iSurf Social Registrations open again!
Hi all!
Well, with some of the bugfixes and improvements that have gone in with system cleanup and performance, I've been able to re-enable some cleanup settings. That, in turn, has led me to re-open registrations for new accounts here.
If you know of anyone who's been looking to give a North American Friendica setup a go, do let them know!
https://www.businessinsider.com/congress-made-amazon-apple-facebook-google-ceos-sweat-during-hearing-2020-7?op=1 
Now we know what Jeff Bezos' worried face looks like
Some grandstanding by GOP members aside, the lawmakers in Wednesday's hearing with the CEOs of four major tech companies asked insightful questions.www.businessinsider.com
iOS Shortcut to record police interaction.
If you and/or someone you know use iOS, someone made a very handy Shortcut task to automatically record, notify a contact, and upload a video if you get pulled over. I just discovered Shortcuts on my iPhone, and seems like a very powerful way to program tasks.
https://www.khou.com/mobile/article/news/hey-siri-im-getting-pulled-over-new-shortcuts-app-allows-users-to-quickly-record-police/83-600653116
https://www.khou.com/mobile/article/news/hey-siri-im-getting-pulled-over-new-shortcuts-app-allows-users-to-quickly-record-police/83-600653116
'Hey Siri, I'm Getting Pulled Over' New Shortcuts App Allows Users To Quickly Record Police
Police say they're used to being recorded and have no problems with you using the shortcut.www.khou.com
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Spring has sprung
...and apparently we’ve been deemed the house for orphaned wildlife. Also have a resident baby robin.
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World Backup Day coming soon!
Coronavirus bound? A perfect weekend project: Backup your data
Online tools from Google, Apple and others are the easiest, but not the most economical. However, they are the safest.www.usatoday.com
iFixit is building a repair database for medical equipment, and it needs your help - A call for service manuals
Repair specialist iFixit is building a database filled with repair information for the world’s hospital equipment in anticipation of the increased demand caused by COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. In particular, it’s calling for repair manuals for ventilators and BiPAP machines that can be used as ventilators. iFixit’s database can be found here, and the company is calling for people to create new device pages and upload photographs and manuals.
The reasoning behind creating the database is simple: as the novel coronavirus spreads, the experience of Italian and Chinese hospitals suggests that the world’s supply of ventilators is going to be placed under huge stress, making it essential that these can be repaired quickly if and when they break down. This equipment will be an essential part of treating anyone who develops respiratory problems as a result of COVID-19.
See iFixit is building a repair database for medical equipment, and it needs your help
#technology #health #covid19It also plans to make repair guides.
https://gadgeteer.co.za/ifixit-building-repair-database-medical-equipment-and-it-needs-your-help-call-service-manualsiFixit is building a repair database for medical equipment, and it needs your help
It also plans to make repair guides.www.theverge.com
Simulating Social Distancing
A great, visual article on the effect of various amounts of #socialdistancing on a virus like the one causing #COVID19 .
These simulations show how to flatten the coronavirus growth curve
The early trickle of new coronavirus infections has turned into a steady current. By creating simple simulations, we can see how to slow it down.www.washingtonpost.com
Help fight COVID-19!
Since I have some CPU cycles to spare on my personal server at home, I decided to contribute computational power to Folding@Home to help fight coronavirus. Thanks @Hank G for posting the article for the idea!
I encourage everyone to download Folding@Home in some fashion to help with computational power. They even have ones for Android, so if you have an old phone lying around you can use that too!
Download at: https://foldingathome.org/alternative-downloads/
I encourage everyone to download Folding@Home in some fashion to help with computational power. They even have ones for Android, so if you have an old phone lying around you can use that too!
Download at: https://foldingathome.org/alternative-downloads/
2 people like this
Friendica 2020.03 Release Candidate (RC) available for testing
Today we have branched of the release candidate (RC) of the upcoming Friendica 2020.03 version. We’d like to invite you to test the code so that some last rough edges can be smoothed out prior to the release.
The release contains many bug fixes (about 40% of the pull request were aimed to this goal) but also some new features. Some highlights from the upcoming release:
- The multiple profile feature was removed and replaced by free form profile fields that you can present different audiences (unverified visitors of your profile and selected Friendica contact/-groups). The old (additional) profiles are converted automatically for the new format.
- The hide-wall profile option was replaced by a hopefully more clear option to have your public postings unlisted on the community page of your node.
- The creation of delegated accounts was made more easy.
- The accessibility of the web-interface was improved.
- Admins can now manage the users of their node from the command line.
- An addon to use Markdown instead of BBCode while composing new postings and comments was added.
Important
Please remember that Friendica now needs at least PHP version 7.0 and MySQL 5.6 (or equivalent) installed on the server to function properly.How to help testing the release candidate?
Assuming that you are running the 2019.12 version of Friendica and that you have installed via git: Please pull the current sources for the core of Friendica and the addons from github. You should see a notification about a new branch called 2020.03-rc during the pull. in both repositories. You just need to checkout this branch with agit checkout 2020.03-rc
and remember to follow the usual steps after updating using git. Please report any issues you encounter using either the issue tracker at github or the Friendica support or admin forums.
Thanks for testing the new code with us!Should the DB update process get stuck
If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script./bin/console dbstructure update
from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned above.
https://friendi.ca/2020/03/08/friendica-2020-03-release-candidate-rc-available-for-testing/
If you have a .org domain name: go renew it now. For the full 10 years.
