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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: November 3rd, 2021

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  • Well, I wouldn’t like AI in any communication client of mine. Perhaps if it’s local to my box I would like that, but this solution really seems cloud based, meaning one could have an AI crawling over one’s data, to do whatever it wants with it. And local solutions usually are not as “good” as the cloud ones for whatever reason (hardware availability, data, and so on):

    for users on less powerful hardware, the development team has integrated NVIDIA’s confidential computing to keep any remote processing secure. Rest assured, those who prefer to skip AI services can continue using Thunderbird without these extras.

    There’s still tuta, or even /e/ (now a days murena), which still seem safer privacy wise than this new thunderbird option.

    I’m really hoping for a “librewolf” kind of fork oriented to privacy, and betterbird doesn’t offer anything like that. The phoenix project has a safer user config for both firefox and thunderbird, but that doesn’t get rid of components (well perhaps it could possibly turn them off, though to make sure they better get ripped at build time).

    Does any one know if this new TB service would offer caldav and carddav services as well? I didn’t see anything on stalwart advertisement.


  • Is there any overlap between already FLOSS applications, whether for mobile (F-Droid for example) or desktop/laptop (GNU+linux for example) and this catalog? Known to date FLOSS applications coming from everywhere, Jami sources for example comes from France and the application is peer-to-peer, XMMP standard protocol specification is governed by the IETF XMPP working group having members from different countries and servers/clients open sources from different people and servers actually all over the world or self hosted… In other words, I don’t know if having an European catalog is what really matters.

    In my mind, no matter where you live, if you want your freedom[s] respected, you should prefer free/libre software, or at least open source, though in the later case it can be tweaked in ways ignored by you which might be dangerous or might not. If wanting privacy related applications, then the prior is a must but on top of that e2ee encryption is required, as minimal as possible personal information leakage, and hopefully using distributed applications mainly peer-to-peer though at least decentralized ones (hopefully self-hosting), and also security wise being externally audited if possible. I understand the EU requires the data to be stored and kept only within the EU, but that doesn’t guarantees privacy any ways, and we should learn that the best is not to trust our information to anyone, and better use peer-to-peer whenever possible or zero trust mechanisms with everything encrypted (protecting the user, not the spying mechanisms so called zero-trust, like falcon-sensor).

    So I’m a bit confused by people trusting a state or supra-state backed catalogs, when FLOSS should be what conscious users should be looking for. Interoperability is what really resonates to me, but open standards (open document standard comes to mind for example) if used or for example a simple particular version of markdown (the pandoc one for example) and so on, should guarantee that…


  • Actually, FLOSS is more precise, given the “L” coming from “libre” in castilian (spanish now a days) referring explicitly to freedom. But it so happen open source != free/libre software, therefore open source usually disregard the philosophic aspect of freedom, which might turn against the users interest, which is what GNU guys were trying to prevent all along, because focusing in the practical aspects, without any concern on the principals behind, actually do have implications on the software itself and its usage.




  • Ups, I just got to enjoy piped and in particular pipeline on gnu+linux and libretube on AOSP.

    Pipeline in particular allows to totally avoid electron (freetube), and in both cases the piped instance is the one communicating with youtube, not me, :) And both applications support sponsorblock (tubular does, but newpipe doesn’t). But not talking directly to youtube is a win. Did I mention dropping another electron app, :) ?

    But… I installed pipeline from AUR, because I don’t like flatpak… Not sure if other user repos offer it as well…



  • yes, but it’s mostly for open source apks, the beauty of apkupdater is that it allows installing/upgrading some apks from apkpure and other sources (it was true for apkmirror directing to the right place to download and install from the browser, but on apkmirror most apks now days don’t install/upgrade unless you install their own apkmirror app), avoiding google play and avoiding aurora store (which besides the issues with anonymous connections, it gets upgrades pretty late for some reason). That’s something I don’t see an alternative for. Yes, upkupdater also allowed to install/upgrade from github/gitlab/… but its major purpose to me, was to be able to install/upgrade some non open source stuff without the need to connect to google play, and using recognized and reputable mirrors like apkpure and when it was feasible apkmirror. For FLOSS I use f-droid (official repo, plus non official like “izzyondroid” and others). Unfortunately there are a few apps I’m forced to use, which are not open source…



  • Not sure what updates you are expecting to happen.

    I’m not aware of any effort trying to identify the traffic going in and out on Thunderbird under android. The guesses from the one reporting about what happens when configuring a new email account is of no use since it’s easily associated to Thunderbird looking for ways to easy automation on new accounts settings.

    Unless there’s a throughout analysis of the traffic, I’m not aware of anything to be expected. You can try reaching the one reporting his concern, and ask if he has looked into how to report an actual issue/bug to Thunderbird, or if someone else has done it


  • Quick question, why not considering lemmy as your “blog” provider? If the “community” concept wouldn’t apply, perhaps creating your own “community” and becoming its “mod”, disabling posts from others except yours, wouldn’t that work? Lemmy already provide RSS feeds so others can follow/track your posts without any lemmy account, just like with any blog providing RSS/atom feeds, and you get “blog” feedback through lemmy, but the same applies to other blog providers, only the ones subscribed can provide feedback.

