Uh, bummer. Thanks. Btw I think FEP-1b12 is the very abstract concept on how to address things to a group. I suppose we should have a working implementation of it in almost all current Fediverse software that deals with groups. The interesting part would be to specify the content that gets delivered like the chat messages this project is concerned with. Or how they’re sorted, or how these groups are presented or the additional multimedia functionality.

Lol, I was just adding the youtube video I watched yesterday to my previous comment: Can I Confuse Police AI Cameras? about road safety cameras in Australia(?), and seems they use some amount of processing power. Or human oversight. At least he doesn’t get a ticket in the end. But that was just a mostly humorous take on a similar thing. Thx for the video on Flock cameras.

Sure. I mean realistically we need something for real-world application, like sunglasses form factor with the category “innocent citizen doing harmless stuff” or “criminal” taped to it, to fool the systems which are currently being rolled out. But I have no clue what amount of computing power they use for license plate readers or to spy on the pedestrians in the city center / mall / train station / bad neighborhood or wherever these AI cameras are being used.

Nice idea. Unfortunately this doesn’t fool ChatGPT… “The picture shows an apple with a piece of paper taped to it that says “iPod.” It’s a visual joke: the apple is being humorously labeled as an “iPod” (since Apple makes iPods), creating a pun.”

Thanks, yeah seems they in fact have the boilerplate code there to handle the basics of ActivityPub. But all the complicated and difficult stuff is missing. And that’d be the majority of the effort.

Is there some documentation / specification for the ActivityPub part of it? I’d like to see how these messages, channels and groups get exchanged from a programmer’s / protocol perspective.

What’s the encryption and signing on a hardware level for? I mean dependent on what’s that good for and who controls it, it’s trusted computing, or treacherous computing as Stallman calls it…

(I mean it’s not working out great for GrapheneOS either. Back in the day I had a phone I owned, with privacy features added and alternative background services so I had a pretty much Google-free experience. These days it’s all locked down, I hand out my private metadata to Google, can barely ride a train without, or get a discount in the supermarket. I can’t do backups and I’m f***ed if I want to cross a border to a more restrictive country because these guys are in on it as well. They’re probably going to use it to limit what I can install. And more and more manufacturers lock down bootloaders etc and I thought we were past this. Graphene itself advised me to switch to proprietary code in the name of security and they’ll have a look at the code later, once Google eventually releases it. All of this is due to (or related to) these security measures working way too well and that’s also why they’re being used. I wish my phone didn’t have a TPM but a simple disk encryption like LUKS on Linux instead. And I don’t see many reasons why we should copy these very bad dynamics.)

I think the overall idea is nice, though. We had these project ideas to just plug in a box and be self sufficient in the self-hosting community since the SheevaPlug. Or the FreedomBox. There are some hardware projects as well like the Home Assistant Green or back in 2019 they tried to sell a Pioneer-FreedomBox. None of those match exactly with your proposal, but I think they’re pretty close. Maybe get in touch with them and see if you can participate in a new iteration, or read about their past experience with the proposed target audience. Especially FreedomBox seems like a good fit to me. They’re not very loud, but afaik still around. And they’re Free Software nerds, which seems to align with your idea, minus the locking it down and transferring control to other parties via the TPM.

Yeah, I’d be willing to partially blame that on the users. If you’re using some big advertisement company’s product as your portal to the digital world, that’s on you. Similar for other data-harvesting companies like OpenAI.

Btw, the proper place to mount filesystems is either /media or /mnt. I wouldn’t create a directory called /Volumes in Linux. And pay attention, these are case-sensitive and most (not all) system directories have agreed on using lower-case letters only. And “volume” is kind of a Windows and MacOS-term anyway, I rarely see Linux-people refer to media and filesystems that way.

I guess politicians like that just exist. We had Ursula von der Leyen for that. She was big time into internet surveillance and censorship before proceeding to other endeavours, defence and then president of the european commission. Her list of controversies, shady contracts and deals and investigations is pretty long. So yeah, I’d say there’s likely something shady going on in the background with those people. But investigating them doesn’t seem to do anything, at least not in Germany. That just makes them become president of something or similar things.

Sure. As if there was a difference between a dystopian surveillance state based on a voluntary effort or basing it on mandatory surveillance. The effects are the same, no matter why someone does it. Also, why would we tell Google to voluntarily invade people’s privacy? That’s already their business model. I don’t think we need laws for that.