Registration rights for .org were just bought by a private equity firm. And as part of that contract, the price caps were removed.
Anything in .org will get much more expensive, soon.
A ten year renewal will cost you a bit over a hundred bucks. Which is probably less than one year will cost you in the very near future.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/20/org_registry_sale_shambles/
Wow, and this is from a Republican who's been on the inside! 
Trump administration official resigns, calls for student debt forgiveness
A. Wayne Johnson had been COO of the Office of Federal Student Aid, which manages the country's $1.6 trillion outstanding student loan portfolio.www.cnbc.com
Ray Bernache likes this.
Vision Quest
Even tech-savvy people can fall victim to spear phishing attacks. This cautionary tale by @RobJHeaton shows how creative hackers can be. The lesson here? Never click on a link from someone you don’t know unless you’re 100% sure it’s legitimate. https://robertheaton.com/2019/06/24/i-was-7-words-away-from-being-spear-phished/
Kenny Chaffin likes this.
New House, New Rules
I suppose moving to a different municipality means that the ISP (which is the same one I had before) enforces ipv6 a lot more than before. That means it's messing with my laptop's ability to resolve hostnames, use Skype, and I had to add some extra configuration to all of my nginx configuration files for ipv6 listening.
In other words, the joys of moving/owning your own house.
In other words, the joys of moving/owning your own house.
Kenny Chaffin likes this.
hello world (redux)
Server is back online! Excited to be back on the federation/fediverse.
alysonsee (Fca) likes this.
Lucky you, who can be heard by friends. When I brought back my server a huge design failure made it so that I could not connect to friends again ...
https://github.com/friendica/friendica/issues/3466
The saddest thing is to see a "cant fix" label attached to a Free Software issue... Doesn't make sense, does it ?
https://github.com/friendica/friendica/issues/3466
The saddest thing is to see a "cant fix" label attached to a Free Software issue... Doesn't make sense, does it ?
Off the grid
jb-net.us will be going off line for about a week while I move into my new house. I apologize to all of the admins in advance for all of the "message not delivered" errors to my node. 
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@Michael Warburton Thanks! You never appreciate (or wince at) the amount of stuff you have until you have to move it all...
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**Sidestepping Apple: the third-party tinkerers fighting for your right to repair
| The Guardian**hen Jessa Jones’s twin daughters flushed her iPhone 4S down the toilet, she decided that she was going to fix it herself. She took the toilet apart in her backyard, retrieved the device, and then searched online for how to make it turn on again.
She not only went on to fix it, she started a repair business.Jones soon had more business than she could handle. After recruiting other stay-at-home moms in her neighborhood and teaching them electronics repair, she launched a small business from her dining room called MommyFixits.
#technology #mobileSidestepping Apple: the third-party tinkerers fighting for your right to repair
Online repair communities are spreading repair knowledge online to place power back in the hands of consumerswww.theguardian.com
Back from isolation!
Internet was down for a few days. Finally got repaired with a new modem and back on the fediverseration!
alysonsee (Fca) likes this.
Derp. 
Facebook stored millions of Instagram passwords in plain text
A lot more than initially stated.www.theverge.com
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Take a Hike
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
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@alysonsee (Fca) it was a wonderful day. Full disclosure, took a "mental health day" (i.e., sick leave) to go. Work's been crazy, but sometimes you just have to make the time.
alysonsee (Fca) likes this.
Your password may be weaker than you think. Learn about how passwords get hacked and how to create a strong password: https://protonmail.com/blog/how-to-create-a-strong-password/
3 people like this
Welcome to the new We Distribute!
We Distribute is my years-long-in-the-making project to document and write about free software, decentralization and federated social technologies. It has taken many forms over the years, ranging from small news bulletins talking about what a given project was doing, to detailed overviews of how these different systems actually work, and interviews with the people who are building them.
This status is a statement of intent to bring this project into its next phase: a media publication focused on bringing news about these things directly to the fediverse itself. How, you may ask?
Firstly, We Distribute is moving off of Medium.com, and opt instead to self-host using only Free Software. Our site doesn't serve ads, doesn't use paywalls, and doesn't limit how many articles you can read. We don't collect personal data on you, and we give every article away for free under the Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution Share-Alike license.
Secondly, our publication feeds directly into the fediverse. We're using the ActivityPub protocol to talk to the federated social web. What this means is that if you have an account in the fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, Hubzilla, and a growing list), you will be able to subscribe to this site (blog@wedistribute.org) and comment on our articles through your social stream reading applications of choice.
All you have to do is subscribe to blog@wedistribute.org using your fediverse client of choice.
There are currently some kinks in federating with certain kinds of platforms, but we're doing our best to work them out. Articles that exist before today will not be able to federate because they are older, and existed before our federation plugin was implemented (Pterotype doesn't appear to like content made prior to itself being activated).
We're working hard to prepare for a new and improved writing cycle, which means more quality article in less turnaround time. This will include:We're excited about starting off March 2019 strong. Please keep an eye on this space as we continue to grow and develop!
- News
- Interviews
- Reviews
- Demos
- Opinion Pieces
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JB Carroll 5 months ago
Best cheap hardware to run Nextcloud on?