With debate raging in the Fedi about Threads’ federation, I was having a discussion with another user about the recently implemented instance blocks. They pointed out that, blocking an instance simply hides their content from your feed but doesn’t prevent your posts from being sent to them. Firstly, is this correct? Is this...
Mastodon instance blocks are already bidirectional AFAIK: if you block an instance your content does not get federated with them. I was actually surprised that this does not seem to be the case for Lemmy. I don’t think this break any core abstraction of AP…
This post from Eugen Rochko mentions that blocking Threads at the user level “stops your posts from being delivered to or fetched by Threads”. Basically, the user-level instance block is bidirectional.
Limited federation mode is a different feature, at the admin level. It doesn’t really affect the delivery of posts in either direction, it just hides the blocked instance’s content from the global feed. Defederation on the other hand is indeed bidirectional, but again it’s on the admin level rather than users’.
The reason for not directly federating content to Threads isn’t so nobody there can ever see my amazing posts, it’s so Meta can’t easily profile me. Scraping public posts on a different platform would probably be illegal, at least in the EU, and reposts don’t give them a lot of data about me. Federating content, however, would give them most of the same data that Mastodon has on me without even having to ask.
In the EU companies can’t scrape personally identifiable information without consent, even if it’s already publicly available. IANAL, and there’s probably ways they can sneak around the GDPR, but at least it’s not a free for all. It’s unclear though how it works for federation. It’s definitely not the same legally though.
Other people in that thread have pointed out that it isn’t showing posts being delivered to Threads despite the block. That should be testable with other instances, but not Threads since it’s not receiving any content from Mastodon at the moment. The concerning thing there is the user still being able to view content from people they’ve blocked, but that seems to be a bug if it’s reproducible.
There's a common false dichotomy about #Threads: cut them off, or leave it to user choice.I can't speak to other software, but Mastodon offers a third option: limiting Threads. This can be done for all users of a server....
ActivityPub doesn’t just push everything on a server to every federated instance like a fire hose. In the first place, as [email protected] said, it only feeds your content to an instance if somebody on that instance follows you, which you can set to require your manual approval. Your posts could also get pushed if somebody else boosts your post and they have followers on the other instance.
However, if you set an instance block, none of your posts get sent to the instance, period. They would have to resort to scraping. In other words, if you don’t want to give meta your data, just set an instance/domain block.
I don’t think Lemmy does either…? It pushes updates to subs that at least someone on the receiving instance subscribes to (at least that’s how it worked last time I checked). That’s why there are scripts going around for new instances to automatically follow a bunch of popular subs to populate the All feed.
I think Mastodon works in the same way with users, where it sends updates for accounts that someone on the receiving end follows. So if nobody follows you from Threads it wouldn’t send any of your posts there.
Ah ok this I’m not sure about. I mean, Lemmy added instance blocks as well in the latest release (0.19), but it seems that, unlike Mastodon, this only hides the content from you and doesn’t prevent your content from being sent to that instance. It does seem like a pretty big oversight, but I haven’t found a discussion about this. There might be good reasons why it’s this way.
I’m looking for a way to keep track my recurring subscriptions. I just want a nice overview of recurring payments and where they come from, I don’t need a solution to actively go and manage the subscriptions for me. Unfortunately my bank, despite being a trendy digital bank, does not have a good built-in tool for this....
I guess you’re right, yeah. I was hoping someone had figured out a different solution, perhaps integrating directly with the individual subscription providers. But I guess that’s way too broad of a scope, integrating with countless individual services.
At least a cross-platform, cloud backed “spreadsheet” would be nice to have though.
For my use case yes, that would defeat the purpose, but for what it’s trying to do it kinda makes sense… At least, they have to do it to comply with payment regulations. And you’re still only exposing your identity to one service with a decent reputation, rather than plenty of possibly shadier ones. It seems like a fair tradeoff if what you’re looking for is privacy from services you want to pay for.