I got a nice Dell Latitude 7390 for like 250€ a year ago. I usually just have an eye on the sales page of my local laptop refurbisher and go for the best Dell or Lenovo laptop in my price range. Since that’s mostly devices returned from leasing by businesses, they’re the more serviceable models than regular consumer models. But serviceability is somewhat limited these days. You’d have to check individually how many RAM slots are available (if any) and whether the BIOS accepts random wifi cards.

I did it some months ago. Was very smooth, no effort needed. Though I don’t have any experience with the Docker install. I suppose you just change the image name and be done. Maybe take a backup of your database and data volumes to be safe. Here’s the conversation from back then, but that wasn’t about docker either, but includes quite some discussion of continuwuity vs tuwunel:

https://awful.systems/post/5029223

Edit: They have some sentences about the migration on their releases page: https://forgejo.ellis.link/continuwuation/continuwuity/releases

Yeah, looks like a coordinated effort. They’re re-aligning other things as well. They also forfeited their pledge not to develop AI for weapons and surveillance. Joined that “age restriction” effort to collect people’s IDs. And I’ve seen a massive crackdown on Youtube, from ramping up advertisements, making it harder to circumvent these, or download videos, to what they pay to creators which has also reportedly changed substantially.

I guess Android is amongst the more annoying ones, because we all rely on smartphones and the operating system on there.

Geary is very polished and shiny. I ended up not using it because I have a lot of folders, automatic rules to sort things, different signatures and addresses and some of the advanced email stuff isn’t in there. But definitely worth a look for someone with a simpler private email inbox. And so much more intuitive to use than for example Thunderbird.

I’d say that depends on exactly what you’re trying to protect. They’re both large American companies with control over your data and your data and metadata will end up in their respective clouds. Push notifications will be handled by Google services if you use Android, but there’s an equivalent mechanism for iOS just that it uses their servers. They handle some details differently, but I don’t think any of those options deserve the word privacy.

Great. I’m still disgruntled by them restricting device-trees, AOSP development and app installation in the future.

There’s always a possibility of someone posting arbitrary content when a platform allows user content or combines content from many sources. I mean we do have moderation here and illegal content is supposed to be removed or flagged. However as the operator of some internet service, you are ultimately responsible for what’s on your instance. So you definitely do need to make an effort to stay in control. Btw, there are possible compromises, such as using an allow-list of instances you federate with, so you don’t pull content from sources you don’t trust and didn’t approve.

Uh good question. Seems people recommend Tipp10 and it’s in the repositories. Looks like for way older people, though. I remember playing Tux Typing that’s more colorful with words falling down. Idk. I hated these programs as a kid. 10 finger typing is a boring and tedious task. But I’m not sure about the didactics of it. My knowledge on when you should learn proper typing is a bit outdated. Maybe not yet at that age. Just give them some motivation to type something (anything)? So they start trying and understand how the keyboard is useful?

With the mouse… Well I just picked that up on my own. We played PuttPutt and Monkey Island 2. And obviously playing point and click adventures is going to give you the needed skills fast. Though you really need to be able to read for that and that might take 2 years of school? Most of the computer isn’t accessible without being able to read. You can draw, though. Or play games with speech output. (And non-educational games like racing games or whatever works without language)

And by the way, I had another look at it and some people curate educational games for Linux:

• https://www.icefun.ch/
• KDE for Kids
• KDE Education Project
  and I remember Debian has some metapackages with education software as well.

I think kids find ways to play and tinker with stuff. I’d give them an office suite to practice writing letters or advertisements or whatever they come up with, something to draw… maybe not Gimp because that’s not easy to use… I’ve seen people give their kids an instant messenger which connects to their dad/mom so they’re incentivised to type something. And then of course we have games. From Supertux, PlanetPenguin Racer, Tuxkart to commercial games. There are some kids games in the repos. Kartoffelknülch, drawing programs. Programming languages to learn coding with puzzle pieces and blocks or animate Turtles. There are educational games, at least my local library has some and I played some as a kid. But maybe at least try to balance the gaming. There’s so much more interesting stuff in computers. And then of course you could put some content into some directories, I think unrestricted internet access isn’t great at 6yo and the computer will be empty without, so idk. Maybe put some templates there, ideas what to draw, music or audiobooks or whatever fits the purpose…