#FreeSchool=Co-Op+Learn+DIY 🔁 @freeschool@qoto.org

Ask not for whom the workbell tolls, it tolls for me.

#WorkLife

Half baked idea time

Distributed, decentralized, social media.

The problem, imho, is servers. You can set up a mess of servers, but that still centralizes on them.

My uncooked idea is to completely decentralize to the device and build the network friend to friend up, each acting like a small dns for all its connections and so on.

Yes, storage issues. Yes connection issues, but.. for real decentralized

#halfbakedthoughts

Don't do what they tell you to.

Don't do what you *think* they're going to tell you to.

Find reasons to delay.

Find reasons why "it won't work."

Do it slightly wrong, just enough to make it almost work but not.

Do it half-assed in a way that makes it look like you're actually putting in your full effort.

When they want something, make that thing mysteriously disappear.

Smile, nod, ignore.

For the love of all that's good and true and right in this universe, BE FUCKING UNGOVERNABLE.

@jwz @pixel loading animation still lives rent free in my head.

Netscape Navigator 2.0 was released 30 years ago today.

This version introduced a number of new features:

• Plugins! This was the first time a web page could make sound, via RealAudio.
• Incremental display of progressive JPEGs on slow dialup connections.
• Animated GIFs that were actually useful.
• HTML frames.
• JavaScript! That wasn't my fault, but you still have my apologies.
• And of course my baby, the first release of Netscape Mail and News:

https://jwz.org/b/ykvY

@freeschool @avlcharlie @milan

IPFS shares a portion of your storage system with the universe. Files are encrypted in transmission and at rest. Files are broken into a random number of random-sized fragments, with each fragment stored redundantly across multiple hosts.
You will have the 'address' of the file, and you can choose to share this. The address allows normal network file system access to the file.
Files are resiliently available, with strong anti-censoring effects.

Does anyone have some intel on discord tokens and how they get stolen?

Ive had a case with my girlfriend and now with a friend of mine, both the cases it happened after fresh system installs (1 month and 3 months) and its started scratching my curiousity.

If anyone has any info about it, feel free to reply or dm!

#discord #session #cybersecurity

@Tutanota
𝖴𝗉 𝗍𝗈 𝖽𝗈𝗐𝗇, 𝗅𝖾𝖿𝗍 𝗍𝗈 𝗋𝗂𝗀𝗁𝗍:
#DeepL; #VivaldiWebmail #Calendar; #Brave_Search/ #DuckDuckGo_Search; #ProtonPass; #Session; #VivaldiBrowser; #OnlyOffice; #Aurora_Store/ #FDroid; #e_OS (𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙮𝙚𝙩); #Ente_Photo; #Logseq; #Heliboard; #ProtonMail/ #VivaldiWebmail/ #TutaMail; #MiroTalk_SFU; #Ente_Auth; #ProtonDrive/ #filen_io; #PipePipe (𝙖 𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙠 𝙤𝙛 #NewPipe); #OsmAnd

@cavyherd that is why #DeltaChat is a better alternative, it requires literally nothing, just set a name and avatar and start chatting, also it has multi-profile support so I have 1 profile for family and friends and another for work and more public interactions,

also the multi-device support is great and I can use different devices for the same accounts, if one device dies I don't lose any message or chat

@paregorios

Why I Prefer Delta Chat To Signal

I find Delta Chat support for multiple profiles to be a killer feature.

Photo by kuu akura on Unsplash

I have Delta Chat and Signal installed on my phone and my laptop. I’ve used both platforms to talk to various people. They both work fine. However, I do prefer Delta Chat because I do find it more flexible than Signal. I’m going to give some details of my reasoning in this article.

What Is It?

Delta Chat is an encrypted chatting application. The messages you send to your contacts are encrypted end-to-end. Even Delta Chat servers are unable to read the contents of your messages. Only a bit of metadata is unencrypted. Its closest relative in the chatting application realm is Signal, which also does end-to-end encryption.

What I Like

Delta Chat does not tie your profile to a specific phone number. Signal does tie your profile to a phone number. However, Signal allows you to use a username rather than a phone number to make a connection, and thus hide your phone number from contacts. In addition, Delta Chat allows you to have multiple profiles. Signal, on the other hand, allows you only one profile. These two features of Delta Chat make a world of difference when you are chatting with people who might not take “no” for an answer.

Let’s take the example of online dating. If you know anything about it, it is that you are likely to run at times into scammers and flakes. Now, most of the people on the dating apps are decent and do not fall into these two categories. Still, scammers and flakes do exist. So how do you protect yourself from them?

