I am actually looking forward to hearing from the people here. Yeah Low-effort I know.

But I think this is an important topic to discuss, considering how much of the FOSS community is kept afloat by unpaid & volunteer-labour.

I am especially looking forward to any discussions of possible solutions

TL;DR: The big tech AI company LLMs have gobbled up all of our data, but the damage they have done to open source and free culture communities are particularly insidious. By taking advantage of those who share freely, they destroy the bargain that made free software spread like wildfire.

Some of these machines literally took 5 minutes to get from boot to watching a YouTube video, and now they can do so in a fraction of that time.

I'm super-interested in helping people reduce e-waste in my community now, and am wondering about how to go about advertising my willingness to help strangers restore their old/slow/Win11-ineligible machines. I wish I got over the fear of OS-wiping years ago!

I was fed up with having to keep things like npm, NodeJS and git up to date manually; so I created a little script that keeps things up to date automatically (configurable on a per-app basis) via WinGet.

I know there are already things out there… but they looked like a pain to install, and this is simple enough that I actually understand what it’s doing XD

https://github.com/ELowry/WinGet-Updater

Hello Lemmy,

With this release, bluetuith now works on MacOS. MacOS specific instructions are here: https://bluetuith-org.github.io/bluetuith/Installation/MacOS.html.

(TL;DR Install and run Haraltd and then run Bluetuith)

Bluetuith is a TUI based bluetooth manager, that aims to be an alternative to most bluetooth managers, and can perform bluetooth based operations like:

• Connection to and general management of bluetooth devices, with device information like battery percentage, RSSI etc. displayed, if the information is available. More detailed information about a device can be viewed by selecting the 'Info' option in the menu or by clicking the 'i' key.

• Bluetooth adapter management, with toggleable power, discoverability, pairablilty and scanning modes.

• Transfer and receive files via the OBEX protocol, with an interactive file picker to choose and select multiple files.

• Handle both PANU and DUN based networking for each bluetooth device (Linux only)

• Control media playback on the currently connected device, with a media player popup that displays playback information and controls. (Linux only)

I hope you enjoy this release, and any feedback is appreciated.

TL;DR: Mozilla’s translation bot on Support Mozilla (that is currently overwriting user contributions is based on the closed source, copyright infringing LLM, Google Gemini. This is in spite of Mozilla claiming that they are at the forefront of open source AI, and belies their exhortations to choose to build open source AI and data sets. Although Mozilla has experience in attracting open contributions for data sets in projects like Common Voice, Mozilla is using a closed data set to overwrite open contributions. Since (paid) Gemini queries do not train the model, Mozillians can expect to correct errors every time the bot automatically updates an article.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/42851505

Slightly more detail in this GitHub issue, however much is still unknown, even after three or so days. The dev hasn't revealed any further details. Some articles on this incident:

• https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/smarttube-youtube-app-for-android-tv-breached-to-push-malicious-update/
• https://www.aftvnews.com/smarttubes-official-apk-was-compromised-with-malware-what-you-should-do-if-you-use-it/

Note that the articles provide little detail on what's happened, mostly just detail that a malicious library was found and Play Protect started removing the app if affected. It's unclear which versions are specifically affected, how the dev got breached, and what the malware actually does. According to a user (who may or may not be using some sort of LLM, their comment sounds like one at least) in a separate, related issue, the malware may collect device info and send to a command & control server. It could (in theory) receive new instructions at any point if it's a C2 server. Again, it does appear that they had an LLM of some sort generate their comment, so take it with a grain of salt.

I'm going to uninstall the app and revoke access on my Google account page. I see little reason to need to reset my password as of right now, since the app uses an API key and not my actual password. In my opinion, it's possibly related to YT viewbotting and commenting, or to add your device to a botnet. It's unclear to me how this botnet would work in practice, since even Android TV sandboxes apps (for the most part).

Update: it appears that this may be related to the Vo1d botnet: DrWeb: Android.Vo1d.14.origin. If this is indeed the case, then the goal was to add devices to the botnet. It's my understanding that previous versions of this botnet typically required cheap, pre-rooted Android TV boxes, in order to install other apps. I'm not sure if that means that you're safe if your device is not rooted. It might be worth checking your installed apps for oddities.

TL;DR: Mozilla is killing localization on Support Mozilla, overwriting articles written by humans with machine generated translations. Although Mozilla knows that their AI doesn’t localize or adhere to style guides, Mozilla is going live with it anyway. I thank locale leaders and localizers for their tireless efforts. Locale leaders seem to be obviated by AI, and Mozilla has nothing to say about it.

