nicoco

Oh, that's my little project. I planned on doing a show HN in a few days or so, but someone was faster than me. I'm happy to answer any question.

Slidge even has a hackernews plugin, to be notified of replies to your comments and to re-reply from you XMPP client. ;)

This guy apparently took the time to propose counter arguments: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362959885_A_note_on...

The article mentions using chatty for SMSes which also happens to be an XMPP client, then a few workarounds to get discord and signal on their phone. It's shameless plug time for me, as I'm developing XMPP gateways for both these chat networks as part of my slidge[1] project. The only other user besides me was precisely interested in getting signal support on their pinephone.

[1] https://sr.ht/~nicoco/slidge/

But lying, manipulating your emotions, etc. are efficient ways of doing ads. If something is OK when done poorly and harmful when optimised, maybe it was a bad thing in the first place?

Most of these issues require a malicious user, right? I think none of them really are a problem for a friends-and-family instance (as long as they don't get their creds stolen obv). For a single-user usage, none of these really are issues, are they?

I'm surprised not to find any mention of Chomsky here and his "new pascal wager".

> Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.

Aren't there ads in the task bar and start menu?

You can easily block any XMPP address you want. Why are you spreading FUD like this?

You quote a comment where I present several options to solve a problem I have never experienced on XMPP (spam). How does that illustrate "critical features [not being] there"?

> I found that in practice it doesn't work

May I suggest you give it another try? It has been steadily working for me for a few years now. (Conversations/gajim/dino/siskin-im/beagle for the clients, and prosody server side)

> because their server hasn't enabled the necessary XEPs

Changing to a server that does is not a big deal, since most (all?) XMPP clients allow multiaccounting.

> it's a super fragmented experience

What you call fragmentation I would call diversity, and I think it is a good thing.

> Most users do not (and should not need to) know the technical details

I agree that a certain level of abstraction is necessary to use complicated stuff. However, I think not having the slightest idea of things work is a problem, and leads to alienation.

What I meant what "who you talk to and how often you do" is as valuable as "what you say".

> If they didn't care about the content of your message

I'm not saying they don't care, just that e2ee in a centralised platform whose business is data collecting does not accomplish as much as one can think.

> why would they ask signal to help them add ee2e in the first place.

"Marketing" is why.

I think that beside the scary name, not forcing 'apps' into user's devices and via massive advertising is what makes XMPP not so popular. https://snikket.org/ is an attempt to 'rebrand' XMPP into something that should be more familiar to non-hackers.

I think you can block a user easily if your server supports XEP-0191, or if it implements some sort of blacklisting. I am unsure about blocking client side, since I never needed it (yet?).

It is probably due to XMPP's lack of popularity, but FWIW I have been using my XMPP for about 4 years and have not received a single unsolicited message yet.

E2EE in WhatsApp is here because Meta does not care about the content of your messages. Analyzing natural language is hard anyway, whereas determining who you are, what you aspire to, and how to trick you into thinking your life won't be whole until you buy $PRODUCT is scandalously easy given your (weighted) relational graph.

No mention of XMPP so I'll be that guy.

XMPP has a variety of clients for about all platforms, is federated, can (optionally) be e2ee. Its most used client on Android is user-friendly and has built-in (optional, again) tor support. On a cheap vps you can easily run a server with many users. I think it deserves a little more love than it receives.

Modifying gorillas? You and your and friends were rockstar programmers already. I remember looking at the source code and thinking "this must be black magic".

Thanks for bringing back the memories though. I looooved playing gorillas!

You have a valid point here. It's probably utopian, but to me the only reasonable answer to this is to acknowledge that science is a collective process. Of course, this goes against the (stupid) idea that some extremely deserving geniuses are the ones that make science...

This is an interesting idea. Although I am afraid that publishing a dataset, even a good one, will not be considered "real science" by our (broken) institutions.

From my experience in the digital health sector, concerns for privacy is always the reason given for not sharing anything valuable and/or useful to others. But it's just a convenient way of hiding the 'desire of commercialisation'.

Funny, a stable release is the main reason why I choose Debian over anything else. I enjoy that it doesn't change too much. And for the occasional software for which I really want (rarely need) the upstream version, backports, flatpak, docker or compile from sources got me covered.

But the beauty of libre software is its diversity. Keep on using what you like ;)

koreader is great and also works on (some?) kobo devices.

>as simple as uploading it to my hosted instance of calibre-web, and then next time I pick up my kobo it will automatically download it.

Wow, sounds really nice, you got my attention! My stack to achieve the same result is a bit more complicated: I installed KOreader on my device, and it can read calibre's OPDS catalog feed. KOreader has some other niceties that I enjoy, mostly wallabag support.

How do you trick the native kodo firmware? Does it work outside your home network?

This would be interesting indeed. But it wouldn't be enough to really appreciate the paper's value. Often times a paper is cited because it is related 'prior work', even if it's crap. This can happen because a reviewer asks it. Sometimes the reviewer is the crap's author, for instance. Yes, many things are broken about bibliometry and scientific publishing in general.

The author is aware of this. At the bottom of the article:

> Please don’t contact me to “well ackchyually” me and explain MITM attacks and how your terrible ISP inserts ads into your unencrypted web pages

Care to elaborate why?

Well I was surprised to receive the "lettre avec accusé de réception" recently. So HADOPI's not dead yet, unfortunately...

Ineffective to prevent torrenting, they definitely are. But I think they are winning on the ideas front unfortunately. The idea that 'pirating' is immoral has made its way to the general public. I wonder if I'll see the time where everyone is convinced that you're stealing something when you lend a book to a friend, or when you play music in your house and some people that aren't spotify subscribers can hear it.

Because I don't care? What worse can happen to me?

I firmly believe that sharing "cultural products" (sic) between individuals not seeking profit should not be illegal, and that any attempt to restrict this is vain at best, and most likely counter-productive for society as a whole.

>None of us knew we needed Steve’s devices until they were given to us.

I have recently been given a $2500 toy by $EMPLOYER$ and I still don't need it.

Personal anecdote aside, is this post seriously advocating for creating needs from scratch?

Not in France, at least not immediately. The antipiracy authority first sends you an email (1st warning), then an IRL letter (2nd warning). When you receive the IRL letter, THEN you should VPN (or SOCKS or whatever) for one year, then you can go turn it off until you receive your 2nd warning again, if that happens.

I received my fair share of 1st warnings during the past ~15 years. I only received my first 2nd warning this year. I configured a systemd service `ssh -D myvps` and configured deluged to use this SOCKS5 proxy. Waiting for next April to turn it off...

I cannot listen to music whenever I do anything else than a braindead repetitive chore. I've always thought that the fact that I am a musician is related; I think I cannot help but try and analyze the music I listen to.

However, I enjoy playing 'strategic', puzzle-like videogames and the soundtrack usually is not a problem for me, although I rarely enjoy listening to it. Are the videogames I play braindead repetitive or should I try to listen to videogame soundtracks when I work?