ytjohn

I have used and promoted Signal before, and I also made the mistake of making it my default sms/mms client. I'm on android. Signal does allow you to make a backup file. Then you have to get that file over to a specific directory on the new phone BEFORE you install signal. But the import rarely works. There are tons of issues on the signal repo, and a lot of them closed with won't fix type answers. I myself am stuck with a history of some signal, but mostly sms messages trapped on one phone because the backup the signal app creates fails halfway through importing on other signal apps. Even if it was reliable, it's way too complicated for most people. People change phones every few years and they expect their data to follow them to the new phone.

There's also https://github.com/xeals/signal-back which actually uses the same code as signal to essentially export a backup. If you check their issues page, you can see that most of the issues are problems reading the backup file. Since this tool is using the same code with just a command line wrapper, it gives us more insight into how unreliable the backup and restore functionality of signal is.

Take a look at rkt. It seems like it would be much closer as it does script based container execution.

https://coreos.com/rkt/

I've used imapsync before (link below). You configure in your gmail credentials on one side and your new account on the other. You'll want to set up "device" password for it to avoid any 2fa/not a robot checks. It does take a while due to google rate limiting (think days). But once you get it started, you can just let it run.

imapsync homepage: https://imapsync.lamiral.info/

imapsync github gmail faq: https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync/blob/master/FAQ.d/FAQ.G...

Interesting. Are these bigger city hospitals? I've visited people in several hospitals and you just walk in. Unless you actually go up to a counter to ask for help, you're free to roam. Sure, some areas are off limits. You can't go into the ER patient area without someone opening the door, and I'm sure the surgery section is off limits. But you can walk to a patient's room, the maternity ward, the cafeteria, etc. In fact, our local hospital has a pretty decent cafeteria. It's nothing fancy, but it's relatively cheap (cash only) and decent food. There are definitely people that just go there for lunch.

Google Docs predates Wave and has since been rebranded as Google Drive. Various blogs have pointed out how certain aspects of Wave have been integrated into Docs/Sheets/Drive. The big concept with wave was that you did operations. "Go to row 12 and bold characters 15 through 38" as an operation within a document, as opposed to synchronizing an entire object. So when you set your cursor on a word in the document, it sent that as an operation, and any other clients editing the document could see where your cursor was at. Operations at the individual character level would sync to all attached clients and you can see edits in realtime. It's really interesting when a team at work is all looking at and modifying the same spreadsheet. The box they are editing is highlighted so you naturally stay away from it. If you are "idle", you might click your cursor away from all the activity as a common courtesy.

Good Docs had this to a degree before Wave, but it was unpolished. Two people could definitely edit a sheet together, but editing a document was more cumbersome (whole blocks of text would update at once). After Wave, they took the concepts and you could then see everyone editing the document as they typed or simply moved around the document.

Heh. One colleague has "Hope is not a valid deployment strategy" as a signature.

Most places might be blocking this type of activity by default. For most of our security audits, it's just assumed that the SM IPMI or Dell idrac is vulnerable to one exploit or another. We mitigate that by controlling the traffic. I feel this is common practice in most places that understand vlans and firewalls.

However, while blocking is easy, being aware of something like this is on another level altogether. Unicorn jumping over a rainbow level rare. You really have to be logging outbound attempts and dns lookups. Where I work, there is a full security team and they are at an insane level where they log the allowed traffic. One told me that the allowed traffic is more interesting than the denied traffic. Denied just tells them what we anticipated, while active helps them establish a pattern and look for deviations.

I had never even heard the phrase until this thread. A quick google/wikipedia shows me it's the British term for what we in the US call "telephone". I guess I learned something new today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers#Etymology

> As the game is popular among children worldwide, it is also known under various other names depending on locality, such as Russian scandal,[3] whisper down the lane, broken telephone, operator, grapevine, gossip, don't drink the milk, secret message, the messenger game, and pass the message among others.[1] In France, it is called téléphone arabe (Arabic telephone) or téléphone sans fil (wireless telephone).[4][better source needed] In Malaysia, this game is commonly referred to as telefon rosak, which translates to broken telephone. In the United States, the game is known under the name telephone – which in this use is never shortened to the colloquial and more common word phone.

Most places I know of isolate their OOB management network, requiring a vpn or jumpbox to access it. However, if someone did let their OOB network full outbound access, I could see this slipping through. I could imagine that simply going to a CDN or cloud provider like AWS/Cloudfront/cloudflare/akamai with a dns lookup along the lines of updates.supermicro.cdn-front.com wouldn't be too suspicious. At that point, you'd be looking for dns lookups and not firewall hits.

If you are blocking outbound, I could still this going unnoticed if you're not actively reviewing denials.

But, if you are properly watching dns lookups from OOB and it's anything other than necessary services (ntp, ldap, syslog), then this would get picked up pretty quickly.

