Giver of skulls
Now that WordPress has official ActivityPub support: yes, pretty much. Posting to both Mastodon and Lemmy will be a challenge, though, as Lemmy doesn’t really offer following individual users.
Technically, any website can be an ActivityPub server, so you could “trick” Lemmy into thinking your website is a community while “tricking” Mastodon(-likes) into treating it like a normal feed. That’s pretty messy, though.
Offtopic, but: what bloat is on Samsung phones these days? Last I checked they didn’t come with much, maybe a calendar or a clock app. They don’t even ship their own email app these days, that’s all Gmail and Google now.
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.
That’s the trouble with bringing federated service to normal people, except for maybe email they all equate 1 app/website to 1 owner/company. With Lemmy.ml being the default (they’re the people who maintain Lemmy, after all) and being quite ban-happy and perhaps even propagandistic, I bet a large amount of would-be Lemmy users get turned off pretty quickly. Probably also doesn’t help that some people will tell people “it doesn’t matter, just pick any random server” when it comes to getting people over their reservations regarding federated services. They might up thinking that criticising China is banned all across the Lemmyverse.
Time for a fediverse alternative for 4chan! /s
I think this is just an implementation of the existing standard for QR code payments (https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/sites/default/files/kb/file/2024-06/EPC024-22v2.10 Standardisation of QR-codes for MSCTs.pdf), but not part of this Romanian bank. I’ve seen them used before in other online portals.
At least I hope it is. They’d be crazy to add a new, non-standard QR code when even other banks are already working on implementing a common standard anyway.
It sure does! Except that’s not what this will be. It’s what cryptocurrency should be, and how digital money should work, but it’s not that simple.
Payment processors don’t just magically take fees, they also verify and register transactions; something that will still need to be done even with cryptocurrency.
When Steam implemented cryptocurrency, they used a third party to do it. When El Salvador adopted Bitcoin nation-wide, it used a system of payment processors for most payments. Payment processors exist because having your local bank integrate directly with the payment ecosystem is not practical.
I can wire transfer money to banks for free already. The reason my grocery store isn’t letting me pay that way is because they don’t want to integrate with the bank directly. Better to pay a decimal point of a percentage on the transaction than to deal with all that crap.
The promise of the digital euro is “now the banks can’t screw you over”, but that promise is made by the people regulating the banks. This is just a bank account with the ECB, but with a ton of overhead and false promises (like promising “privacy” in a permanent ledger and accounts tied to names, lol) on top.
Out of all the cryptocurrencies, I do think one led by the ECB would be the best one, but it’s still a solution looking for a problem. Now, they’ve tied the very necessary removal of European dependence on American payment processing standards to this project. When the crypto-euro fails or doesn’t get taken up, we’re stuck with VISA/Mastercard for yet another decade.
Unfortunately they bought into this right around the bitcoin hype, so I expect the entire project to become a wasteful slog that nobody has any real use for, except for maybe gambling on exchanges, like most cryptocurrencies.
I have a lot of apps on my phone. Several government and banking apps require to be updated at least weekly or they’re locked out for security reasons. Sure I could interrupt my 2FA login flow to update the app (assuming I have fast Internet available) but why bother? Google Play should be updating those things in the background while the phone charges. Same with F-Droid, though that’s buggy and gets stuck all the time.
My Android devices are nothing compared to my Linux installs, anyway.
You can run the bridges yourself, they’re open source. Requires more work (and your own server, of course).
As for third party services, yeah they can block you but then you’ll end up in exactly the same situation as when you say “I only use Signal” anyway. The whole reason people are setting up services like this is because the people they chat with aren’t on their platforms if choice.
You can use tools like Stallwart and Mailcow qnd even Mail-in-a-box to make mail hosting a LOT easier. One does not simply configure ClamAV as a milter and chaining DKIM validation too late I the process is a great recipe for random spam status issues.