Well, the first thing to do is to not share your phone number with someone you do not know yet. I’ll note here that your phone number can be used to find your street address. I’m not going to get into the details of how I know this.

Both Signal and Delta Chat got you covered on this front. With Signal, you can just give your username. This username is a relatively compact string, something like “autisticfun.99” With Delta Chat, you can provide a link or a QR code. The link does not really work like Signal’s username because it has annoying features:

It is too long to put in a dating profile. Signal’s username is small enough to be easily embedded in a dating profile.
Forget about sharing it by spelling it to someone else. Signal’s username may be annoying to spell out, but it is on par with spelling out email addresses.
It may scare people who do not know much about Delta Chat. You’re being asked to click on a link. Who knows what is at the other end of the link? The Signal username can be used only for one thing: you input it manually in Signal to connect with someone. End of story.

Okay, so you’ve connected with someone over Signal or Delta Chat. You chat pleasantly for a while, only to discover that you’re 100% incompatible with this individual. So incompatible that you just have to cut contact cold. This is not the option I prefer. I’ve sometimes had to learn that the person was not into me, or had to deliver to the other person that I was not into them, and yet been able to communicate peacefully about this. However, there are times when you just know the other person won’t be able to handle your news peacefully. What do you do?

Your Autistic Life is supported by readers like you. Use one of the links below to support my writing! Thank you.

Join Us Bonfire Merch

With Signal, you can just block them. Okay, what if they decide to come back at you? If they try to reach you from the same phone number, they won’t be able to: you’ve blocked them. However, they can easily get try from a different phone number. It is not that difficult or that expensive to have different phone numbers on a modern cell phone.

If they try this stratagem, then you have only one solution with Signal: you must change your username. However, changing it means that everyone who had your previous username but wasn’t already in contact with you won’t be able to reach you. If you had it in a social networking profile somewhere, you need to remember this and change it.

With Delta Chat, if you have a bit of foresight, you can avoid the need to remember where you used a username. Remember that Delta Chat supports multiple profiles. You create a new profile, only for your new connection. If you then discover that you need to cut things cold, you can just delete this profile. They won’t be able to reach you anymore, and any information you gave them to reach you with this profile won’t work anymore. There is no need to go change usernames anywhere.

This very scenario happened to me recently. I connected with an individual. The chat was pleasant, until I realized that we were not on the same page about something quite fundamental. I wished them good luck in their search, and deleted the profile I had created just for them. (I had to do this on all the devices on which the profile was present.) I also blocked them on the dating app. From this point on, it became impossible for them to reach me.

Note that Delta Chat allows you to reset your QR code and the link associated with it. If you do this, then your old QR code and old link won’t be able to be used to reach you anymore. If you do this, you also are in the same situation as when you change your username on Signal, what you may have shared in the past has to be updated if you want folks to still be able to find you. However, the need for this eventuality is lessened if you have the foresight to create a new profile for people you don’t really know.

The multiplicity of profiles supported by Delta Chat means that you can easily create a personal profile, one for work, specialized profiles for specific tasks, etc. One nice benefit of this support is that Delta Chat does not require all your profiles to be on all devices you use Delta Chat on. My phone currently has a couple of profiles on it, though this may change in the future.

Finally, the ability to have multiple profiles for multiple purposes means that you can put different things in the bios of your profiles. You can have a professional bio for the professional profile, and a personal bio for the personal profile. On Signal, you have one profile, with one bio. If you use Signal both for work and for personal purposes, what do you put in your bio?

A Few Cons

I would be remiss if I did not talk about the few cons I ran into. These are not dealbreakers for me, but they could be for someone else.

As I had implied above, it would be nice if Delta Chat had a username system similar to Signal’s. I don’t think it should be identical to Signal’s system, but the hyperlinks that can be linked to a specific profile are too unwieldy, and can appear suspicious in some contexts.

Both Signal and Delta Chat allow you to create group discussions. In Signal, there is the capability to limit who can add or remove people from a group. Delta Chat has no such capability. Anyone can add or remove people from any group created in Delta Chat. If someone added to a group goes rogue, good luck!

Delta Chat does not allow you to search for animated GIFs in an online database like Tenor. There is a good security reason for this. If you query a database, you are effectively leaking some information from your discussion. It is possible for users to work around this issue by saving ahead of time those GIFs they want to use to a directory which is synchronized between their various devices. Then, you can select images from this directory to add to your messages. (This is what I do.)