The Facebook Container Extension does this. The maintainers hard code the list, but it really makes me think that someone can make an extension to let a user manage a list themselves. As an early adopter of Facebook Container, I had to live through when I couldn't log into messenger.com (the only part of facebook I really used). For that specific project, they maintainers wanted to control the list of domains as opposed to allowing users to maintain their own list and "dilute" the effectiveness of the container for "everyone else". Ie, if something was missing, they wanted to fix it upstream and push it down.

I would like to see an extension like this for google. I do use google and I have set the various google apps I use to only open in the google container. But the main google.com/search domain does open in any container. I have to be careful if google prompts me to login to not login.

https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook/issues/45#issuec...

https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook/blob/1e37bc677ac...

It's for macOS instead of iOS, but numi is a great scratchpad calcualtor. https://numi.io/

Never tried it, but Soulver looks like a good solution for iphone: https://acqualia.com/soulver/

and CalcNote on Android - just installed this and its' just like numi. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.burton999....

> if dongles are required for everything from iPhones

I never understood this complaint. AFAIK, I've never seen a macbook with a lightning port or the older 13-pin iphone port. If someone had an iphone, they had a USB-A to lighnting cable. Now they need a USB-C to lightning cable. Then you can use the macbook to charge your phone, or the usb-c charger that charges your laptop to charge your phone. Or yes, you can get a usb-c to usb-a dongle - but you can just as easily get the appropriate cable. I'm also seeing that Apple is going to start producing usb-c chargers for iphones and ipads (with a usb-c to lightning cable) in the near future.

I'm a macbook + android user, so I've had USB-C phones for a while, so now I can use the same cable and charger for my laptop or my phone.

But not websockets though.

Also, Fava adds budgeting to Beancount. Beancount itself doesn't really have the concept, but Fava lets you add budget lines and compare your spending against your budget.

Looking at the code, it looks like that's a work in progress. You can start an http server and use a browser to browse and read your memos. It also looks like you can query for particular memos like you do in the CUI.

It could very well be that the author has plans to be able to create or edit memos using web calls, and pave the way for a browser based memo app.

It references some templates which I don't see in the repo, so not sure how far along it is. Maybe those are included in one of the dependencies.

When I'm on a plane and Gogo is moving about dialup speeds, while blocking protocols that would make dialup usable.

Not technically possible currently (well, last I checked). A client could be configured to send a "please delete message id 29342" type post, but other clients would have to know how to understand that and to honor it. The functionality would be similar to "sender has recalled this message" in exchange.

Also, the way the protocol works is that clients discover the most recent log entry number, and then request all "missing" ones. So that delete message would be more like a "please overwrite message id 29342 with zeros or something".

Pied Piper is working on that.

I'm planning to setup Hubzilla as a forum/wiki for my local radio group and local tech community. Hubzilla might not have everything right (I would prefer the scuttlebut/patchwork approach), but it definitely checks most boxes for me. The key one being Nomadic identity - they can export everything they've ever posted and upload it to another server. This is really crucial (not for my club, but for other groups). Hubzilla also federates with ostatus, diospara, gnusoc, frendica, mastadon, and others.

Hubzilla only has a few thousand users. In a social media world, that's a rounding error. So my thought is that people should setup Hubzilla for a targeted group. Get an active community of dozens or possibly hundreds of people, and if they like the platform, encourage them to invite other people and start additional communities. Or find communities through the federation.

https://project.hubzilla.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project

https://medium.com/we-distribute/the-do-everything-system-an...

Oh wow. Back in the 90s, I "played" a game called Progress Quest. Basically you downloaded the game, spun the dice a few times and then your character would go out on quests. Your game was saved in a small file, which you could move about machines, and you could have your stats uploaded to a web-based leader board. Now they have a web-based version, accounts and forums.

Godville seems like a much more advanced concept of this. Whereas PQ has an automatic hero that's supposed to be you, Godville has a character that worships you and may or may not follow your commands, if you choose to send them at all. I like it.

http://progressquest.com

I actually picked up a couple of these with the idea of putting a PiZero in them. There's a good bit of space in the area on both sides of the screen. If we could make the keyboard recognizable by the pi in some capacity (perhaps with an arduino translator), definitely some possibilities.

This cycle is one of big concern to me. In Pennsylvania, UPMC keeps growing its monopoly and getting into territory disputes with Highmark Health. In this case, both companies offer insurance and health care. At one point, UPMC decided to stop accepting Highmark health insurance, which is what the state government used as their health provider. State employees became effectively barred from using the near-monopoly healthcare provider for the Western half of the state. This has been going on for years, each year with variations of "consent decrees" where the two providers make concessions what facilities in underserved areas they will see other's clients in.

I've been watching this play out in my state for years, but never quite realized the full impact of this until a recent Guardian article mentioned UPMC by name as why single-payer/medicare-for-all could fail.

>Who would blink first if the government threatened to exclude UPMC from its healthcare plan, which under a “Medicare for All” system, would be the only one available? Without access to the UPMC system, the region would face an instant healthcare crisis.

As someone that watched a state government blink first and change insurance providers, this really drove the point home.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/28/big-me...

It's much closer to Twitter but with federation, so different organizations can run their own servers, like with email.