You just have to accept that nobody using Google’s or Microsoft’s email servers will receive your email in their inbox ever again. All of your outgoing email will be marked as spam, unless you slowly trickle non-spam emails at rates of dozens to hundreds a day to various email servers to build up IP + domain reputation. If you’re not a marketing company, that will probably not happen. That includes almost every company, big or small, local or international, using their own domain names. Customer service will likely ignore you and email that doesn’t get delivered will be considered your fault. Of course you can fight against the system by still using an independent email server (like I do) but know that you’re a tiny drop in an ocean of The Big Three email servers.
Also, reserve four to eight hours a month for maintenance and dealing with problems. Easy to do as a student, challenging as a parent.
Futhermore, for your domain name, make sure to check the requirements. You may lose the rights to your domain when you emigrate, or when your country ceases to exist (unlikely) or leaves the economic union controlling the domain (like the British people with .eu domains). You may find the Taliban in control of your domain one day (because you chose the funny .af ccTLD). Also pick a TLD that’s not full of spam already, like .biz or the ones that used to be free (.tk).
This sounds like the premise of a Lower Decks episode. Just the main cast in a plot line consisting off only Jeffrey Combs characters.
I quite regularly see installation stall on older and cheaper phones. One single app install is fine, but when five or ten apps update all at once the phone becomes sluggish for minutes.
With Android consisting mostly of what, four instruction sets, this problem should’ve been prevented years ago in my opinion. Precompile for the most common platforms, leave the current slow processes for instruction sets nobody uses in practice, like MIPS and RISC-V.
Tap on an app there. There are three settings. “disabled” for basically freezing apps once they’re no longer in the foreground, "enabled“ for doing things like occasionally checking for content updates j the background and playing music while other apps are on the forefront, and “unlimited” for the setting you’re thinking off, which badly designed apps often need to not be killed when they keep hitting the CPU in the background while the user hasn’t interacted with them for ages.
Other manufacturers have even worse appp killers.
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.
It’s very useful in sealed devices (smart watches, ear phones). Much better than pogo pins on your skin; whatever metal they pick, someone is going to be allergic. Things like active pencils (Apple Pencil, but als the Windows open standard ones) also make a lot of sense to charge like that.
I also use a wireless charging stand for my phone. Most phone stands have an opening for a cable, but for some reason that opening is always at just the wrong space, or not right for the cable. K They’re also useful when using your phone for navigation in your car. I find a cable sticking from the bottom of my phone quite a handful to manage, especially as the USB ports are all so close to my gear shifter.
For those still sporting lightning iPhones, it also provides a universal charging option.
Oh, and then there’s the edge case of “I want to plug something into my phone and also charge it”. Tiny flash drives, 3.5mm converters, you name it. Most phones only have one USB port, so using it for anything but charging usually means not being able to charge unless you go wireless.
Still, wired is the way to to moet of the times. Wireless is just a nice backup, and maybe a fun gimmick in certain furniture.
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.
Backups are important when dealing with software like this. Don’t click “update” unless you can spend the five or ten minutes to restore a backup (or have the hour or two to fix things). Do regularly update, though, because the longer you stay behind, the more difficult it will be to catch up later. I generally YOLO the home assistant updates and hit update whenever there’s a prompt.
As for the Zigbee2Mqtt thing, don’t update major software releases without checking the change logs. If software decides to go from 1.x to 2.x, something significant probably changed. I wouldn’t stick with the old version forever, but i wouldn’t update major versions unless I have an hour or so to fix the breaking changes.
With Zigbee, you can configure many devices to connect to each other directly, so even when Home Assistant shits the bed, you can still turn your lights on and off. Not as feature rich as full home automation, but probably the best choice when you share your house with others.
You could go for a staging environment but there’s no way to actually test that without having dedicated hardware hooked up to the staging server, so that’s probably way too much. Instead, I’d focus on a good backup solution. For instance, making daily backups (or more! Only record the bits that are changed!) if your home assistant disk, using tools like virtual machines and ZFS. Put any databases with important long term storage on a separsre (virtual) machine so you can revert home assistant without data loss. This time your problems may have been caused by a significant update, but next time it could be a random particle taking billions of years to cross half the universe just to hit your RAM in exactly the wrong way and corrupt your entire OS. If you can easily recover from crashes outside of your control, you can reuse that tech to recover from crashes you accidentally caused yourself.