Delta Chat does not have a user-friendly system for supporting stickers. Yes, there is a bot. I tried it. It is far from being user-friendly to use.

Addendum: I Smelled Drama

The dreaded scenario happened. I matched with someone on a dating app. I offered my Delta Chat profile, but they preferred Signal. So I gave them my Signal username and the link. We chatted on Signal for three days, and this morning I realized I was smelling drama, and I don’t do drama. I wished them good luck in their search and blocked them on all the platforms we had connected on.

However, I’m sure that my old Signal username was still accessible to them. So I had to change it to make sure that drama would not follow me.

I’ll note that having to change my username could have been avoided, if I had given them the link to my Signal profile or the QR code. However, this strategy completely eliminates the advantages of having a username in the first place.

#AutisticWriters #DeltaChat #security #signal #YourAutisticLife

@mythologyandhistory

When I was studying physics this was the story about the "No Bell" prize. 😕

Microsoft’s latest Windows 11 update removes all remaining methods to bypass Microsoft Account requirements during setup, enforcing online sign-in and blocking any possibility of creating local-only accounts during installation https://alternativeto.net/news/2025/10/windows-11-now-blocks-all-microsoft-account-bypasses-during-setup/

How to *actually* test your readme

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/10/how-to-actually-test-your-readme/

If you've spent any time using Linux, you'll be used to installing software like this:

The README says to download from this link. Huh, I'm not sure how to unarchive .tar.xz files - guess I'll search for that. Right, it says run setup.sh hmm, that doesn't work. Oh, I need to set the permissions. What was the chmod command again? OK, that's working. Wait, it needs sudo. Let me run that again. Hang on, am I in the right directory? Here it goes. What, it crapped out. I don't have some random library - how the hell am I meant to install that? My distro has v21 but this requires <=19. Ah, I also need to upgrade something which isn't supplied by repo. Nearly there, just need to compile this obscure project from SourceForge which was inexplicably installed on the original dev's machine and then I'll be good to go. Nope. Better raise an issue on GitHub. Oh, look, it is tomorrow.

As a developer, you probably don't want to answer dozens of tickets complaining that users are frustrated with your work. You thought you made the README really clear and - hey! - it works on your machine.

There are various solutions to this problem - developers can release AppImages, or Snaps, or FlatPaks, or Docker or whatever. But that's a bit of stretch for a solo dev who is slinging out a little tool that they coded in their spare time. And, even those don't always work as seamlessly as you'd hope.

There's an easier solution:

Follow the steps in your README
See if they work.
…
That's it.

OK, that's a bit reductive! There are a million variables which go into a test - so I'm going to introduce you to a secret zeroth step.

Spin up a fresh Virtual Machine with a recent-ish distro.

If you are a developer, your machine probably has a billion weird configurations and obscure libraries installed on it - things which definitely aren't on your users' machines. Having a box-fresh VM means than you are starting with a blank-slate. If, when following your README, you discover that the app doesn't install because of a missing dependency, you can adjust your README to include apt install whatever.

OK, but how?

Personally, I like Boxes as it gives you a simple choice of VMs - but there are plenty of other Virtual Machine managers out there.

Pick a standard OS that you like. I think the latest Ubuntu Server is pretty lightweight and is a good baseline for what people are likely to have. But feel free to pick something with a GUI or whatever suits your audience.

Once your VM is installed and set up for basic use, take a snapshot.

Every time you want to test or re-test a README, revert back to the original state of your box. That way you won't have odd half-installed packages laying about.

Your next step is to think about how much hand-holding do you want to do?

For example, the default Debian doesn't ship with git. Does your README need to tell people to sudo apt install git and then walk them through configuring it so that they can git clone your repo?

Possibly! Who is your audience? If you've created a tool which is likely to be used by newbies who are just getting started with their first Raspberry Pi then, yeah, you probably will need to include that. Why? Because it will save you from receiving a lot of repeated questions and frustrated emails.

OK, but most developers will have gcc installed, right? Maybe! But it doesn't do any harm to include it in a long list of apt get … anyway, does it? Similarly, does everyone know how to upgrade to the very latest npm?

If your software is designed for people who are experienced computer touchers, don't fall into the trap of thinking that they know everything you do. I find it best to assume people are intelligent but not experienced; it doesn't hurt to give slightly too much detail.

The best way to do this is to record everything you do after logging into the blank VM.

Restore the snapshot.
Log in.
Run all the commands you need to get your software working.
Once done, run history -w history.txtThat will print out every command you ran.
Copy that text into your README.