    I was looking for an anonymous blogging mechanism with digital signature (not to identify the author but to verify its authenticity). Long story short, nothing out there seemed to really fit into what I was looking for, but among the suggestions lemmy was there as an option. You can avoid following anything, and looking into lemmy’s default from page, just use it to post and get feedback, forgetting about the social networks characteristics of lemmy, and make it work as your blog provider…


  • What they’re saying there is that when trying to auto detect the server configurations, there are unexpected connections to cloudfare IPs, which didn’t usually happen with K9. Who posted the concern associated this to telemetry, but the answers are pointing a different direction. But at this point it just guesses, :(

    I guess some more formal traffic inspection needs to happen to understand if truly there’s unexpected traffic, where it is directed to, and hopefully infer somehow its purpose. The guesses about what’s happening suggest it’s just about the auto connection, but again, just guesses.

    I explored the configurations, and I didn’t find anything about telemetry, and so neither how to disable it. K9 does not have an about:config advanced configuration like desktop Thunderbird does, so if there’s truly telemetry or some other sort of information leakage, then after proving it, perhaps developers realize they can do better. But so far nothing really proving telemetry or information leakage.



  • This banning culture of hate is ridiculous, you can disagree with someone, or even just ideas, but procuring “canceling” and “banning” to everything we don’t agree is crazy. This mono culture of hate really saddens me. But perhaps you’re right on your appreciation.

    Some of these periodical rebirths of the debate about RMS, what are really looking for is discredit on the Free software, which is not the same as open source software. Drew is one of those, if I’m not mistaken because his blog is prolific, who believe free software has no hope, and the total triumph of open source, which in practice is correct, but ethically I’m not so sure. We should be aware of what’s behind all these attacks, and I believe it’s naive to think these attacks are just about RMS. Free software is ethical in the sense of the freedoms it seeks for the users, but that has no place on enterprises and corporations, open source has enjoyed a different fate because it’s not as strict on respecting those freedoms, which under enterprises and corporations are believed to be too restrictive and against their interests. And here we are over and over attacking the organizations (yes, the FSF is attacked not only because RMS is part of it, it was founded by him as well) and people defending those principles, because in the end our minds tend to disqualify everything way too easily, made easy with this banning culture of hate. I’ve read about how useless it is the FSF, and also about how useless it is the copyleft, and these recurrent intend to discredit the one who started all that of course discredits what came from him, one way or another. I wish I’m wrong on this, and that there was no pun intended towards free software…

    The original post was most probably included into the wrong community for sure BTW, this is an open source community, so looking to empathize about free software stuff in here is not going to happen, even less for RMS.


  • kixik@lemmy.mltoLinux@programming.devConfused about linux as always
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    7 months ago

    Just a minor suggestion. When looking for something different than what you’re currently familiar with, do so in very open minded way, hopefully no looking for clones to what you were used to, but willing to experience and learn new stuff (there’s no failure, just something new that had to be learned and experienced).

    I know it’s easier saying than doing…

    Looking for advice on giant communities is sort of hard, and in the end you won’t know what works better for you if you don’t try it. The open mind needs to come with some time to be able to play, and enjoy during the play, so it’s not a whole series of frustrations.

    On this same forum (different threads/posts/converstions) I’ve read very different recommendations. Even though Manjaro has been recently getting a lot of bad reputation because of letting some certs expire, it’s still considered an “introductory” gnu + linux distribution. I’ve also read Mint is a pretty good “introductory” gnu + linux distribution as well, specially now that ubuntu has finally shown its inclination towards its snap store, rather than the good and solid dpkg + apt, which allowed it to grow on users to where it’s currently at.

    I myself prefer rolling release models for distributions, and being as vanilla as possible, to be closer to upstream as possible. However I dislike systemd, which is just a personal taste, so I don’t have a specific recommendation. It used to be Manjaro offered openrc, but they dropped it, and the distributions I know are Artix (it has gui installers if that’s considered “introduction” level distribution, but one still need to handle the configuration mismatches with upgrades as with Arch), Gentoo (I wouldn’t say it’s not for starters, but for sure it has its learning curve, but more importantly you need to be aware that it’s a source based distribution), and Void. If you don’t really care, rolling release distributions, which might have an easy ramp up might be Manjaro as mentioned, and now I believe openSUSE Tumbleweed. maybe even fedora come close… Rolling release models might come even easier for newcomers, in my opinion, since there’s no need to think on what happens on major updates, but rather one needs to keep updating periodically, but hopefully the distribution helps supporting the safest and saner configurations natively so the user, and particularly newcomer to the distribution don’t have to deal a lot to get such safe and sane configurations, at least to start with. And that’s to me the important part to call it “introductory” distribution, easy installation might be part of it, but it’s hardly the majority of it, and this is perhaps the sad part of what I like about being as vanilla as possible, some distributions even take that as a mantra for configurations, and upstream developers don’t always have the safer, or the saner configurations by default. I believe Manjaro and some others take that into account to make things smoother to start with. Maintaining the distribution, keeping it up to date, being able to install stuff, has it’s learning curve, no matter the tools/frameworks to do so, and it might be harder if one has to deal with how to make things work because the software doesn’t work as it should (configuration required upfront), and it’s not hardened enough as well so the user needs to know that and do additional configuration upfront as well.