[-] ericjmorey@beehaw.org 22 points 10 months ago

When to use a VPN

VPNs are not magical fixes for privacy and security on the internet. However, there are some specific situations where they are useful tools.

Network blocks and internet censorship. VPNs can help you access sites and services that are restricted by your local network or government. That's why downloads of VPN apps in Russia skyrocketed in 2022, after the country's invasion of Ukraine and more services became blocked. The same trend happened in Virginia and other U.S. states after they passed laws requiring photo identification for adult websites.

Piracy. Internet service providers can sometimes detect when you are pirating movies, TV shows, music, or other media and send you angry letters. You can avoid that entirely by using a VPN when you download or torrent copyrighted material. Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free... but use a VPN.

Region-locked content. This is a popular selling point for VPN companies that is actually true: VPNs can help you access online content that is officially restricted to a certain region. Switching your VPN server to a different country can change what movies and shows are available through Netflix, and UK-based VPN servers are frequently used to access BBC iPlayer content in other countries. However, this is not always reliable, as service providers will usually detect VPN servers after a while and block them.

Accessing your home network. Setting up a VPN server at home is one way to access devices on your home network (such as self-hosted security cameras, media servers, and remote desktop) without opening up more of your network to the rest of the internet.

There are other more niche use cases for VPNs, but those are the most popular ones that aren't completely made up.

[-] ericjmorey@beehaw.org 25 points 10 months ago

I feel like simply knowing that X, formerly known as Twitter, paid for neo-Nazi content and promoted it is all I need to know about their content moderation policies.

The law does seem like a generally good thing, but I doubt that anyone who would care hasn't already abandoned the platform.

1
8

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/6470590

This looks like a great starting point for people with little to no experience with programming to learn to program using Python.

Everything taught by futurecoder.io can be used locally on your own computer. But futurecoder.io doesn't show you how to install Python on your machine but you can fill in that gap with the information provided @ https://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/Download

Other resources are provided on the python.org Beginners Guide if needed.

[-] ericjmorey@beehaw.org 27 points 1 year ago

This whole thing has the smell of Microsoft pulling the strings to gain more control over the bleeding edge of AI. Idealists losing out to cold capitalists seeking profit and control is something we've seen many times before.

[-] ericjmorey@beehaw.org 25 points 1 year ago

I don’t think anyone except for employees there know

I wouldn't even bet on that. It seems that no one has a full picture of what is going on.

28
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ericjmorey@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

OpenELA is a non-profit trade association of open source Enterprise Linux distribution developers.

There are many Linux Distributions that are perfectly suitable for enterprise use cases and environments. For the purpose of this charter and project, OpenELA recognizes “Enterprise Linux” (EL) as 1:1 and bug-for-bug source code compatibility which today is aligned to RHEL and CentOS.

OpenELA's mission is to provide a secure, transparent, and reliable Enterprise Linux source that is globally available to all as a buildable base.

OpenELA is a collaboration created and upheld by CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE.

Read the recent article on the formation of OpenELA by Richard Speed at The Register

ParanoidFactoid may be interested in this development.

13
submitted 1 year ago by ericjmorey@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org
[-] ericjmorey@beehaw.org 20 points 1 year ago

At least 3 orders of magnitude too low

[-] ericjmorey@beehaw.org 31 points 1 year ago

And they won't collect information about the subscribers, right?

[-] ericjmorey@beehaw.org 21 points 1 year ago

6'3" 215lbs was reported. I don't believe that for a second.

https://journa.host/@w7voa/110947325004066228

1
submitted 1 year ago by ericjmorey@beehaw.org to c/chat@beehaw.org

I'd also like a larger character limit.

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Lemmy v0.18.0 Release (join-lemmy.org)
submitted 1 year ago by ericjmorey@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1465740

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top.

