blacklight

blacklight, 3 months ago to random

The plans are moving to pull the plug from this instance and migrate to a new one.

Running Mastodon really isn't fun anymore. I need 100GB of space on an S3 bucket just to store a cache that I can never delete, and 6GB of RAM constantly allocated by Redis or sidekiq just to run an instance with me and 3-4 more active users. There must be a better way.

I have registered a new domain, configured the DNS, and I'm currently toying with Akkoma to see if it meets my needs. I may also toy with CalcKey before taking any decisions.

It may be challenging for me to immediately replicate all the feature of this instance on a new one (especially if I opt for Pleroma/Akkoma, as I'm far more familiar with Ruby than with Elixir/Nix), but it may be a good opportunity to experiment with some new shiny toys.

Of course, I'll personally reach out to the active users on this instance to check if they need any assistance with migration / data dumps before it shutting down.

blacklight, 3 months ago to random

Another textbook example of enshittification: profit through rental when profit margin become too thin.

Hardware companies are no longer happy with making money out of the hardware purchases that you make. And not even with all the data that they scoop and sell about you.

Their ultimate goal is for you to pay a subscription in order to keep using their hardware.

Everybody wants you to subscribe to everything. Everybody wants money to come in no matter what.

This race towards the bottom has reached such nauseous heights that it requires public intervention.

Subscription-based models can obviously exist, but, especially in the case of hardware, they should always be sold as add-ons on top of the physical product.

The product should be able to operate with or without the subscription. And even if the producing company goes out of business.

Finally, I'm no legal expert, but I don't see how "genuine cartridge checks" processes etc. can be compatible with the right to repair - and inter-operability more broadly.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/hp-make-printing-subscription

blacklight, 4 months ago to RSS

Several websites now have #RSS feeds that seem to block bots - Reuters, ANSA and Dutch Review are among those.

I've noticed it because several feeds had become unavailable in the past days on my Miniflux instance.

Apparently setting HTTP_CLIENT_USER_AGENT to a Firefox/Chrome user agent rather than a string that contains "Miniflux" is enough to bypass the block.

This kind of stuff just baffles me.

1. How do they expect people to consume RSS feeds? From their browsers? That's a bummer, because both Firefox and Chrome haven't even rendered RSS/Atom content types for the past decade, so it'd require people to be quite fluent in reading XML in order to consume the content.

2. If for some reason they expect people to consume feeds from the browser, then how are they going to notify people that there's a feed available when they navigate on their page? Reuters doesn't even bother to use a <link> attribute in the DOM, for instance, nor it bothers to tell folks about the feeds on the homepage.

3. If, realistically speaking, feeds can no longer be read in a browser in 2024 (sure, there are folks like me that use custom Firefox extensions, but realistically we're <0.1% of the traffic), then of course the only alternative is an offline aggregator. So what's the point of blocking bot user agents, if that's exactly the way things are intended to work?

4. How is a mechanism that simply throws a 403 if the request comes from a user agent containing e.g. "Miniflux" or "libcurl" supposed to be "bot protection", when I'm only one step away from spoofing my user agent?

5. If these folks are really so hostile towards feeds, then why do they even bother to still run feeds?

My proposal: all large news outlets should have mandatory support for RSS/Atom feeds, properly advertised as a <link> tag and/or on the homepage, and with no barriers (especially barriers as dumb as a static UA test).

Being a large news outlet (especially, as it's often the case in Europe, a large publisher partly funded by public money) means that your information must be accessible even to users that don't/can't read your articles in a standard web browser. Especially if we want to set up automatic alerts/notifications based on some events. Twitter and its APIs used to be a temporary replacement for this kind of service until Musk took over, but now that the risks of delegating the delivery of information in the public interest to a private for-profit business are clear we need legislation that enshrines the duty for large news providers to adopt open feeds as a way of delivering content.

