News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

rogerbraun

Re:Deploying Mastodon on Digital Ocean on Thursday November 15, 2018 @10:02AM (#18459721)
Re:Why ActivityPub is the future on Wednesday June 27, 2018 @11:18AM (#17408829)
Re:ActivityPub: decentralized social networking protocol on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @01:48PM (#16225216)
no, we really don't. Not every tool needs to be equipped for private discussions. ActivityPub and OStatus are used for Twitter-style communication. Those aren't high security communication services.
Re:ActivityPub: decentralized social networking protocol on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @01:14PM (#16224889)
it's really not worth it. If people want to exchange encrypted messages, they should use a proper tool for that.
Re:ActivityPub: decentralized social networking protocol on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @12:43PM (#16224589)
In AP, messages are signed with http signatures (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-cavage-http-signatures-09). OStatus has a similar mechanism called salmons, which are signed XML payloads.
Re:ActivityPub: decentralized social networking protocol on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @11:54AM (#16224167)
there's #social on freenode, although it's not very active. You might have more luck asking your questions on #pleroma on freenode (another Ostatus/AP server) or on the mastodon discord.
Re:ActivityPub: decentralized social networking protocol on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @11:46AM (#16224098)
messages are signed using http signatures (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-cavage-http-signatures-09)
Re:ActivityPub: decentralized social networking protocol on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @11:04AM (#16223717)
In OStatus 'salmons' are messages sent from one server to another that contain posts. They are signed, so the receiving server knows if it can trust it.

If person [email protected] mentions [email protected], a salmon is sent from example.com to differentsite.org containing the message. The endpoint that this is posted to is the 'salmon endpoint'.

Using a second endpoint for privacy enhanced messages would have the way to go. Old servers wouldn't ever receive private messages, while new servers that understood the extensions could have kept 90% of their old code and infrastructure.

Re:ActivityPub: decentralized social networking protocol on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @11:00AM (#16223667)
this doesn't make much sense. The very easy way to add AP-level privacy to ostatus was to just use a different salmon endpoint for private messages. This way, messages would never have federated to servers that don't respect privacy settings (by accident. if the server leaks on purpose, that's a different story).

This solution was discussed at length with mastodon devs before the implementation of the private messages. It was ignored. Now we have a situation were Mastodon is likely to switch off OStatus soon, leaving behind all those projects that don't have the dev resources to rewrite their core federation systems every few years.

The Ostatus/AP dual stack is also pretty hacky and not even valid according to the AP spec, although it's getting better all the time.

Re:ActivityPub: decentralized social networking protocol on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @10:49AM (#16223567)
Yes, and this was known to the main developer. There were easy ways to make it at least private if the other server was trusted, but they chose to not implement them.
Re:ActivityPub: decentralized social networking protocol on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @10:33AM (#16223393)
Privacy on the level of AP would have been very easy to add, by just using a different salmon endpoint for private messages. This was discussed at length back then, but Mastodon still chose to implement the leaky-by-default changes. There's nothing in AP that can't be done using OStatus, with very very minor extensions.
Re:Mastodon 2.0 on Friday October 20, 2017 @10:59AM (#15516284)
sadly, the federated timeline is close to useless. I don't understand why it isn't the public timeline that's exposed.
Re:Mastodon 2.0 on Friday October 20, 2017 @10:42AM (#15516145)
This is something that was always a problem on Mastodon, but you can use other fediverse servers like https://social.sakamoto.gq/main/all to look at the network, they show things publicly.
If you are European you're probably part of the visa waiver program anyway.
I looked into this a while ago. Here are some notes I made:

- https://git.heldscal.la/roger/the_wired/wiki/OStatus

- https://git.heldscal.la/roger/the_wired/wiki/Salmon

Hope it helps. Essentially, you can basic functionality going by implementing webfinger and an atom feed. This old guide might be helpful: https://web.archive.org/web/20120306210855/http://ostatus.or...

Re:Elixir 1.3.1 released on Monday July 11, 2016 @11:54AM (#12071894)
It depends on your use case. The overhead is much smaller than you probably think and the Erlang / Elixir programming model works extremely well for some cases, networking for example. I've been writing pieces for a Bittorrent client in Elixir. Using a process for every connection to another client or for every torrent makes structuring your code really easy.
Re:Rare color photos of Berlin from the 1930s to the 1960s on Monday November 09, 2015 @10:18AM (#10533451)
How do you take photos that look like the old ones? They seem to have much more interesting colors.
Re:Signal for Android: RedPhone and TextSecure in one app on Wednesday November 04, 2015 @03:10AM (#10505190)
That's what I meant, sorry for the confusion.
Re:Signal for Android: RedPhone and TextSecure in one app on Tuesday November 03, 2015 @11:01AM (#10500399)
Thanks for the answer, but if you don't care about this use case, then I think I'll just use a different application that does.

The things I don't like about Signal / Textsecure are:

- Requires Google / Apple services

- No easy way to self host

- Accounts bound to a phone number

- No desktop client ("Being worked on" for months now...)

All these things can be solved for me by using XMPP with Conversations on Android.

So maybe the right thing to do is to stop complaining. Signal / Textsecure is just meant for other people than me.

Re:Signal for Android: RedPhone and TextSecure in one app on Tuesday November 03, 2015 @10:43AM (#10500265)
Just use Conversations. It can now use the same protocol and is the best XMPP client there is.

I'm completely baffled that the Textsecure people insist on using the gapps package, which is of course an extreme privacy risk.

What I find much more amazing is that the thought experiment of Schrödinger's cat is so often used to explain the implications of quantum mechanics, because it was meant as a way to show that all that superposition stuff clearly doesn't happen in normal life, so something has to be wrong / missing in quantum mechanics.
Re:KeepassC – Curses based keepass written in Rust on Monday October 05, 2015 @08:54AM (#10331458)
I use it, it's pretty good. As simple as it can be, easily integrates with everything.
The most modern RMS proof laptop is the Thinkpad X200 with Libreboot. It's probably still faster than this chip.
Re:Inside the Feminist Hackerspace on Tuesday September 01, 2015 @02:40PM (#10154713)
'As with many extensions of startup culture...' - is this true? Are american hacker spaces grown out of startup culture?
Re:Quantum weirdness is everywhere in life on Monday August 10, 2015 @07:41AM (#10033895)
It's always a shame when the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is presented as how reality works. Most of the perceived weirdness of QM comes from the leaps of faith required to make the Copenhagen interpretation work.

Older »