A threat model for opposing authoritarianism
A decade ago, I published a book on privacy “Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance.” In the book, and since then, in articles and speeches, I have been dispensing advice to people on how to protect their privacy. But my advice did not envision the moment we are in – where the government would collaborate with a tech CEO to strip-mine all of our data from government databases and use i … ⌘ Read more

Zoom Outage Caused by Accidental ‘Shutting Down’ of the Zoom.us Domain
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Even though I really do like the shell, I always use Dolphin to mount my digicam SD card and copy the photos onto my computer. I finally added a context menu item in Dolphin to create a forest stroll directory with the current date in order to save some typing:

Image

The following goes in ~/.local/share/kservices5/ServiceMenus/galmkdir.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Service
X-KDE-ServiceTypes=KonqPopupMenu/Plugin,inode/directory
Actions=Waldspaziergang;

[Desktop Action Waldspaziergang]
Name=Heutigen Waldspaziergang anlegen…
Icon=folder-green
Exec=~/src/gelbariab/galmkdir "%f"

In order to update the KDE desktop cache and make this action menu item available in Dolphin, I ran:

kbuildsycoca5

The referenced galmkdir script looks like that:

#!/bin/sh
set -e

current_dir="$1"
if [ -z "$current_dir" ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 DIRECTORY" >&2
    exit 1
fi

dir="$(kdialog \
    --geometry 350x50 \
    --title "Heutigen Waldspaziergang anlegen" \
    --inputbox "Neues Verzeichnis in „$current_dir“ anlegen:" \
    "waldspaziergang-$(date +%Y-%m-%d)")"
mkdir "$current_dir/$dir"
dolphin "$current_dir/$dir"

This solution is far from perfect, though. Ideally, I’d love to have it in the “Create New” menu instead of the “Actions” menu. But that doesn’t really work. I cannot define a default directory name, not to mention even a dynamic one with the current date. (I would have to update the .desktop file every day or so.) I also failed to create an empty directory. I somehow managed to create a directory with some other templates in it for some reason I do not really understand.

Let’s see how that works out in the next days. If I like it, I might define a few more default directory names.

@xuu@txt.sour.is like, badly broken. I mean, the guy doesn’t even use twtxt (it is more like an RSS feed for him). So, yeah, even if it was the correct mention it would never reach the intended ears. 😂

Tell HN: Warning Google trains on your data when using aistudio.google.com
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Just keeping this shell alive, and sending an useful twtxt in the process. :-P

Dirty tricks 6502 programmers use
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@bender@twtxt.net I don’t no. I mostly just use whole themes. And my facourite it AMOLED

@prologic@twtxt.net I am just going over things. I don’t use it, do you?

Mark Zuckerberg’s failed negotiations with the FTC to end Meta’s antitrust case
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The captchas have become sentient: we’re working on fixing the captcha issue
As some of you may have noticed, we’ve been having some issues with captchas. The powers that be – which isn’t me, I don’t know anything about web development – are looking into it, and once we’ve pinpointed the problem we’ll get it fixed. It’s annoying us too, so we want this resolved as quickly as possible. OSNews readers just trying to visit the site to read some tech stuff shou … ⌘ Read more

Hahaha! And now they show tiny! I had to reload the page. So, I see the problem on iOS and macOS Safari too. I have no other browser to test with, I exclusively use Safari.

Show HN: I made a tool to send a letter now people use it to just print
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my main itch with the DMs extensions is that these messages are intended to be private, not public information. That’s why other extensions make sense, but DMs are another kind of feature.
TwiXter, Mastodon, FB and some other services usually hide the DMs in another section, so they are not mixed with the public timeline.

I find the DM topic interesting, I even made an indie experiment for a centralized messaging system here https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/owl.
Although, as I’ve said a few times here, I’m not particularly interested in supporting it on microblogging, as I don’t use it that much. In the rare case I’ve used them, I don’t have to manage public and private keys, and finally none of my acquaintances use encrypted email.
Nothing personal against anyone, and although I like to debate and even fight, it’s not the case here. This proposal is the only one allowing DMs on twtxt, and if the community wants it, I’ll support it, with my personal input, of course.