Sure, I can technically bypass all the dumb barriers and all the pointless friction points that both browser manufacturers and news outlets add to discourage people from using feeds. But at some point I just run into technical fatigue. Open feeds for large outlets that deliver critical news should be a mandatory requirement. Not a war that should be fought only by tech savvy citizens on an individual level.

blacklight, 4 months ago to random

Bi-directional power generation is the future of sustainable grids.

If I have solar panels that produce more energy than I need, I push thay extra energy back to the grid so others can use it. That reduces the demand for dirtier energy by design.

If I pay for consuming electricity, then I should be paid for creating electricity.

Unfortunately, more and more energy companies seem to go in the opposite direction. As many struggle to remain profitable as they are finally forced to pivot away from dirty energy generation, they're desperate to find other sources of revenue. And they couldn't come up with anything smarter than turning domestic electricity generation from a (tiny) cost for them into an undeserved revenue stream. These companies would literally prefer you to waste your excess electricity, or use it to mine Bitcoins or whatever, than distributing it back to appliances which may need it. They could invest more in storage, if they really have a problem with excessive loads on the grid from domestic production (and I don't think that's the case anyway), but of course companies that have "budget" in their names horrify at the idea of investing into anything.

If you are Dutch and you have a contract with Budget Energie, or with any other company that has irrationally decided to turn electricity production into a cost for the producer, then consider terminating your contract with them immediately. The world doesn't need these parasites who readily sacrifice long-term viable business models on the altar of short-term profitability.

https://www.dutchnews.nl/2024/01/budget-energie-to-charge-solar-panels-owners-a-fee-for-grid-use/

blacklight, 4 months ago to random

I'm looking for a service where I can just buy a domain name - no hosting attached.

I'm tired of 80% of my Bluehost bills being for hosting+WordPress (a service I've never used) when all I need is just a domain name.

And I don't like Bluehost's dark patterns either - in their new UI they've made sure to hide DNS management under many, many clicks under the advanced tab, even with a non-dismissable warning. I'm not sure it they are planning to make it a premium feature in the future.

Requirements:

1. It needs to be certbot/Let's Encrypt friendly - that excludes GoDaddy

2. It needs to provide me with the ability to register as many subdomains as I want and manage the DNS records however I want

3. No mandatory hosting+WordPress upsells. If I never asked for it, it means that I don't want it

4. I'm also happy (if not happier) if it simply allows me to point to my own DNS server. I really just need the domain name, I can run my own DNS

Of course, registering my own registrar with ICANN may be an alternative, but for obvious reasons I'd rather avoid that path if possible.

blacklight, 4 months ago to random

I've had to take down my Piped instance at piped.platypush.tech.

As my Linode bills were getting more and more expensive, I've had to move some services inside of my home network - and Piped is among them.

Once I moved Piped within my home network, it really started taking a toll on my connectivity. Streaming videos to ~20 users simultaneously, with no Cloudflare in front, from a home DSL connection takes quite of a toll.

Since many have been using the service but nobody has bothered to contribute to so far, I've decided to take it down and move it to a domain that I won't advertise this time.

I like to self-host, and I'll always keep doing it. And I also like to give something back to society - many have been using my services for years, and I'm ok if others use them. I'll always offer them free of charge and I'll always respect everybody's privacy.

But there's a limit to everything.

One thing is to offer a search engine aggregator or an ebook hosting service for free. Another thing is to provide a media streaming service, running on a home connection, for free.

It cost me money to run Piped on a Linode instance (precisely ~$100/month extra on my Linode bills for a beefier 16GB machine), and it costs bandwidth and electricity to run it on my home network.

Free software (and services) should be free as in speech, not as in a free beer.

I've asked multiple times for users to contribute to keep the lights on, but haven't received a single penny - all while I got on average ~5 video views per minute that prevent me from even having a videocall on my own home network.

If you really love free software, but you can't run it yourself on your machines for whatever reason, please at least bother to financially contribute to the instances that you use. Otherwise you're just a freeloader who does more harm than good to the free software.

blacklight, 4 months ago to random

Standing ovation for Rep. Rashida Tlaib.

