JD Vance "is Thiel’s creature", so personalized mass-surveillance just started its way into the White House.¹
If you’re not a Trumpist, you can be sure that all your non-confidential communication will be analyzed and used against you, so use the remaining month you have to setup confidential communication with your friends.
Signal may suffice for the start, but if you want confidential metadata, you may want to run and connect Hyphanet now:
https://www.hyphanet.org/freenet-hyphanet-build-1498-debian-package-optimized-networking-layer-richer-websites-ux-safety.html
@ArneBab Sounds a lot like freenet, are there major differences?
@hllizi Hyphanet *is* Freenet, but we¹ were forced to rename because the creator of the project decided to take the name freenet for his new pet that doesn’t have privacy as its goal.
See https://www.hyphanet.org/freenet-renamed-to-hyphanet.html
¹ the people actually working on the project, doing releases and so on, but not sitting in the board of the non-profit. See the archived mailing list thread linked in the article if you want to know why along with the renaming also separated completely from FPI now.
@ArneBab ah, that's interesting and good to hear. Didn't the creator end up as a Trumpist?
@hllizi In the mailing list he said that he thinks democracy does not work for a project, so it’s pretty likely that he’s a Trumpist now — we have no more contact.
As a personal rant:
Such stuff is pretty high on the list of things you don’t want to deal with when you’re voluntary dev and release-manager of a project.
Together with all the problems that came along with that, it occupied at least half a year of my free time.
But it’s done since the release of 1498 and we’re moving forward.
@hllizi Takeaway for other projects: make sure that the "governing structure" (access to keys, domains, and such) does not deviate too much from the group of people doing the actual work.
He’d been separate from the project for a good decade, only doing bureaucratic stuff (filing finances of the non-profit) and when he decided to get active again it was "this all sucks, we’re doing this new thing now" — without even knowing what the project was capable of; when I showed him, that became clear.
@hllizi concrete example: he did not know that Freenet (now Hyphanet) already supported video on demand two years ago. That people were actively watching music videos on that fully decentralized, privacy preserving system.
Not in perfect quality, but good enough that most music videos were enjoyable. Conference talks and similar were no problem at all.
(currently that’s broken, because Mozilla removed Theora from Firefox and we need to validate data so the browser doesn’t leak private info)
@hllizi (as first step to regain that we need to add validation for webm and vp8 — we already have vorbis; with vp8 instead of theora quality should actually get much better)
Mozilla removed Theora from Firefoxoh, so that's what broke Internet Banking token-based authentication for me with abrowser 131. thank you (not), Mozilla!
@lxo removing Theora support broke token-based authentication? What did they test for?
@lxo so much for "isn’t used anyway"
The first to break it was Google, then Mozilla said "we’re the only implementation left, let’s remove it, too".
Google to "reduce exposure to codec risks" — so I get it that we’ll soon have broken GIF, too … (sorry, I’m a bit annoyed. A tiny bit).
@lxo See the references in my bug report:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1921407
⇒ the plan: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1860492#c0
⇒ another bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1918930
Their suggestion to cope with that: ask websites to embed a non-standard theora player that uses C transpiled to Javascript with emscripten:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1921407#c6
@lxo Their workaround might actually fix your problem, but I’m still pissed that they remove working codecs that are web standards.
As far as I know, killing Theora is the first time a web standard codec got removed.
@lxo here’s another recent bug, with "fix-optional" for FF 133 and "affected" for FF 134, so you creating an additional bug for your OTP may actually be significant:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1924070
"you broke my banking app" is a pretty strong argument not to break the web (far stronger than "you broke our fully decentralized video on demand system that happens to make people less dependent on your biggest donor").
@lxo Thank you!