A good approach I could find with a good compromise between compatibility with current clients and keeping these messages private is ‘hiding’ the DMs in comments. For example:
# 2025-04-13T11:02:12+02:00 !<dm-echo https://dm-echo.andros.dev/twtxt.txt> U2FsdGVkX1+QmwBNmk9Yu9jvazVRFPS2TGJRGle/BDDzFult6zCtxNhJrV0g+sx0EIKbjL2a9QpCT5C0Z2qWvw==

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev I don’t see any “fighting” here. This is just good experimentation. Unfortunately there hasn’t really been enough time or effort by other “client authors” yet, me especially as I’ve been super busy with ya’ know my “day job” that pays the bills and refactoring yarnd to use a new and shiny and much better SqliteCache 🤣 – I certainly don’t think your efforts are wasted at all. I would however like @doesnm.p.psf.lt@doesnm.p.psf.lt encourage you to look at the work we’ve done as a community (which was also driven out of the Yarn.social / Twtxt community years back).

Understanding US Power Outages – By Brian Potter
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EC issues burner phones for visits to US
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@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net @eapl.me@eapl.me I think opening another file is a bad idea because it adds complexity to the clients, breaks the single feed and I think keeping legacy clients will be more complex to add new features in the future. A modern approach is important.
I’ll be honest, I’m a bit tired of the fight around the direct message. Perhaps, we can remove it as an extension and use the alternative @prologic@twtxt.net . My suggestion apparently doesn’t like to the community. I have no problem with remove it.

Overuse of CT scans could cause 100k extra cancers in US
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How I Don’t Use LLMs
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@andros@twtxt.andros.dev maybe create a separate, completely distinct feed for DM? That way, clients do not need to do anything, only those wanted to “talk in private” follow themselves, using their very special dm-only.txt feeds. 😂

The subjective charms of Objective-C
To argue that Objective-C resembles a metaphysically divine language, or even a good language, is like saying Shakespeare is best appreciated in pig latin. Objective-C is, at best, polarizing. Ridiculed for its unrelenting verbosity and peculiar square brackets, it is used only for building Mac and iPhone apps and would have faded into obscurity in the early 1990s had it not been for an unlikely quirk of history. Nevertheless, in my time working as a softwar … ⌘ Read more

Canadian math prodigy allegedly stole US$65M in crypto
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@eapl.me@eapl.me When it is up and running, I promise to add it to the specification. I will also include some corrections.
The nature of twtxt does not allow us to selectively hide clients. It’s a problem not with DM, but with any extension.
@prologic@twtxt.net Yes, it is a security hole. All dm-echo messages are readable. I intend it to be a debugging tool. Maybe I can include a warning message. If many of you see that it is a serious problem, I can remove the links.
@xuu@txt.sour.is It’s already much better than Mastodon :P . Maybe we can remove the sender and receiver references with an intermediary register.

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t know, maybe it will be useful for someone 😇

First global fee targets ship emissions + 1 more story
High US-China tariffs disrupt trade, worry businesses; major nations agree on first global fee for ship emissions ⌘ Read more

US tech tariff exemption may only be temporary, says Lutnick
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@prologic@twtxt.net I hope it is as useful to you as it is to me 😋

I was trying to optimize the SQL query used for the Compact FrontPage (anonymous view for Discovery when the Admin/Operator chooses “one twt per feed”).

AI problems, top to bottom:

1: Open AI nerds, believe fine tuning a language model algorithm, will eventually produce an AGI god.

2: Subpar artists and techbros who can’t code, convinced AI image bashing and vibe coding, will help convince the dumber parts of Internet, they are a real deal.

3: Parasites, using AI to scam people, because they just want passive income, selling crap, made by an automated process.

