● 07.02.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 02/07/2023: Independence Day and Consequences of Running Leftist Communities

Posted in News Roundup at 5:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

Politics and World Events

• It’s around 11pm, the dog is trying to stand on the table and we’re anxiously watching the baby on the monitor as the sounds of *pops* and *booms* are all around us.

• We grilled up some burgers on the patio and watched our town’s firework display for Independence Day here in the US. Great show, and we could see it clearly from our house. We flew the drone up to capture most of the show. I noticed a few other blinking lights in the sky marking my neighbors doing the same. Unfortunately I wasn’t as prepared as them, as I ran out of battery before the finale.

Technology and Free Software

• Today, the administrators of kolektiva.social, a Mastodon instance that bills itself as a “free, non-corporate platform for anarchists and anti-colonial content producers looking to circumvent Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists,” announced that an unencrypted copy of their database circa May 2023 was seized by the FBI as part of an unrelated raid². The main content affected as part of this is all user account information and all posts, regardless of the post’s privacy level. It should be noted that direct messages on Mastodon require a copy to be stored on both your instance’s server and the target server, so the availability of these types of data is not unique. However, the failure to adequately handle potentially sensitive user data and to quickly communicate this breach shows me that kolektiva is falling prey to the lack of meaningful concern for its users that plagues most leftist spaces.

• [...]

• To be clear, this is no worse than corporate social media, which is often more than willing to hand over your unencrypted DMs to any government agency that asks for them. However, spaces that advertise themselves as places for activists to gather and work are essentially creating large databases of leftists that can be easily scooped up by the feds if that data isn’t secured.

• The Old Computer Challenge 2023[1][2] is coming up in little over a week and I’ve planned this weekend to get things set up for it. The idea of the challenge is simple: to use a computer with maximum 512m ram, 1 core and the lowest cpu frequency, for one week, and see what happens. The challenge runs from July 10th to 16th and this will be my first OCC, as I (regrettably) had never heard of it before. But let’s get started!

• [...]

• So far, the first steps into setting up OpenBSD made me both really excited but also very aware of the limitations of the device. I already had to reinstall the OS once after the /usr partition was full due to me setting up ports. Speaking of… extracting the ports.tar.gz file took a whopping 30 minutes (for reference, this takes about 15 seconds on my M1 mac).

Internet/Gemini

• I stopped hosting fedi. Deleted my alt account as well. i’m going through my phase of not socializing a lot anymore, or at least, trying something different.

• right now i’m only hosting gemini and xmpp over a dynamic dns. so please, if you wanna reach out, xmpp is my preference (i can email too, though!)

• Had a horribly distracted morning again, but just couldn’t let this one go.

• The final thing on my todo list for my AmiGemini setup was getting a comfortable line length, without excessive window decorations.

• Being the odd little duckling that I am. I’m not really a fan of anything more than 10-12 words per screen width of text.

• Without excessively large fonts. AmiGemini when in full screen mode therefore is quite uncomfortable for me to read in.

• There are many projects, most of them only designed, which domains have been bought for. Being sensitive, these were reserved where original personal member domains were reserved. Unfortunately, this was very convenient, because we used Google Domains.

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