[-] brie@beehaw.org 106 points 5 months ago

As a reminder, you can always just uninstall OneDrive and call it a day.

Until Microsoft takes that option away as well....

42
submitted 5 months ago by brie@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
[-] brie@beehaw.org 25 points 5 months ago
[-] brie@beehaw.org 41 points 5 months ago

On the one hand, having an AI generated alt-text on the client side would be much better than not having any alt-text at all. On the other hand, the pessemist in me thinks that if it becomes widely available, website makers will feel less of a need to add proper alt-text to their content.

[-] brie@beehaw.org 27 points 5 months ago

Increasing capacitance (how much charge is stored to reach a certain voltage) or the voltage it is charged to would indeed increase the capacity. Putting several in parallel would work, as would making a bigger capacitor. The main problem as far as I can tell is that the energy density of even supercapacitors is low, so you'd need a much larger volume to have the same capacity (and thus a much thicker phone).

[-] brie@beehaw.org 23 points 6 months ago

Alexandria and Stract use their own open source crawlers. Brave is also independent, if I recall correctly.

13

Fedora 40's Changeset

It's mostly minor changes, but the most noticable one for me was that Gnome 46 now has expandable notifications, no extensions needed. (Making it impossible to read the full notification text was one of the design choices of all time.)

63
submitted 7 months ago by brie@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

Caveat: It isn't available in the app store in the EU, and is instead only available via the developer's marketplace, AltStore¹. As far as I can tell, this genuinely isn't because of greed, but because of a little detail in Apple's EU rules (possibly wrong):

[...] Developers can choose to remain on the App Store’s current business terms or adopt the new business terms for iOS apps in the EU.

Developers operating under the new business terms for EU apps will have the option to distribute their iOS apps in the EU via the App Store, Web Distribution, and/or alternative app marketplaces. [...] Developers who achieve exceptional scale on iOS, with apps that have over one million first annual installs in the past 12 months in the EU, will pay a Core Technology Fee. ²

The problem being, if you're under the old terms, there is no "Core Technology Fee." However, in order to distribute on another marketplace, you must opt into the new terms, meaning you now have to pay the fee even on apps that are distributed on Apple's app store. Thus, if you distribute on the iOS app store in the EU for free, and lets say it gets 2 million installs, you get 1 million installs free... and you now owe Apple half a million dollars.

  1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067556
  2. https://developer.apple.com/support/core-technology-fee/
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submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by brie@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

TL;DR: Update immediately, especially if SSH is enabled. xz versions 5.6.0 & 5.6.1 are impacted. The article contains links to each distro's specific instructions of what to do.

https://news.opensuse.org/2024/03/29/xz-backdoor/

Current research indicates that the backdoor is active in the SSH Daemon, allowing malicious actors to access systems where SSH is exposed to the internet.

In summary, the conditions for exploitation seem to be:

  • xz version 5.6.0 or 5.6.1
  • SSH with a patch that causes xz to be loaded
  • SSH daemon enabled

Impact on distros

  • Arch Linux: Backdoor was present, but shouldn't be able to activate. Updating is still strongly recommended.

  • Debian: Testing, Unstable, and Experimental are affected (update to xz-utils version 5.6.1+really5.4.5-1). Stable is not affected.

  • Fedora: 41 is affected and should not be used. Fedora 40 may be affected (check the version of xz). Fedora 39 is not affected.

  • FreeBSD: Not affected.

  • Kali: Affected.

  • NixOS: NixOS unstable has the backdoor, but it should not be able to activate. NixOS stable is not affected.

  • OpenSUSE: Tumbleweed and MicroOS are affected. Update to liblzma5 version 5.6.1.revertto5.4. Leap is not affected.

CVE-2024-3094

189
submitted 8 months ago by brie@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

As far as I can tell this basically means that all apps must be approved by Apple to follow their "platform policies for security and privacy" even if publishing on a third party app store. They will also disable updating apps from third party app stores if you stay outside the EU for too long (even if you are a citizen of an EU country, with an Apple account set to the EU region).

The idea that preventing app updates is in line with their claims of protecting security is utterly absurd. "Never attibute to malice what can be explained with stupidity," but Apple isn't stupid.

73
submitted 9 months ago by brie@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

I used a sentence from the article as the title since I felt it represented the actual issue better, let me know if I should change it.

Essentially, Snap Store has basically no restrictions on publishing new applications, allowing for scammers to impersonate legitimate applications. In this case (and several times in the past) the target was a cryptocurrency wallet, resulting in ~$490,000 worth of bitcoin being stolen.

The "Safe" rating reminds me of this xkcd:

If someone steals my laptop while I'm logged in, they can read my email, take my money, and impersonate me to my friends, but at least they can't install drivers without my permission.