You should check out Scuttlebutt

https://staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html

https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/getting-started.html

https://scuttlebot.io/docs/basics/install-the-database.html

Not familiar with thrift or protobuf, but when I think of a single API layer in front of a database, the API specification becomes independent of the database. You also want to version your API.

Let's take an address for an example. Your contact database might have "id", "name", "addr_line_1", "addr_line_2, "addr_line_3", "city", "state", "zip". Your API v1 lets you query any combination of these fields and return a set of fields.

/api/v1/contacts?zip=10018&fields=name

[{"name": "Jessica Jones"}, {"name": "Matt Murdock"} ]

/api/v1/contacts?name=Matt%20Murdock&fields=zip returns something like:

[{"zip": 10018}]

Later, you change your database to split name into fname and lname. You update your code and API to reflect this. In calls to /v1/ of the API, the field "name" is concatenated by your code to combine the database columns of fname and lname. In /v1.1/ of your code, you may or may not keep the "name" field as a convenience , but you do provide the ability to search on fname and/or lname fields.

Basically, for any change to the underlying database, your API maintains the same interface to the data, however you might also publish a newer version of the API. In fact, your code that handles the API might be entirely different. For instance, /api/v1 might be handled by a python flask framework, while /api/v2 is handled by node. You can run multiple versions of the API at one time, supporting multiple iterations of clients. Obviously to reduce the amount of maintenance efforts, you will deprecate some versions and provide deadlines for them to be disabled. You can run all sorts of reports on the usage of each API endpoint and see what calls and response formats are still in use. This can open up the ability to do an outreach to those developing a client and make them aware of necessary changes.

That sounds like secure scuttlebutt.

Secure Scuttlebutt is a database protocol for unforgeable append-only message feeds.

"Unforgeable" means that only the owner of a feed can update that feed, as enforced by digital signing (see Security properties). This property makes Secure Scuttlebutt useful for peer-to-peer applications. Secure Scuttlebutt also makes it easy to encrypt messages.

https://scuttlebot.io/more/protocols/secure-scuttlebutt.html

He takes a while to get there, and doesn't quite drive the point home, but this is actually what André Staltz is proposing. Mesh-first devices. If we start at the bottom of his article, here's basically the plan:

1. Work on polishing IPFS, CJDNS, SSB[1], Beaker Bowser and some others into a "mesh-first" setup. 2. Sell, subsidize, or outright gift mobile devices to offline users in Africa (I'm going to assume these are android smartphones) setup to automatically join a mesh network, with these apps installed. 3. Users will transport these phones around, adding and creating content. Their phones will automatically sync content with other devices as they come in range. In general, only content that the user is interested in (that they follow) will be synchronized, though some may act as hubs syncing all manner of content for later redistribution. 4. As usage grows, there will be various regional and national mesh networks that build up.

I think a good comparison is to Cuba's weekly sneakernet[2] distribution, just with wireless mesh.

[1]: Secure Scuttlebut is one of the author's creations: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ [2]: https://www.wired.com/2017/07/inside-cubas-diy-internet-revo...

Actually with the recent spikes in bitcoin, it's become profitable again - for the moment. Lots of people standing up mining rigs, or dusting off their old ones.

When I click the link, I see some handwriting, and 4 images of an owl moving around. Then a second later, it redirects me to a site called debsys.com, which kind of seems to be a q&a site, or a demo of one.

I'm a fairly happy MBP 2016 user. I would love to have a single USB-A port. And that is because of the logitech unifying receiver[1], the Elecom wireless trackball dongle[2], or the plantronics voyager uc adapter[3]. These are all USB-A and fit almost flush with the laptop, unless you have to attach a usb-c adapter, in which case you have to stick out 2" with a ridid adapter, or a 6" flexible cable adapter.

Now you're probably thing "but what about bluetooth"? And I'd agree. In fact, I have almost no need anymore for the unifying receiver. Except my elecom trackball isn't bluetooth, and up until this year's Logitech MX Ergo, bluetooth trackballs just were not an option. I still prefer the Elecom over the MX Ergo.

And the plantronics headset? I've gone through so many bluetooth headsets, and this is really the best one I've ever found that lets me switch between phone and PC. However - computer bluetooth leaves something to be desired for VOIP windows and mac). That's where their UC adapter comes in - it makes voice conferences heavenly sounding.

Anyways, these are small nitpicks. When I'm at my desk, my laptop is docked and the various accessories live in the dock. It's really only when I travel or want to use that headset to take a zoom call on my computer from the couch that I find myself missing it. I'd love to just leave that tiny dongle live in the laptop all the time instead of retrieving it (plus usb-c to usb-a adapter) as I'm setting up for the call.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Unifying-receiver-keyboard-Logitech-c... [2]: https://www.amazon.com/ELECOM-M-XT3DRBK-Wireless-Trackball-f... [3]: http://www.qtooth.com/plantronics-voyager-legend-uc-bluetoot...

Wow, thanks for the link to DFeed. That seems like a route I might want to pursue for a community forum I'm planning.