It takes guts in the West to call out Netanyahu for what he really is (a fascist genocidal maniac and a war criminal), and it takes even more guts to do so if you're a US Congress representative.

To the intellectual dishonest journalists covering these facts:

1. Stop calling the Squad's Congress minority a "far-left" group. Their mild social-democratic ideas and their support for a sensible welfare state are close to what in Europe would be defined as "moderate center-left". The fact that such ideas are considered extremist in the US tells much more about how far to the right the political baricenter has shifted in the US, rather than how extremist the alleged "left" (or whatever is left of it) has become.

2. Stop writing blatant falsehoods like "The group has been vocally against Israel since its conception". Nobody in the group has ever tried to deny the existence of Israel as a State. They only call for Israel to respect the UN resolutions, after violating >100 of them since 1948, respect the international boundaries drawn by the Oslo accords, stop its illegal settlements and evictions in the West Bank, end the state of "perennial occupation", and make progress towards a two-State solution. The fact that calling for Israel to respect international laws and institutions is now considered "anti-Israel", or even "anti-semitic", tells much more about the absolute impunity that Israel enjoys rather than the group's allegedly extreme positions - and how morally bankrupt and intellectually dishonest mainstream media has become.

https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/rep-rashida-tlaib-calls-netanyahu-genocidal-maniac-via-instagram/ar-AA1mbGbh

blacklight, 4 months ago to random

Ok, git.platypush.tech has successfully been migrated from Gitea to Forgejo.

It didn't take long - it is indeed a drop-in replacement, but the systemd configuration packaged with Arch required a bit of tweaking to point to the previous Gitea paths and some permissions changes, only then it's an actual drop-in replacement.

Luckily I've always used git as a username rather than gitea, so that part, after a few changes in the configuration, won't require any more changes.

Tip: never, ever use the default username provided by your code forge (gitlab, gitea, forgejo...). Code forges come and go, and one after the other they are doomed to enshittification. Code repositories, configurations, scripts and documentation are there to stay instead. So never use a username that is tied to your code forge, or you'll have a hard time changing it later.

KathyReid, 4 months ago to VintageOSes

PSA: Read #EventBrite's new #ToS very carefully - section 9 requires you to use arbitration and reduces the ability for you to make a class action against them.

This is another example of #enshittification (per @pluralistic) and Rebecca Giblin's work on #ChokepointCapitalism - this sort of clause is one of the ways of creating a chokepoint and reducing the power users of a platform have, while concentrating power in the hands of the platform.

shoq, 4 months ago to random

I don’t disagree, but I find the entire Mastodon experience, while promising, to still be woefully inadequate as a discovery or discussion venue, and its pace of development glacial. It’s just a bit better than what we had before. In 15 years, there have been no big innovations in “discovery tools” worth noting in any of this social tech. The two big exceptions: Nuzzle, and Bluesky’s personal feeds.

Source: @blacklight
https://mastodon.social/@blacklight@social.platypush.tech/111648064409177306

blacklight, 4 months ago to random

"We don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse".

So goes #Substack, for good.

If you don't like Nazis, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, you kick them out and demonetize their content, period.

I don't know what's so hard to understand. If you throw a party, and invite someone who shits on the floor, vomits in other guests' cups and insults anybody with a different creed or tone of skin, then all decent people will leave.

If you let Nazis hang out at your party, then your party will become the Nazi party, period.

And I'm sick of reading "we're becoming too polarized, liberals no longer want to share spaces with conservatives, extremes are winning" etc. No, we are NOT becoming more extreme on the left - quite the opposite. It's the other political side that has decided to go full in with their extremely distorted and intolerant views of society. And it's our duty, as a civilized society, to confine them to the sewage they belong to, before their shit talk takes over all the platforms.

https://substack.com/@hamish/note/c-45811343

blacklight, 5 months ago to threads

deleted_by_author

blacklight, 5 months ago to random

This is the picture of a drug dealer who's desperately trying to convince us that drugs are good. #Cop28 should have NEVER been hosted by one of the biggest polluters. For clarity:

1. There's no such thing as "low-carbon" fossil fuels. All fossil fuels are made of hydrocarbons, and all hydrocarbons release carbon when you burn them. Let's start calling immoral marketing stunts and outright lies by their name.