(For comparison, it seems being proprietary is an automatic unsafe rating for any application, which could be considered too extreme in the other direction.)

38
submitted 9 months ago by brie@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

There's also more example videos on the technical report

Personal take: If they didn't say how the videos on the page were created, I genuinely think that several of the AI generated videos could be passed off as being made with a camera or CGI (though there's probably still inconsistencies when looking hard enough).

This failure example is quite amusing.

11
submitted 9 months ago by brie@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

TL;DR: Explanation of why the escape sequence for 256 color and 24 bit color modes are weird and can vary. \E[38:5:​_n_​m is technically the correct form for 256 color, but \E[38;5;​_n_​m is the form terminals more widely support.

I saw this on Hacker News today, and found the article interesting because I'd recently seen a Terminal Guide page on 256 color that mentioned how terminals support different versions of the codes (with semicolons being the most compatible). Semi-relatedly there's XTerm's criticism of Gnome Terminal and VTE (which is talks about compatibility in general).

7
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by brie@beehaw.org to c/programming@beehaw.org

Edit 2024-01-26: I ended up feature creeping it a bit. It can now be used as a less input filter, and asciinema-esque recording playback.

Original post:

A less bad name TBD.

This is a little program I made to convert script captures into properly laid out text. A lot of the behaviour still isn't quite right, but I'm pretty happy with it as a proof-of-concept.

81
Wine 9.0 released (gitlab.winehq.org)
submitted 10 months ago by brie@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org
49
submitted 10 months ago by brie@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

We have collected personal details of most individuals involved in [Tachiyomi] and plan to proceed with strong legal and institutional responses against over 100 forked GitHub pages.¹

It sounds like Kakao Entertainment's "Global Anti-Piracy Task Force" (P.Cok) might plan on directly targetting the developers, rather than just the project itself ¹ ². Tachiyomi has in response removed all of their extensions except for selfhosted services ³.

I'm not too sure how much of a legal leg they have to stand on, but it isn't very surprising since Tachiyomi did have a lot of extensions for... dubious sources. It doesn't seem like they plan on adding back extensions that scrape official sources though.

  1. https://nitter.net/kakaoent_pcok/status/1744889648265175197
  2. https://newsroom.kakaoent.com/news/meet-p-cok-kakao-entertainments-global-anti-piracy-task-force/
  3. https://tachiyomi.org/news/2024-01-09-extensions-removal
[-] brie@beehaw.org 26 points 10 months ago

F-Droid doesn't usually remove apps that aren't maintained, as far as I can tell. There are apps that haven't been updated in over a decade (Quill). Since F-Droid sorts by recency of release, they tend to just sink to the bottom of searches anyway.

147
submitted 10 months ago by brie@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

Fossify Gallery on the official F-Droid repo

The removal isn't directly related to the buyout/fork. Simple Gallery was taken off of F-Droid due to a dependency on the nonfree Google VR being discovered by IzzySoft¹ ². Fossify's fork has removed the dependent features to be compliant³.

  1. https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/14284
  2. https://github.com/FossifyOrg/Gallery/issues/36
  3. https://github.com/FossifyOrg/Gallery/issues/36#issuecomment-1873458105
[-] brie@beehaw.org 49 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The study is from 2018, and I wasn't able to locate the original source from searching. Also, from the author's bio:

Ph.D. Rocket Surgeon & Aspiring Troglodyte

The Hacker News discussion also does not inspire confidence....

[-] brie@beehaw.org 77 points 11 months ago

"Open source is free if you don't value your time." (forgot who that quote is from)

Sometimes the time investment is small, but especially for complex software, the friction of switching from one imperfect (proprietary) software to another imperfect (open) software makes it not really make much sense unless the issue is severe (house is half destroyed).

[-] brie@beehaw.org 102 points 1 year ago

In the EEA, much more is on the way:

Bing's web search from the Start menu and the Edge browser can be uninstalled Third parties can add to the Windows Widgets Board feeds Third parties, like Google or DuckDuckGo, can provide the built-in web search results that Bing once had exclusively Windows users who choose to sync their Microsoft accounts will have their pinned apps and preferences synced, seemingly keeping their EEA-enabled choices Windows will now "always use customers' configured app default settings for link and file types"

Good to see Microsoft just blatantly confirming that these are anti-competitive measures rather than any sort of technical limitation.

[-] brie@beehaw.org 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I can understand why installing the wrong part should give a warning, but the IDs are unique to the part, not the model of part, so even identical parts are not interchangable.

[-] brie@beehaw.org 22 points 1 year ago

Although you have good intentions, writing your own license is probably not a good idea without adequate legal advice/background.

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brie

joined 1 year ago