The shitty/distracting web run on ads, so why not making a search engine which index based on that? You would have an experience similar to what was the internet originally: no corporate shit, no infinite scroll, just independent websites made to share real informations and real knowledge, and would still leave space for subscriptions or donations! And you could still use JS and avoid just using a text browser, making the occasional order from a website or navigating the fediverse!

Not an ADblock, the issue isn't ads, the issue is how the web is TAILORED towards ads, and how that makes shitty web.

Is there any tool which does that? The goal would be blocking/avoid indexing all websites connected somehow to ads, is this even something possible? I know it would block 90% of the web, but if that 10% is freedom, I want that freedom!

I had this idea recently: if people are willing to pay a small fee monthly for streaming services or Photoshop, surely some would also be willing to pay a similar amount for the FOSS they use. Even a few cents monthly would add up to quite a substantial sum over a vast userbase*. In light of this, I've started working on an app that records your app usage, and then at the end of the month splits whatever sum of money you want to donate amongst the apps in proportion to the time you spent using them.

Then it will (hopefully) let you donate to all of those projects with a single click.

Since it's only halfway finished, I'm posting this to gague how much interest there would be in such an app. Could you could see yourself using something like this? Do you have any ideas for what I should add/change?

*(It also occurred to me that perhaps one way to fix surveillance capitalism on the internet would be if every HTTP get request came with a microtransaction (eg 0.01¢) attached; those without money would gain those 0.01¢ by seeing ads, like today)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/38929150

Overview here

https://forum.syncthing.net/t/does-anyone-know-why-syncthing-fork-is-no-longer-available-on-github/25661/39

The new owner of the repo has a fresh github account and apparently has the signing keys from Catfriend1 too.

Time will tell if they are trustworthy, but for the extra paranoid it might make sense to pause updates for a while.

The new repo has two releases in it now. GitHub is silently redirecting to the new repo, even in Obtainium, meaning it's possible that if you had this previously installed via Obtainium and updated now, you may have apks installed that may or may not contain the changes in the repo.

This is a mess. I deleted the repo from Obtainium (luckily I don't auto install updates) and will wait to see what happens over the next few months. Might just save my notes in a network share instead of using syncthing from my phone. Idk, notes are all that I was using it for.

I've noticed something new on my Debian Linux VPS. When I run "ss" or "netstat" with the appropriate parameters I find that there are a lot of IPv6 connections in the SYN-RECV state. This is something new.

The connections seem to all be to port 443 (my apache https port). They all seem to be IPv6 mapped IPv4 source addresses. If you geo lookup the IPv4 address, they map to Brazil. This has persisted over weeks maybe longer, and the IPs do shift over time especially the first and second components, the third seems to be in the 220-223 range, the fourth seems to be random, and the port seems random. The ones I've seen are all Brazil. It does not seem to be DDOS related as it causes no other issues I can see, and I see no evidence of intrusion. Just don't like this new thing. Feels like some sort of scanning.

So any ideas of what this is, or what to do about it?

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/48228755

Edit: I seek a server-less solution.

The only thing I can see is Linwood Flow but it looks like it's a really, really long way off before becoming a primary calendar app.

If it could just store all calendar content in 1 local file, then that could be so easily auto-synced across devices with !syncthing@programming.dev. Does anyone have any leads?

Hmm, I just now learned about Fruux, in this Reddit post...

I just had to edit a Google Doc for a university thing, and I found the mobile UI to be rather nice. The desktop UI, too, was very good, and I remember having good experiences with Google Slides before I began my privacy journey.

I am fully capable of using things like LibreOffice and ONLYOFFICE, and I currently just use Markdown and CSV for my documents and spreadsheets.

However, if there's a FOSS and privacy respecting piece of software out there with a similar UI/UX to Google Docs/Slides/Sheets, I would would be very happy to hear about it.

An easy and quick way of managing SMS and MMS messages without ads. Fossify Messages is your trusted messaging companion, designed to enhance your messaging experience in various ways.

Hi, I want to share my fist app OnTime. It's a simple "traffic light" timer used by speakers at live events and conferences. Basically the color indicates the time you have left for your speech/presentation.

As far as i know it my app has been used at 3 conferences so far.

Would love to hear your feedback. Thanks!

(Ps. This is my first post on lemmy, still learning it. I hope its ok to promote your own stuff here?)

What are some good options for translating between spoken languages?