I wish they were all on the same day of the month…
Dates aren’t a big concern though. What I was hoping for is something that would update automatically to some extent if (say) some amounts change, or a payment is missed. But I guess indeed that’s basically impossible without access to my payment data.
Given that I have to update it manually though, I would at least like it to be synced remotely. So that I can, say, check it from my laptop on a webpage or desktop app without redoing all the manual data input.
Oh yeah, you’re right on that. If I’m looking for privacy from the subscription manager signing up with a service like this is a terrible choice, because it is fully a financial institution.
Hello, I have a BIIIG problem. It started of me wanting to root my device. Of course, I used a random tutorial from the Internet. I did the steps carefully, but after a reboot, I had no TWRP, and I had an overlay of Download mode on top of Samsung secured by knox screen. So I downloaded another TWRP (unofficial, but stable), and...
I don’t have the same phone and it’s in general pretty difficult to fix a brick without being able to tinker with it. I can give you some pointers though…
First off, this guide is for a model A525F, but your title says your phone is an A526B. If that’s correct there’s a chance the files you tried to flash were for a different model number and that’s what went wrong. Make sure you download the right files for your exact model number rather than trusting the ones your guide provides.
Secondly, to be honest, this guide does not seem very trustworthy. When doing this kind of thing every little step matters, a single misplaced reboot might screw up the whole process. Also, you’re downloading and installing on your phone some files from some random website, that’s a big risk. The thing is: you don’t need a shitty guide for your exact model. For future reference, you’re better off with a good, detailed guide for your general vendor (Samsung). XDA forums are usually the place to look. Always find the files you need by yourself, don’t just flash whatever some random website makes you download. Go to the official download pages for Samsung stock OS or TWRP and get the files from there, making sure they match your exact model number.
If you’re 100% sure that the firmware you’re trying to flash is the correct one for your model, you can try avoiding Odin and use adb flash directly. There’s plenty of guides on how to do that going around. You might not need TWRP either at that point. Getting familiar with adb is always useful.
[…] I set up a cloud service where my VPN service would be located on Amazon’s web services, a reputable and widely trusted cloud provider. […] After about an hour, I set up a VPN that worked flawlessly. The best part? Not only is it free to use […]
Sorry, what? Last time I checked AWS VPSs were very much NOT free to use, and I’m pretty sure the lowest tier is still more expensive than your average VPN.
Also, this article seems to be arguing against its own points: “you probably don’t need a VPN, but I have one anyway”…
This is just straight up true. Besides the belligerence and racism it pushes, it also makes it near impossible to have an actual, reasonable and critical comparative discussion of Chinese and Western societies. It closes any space that might exist for Chinese people to take part in any discussion of international affairs, since the attitude is so strongly against them. This pushes any open minded Chinese netizen back into the arms of their own government’s propaganda, rather than inviting them into an open discussion of the good and bad sides of their and other societies.
Oh sure, didn’t mean to imply that Chinese people weren’t smart enough to think for themselves. I was just making the point that neither western media nor Chinese media is helping at all to create space or goodwill for critical exchange and debate across boundaries and firewalls (which, to be fair, is not surprising).
Glad to see there are actually Chinese netizens on Lemmy, by the way.
Bold of an English speaker to accuse any other language of unpredictable spelling…
Funnily, Italian is almost completely phonemic, meaning it’s trivial to both spell and read words if you know the rules. English can only dream of that.
Legacy COBOL code is largely used in critical systems like those of banks and airlines. What could go wrong with having that code rewritten by stochastic parrots who get programming answers wrong half of the time?
I’m aware they’re not using a generic model, but that’s not much better. Current custom-made models still fuck up significantly more than humans, and in less predictable ways.
Even if their custom model is slightly incorrect 1% of the time, that’s still a major problem in critical systems like those.
Oh I mean, sure, but I don’t think IP logging is the main privacy concern with spy pixels.
I’m assuming this trick uses the user agent string and other request metadata to identify clients. Even if it didn’t recognize Jerboa as a client, it did guess that I was on mobile. That’s not possible just by tracking IPs, unless they’re cross-referencing it with other datasets. Also, I was on VPN anyway, so the IP would have been useless.
