ciferecaNinjo

3

Just commenting based on the title since I am blocked from YT and also don’t speak German. (An English transcript would be useful)

Ditching Gmail is trivially easy. Boycotting gmail is where the interesting conversation is, because often you need to reach someone who uses gmail. You can do an MX lookup on the domain of the recipient’s email address, but that only works about 70% of the time. If they use an email firewall like Barracuda or a forwarding address, then there is no way to know where the email route ends.

If I cannot get confidence from an MX lookup, then the recipient is getting a fax or postal letter from me. Google could still end up in the loop, but as long as you don’t reveal an email address to the recipient, at least you remain in control over what Google collects and profits from.

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 4mo ago

I’m not sure what you want a source for. You mean a vendor who will sell one? XO-4 Touch was apparently the last model. I just had a look at laptop.org and the site looks useless now. It used to be full of wikis with copious details about the hardware and software of the OLPC.

There are (or were) a variety of NGOs who worked on getting OLPCs into impoverished schools. One of them was https://unleashkids.org/. They are not in the business of selling them but ~15 yrs ago they were kind enough to sell some. The idea was that teachers and developers would need them to help support the OLPC project. I suggest touching base with them and see what they say, since they seem to still be around.

The XO-4 Touch came with “Sugar”, a foss OS just for kids. It was easy to make it boot into Gnome instead (underpinned by RedHat). And someone made an Android OS that could be flashed onto an SD card and booted in the OLPC. I should mention that the OLPC was never 100% FOSS. The usual shit-show of blobs for some of the hardware drivers. I mainly just used it as an e-reader on Gnome.

I’ve always been baffled that these FOSS e-ink laptops did not make it onto the general marketplace, while at the same time there were no commercial makers of anything like it. There was a “Pixel QI” dual-mode screen that could be bought bare and installed in Thinkpads and other machines, but for some reason that never took off either.

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 4mo ago

OLPC (one-laptop-per-child) is a FOSS e-ink laptop (but small enough to function as an e-reader). Though I think they are no longer made and they were always hard to get.

ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 4mo ago

Here is a way to use open data law to take individual action:

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/48016373

ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 4mo ago

From the PDF, one of the EU’s concerns is:

However, much of the value generated by open-source projects is exploited outside the EU, often benefiting tech giants.

When tech giants use FOSS, it’s a shame they can extract wealth without compensating the contributors. OTOH, if the baddies become dependent on FOSS, that’s favorable anyway. It means they might contribute code to the projects which otherwise would not happen.

The PDF does not cover public schools specifically. They need to be told that public schools are the most important place to deploy FOSS. Consider a university in Denmark pushes commercial software on students (sadly, they provide that software on a campus webpage improperly titled “Free Software” b/c it is gratis for students). The damage is of course that Denmark educates people to be dependent or clung-onto closed-source software like MATLAB, not GNU Octave. That negative training means the young generations are being conditioned to favor non-free software.

FSFE does not know about this?

The FSFE has a newsletter for “public money → public code”. They have not mentioned this /have your say/ page. Strange.

Downvotes?

I get why the OP was downvoted here.. this is a bit off-topic for BuyFromEU. But !ETS@europe.pub has 4 silent down votes. WTF? I’ve seen that before. ETS seems to be heavily read by opponents of ETS.

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 8mo ago

I block hundreds of forums because mbin is incapable(?)¹ of blocking whole instances. But I did not block !dabradio@feddit.uk. In fact, I subscribed to that community before posting. I only block 1 user, likely spam, not the person who replied in the thread.

I can only imagine that there is a serious bug. I say serious because nothing is worse than an author being deceived into believing their post will be seen by the person they reply to, and an OP who is silently denied visibility to replies which they may never discover existed.

feddit.uk blocks tor, which I use. But I don’t imagine that could impede fedia.io from caching feddit.uk posts when fedia.io is not using a Tor exit node IP (AFAIK).

¹ In mbin settings, there is a Blocked » Domains tab, which is empty. I would like to know how to populate that.

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 9mo ago

Which search? There is a magnifying glass search and a “Magazines” search form. I tried both.

I’ve seen the same before, where searching yielded a 404, I raised an issue, then within a week it mysteriously worked. It’s unclear what preconditions make some mags findable and some not.

ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 11mo ago

Thanks. I wonder how long that statement has been made. In the past I was never confident in the wording from the national bank as far as expiry of banknotes. But the page you link seems solid enough. Saving an archived version here as an extra measure against any future shenanigans:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250521052910/https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/exchanging-old-banknotes

(and because bankofengland.co.uk is not an open access website)

ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 11mo ago

I see it now. Indeed it was apparently just a very long delay. Perhaps there is a moderation queue.

ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 1y ago

the site isn’t useful if I keep it locked down like it is now

I’d say it’s crippled but not useless, just as old-fashioned non-federated forums are still useful despite limitations. And as it is now we still have some of the fedi benefits.

bug 1

One bug comes to mind, which should perhaps be reported against kbin. Is the current locked down state something that is facilitated by the software, or did you hack it to redirect outsiders to login screens? If it’s the former, then the software is disservicing users who unwittingly post a link back to the access-restricted resource. If I cross-post by posting a link to fedia.io/yadayada, I should ideally get a warning to say “are you sure you want to post a link that is inaccessible to outsiders?”

bug 2 (perhaps more of an enhancement)

One work around is for a Fedia user to create a post, wait for a non-fedia response, then dig up the cached version on the non-fedia host and publicise that link in other places. That’s already possible with a bit of navigation effort. It would be useful if users could obtain a link farm of cached versions of any post or comment. Not just for the situation at hand but with small hosts coming and going coupled with censorship as well, users of mastodon, lemmy, and [km]bin all suffer from dataloss. A sophisticated client could use caching info to locally build/recover a complete thread, as well as track points of data loss.

Anyway, just brainstorming here.

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 1y ago

I’ve always appreciated your competence and diligence in setting a good example of responsible hosting without resorting to shitty technofeudal fiefdoms like Cloudflare. Nice to see you are standing your ground and not selling the users out (unlike lemmy world and many other boot licking hosts).

I must say there is a notable side-effect to this. Since mbin does not have a cross-posting feature, I have been cross-posting by creating a link post to my original post from other relevant magazines. Now all of those links are unreachable to outsiders. To outsiders, I polluted their magazine with access-restricted links.

I can think of only two workarounds:

Make the original post on a publicly open forum, then link to that from other forums. This means the original post can never be on Fedia (which has the side-effect of reducing fedia publicity); and/or
Copy/paste the payload of the original msg into the cross-post.

Fix 1 is impossible for existing past threads. Fix 2 is tedious and it’s a maintenance burden esp. if a post needs edits or updates. Fix 2 is also problematic because if I withold the original link, users cannot find other discussions that are scattered; but if I supply the original link, then non-Fedia readers cannot reach the OP anyway.

That will mean we don't show up in search engines and whatnot, which for some will considered a good thing and will likely cause others to leave.

Worth mentioning that paywall sites handle this by giving crawlers special treatment. I’m not necessarily suggesting that though.

There is a remaining problem related to the login form. Calls to the login page are breathtakingly expensive,

The login form loads must be through the roof because whenever a non-fedia user follows a cross-post into fedia, they are redirected to a login form which did not happen before.

There would be some relief if Mbin would implement a cross-post feature that automatically copies the OP text into the body, which would cut down on the number of visits. At the same time, I’ve always considered that a sloppy approach because edits are not sychronised. So in principle the threadiverse probably needs a smarter API specifically for cross-posts.

The use of 3rd-party clients would obviously give relief on the login form loading. But I have not found any decent 3rd-party clients for Lemmy or [km]bin - (perhaps because I’m fussy… I could really use a text UI in linux that stores content locally).

ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 1y ago

If a resource blocks certain IP addresses, that is not open access. It is access restricted. It is a deliberate blockade against a demographic of people.

“Open data” has different meanings in different bodies of law, so your comment is meaningless without context. But in any case, we can call shenanigans whenever an “open data” legal definition fails to thwart access restrictions in an Emporer wears no clothes type of attempt.

ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 1y ago

Yes I understood that but it is not correct. We choose to use Tor for privacy, not to lose access to resources. There is no exclusion on the Tor side of this.

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 1y ago

You don’t know how Tor works. The Tor community has exit nodes on the clearnet which give them inclusion. When a tor user is blocked, the exclusion is done by the resource, not from the Tor side. The tor network in no way excludes people from accessing legal publications.

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 1y ago

I mentioned that, along with the problem of that. As well as the problem of searching using private sector tools.

We should not be pushed to use private search engines like Google, Bing, or their syndicates to find public resources. Public administrations have an “open data” obligation to some extent. Certainly the EU knows where the member state’s implementations are.

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 1y ago

This is generally saying if you are being discriminated against, change whatever your demographic is that is subject to discrimination. Putting oneself inside the included group does nothing to remedy the fact that there is an excluded group of people.

It’s also wrong to assume everyone has clearnet access. At this very moment I am using a machine that does not have clearnet access.