2. "At the end of the day, remember, it is the demand that will decide and dictate what sort of energy source will help meet the growing global energy requirements" - sure, just like it's demand for heroin that keeps heroin dealers in business. Demand alone doesn't legitimize business practices. Otherwise we should all make and sell sandwiches out of our crap - after all, 10 billion flies in the world surely can't be wrong about what tastes good.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/15/cop28-president-sultan-al-jaber-says-his-firm-will-keep-investing-in-oil

blacklight, 5 months ago to random

If big fancy smart TVs nowadays seem cheaper than they should be, it's because they are.

You are no longer purchasing a TV, you're purchasing a device that will forever yield profits for its manufacturer by scooping up and selling data points about everything you watch in the screen. The money you don't pay to Samsung or Sony for your TV will be paid many times over through telemetry.

The MIT's advice on how to disable aggressive telemetry definitely work. But I wouldn't trust anything that is available as a user setting in a UI - companies can easily remove or hide those features if they feel that they're hitting their wallets too hard. You can go even further with a an even simpler advice: enable PiHole on your local network and configure it as your default DNS.

Since I did it a couple of years ago, I haven't seen a single ad or sponsored content on my Samsung TV, and all the requests to sewage domains like lcprd1.samsungcloudsolution.net or device-metrics-us-2.amazon.com are diligently redirected to /dev/null.

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/12/12/your-smart-tv-knows-what-youre-watching

blacklight, 5 months ago to random

I definitely see the author's points in this article https://rknight.me/please-expose-your-rss/, but I disagree with the proposed solution. Feed discoverability should be a basic browser feature, not something web developers need to actively implement, nor some information that users have to scrape themselves from the DOM.

I made an extension back in the day that parses the <link> tags and puts back the feed icon where it's supposed to be (on the right side of the URL bar), and also renders the feeds properly rather than just spitting out the raw XML: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rss-viewer/. A mobile version that can be installed as a Firefox Mobile extension is also on its way.

This is how the web used to work 10 years ago. The <link> tag has a purpose: it instructs browsers that the current page has a feed, so the browser can parse it and show a feed button to the user. Both Firefox and Chrome used to work this way 10 years ago.

Then motherfucking evil Google began its war against feeds. First it killed Google Reader, then it stopped complying with the <link> conventions, removed the feed icon from their browser and stopped rendering RSS/Atom. Firefox quickly complied too.

Let's make it clear once and for all: yes, I, can add an RSS URL to my website to make discoverability easier, but it's not my job as a web developer to explicitly make feed discoverability easier by modifying my frontend. That's just a workaround. My job as a web developer should be to provide the right <link> element, and then the browser should know what to do with it. Just like the browser is supposed to know what to do with scrollbars if my divs exceed the window size, with no need for explicitly tinkering with window geometry on the frontend side.

And, as a user, I shouldn't write my custom JavaScript to parse the feed URL from the DOM. Just like I'm not expected to write my JS user script to render the title of the page.

Feeds are one of the fundamental features of the Web. <link> conventions are one of the pillars for scalable content distribution, which was never supposed to be limited to hypertext. I won't settle for a crippled version of the Web just because the crippled version gives some private corporation the illusion of higher profitability.

If browsers refuse to provide such basic features, then it's a browser problem. I would say "choose a browser that natively supports feeds", but there's none left. So use extensions to mitigate the impact of feed-hostile browser politics.

blacklight, 5 months ago to Dubai

Hosting #COP28 in #Dubai is like hosting a meeting for victims of sexual abuse in the house of a serial rapist.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/03/back-into-caves-cop28-president-dismisses-phase-out-of-fossil-fuels

blacklight, 5 months ago to Israel

Denouncing the #genocide that #Israel's #fascist government is committing in #Gaza must be the equivalent of a death sentence I guess, even if you are literally one of the smartest journalists alive today.