Major Changes

HTTP API instead of Websocket

Until now Lemmy-UI used websocket for all API requests. This has many disadvantages, like making the code harder to maintain, and causing live updates to the site which many users dislike. Most importantly, it requires keeping a connection open between server and client at all times, which causes increased load and makes scaling difficult. That's why we decided to rip out websocket entirely, and switch to HTTP instead. This change was made much more urgent by the sudden influx of new users. @CannotSleep420 and @dessalines have been working hard for the past weeks to implement this change in lemmy-ui.

HTTP on its own is already more lightweight than websocket. Additionally it also allows for caching of server responses which can decrease load on the database. Here is an experimental nginx config which enables response caching. Note that Lemmy doesn't send any cache-control headers yet, so there is a chance that private data gets cached and served to other users. Test carefully and use at your own risk.

Two-Factor Authentication

New support for two-factor authentication. Use an app like andOTP or Authenticator Pro to store a secret for your account. This secret needs to be entered every time you login. It ensures that an attacker can't access your account with the password alone.

Custom Emojis

Instance admins can add different images as emojis which can be referenced by users when posting.

Other changes

Progressive Web App

Lemmy's web client can now be installed on browsers that support PWAs, both on desktop and mobile. It will use an instance's icon and name for the app if they are set, making it look like a given instance is an app.

Note for desktop Firefox users: the desktop version of Firefox does not have built in support for PWAs. If you would like to use a Lemmy instance as a PWA, use use this extension.

Error Pages

Lemmy's web client now has error pages that include resources to use if the problem persists. This should be much less jarring for users than displaying a white screen with the text "404 error message here".

Route Changes

Pages that took arguments in the route now take query parameters instead. For example, a link to lemmy.ml's home page with a few options used to look like this:

https://lemmy.ml/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/Active/page/1

The new route would look like this:

https://lemmy.ml?listingType=All

Note that you now only have to specify parameters you want instead of all of them.

Searchable select redesign

The searchable selects, such as those used on the search page, have a new look and feel. No more inexplicable green selects when using the lightly themes!

Share button

Posts on the web client now have a share button on supported browsers. This can be used to share posts to other applications quickly and easily.

Lemmy-UI Overall look and feel

lemmy-ui is now upgraded to bootstrap 5, and every component is now much cleaner.

Special thanks to sleepless, alectrocute, jsit, and many others for their great work on improving and re-organizing lemmy-ui.

Database optimizations

Special thanks to johanndt, for suggesting improvements to Lemmy's database queries. Some of these suggestions have already been implemented, and more are on the way.

Query speed is Lemmy's main performance bottleneck, so we really appreciate any help database experts can provide.

Captchas

Captchas are not available in this version, as they need to be reimplemented in a different way. They will be back in 0.18.1, so wait with upgrading if you rely on them.

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker.

If you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum or on the Matrix Chat.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for almost three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. No one likes recurring donations, but they've proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

8

What's going on?

[-] ericjmorey@beehaw.org 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

TL;DR (if you can’t be bothered reading all of the below) - Fosstodon will wait and see what happens, but if Facebook’s new service introduces any issues that could negatively impact our users, we will defederate.

This is Fosstodon's official stance on the whole Facebook joining the Fediverse debacle.

31
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ericjmorey@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/73564

In table format with FOSS status, platform, and OS for your viewing pleasure:

FOSS Name Platform OS Stage Source Code Info
YES Memmy Lemmy Android, iOS Android Release (Pending Play Store Approval) Github memmy@lemmy.ml
YES Morpha Lemmy Android, iOS Under Development Gitlab morpha@vlemmy.net
YES Thunder Lemmy Android, iOS Alpha Release Github thunder_app@lemmy.world
YES Mlem Lemmy iOS Submitted for App Store Review (July 1) Github mlemapp@lemmy.ml
YES Jerboa Lemmy Android Released Github jerboa@lemmy.ml
TBD Artemis Kbin, Lemmy Android, iOS Private Beta (Starts End of June) Unreleased ArtemisApp@kbin.social
TBD Limbo Lemmy iOS TestFlight Beta Unreleased limbo@lemmy.world
YES Beyond Lemmy Android, iOS Under Development Unreleased original Beehaw post
NO Sync Lemmy Android Research N/A syncforlemmy@lemmy.world
YES Slide Lemmy Android Under Development (More information coming) N/A original Lemmy post
YES Lemmynade Lemmy Android Under Development N/A original Lemmy post
  • TBA kbin app from @developerjustin (iOS, kbin Only, in development) - I've had a chat with the dev of this as-yet-unnamed app, but it's not ready for testing yet.

