• 0 Posts
  • 44 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
cake
Cake day: September 14th, 2025

help-circle
  • The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it.

    We already declared that with the advent of photoshop.

    I think that this is “video” as in “moving images”. Photoshop isn’t a fantastic tool for fabricating video (though, given enough time and expense, I suppose that it’d be theoretically possible to do it, frame-by-frame). In the past, the limitations of software have made it much harder to doctor up — not impossible, as Hollywood creates imaginary worlds, but much harder, more expensive, and requiring more expertise — to falsify a video of someone than a single still image of them.

    I don’t think that this is the “end of truth”. There was a world before photography and audio recordings. We had ways of dealing with that. Like, we’d have reputable organizations whose role it was to send someone to various events to attest to them, and place their reputation at stake. We can, if need be, return to that.

    And it may very well be that we can create new forms of recording that are more-difficult to falsify. A while back, to help deal with widespread printing technology making counterfeiting easier, we rolled out holographic images, for example.

    I can imagine an Internet-connected camera — as on a cell phone — that sends a hash of the image to a trusted server and obtains a timestamped, cryptographic signature. That doesn’t stop before-the-fact forgeries, but it does deal with things that are fabricated after-the-fact, stuff like this:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_guy



  • tal@olio.cafetoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe Web is Going to Die
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    That depends on how you define the web

    Wikipedia:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

    The Gopher protocol (/ˈɡoʊfər/ ⓘ) is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.[1]

    gopher.floodgap.com is one of the last running Gopher servers, was the one that I usually used as a starting point when firing up a gopher client. It has a Web gateway up:

    https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/

    Gopher is a well-known information access protocol that predates the World Wide Web, developed at the University of Minnesota during the early 1990s. What is Gopher? (Gopher-hosted, via the Public Proxy)

    This proxy is for Gopher resources only – using it to access websites won’t work and is logged!



  • tal@olio.cafetoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe Web is Going to Die
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer?

    Gopher predated the Web.

    I do agree that there have been pretty major changes in the way websites worked, though. I’m not hand-coding pages using a very light, Markdown-like syntax with <em></em>, <a href=""></a>, and <h1></h1> anymore, for example.


  • tal@olio.cafetolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldDo you like systemd?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    It doesn’t work with private DNS servers or forward DNS over VPN.

    Like, you want to have it query some particular DNS server?

    From man 5 resolved.conf:

       DNS=
           A space-separated list of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to
           use as system DNS servers. 
    
           For compatibility reasons, if
           this setting is not specified, the DNS servers listed
           in /etc/resolv.conf are used instead, if that file
           exists and any servers are configured in it.
    

    If you specify your private server there, it should work. For VPN, I mean, whatever VPN software you’re using will need to plonk it in there. Maybe yours is not aware of systemd-resolved, is modifying /etc/resolv.conf after systemd-resolved has already started, and it doesn’t watch it for updates?

    In my /etc/nsswitch.conf, I have:

    hosts:          files myhostname mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] resolve [!UNAVAIL=return] dns
    

    I’m assuming that the “resolve” entry is for systemd-resolved.

    kagis

    https://www.procustodibus.com/blog/2022/03/wireguard-dns-config-for-systemd/

    With systemd-resolved, however, instead of using that DNS setting, add the following PostUp command to the [Interface] section of your WireGuard config file:

    PostUp = resolvectl dns %i 9.9.9.9#dns.quad9.net 149.112.112.112#dns.quad9.net; resolvectl domain %i ~.
    

    When you start your WireGuard interface up, this command will direct systemd-resolved to use the DNS server at 9.9.9.9 (or at 149.112.112.112, if 9.9.9.9 is not available) to resolve queries for any domain name.


  • It’s been a long time, but IIRC Windows’s file dialog also remembers your recently-used files for quick access in the file dialog, and I assume that Explorer has a thumbnail cache.

    It looks like GTK 3 has a toggle for recently-used files:

    https://linux.debian.user.narkive.com/m7SeBwTP/recently-used-xbel

    While the guy sounds kinda unhinged, I do think that he has a point — he doesn’t want activity dumping breadcrumbs everywhere, unbeknownst to him. That’s a legit ask. Firefox and Chrome added Incognito and Private Browsing mode because they recorded a bunch of state about what you were doing for History, and that’s awkward if it suddenly gets exposed. There should really be a straightforward way to globally disable this sort of thing, even if logged history can provide for convenient functionality.

    Emacs has a lot of functionality, but I don’t think anything I use actually retains state. If emacs can manage that so can oyher stuff. Hmm. Oh, etags will store a cached TAGS file for a source tree.

    thinks

    Historically, bash defaulted to saving ~/.bash_history on disk. Don’t recall if that changed at any point.

