rogerbraun
rogerbraun on Hacker News
Posted by
rogerbraun on Tuesday March 13, 2018 @08:35AM
from the blog.soykaf.com dept.
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.
it's really not worth it. If people want to exchange encrypted messages, they should use a proper tool for that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
sadly, the federated timeline is close to useless. I don't understand why it isn't the public timeline that's exposed.
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.
Posted by
rogerbraun on Saturday August 20, 2016 @03:01AM
from the zompist.com dept.
Posted by
rogerbraun on Sunday July 31, 2016 @10:27AM
from the scsh.net dept.
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.
How do you take photos that look like the old ones? They seem to have much more interesting colors.
That's what I meant, sorry for the confusion.
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.
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.
Posted by
rogerbraun on Sunday November 01, 2015 @10:36AM
from the jve.linuxwall.info dept.
Posted by
rogerbraun on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @08:39AM
from the sanityinc.com dept.
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.
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.
'As with many extensions of startup culture...' - is this true? Are american hacker spaces grown out of startup culture?
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.