



  • Two possible reasons here:

    1. Discord is blocking Nord from password reset links on a network level (probably because VPN servers are second only to Tor when it comes to malicious traffic). Frankly, I would’ve expected a CAPTCHA page instead, but it’s technically possible for an error to show up that way. You can try bypassing it by manually editing the address to make sure it starts with https.

    2. Your VPN is actively trying to sslstrip you. Aside from the whole “that’s literally a crime people go to prison for” thing, that means you cannot ever trust that VPN again. Just because Discord bothered to secure their website doesn’t mean other apps do. You may already have been hacked if that is the case.

    I’d be extremely cautious with VPN software because you’re essentially trusting them to be your ISP. If they’re doing permanent 40% off deals or (god forbid) sponsoring YouTubers, you should never trust them. It’s both funny and depressing how companies like PIA and Nord somehow convinced everyone that VPNs make your internet more secure while also not getting people to think for even a second about how much they trust these shady ass Caiman Island tax dodge scheme companies.