Important note from frasassi@kbin.social

Am super open to any apps, code repos, communities, or info I'm missing as well as updates.

208
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ericjmorey@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

More up to date and more detailed information at: https://beehaw.org/post/683217

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/71764

The amount of apps being developed for iOS / Android is getting really crazy now and new apps keep popping up every day. Updated list below:

  • Artemis (iOS, Android, kbin, lemmy): link
  • Memmy (iOS, lemmy): link
  • Mlem (iOS, lemmy): link
  • Morpha (iOS, lemmy): link
  • Thunder (iOS, Android, lemmy): link
  • Beyond (iOS, Android, lemmy): link
  • Limbo (iOS, Android, lemmy): link
  • Jerboa (Android, lemmy): link
  • Slide (Android, lemmy): link
  • Sync (Android, lemmy): link
  • Unnamed (kbin): link

Most apps on the list are lemmy apps, meaning they don't work with kbin. Artemis is specifically designed to work with kbin, not sure if or when any of the other ones will go in that direction or become interoperable as there are some challenges with the kbin API at the moment. Having said that, a new API is in the works (https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls/357) so things should get better with time. Some of the apps are in very early stage of development so it may happen that they adjust OS availability and platform support.

See info in table format with more details:
https://beehaw.org/post/697419

[-] ericjmorey@beehaw.org 25 points 1 year ago

It's not great. The people running rblind.com have forked Lemmy and hope to remerge upstream at some point in the future. Their own fork has a number of outstanding issues: https://rblind.com/post/569070

[-] ericjmorey@beehaw.org 65 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This post is inaccessible to anyone who is blind.

So here's the content of the original post on /r/blind:

Announcement !!Open Alpha!! RBlind - A community on Lemmy, brought to you by the moderators of the /r/blind subreddit.

Since the news broke regarding the forthcoming changes to reddit’s API and the ippact that will have on the third party apps and tools many of us rely upon the mods here at r/blind have been working on an accessible option for those who either cannot or will not be staying on reddit. As talk of alternatives like mastodon, lemmy, and the like have increased we decided that it would be best to reveal what we have been working on, hence this post. Several days ago we shared this with those of you on our Discord server and have been asking for feedback.

This project is by no means finished or polished, and is currently operating on development backend code and a beta UI to allow for access to still unreleased features that our community needs such as up/down votes displaying state changes, and nested comments, read this as there are and will be bugs and outstanding accestsibility problems. However, the advantage of this platform is we control the servers, the UI, and can fix accessibility concerns ourselves instead of relying on a for profit company or the generosity of app developers to do it for us, not that the latter is unappreciated.

So please be understanding of the above and we hope those of you who decide to join and see what we have done so far for all of us, and please report problems as you find them.

https://rblind.com/

[-] ericjmorey@beehaw.org 24 points 1 year ago

You're not the audience they're looking for.

[-] ericjmorey@beehaw.org 89 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Elon Musk could lose 99% of his wealth this month, then 99% of his remaining wealth next month and still be better off financially than 99.99% of everyone. He's not ever going to experience financial distress.

4
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ericjmorey@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

What browser extensions do you use that you'd recommend to others?

Do you contribute to any FOSS browser extension projects?

Are there any non-FOSS extensions that you wish had a sufficient FOSS alternative?

1
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ericjmorey@beehaw.org to c/programming@beehaw.org

It seems like there are about ~~22~~ ~~27~~ ~~46~~ ~~219~~ ~~320~~ ~~493~~ 1840 active subscribers here. I have a few questions for you all.

  • Which programming languages do you regularly use?
  • Which are your favorite to work with and why?
  • Which do you have interest in trying and why?
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ericjmorey

joined 1 year ago