    There’s ccache, which caches binary objects from gcc compilations persistently.

    Firefox can persistently cache data in the disk cache or for LocalStorage or cookies.

    System logfiles might record some data baout the system though they generally get rotated out.

    Most of the time though, I don’t have a lot of recorded persistent state floating around.







  • I don’t see why it would need to be affected.

    The constraint to require a valid signing isn’t something imposed by the license on the Android code. If you want to distribute a version of Android that doesn’t check for a registered signature, that should work fine.

    I mean, the Graphene guys could impose that constraint. But they don’t have to do so.

    I think that there’s a larger issue of practicality, though. Stuff like F-Droid works in part because you don’t need to install an alternative firmware on your phone — it’s not hard to install an alternate app store with the stock firmware. If suddenly using a package from a developer that isn’t registered with Google requires installing an alternate firmware, that’s going to severely limit the potential userbase for that package.

    Even if you can handle installing the alternate firmware, a lot of developers probably just aren’t going to bother trying to develop software without being registered.



  • I’m not familiar with Arch’s updating scheme, but I’d bet that it’s pretty similar to Red Hat’s and Debian’s. If you don’t complete an update, boot it up — even if it’s in a semi-broken state — and just start the update again. Even if the thing dies right in the middle of updating something boot-critical, so that it can’t boot, you can probably just use liveboot media, mount the drives in question, start a chrooted-to-your-regular-root-partition root shell, and restart the update.

    Doing that and installing or reinstalling packages is a pretty potent tool to fix a system. It’s not absolutely impossible that you can manage to hork a system up badly enough to render it still unusable in that situation — I once wiped ld.so from a system, for example, and had to grab another copy and manually put it in place to get stuff dynamically-linked stuff like the package manager working again. But that’ll deal with the great majority of problems you could create.




  • You can get inkjet printers that don’t have restrictions on the ink. They cost more, though.

    The reason printer manufacturers are so hell-bent on being a pain in the ass with the ink is because they’re using a razor-and-blades model. They’re selling you the printer at a lower price than they really should, if their price reflected their costs, with the expectation that they’ll make their money back when you buy ink at a higher price than you really should, because people pay more attention to the the initial price of the printer than to the consumable costs.

    Same way you can get unlocked cell phones instead of network-locked cell phones with a plan. Gaming PCs instead of consoles. It’s not that they’re unavailable, but you’re gonna have to accept a higher up-front cost, because you’re not getting a subsidy from the manufacturer.

    Canon sells a line of inkjet printers that just take ink from a bottle. No hassles with restrictions on ink supply there. The ink is cheap, and there are third-party options that are even cheaper readily available…but you’re going to pay full price for the printer.

    https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/printers/megatank-printers

    Their lowest-end “MegaTank” printer is $230:

    https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/megatank-pixma-g3290

    A pack of third-party ink refill bottles is $15, and will print (using Canon’s metrics), about 7,700 color pages and 9,000 black-and-white pages:

    https://www.amazon.com/Refill-Compatible-Bottles-MegaTank-4-Pack/dp/B0DSPSS5W7

    Compatible GI-21 Black Ink Bottle Up to 9,000 pages, GI-21 Cyan/Magenta/Yellow Ink Bottles Up to 7,700 pages

    On the other hand, Canon’s lowest-end “cartridge” printer, where they use the razor-and-blades model, is $55.

    https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/pixma-ts3720-wireless-home-all-in-one-printer

    But you rapidly pay for it with the ink; It looks like they presently sell a set of replacement cartridges for $91. And that set will print a tiny fraction of the number of pages that the above ink bottles will print.

    page yield of 400 Black / 400 Color pages per ink cartridge set and cost of $90.99 for a value pack of PG-285(XL) and CL-286(XL) ink cartridges (using Canon Online Store prices as of June 2025).

    So if you really do want to do photo prints with an inkjet without dealing with all the DRM-on-ink stuff, you can do it today. But…you’re going to pay more for the printer.

    All that being said, I do think that lasers are awfully nice in that you don’t need to deal with nozzles clogging. You can leave a laser printer for years and it’ll just work when you start it up. If you don’t need photo output, just less hassle.



  • tal@olio.cafetoTechnology@lemmy.world60hz Displays are a slideshow
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    I’m the other way. I’d rather have battery life on cell phones, and turn the refresh rate down.

    On a desktop, where the power usage is basically irrelevant, then sure, I’ll crank the refresh rate way up. One of the most-immediately-noticeable things is the mouse pointer, and that doesn’t exist on touch interfaces.