It should be possible for clients to obfuscate/fake the metadata of image requests to make tracking with spy pixels less effective.
This is a wildly sensationalized headline, bordering on just false.
The real story is that US government employees regularly misspell email addresses using the top-level domain .ml (Mali) instead of .mil (The US Military). This means that the domain administrator can read those emails. For now the administrator is some Dutch guy; the Malian government cannot read the emails.
I guess even the BBC is throwing out its last shreds of journalistic integrity at this point…
Jerboa currently ignores single line breaks. I think single line breaks should be implemented as the only other alternative is double line breaks which are not always appropriate.
This is not a missing feature in Jerboa, it’s a design choice in the Markdown syntax. It’s done so that one can break up long lines in the .md file without affecting the rendered page. Markdown is a standard, and Jerboa uses an existing tool to format posts. In order to make this work for Jerboa the devs would have to break compatibility with Markdown and create their own rendering tool. They’re most likely not going to do it, and I don’t think they should.
That’s not a problem, though, because you can already create single line breaks in Jerboa, using standard Markdown. All you have to do is add two spaces at the end of your first line, where you want your line break to be. So, if I write down:
<span style="color:#323232;">This is a line</span><span style="color:#a71d5d;"><</span><span style="color:#63a35c;">space</span><span style="color:#a71d5d;">><</span><span style="color:#63a35c;">space</span><span style="color:#a71d5d;">>
</span><span style="color:#323232;">This is another line
</span>
this gets rendered to:
This is a line
This is another line
There are other ways to create line breaks in Markdown:
Using an HTML <br/> tag
Using a backslash ``
but they’re not supported by all renderers. For example: the <br/> tag works in Jerboa, but not in the web UI. Double space works for me in both.
Which other web services support Markdown formatting and also single line breaks? Reddit, for example, didn’t…
Since AFAIK the main reason for this choice in standard Markdown was to make the raw .md files more readable, I can see how this isn’t necessary in Lemmy. I still see two reasons not to change this though:
Effort: forking and maintaining a markdown rendering library just for lemmy would take a ton of effort for a pretty small usability improvement. The dev team is already small and overloaded with work, this doesn’t seem like a good use of their time.
Consistency: each website having its own flavor of Markdown syntax would be pretty chaotic for users. Right now you can learn basic Markdown once and use it on Reddit, Lemmy, Github, etc. If every website did it their own way you’d have to remember all the little differences, it would get messy.
Agreed, standards are what make the Fediverse possible. Rendering posts from other platforms is already messy: we’ve all seen the posts coming from Mastodon where the title is the whole body of the post, cut at the character limit. If Lemmy starts doing its own Markdown flavor it would further degrade the integration with other Fediverse platforms.
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket....
I’m a huge fan of the Jerboa app, and it’s the closest experience I’ve gotten to RiF from any of the Lemmy apps. It’s been a pleasure to use despite the occasional hiccups, but one thing that I thought I could personally contribute to was the icon for the app itself. I thought I’d share them with the community, in case...
These look awesome! This might be asking too much, but I’ll try anyway: I use the Whicons icon pack for the minimalist, monochrome white theme. Would you be able to make a version of these with just the plain white outline and transparent background?
I wrote this post for a friend, I’m sharing it here for anybody it might help. I got asked multiple times how I download cracked music software so I figured it’d be easier to write it down once. It’s meant for people with very low technical skills who just want to start torrenting software without major risks, and it...
You’re right of course, but it’s hard to communicate this level of nuance in a post targeted at newbies. If you don’t disable your antivirus, 9/10 times it will quarantine the KeyGen automatically, and you don’t get anywhere.
I’ve added a warning about the risk of infection. Do you have any recommendations on how to tackle this in a way that’s appropriate for non-nerds?
You’re right, I guess, but if we only recommend paid ones people will just google for free ones and use whichever shady provider is at the top of the google results. People are really averse to subscriptions.
I’ve added a warning about free VPNs and switched to recommending Windscribe, which still has a decent reputation.