Hey presto! You now have README instructions which have been tested to work. Even on the most bare-bones machine, you can say that your README will allow the user to get started with your software with the minimum amount of head-scratching.

Now, this isn't foolproof. Maybe the user has an ancient operating system running on obsolete hardware which is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays. But at least this way your issues won't be clogged up by people saying their install failed because lib-foobar wasn't available or that ./configure had fatal errors.

A great example is the Opus Codec README. I went into a fresh Ubuntu machine, followed the readme, ran the above history command, and got this:

sudo apt-get install git autoconf automake libtool gcc makegit clone https://gitlab.xiph.org/xiph/opus.gitcd opus./autogen.sh./configuremakesudo make install

Everything worked! There was no missing step or having to dive into another README to figure out how to bind flarg 6.9 with schnorp-unstable.

So that's my plea to you, dear developer friend. Make sure your README contains both the necessary and sufficient information required to install your software. For your sake, as much as mine!

Wait! You didn't follow your own advice!

You're quite right. Feel free to send a pull request to correct this post - as I shall be doing with any unhelpful READMEs I find along the way.

#developers #FreeSoftware #linux #OpenSource

Greta Thunberg could have, by now, carved out a very comfortable life for herself as a liberal grifter-celebrity offering platitudes about personal responsibility at Davos. Instead she connected the dots between ecocide, capital, and empire, aiming squarely at the heart of the beast. And now fresh out of captivity she downplays her own suffering to recenter the urgency of aid to the Palestinian people. No wonder she's hated by the fascist+lib coalition that rules this world.

✨ Update from Gaza Soup Kitchen ✨

October 7th, 2025 by Hani Almadhoun, Organizer

"Dear friends,

The past two months have been intense — conference season, media engagements, live on ABC Prime News (link below), and a conversation with The New Arab. Through it all, Gaza has been front and center. I want to give you a clear look at what your support is making possible — and the scale of what remains to be done.

Gaza City:
Roughly 200,000 people are trapped in Gaza City, facing an unknown future. Every day, our teams push into neighborhoods that are cut off, even attempting water deliveries in extreme conditions. We advise them, we worry, but they refuse to leave — this is their home, and they have nothing left elsewhere. For their safety and the community’s, we keep their identities and locations secret, yet still ensure aid reaches those who need it most.

Kitchens & Meals:
Across eight kitchens in the middle and south of Gaza, we are cooking eggplants, potatoes, traditional dishes, and pasta, serving hundreds of families daily. One kitchen alone reaches 500 families, and our teams keep pushing for extra water deliveries wherever possible. Prices are cooling slightly in the south, but in Gaza City, food costs are skyrocketing, and supplies are vanishing. We don’t pause — we keep delivering.

Food Parcels & Care Packages:
Since our last update, we’ve delivered 25,000+ food parcels and care packages. Last month alone, your generosity put over $500,000 directly into Gaza to feed families, support hospitals, and sustain life under siege.

We operate two flexible initiative teams:

1. Hospital Care Team: Prioritizing children suffering from acute malnutrition at Al-Aqsa Hospital.

2. Makeshift Community Team: Led by my mom and Alaa (Chef Mahmoud’s widow), delivering 30–50 care packages at a time to displaced families in makeshift communities — sometimes food, sometimes hygiene kits, always based on urgent need.

Transparency & Accountability:
We’ve been experimenting with open registration for food parcels in Gaza City. When we offered a link for 75 families, 233 families signed up in under two minutes, leaving many temporarily without aid. We publish exactly what’s in each parcel and the prices we pay, so the community sees every action we take. Your donations fuel this transparency, safety, and reach.

Bottom line: Supplies are tight. Prices are climbing. Access is dangerous. But your support keeps food on tables, water in homes, and care packages in hands. You’re keeping hope alive in a place where hope is under constant attack. May this genocide come to an end soon.

Thank you for standing with Gaza — for standing with the people who have nothing left but each other."

Donate:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/Hot-meals-in-gaza-daily

ABC news reel:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPhuNiaDoY-/?igsh=MXRoaXVteHNvOHRqbA==

#NorthGaza #GazaAid #GazaFundraisers #FreePalestine #Fundraisers #FoodIsLife #WaterIsLife #GoFundMe #BeitLahiya #BaitLahiya #KhanYounes #Palestine #Genocide #Starvation #IsraeliWarCrimes #NorthernGaza
Remember #ChefMahmoud
#HumanRightsAreNeverWrong #IsraeliWarCrimes #BibiIsAWarCriminal