solrize

joined 2 years ago
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[–] solrize@lemmy.world 11 points 6 days ago

WTF. What could possibly go wrong. Flip phone here I come.

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago

Sounds like it would be nice if Savannah offered Forgejo hosting.

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Ok I used to feel sorry for non-libre streaming software users, but this is now in "one born every minute" territory. Thanks.

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago (9 children)

What the heck is this thing? Should many of us care?

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Hmm ok, though if a security program needs frequent updates, that's a cause for concern in its own right.. :/

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

So do that. You can do that with Signal.

Do you know of anyone doing it? Other people have said there are difficulties.

You wouldn’t register on websites, but you would communicate with them over plaintext. I hope that makes it clearer.

It is ok, in that era (dialup or wired internet) unencrypted http was basically as secure as unencrypted landlne phone calls. People still have unencrypted phone calls all the time. Typicalally sites would show public content (like product pages on an e-commerce site) by http, then switch to https for checkout to protect stuff like credit card numbers. Encrypting everything became important when wifi became widespread. Wifi hotspots would hijack DNS and spoof entire web sites to steal credentials. Also, LetsEncrypt made it possible to bypass the CA scam industry, making https-everywhere more popular. Public awareness also increased due to Snowden's disclosures.

The RSA encryption patent also expired in 2000. Before that, US website operators were potentially exposed to hassle if they didn't use a commercial server with an RSA license ($$$). But, it didn't apply outside the US and FOSS SSL servers existed for those wanting them.

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Those are nice generalities but I think they ignore reality. Jami seems like sort of a side project to its developers. Bug reports often are answered with a suggestion to make sure everyone is running the latest version of Jami, which is often useless advice. Like if you try to call your friend with your new phone and the call doesn't complete, it's unhelpful for your phone manufacturer to say your friend should get a new phone. You might be interested in helping fix the problem but your friend just wanted to have a phone conversation and doesn't want to get dragged into a debugging project. It's even worse if the other person is not your friend but rather is someone you just met and exchanged numbers with. If you try to follow up with a phone call and there is a problem, GAME OVER. You permanently lose contact with that person. You can't possibly suggest Jami as a Skype replacement after that happens to you once or twice.

Another thing with comms programs in general is you really can't debug them with just one computer. Their whole function is to let two computers talk to each other, so you need two computers where you control both ends and ideally control the network as well, so you can insert delays, network faults, etc. If the Android version has trouble talking to the Iphone version, you need both kinds of phones. I'm not sure if Jami's devs really understand that. I've worked on telecom stuff in the past and it's just the reality of that field.

Yet another (I'm not sure of this) is that Jami is a peer to peer program so I suspect some of the problems revolve around firewall traversal gotchas of various types. I don't know if there is a cure for this while keeping the basic architectecture intact. I do like it in principle and I know that people get BitTorrent working reliably without too much trouble, so maybe Jami is just missing some trick.

Finally, Jami is pretty old and back in those days, people hadn't really thought about the subtleties of encrypted group chats. Signal does a better job, and these days there is a standard (RFC 9420) for how to do it (I don't know if Signal follows this standard). It would be good if Jami were revamped for that, but 1) that would break interoperability again, and 2) I don't know if it's workable at all with Jami's architecture (serverless, using a distributed hash table for peer discovery).

For now I've sort of given up on Jami and am trying to figure out what to use instead. It's unfortunate that the main devs don't seem to have that much interest in making Jami reliable. Randos like me capable of making small contributions can't really help much with more involvement from the experts.

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I found the wikipedia article mostly incomprehensible but it says a few things. You are probably better off asking on MSE or Reddit, sorry to say. Wikipedia's math reference desk has slowed down a lot in recent years though that's possibly another place to try.

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

At least here in the US, lots of mobile phone plans have free or cheap international calls, depending on the countries involved. Example. Some home landline plans also have that. So far that has been enough for me on the few occasions when I've wanted to make an international call. If more frequent, I'd use a VOIP provider, maybe Twilio (I'm sure there are others too, but I know Twilio supports this and has a decent API).