Yup, exactly. We can’t gatekeep this too much, even if it’s warranted, otherwise people will just give up and never actually spend time to learn about this.
The article makes piracy sound synonymous with and exclusive to torrenting
It was only meant to be a guide about torrenting pirated software specifically, not pirating software in general. I also started by linking to the megathread to link people to other resources.
I don’t really want to add a whole other section about DDL just because I feel I couldn’t do it justice, and people have probably already done a better job at that.
Instance blocks and Threads
With debate raging in the Fedi about Threads’ federation, I was having a discussion with another user about the recently implemented instance blocks. They pointed out that, blocking an instance simply hides their content from your feed but doesn’t prevent your posts from being sent to them. Firstly, is this correct? Is this...
Erik Moeller on Mastodon: There's a common false dichotomy about Threads [...] (nerdica.net) en-gb
There's a common false dichotomy about #Threads: cut them off, or leave it to user choice.I can't speak to other software, but Mastodon offers a third option: limiting Threads. This can be done for all users of a server....
Privacy-preserving solution for managing subscriptions
I’m looking for a way to keep track my recurring subscriptions. I just want a nice overview of recurring payments and where they come from, I don’t need a solution to actively go and manage the subscriptions for me. Unfortunately my bank, despite being a trendy digital bank, does not have a good built-in tool for this....
WhatsApp is rolling out a new revamped interface for the Android beta app! (twitter.com)
https:/nitter.net/WABetaInfo/status/1712136814029385805
Samsung A526B no system and booting to TWRP Recovery
Hello, I have a BIIIG problem. It started of me wanting to root my device. Of course, I used a random tutorial from the Internet. I did the steps carefully, but after a reboot, I had no TWRP, and I had an overlay of Download mode on top of Samsung secured by knox screen. So I downloaded another TWRP (unofficial, but stable), and...
How much of this should I believe? (www.nytimes.com)
Anti-China Rhetoric Is Off the Charts in Western Media (thediplomat.com)
Publisher-focused Twitter alternative Post comes to Android, adds newsletter support | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
Laysanya (sh.itjust.works)
I am subject to intrusive monitoring by the government because I posted on an incel honeypot forum (lemmy.world)
You may have heard of the “Countering Violent Extremism” program under DHS....
GAMERS, USING ONLY CAPITAL LETTERS, WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE VIDEO GAME QUOTE? SCREAM IT INTO THE VOID.
NO LOLLYGAGGIN
IBM’s generative AI tool aims to refactor ancient COBOL code for its mainframes (arstechnica.com)
[❓] ChatGPT's fate hangs in the balance as OpenAI reportedly edges closer to bankruptcy (www.windowscentral.com)
Investors are barely breaking even as the venture is hardly making any profits due to a shortage of chips, divided interests, and more....
This post knows where you're viewing it from (Lemmy doesn't proxy external images) [ARCHIVED]
Note: This post now archived and as such no longer works...
music player (lemmy.world)
Hello i am searching for a music player with some specific features....
Ministry of Defence accidentally emails ally of Russia (www.bbc.com)
Feature request: single line breaks
Jerboa currently ignores single line breaks. I think single line breaks should be implemented as the only other alternative is double line breaks which are not always appropriate.
Autoenshittification - How the computer killed capitalism. (doctorow.medium.com)
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket....
Custom Jerboa App Icons! More Details in Post (lemmy.world)
I’m a huge fan of the Jerboa app, and it’s the closest experience I’ve gotten to RiF from any of the Lemmy apps. It’s been a pleasure to use despite the occasional hiccups, but one thing that I thought I could personally contribute to was the icon for the app itself. I thought I’d share them with the community, in case...
How To Torrent Software Safely (For Dummies) (andscape.notion.site)
I wrote this post for a friend, I’m sharing it here for anybody it might help. I got asked multiple times how I download cracked music software so I figured it’d be easier to write it down once. It’s meant for people with very low technical skills who just want to start torrenting software without major risks, and it...