Side: Adobe&co, killing Flash/old web, pricing new artists and developers out, to face learning curves of free tools, or use AI, peddled as solution.

Mark Klein, a Whistleblower Who Revealed Domestic Spying, Dies at 79
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US President endorses bill to lock the clocks in current Daylight Savings Time
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ABC Australia is reporting of a potential market manipulation in the US. Potential? I would call it almost certain. For as much as I would like not to be dragged into politics, it is rather impossible these days.

The phony comforts of useful idiots
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Default styles for H1 elements are changing
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SDL2 ported to Mac OS 9
Well, this you certainly don’t see every day. This is a “rough draft” of SDL2 for MacOS 9, using CodeWarrior Pro 6 and 7. Enough was done to get it building in CW, and the start of a “macosclassic” video driver was created. It DOES seem to basically work, but much still needs to be done. Event handling is just enough to handling Command-Q, there is no audio, etc etc etc. ↫ A cast of thousands The hardest part was a video driver for the classic Mac OS, which had to be created mostly f … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org that’s such a beautiful shot! If I were you I would use the full “original” one; it will do better justice to the shots. Oh, and I gladly take your 15°C! 😍

Aside from fetching feeds every three minutes (which kind of adds mystery to this puzzle), I think there is something else going on with the client you are using, @andros@twtxt.andros.dev. Some of those twtxts are seconds apart, making me truly stumped. 😅

Anthropic Education Report: How University Students Use Claude
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Show HN: I built an app to generate story relationships using Mermaidjs
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oh out of boredom yesterday i made my blog available via markdown files too so you can use charmbracelet/glow to read them in your terminal :)

basically i just set up a file directory on a path of my blog, organized the MD files by year, and so in theory you can navigate to that path and choose a folder, then copy a link to a markdown post and run this:

glow -p https://bubblegum.girlonthemoon.xyz/md/2025/2025-03-31%20premature%20reflections%20on%20sudden%20responsibility.md

and then as long as you have glow installed, you can read my posts from the terminal :D it’s so cool

guys omg the people behind pico.sh are so nice ;_; one of the people running it emailed me to let me know i had what was likely a malfunctioning (or well, not working as intended) script that was spawning the same SSH tunnel over and over and they wanted to give me a heads up.

and i felt SO BAD because i worried i was straining their service or something so i disabled my 4 tunnels (they were serving little SSH games and services) and got back to them.

but i just woke up to THE NICEST EMAIL EVER reassuring me that i was actually using it as intended, it was just my script that was having problems, and they even said that if it was intended to work that way it was fine and they just wanted to let me know!

so i restarted the tunnels but have since added lockfiles as safeguards so that when the script is run it’ll check if it’s already running :D

US increases China tariffs to 104%; China responds with 84%
China retaliates against US with new tariffs; UN considers first global shipping tax to cut emissions; NATO monitors China’s military activities near Taiwan. ⌘ Read more

@david@collantes.us yeah @movq@www.uninformativ.de and I discovered its a bug in lextwt last night 😢 We’ll fix it as soon as @xuu@txt.sour.is can 🤣

@david@collantes.us Yeah, we’ve been debugging that a bit yesterday. Looks like the wrong input (sometimes) gets fed to the hash function → broken threads.

Anyway. this was a good use for search btw. I couldn’t find my Twt, so I just quickly searched for it, snap, bingo I found it in a snap! 🫰

@david@collantes.us Ah, yes, the hardware might not. As I just said in the other thread: No problem, you can keep the same installation. I did so many times on my PC/laptop at work.

Toulouse University wants to host US researchers whose work is at risk
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Framework stops selling some laptops in the US in response to tariffs
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hello friends i spent a couple hours today using a random string generator by charm CLI called hotdiva2000 to make a script that 1) generates a static index.html page 2) the page is a prompt generator where all the prompts are from hotdiva2000!!!!!

this makes more sense if you look at it check it out

https://prompts.4-walls.net/hotdiva2004/