VOIP providers will often also sell you inbound phone numbers in the destination country, if you want the other person to be able to call you from their landline without it getting rung up as an international call for them. Those aren't always so cheap, but there are obvious use cases.

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oh I see. Yeah DVD drives generally use the same SATA interface as hard drives.

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Because your status updates and messages are encrypted and stored (until retrieved, of course) once for every recipient, and that includes your other devices and their other devices.

I'd like to see a numerical estimate of how much data this is. But, it sounds to me like more reason to want to self-host.

I don't see any point to rehashing the other stuff. Non-TLS websites mostly went away once DNS spoofing at wifi hotspots became widespread.

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (3 children)

If you mean a 2.5" drive (laptop sized) then yes you can generally do that. 3.5" drives are usually 1" thick and won't fit in a slim DVD drive slot.

 

Basically want something with decent performance and durability. Cost matters, but I'm not trying to hit rock bottom. I'm particularly wondering, is an HMB-type PCIe SSD ok combined with a SATA adapter? I think HMB is supported if your machine can use a PCIe or NVMe disk directly, but I'd be using an older Thinkpad with a 2.5" SATA slot at least for now. So I'm wondering if I'd lose a lot of performance if the SSD combo doesn't have its own RAM buffer.

I see good deals by today's standards for PCIe SSD's at of all places, Office Depot.

Thanks.

 

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/28431012

  • Google is set to cut hundreds of new jobs in its device and platforms divisions soon.
  • The company has continued to cut its Google Pixel teams, doing so earlier this year as well.
  • Rival Microsoft is considering a new round of layoffs next month, per reports.
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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by solrize@lemmy.world to c/flashlight@lemmy.world
 

It's almost the same as v1.0. Surprisingly complex circuit. 13 minute video.

119
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by solrize@lemmy.world to c/android@lemmy.world
 

Apparently Android apps (even in current Android versions) can check for the presence of other Android apps by listing the apps they want to check for in their manifest file. Nothing stops them from listing dozens or hundreds of other apps, and some do exactly that. Up til Android 11 they didn't even have to list the other apps in the manifest. Then Google "tightened" things to be almost as bad. Dumb move, Android.

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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by solrize@lemmy.world to c/rust@programming.dev
 

Question is how to do these in Rust. An example might be a browser DOM: each node has a parent pointer, a list of child pointers, left and right sibling pointers, maybe a CSS node pointer, etc. Inserting or deleting nodes has to repair the pointers to and from the neighboring nodes as needed.

I know this is doable since obviously Servo (Rust's initial driving application) has to do it. I hope the answer doesn't involve the word "unsafe". But I am quite unclear about how to create such a structure under Rust's rules of pointer ownership, and also how to reliably reclaim storage when nodes and trees/subtrees are deleted. Plus there will be thread safety rules that should be statically enforced if possible.

I've heard that doubly linked lists in Rust are handled by an unsafe library, yet this seems even worse. Thanks.

 

Now I have a use for my Sofirn C01R and that H25LR headlamp with 670nm LED's. Cool. 3 minute exposure to 670nm light in the morning apparently improves color perception for the rest of the week. I'll read more closely to find the right intensity and so on.

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by solrize@lemmy.world to c/android@lemmy.world
 

A while back, people here kindly explained how typical commercial Android apps get push notifications. Quick version: notifiications are sent through Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), which communicates with Google Message Services (GMS), an always-on Android client app preinstalled on most Android phones. There's a FOSS alternative to GMS called MicroG but it's still an FCM client, and FCM is an evil Google service that client apps that use it have to enroll with even if you escape GMS on the client side.

Right now I'm interested in sending myself push notifications from a self-hosted service that I run on a VPS. Of course I don't want to deal with FCM. I also prefer to not have to develop an Android app as opposed to running something like an XMPP client.

It looks like there are some alternatives like Iris and Unified Push (unifiedpush.org). It looks to me that UP becoming the preferred solution, is that right? UP has its own always-on client that can receive messages from a UP server that you can self-host. This sounds ok to me in principle.