It doesn't matter how much traditional media tries to cover up the real genocidal motivations behind this war. History will never forget, history will never forgive Netanyahu. Hell awaits him and everyone who supports him.

https://presswatchers.org/2023/11/msnbc-cancels-mehdi-hasan-a-truth-teller-in-a-time-of-crisis/

blacklight, 5 months ago to Netherlands

All the elections in Western democracies have become so ugly.

The societal fracture lines are so predictable that all that politicians have to do to win elections is to exploit them, regardless of basically any other input factor.

All the large cities in the #Netherlands (with the exception of Rotterdam), like basically all the large cities in the West by now, voted compactly for progressive and center-left political forces.

The rural side, and all the cities with less than 50k people, like everywhere else in the West, voted compactly for the populist and xenophobic far-right.

Large cities with large foreign communities are thriving and trying to send a political message - that diversity is ok and it's actually good. Rural districts that have almost no influx of migrants, on the other hand, keep being frightened by something they barely know.

The educational fracture line is also become too wide to ignore. Especially in these elections: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2023/11/analysis-votes-piled-up-for-wilders-as-migration-became-focus/. According to a poll, 62% of college-educated voters in the Netherlands voted for PvdA-GL. When combined with the preferences for other center-left parties (D66, Volt, PS...), it turns out a scenario where almost 3 out of 4 college-educated folks cast their vote on the center-left.

On the other side of the spectrum, however, things are flipped. 47% of those with mid-low level education voted for PVV.

And the old-vs-young divide is also becoming more and more relevant.

The results of these elections, and many others in Western democracies in the past few years, are really shaking my core political beliefs.

I'm probably part of the top 5-10%, but I support parties that want to increase taxes on people like me in order to spread wealth more equally.

I've already purchased my house in the middle of Amsterdam, but I support parties that want to build more houses in order to fix the housing crisis that has left thousands either homeless or struggling to pay rent - even if that means higher taxes on my house, or the value of my house going down once supply increases.

I've already completed my academic studies a while ago, but I want more people to get access to affordable high-quality education in order to have a chance to improve their lives.

I've already got a well-paying job, but I want more people to be granted the possibility of accessing well-paid jobs, and even have a dignitous minimum wage and a dignitous employment contract.

In other words, like many Millennials in my demographic group, and unlike the Boomers and even X-Gens that came before us, I support political forces that often go against my own interests because I see how structural injustice, scarce societal mobility, scarce attention given to equal opportunities for all citizens and outright discrimination affect millions. I support those causes because it's the right thing to do, even if it doesn't directly benefit me on the short term.

On the other hand, how do those who are oppressed the most cast their vote lately?

By voting for those who promise a minimum wage and decent contracts for everyone?

For those who promise to increase the number of paid paternity/maternity benefits, so people can actually take care of their kids and start a family?

For those who promise to increase the number of houses on the market so everybody gets their fair shot at buying a house and starting a family?

For those who promise more funds to education, so many kids will have a better chance in life than their parents?

No, they vote for an ugly racist face with an ugly wig who shouts "kut-marokkan" from a stage like a drunk peasant, who has no plan for fixing any actual problems, but wants people to believe that all of those problems are caused either by the low-skilled African who comes here to do the jobs that the Dutch no longer want to do, or by the highly-skilled EU/US citizen who comes here to do the jobs that the Dutch aren't sufficiently qualified to do, and that once we go out of "their" country things will get better for everyone.

This is seriously one of the biggest political identity crises I've ever faced. Is it even worth to fight political battles to bring more equality and opportunities, when those who need more equality and opportunities the most keep wasting their votes with abhorrent political pipers like #Wilders who have scapegoats for everything and solutions for nothing?

https://www.dutchnews.nl/2023/11/analysis-votes-piled-up-for-wilders-as-migration-became-focus/