My main question is whether UP is somehow worse than GMS, in terms of being a background app that keeps a network connection open. Is GMS anything special in that regard, besides being preinstalled by Google? Would GMS use less battery power or anything like that?

I may also have to look into how XMPP works, if my server program is going to send messages through it. I actually have an unrelated reason to be interested in XMPP. But does that approach sound reasonable? Are there XMPP clients that are non-bloaty, don't eat battery energy in the background, etc.? I'd like a loud audio alert if I get one of these notifications from my server. Can I usually easily set up XMPP clients to allow that only from my own service, while not making sounds for anything else? I'm luddite enough that I still use IRC for online chat, but maybe I have to catch up with the ~~20th~~ 21st century about this. Is there a good community to discuss XMPP development and self-hosting? I.e. I'd want to self-host the XMPP server and use it to send messages to my phone from my own (also self-hosted) server app.

The simplest alternative I can think of is for my server program to just sometimes send me SMS messages through Twilio or similar. The alerts will be infrequent enough that I don't mind going this route. Does that sound easier? It's less in the self-hosted spirit but it gets rid of a lot of software on both the server and the phone, I guess.

Thanks!

 

8 games, 60 minutes + 30 second increment for Benjamin, i.e. classical TC though a bit quicker than some. Benjamin gets N odds in all games. Leela will play at bullet speed. The hardware is not specified in the thread I linked. Leela will apparently be running a network specially trained to play with knight odds. Match will be livestreamed on Youtube with GM Matthew Sadler commentating. It will take place over 3 days, January 25 through 27th.

For those not familiar, Leela is a neural net chess engine inspired by Alpha Chess Zero. GM Sadler is a co-author of "Game Changer", a book analyzing a bunch of games of Alpha Chess Zero, so he's just about an ideal commentator for this event. It should be interesting.

Added: official page about match: https://lczero.org/blog/2025/01/leela-vs-gm-joel-benjamin/

Results of first 5 rounds: 0-1, 0-1, .5-.5, .5-.5, 1-0. Leela has white in all games so this means Benjamin won the first two, drew the next two, then lost one (game 6 now in progress). Maybe he is getting tired. He said after the first day that he was "knackered".

 

They apparently do this every year. You have to make an account on their site which subscribes you to an email newsletter (you can unsubscribe) and deal with some popups and upsell attempts, but it's a decent basic 1AAA light from everything I've heard. 90 lumens, 1 level, 60mm long, maybe not great LED tint, i.e. sort of a less nice version of the Skilhunt E3A but still fine.

Users supposedly get free shipping on their first order and someone on reddit claims to have actually received this, but I didn't, and had to pay the $5.

It's 1 per person and there are apparently a lot of people trying to scam the site, so my payment got flagged as possible fraud (card declined). I called the card company and they fixed it, so my order went through.

I'm not a huge fan of Olight for various reasons, but hey, a free light, I'll take it.

 

It's an old "Soshine" branded NiMH AAA cell claiming 900mah. I'm not about to test it but I did use it for a while. I've standardized on Eneloops since then. Anyway this is FYI so you know that NiMH leaking is a thing.

 

Basically I've acquired a burner Android 8 phone and am running the target.com app which is the only way they let you get parking lot delivery at the store. I assume the Target app is spyware. I keep the phone powered off almost all the time which should limit the spying. The thing is, if I power up the phone and order something, then close the app, I still get an alert when the status of the order changes (e.g. it's ready for pickup). So the app is still listening for network traffic from Target.

Can anyone explain what is happening in Android and whether there is a way to make an app really stop? Does the app stay in a running state even after I've closed the UI part of it? Is there somethng like an inetd in Android that listens for network alerts and re-launches the destination app? Are there Android app permissions associated with this, that I can revoke?

I don't want to run this type of app on my main phone, but I had at first liked the idea of using a burner for such things. Now, though, I wonder if I need a separate burner for each suspicious app. Thanks.

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