Request creation of free software missing from the 🄯ommons 🗽🐧🐃

As a zero waste OCD nutter, I end up with a lot of TV and radio devices pulled from dumpsters and 2nd-hand markets. The remote controls (RCs) are almost always missing. For many devices, the whole fucking device becomes totally unusable without the RC. Which is probably why many devices end up in the trash -- because the remote was lost or chewed up by a dog.

Apparently humans have not evolved to be smart enough to create an open standard mandating that all appliances with remote controls have a published manual containing the IR signal specs for every function to then enable the signals to be reproduced.

Palm pilots (somewhat viable)

In the 1990s, Palm pilots had integrated infrared sensors w/LED. There was a very useful third-party app enabling physical remote controls to be copied. You could design your own button layout and have a tab for every RC. Of course the problem is that you needed the original RC as a source to copy.

Smartphones (nope)

Smartphones are worse than Palm pilots. IR sensors are RARE. There are IR dongles that can be attached to a smartphone (either USB or headphone jack). It’s a bit redicious if you have to have a dongle hanging off the edge of your phone wherever you go. The phone would not likely slide into an arm strap w/the dongle. So you wouldn’t carry it around, which means you have to keep track of it. It’s something else that can get lost (manufacturers and sellers love that feature).

Universal RCs (nope)

Like OEM remotes, these have a fixed set of buttons. But of course they have to try to guess what buttons will be needed. They include a database of hundreds of signal sets, but you are likely fucked if the device is an obscure or rebranded no name generic. I have radios that have the branding of the grocery store that sold them, FFS. No chance that would be in these preset DBs. I also have 4 different models of the same radio brand, and the RCs are incompatible w/each other same brand device (WTF).

The collective solution

Lobby for policy to force an open standard and then mandate the use of it.

The quazi individual solution (using smartphones)

1. Derive a list of smartphones with built-in IR sensors and LEDs.
2. Port a FOSS distro of some kind to all those phones.
3. Code 2 FOSS apps, one for linux distros and one for f-droid for AOS forks. Or make one app that’s ported to both.

The app should be able to record existing OEM RCs. And in the absence of the OEM RC, it should be able to sync to an open data crowd-sourced DB (which means it should also be able to export datasets to the project).

The quazi individual solution (using dumbphones)

A lot of Sony Ericsson feature phones have IR sensors and an LED for the purpose of syncing the contacts, SMSs, etc. The FOSS Gammu app exploits this. If an app could be pushed to those phones it would basically repurpose otherwise wasted dumbphones to help salvage otherwise wasted RC-less appliances.

Is it not embarrassing to mankind that there are many big brains making a huge effort to improve Netflix film recommendations based on past movie votes by like ½% of accuracy, and yet we have nothing of a kind for lawmakers who have a much more impact on our lives?

Let me score various laws:

• anti-immigration law X (-5 points)
• shitty law Y that snoops on people on a mass scale without warrants (-8 points)
• anti-cash law Z (-10 points)
• GDPR: great idea, giant step in the right direction, but weak enforcement by severely understaffed DPAs (+8 points)
• right to repair: going in the right direction, but took 10 fucking years just to get something that’s mostly toothless (+2 points)

I should also be able to browse laws that were never passed.. that got killed off and tossed aside; and score them too.

An app could harvest this information from the cloud, then use my scoring of various laws and ultimately work out which politicians and parties are my allies, and who are my adversaries. Then at election time I am not bogged down in last minute research that is mostly biased guesswork. I would have more confidence in my vote.

The MS Windows and Apple boot-licking communities have ABBYY FineReader. It does not produce LaTeX but it’s very slick and useful, as I mention here.

There is a linux CLI version but it’s not FOSS. It’s apparently not even software. It seems to just be a client that depends on a cloud service. So you have to trust them with your data and pay them too. Fuck all that, obviously.

IIUC, the library is FOSS 🎉

But what uses that NeoML library? If ABBYY’s FineReader uses it, then it’s the right logic.. so the hardest work may be done already. We just need a tool to use it. Docs are here -- and they’re a bit over my head.

A FOSS app could perhaps use NeoML and produce LaTeX output, which can then be edited.

Would someone please make that for me? 🙏

There are at least a dozen FOSS platforms for phones now. Off the top of my head:

• Replicant
• Jolla
• Sailfish
• Lineage
• PostmarketOS
• Graphene
• e/os

Several more were mentioned in a recent FOSDEM talk. It’s becoming unsurmountable for someone to search on which OS works to what extent on what device. These FOSS platforms all have wikis and various ad hoc scattered datasets that are not in a proper importable format, like JSON or XML.

As always with FOSS, it’s disorganised. We need every portable platform project to publish a dataset in a standard format and ideally in somewhat standardized tables so folks can grab all the datasets to search more sensibly. I should be able to run an SQL command to show, e.g., what all platforms are available on phone model X which have wifi capability. And the reverse.. I might want to say which phone has wi-fi support on the most linux-based OSs.

Personally I wouldn’t even need an app. Just datasets to import into SQLite. But an app would make the data useful for more people.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51259064

Shopping for airfare is clearly a game full of shenanigans. You find a cheap ticket, get a (likely fake) indicator warning how few seats are available with a countdown timer, rush through a lengthy process of being forced to make a shit-ton of decisions like whether you want to buy an neck wrap, selfie stick, a bad travel insurance deal, .. lots of shit to get through to slow you down. You finally get to the last screen and it says “price has increased since we first quoted you”. Motherfuckers.

Considering aircraft are quite shitty for climate, why not make the airlines shenanigans backfire against them? We have bots arbitrarily hit the air travel sites, enter bogus orders but never submit the last page. Just give the airlines a false indicator of demand. This games their dynamic pricing to quote prices higher than optimum. Any deviation from optimum prices translates into lower profit, likely a consequence of lower sales.

Perhaps an org like Greenpeace would be interested in this tactic.

Linked thread is the seed of the idea.

We need a tool that makes short work of ethical investors trying to find decent investments that align with their values.

Crowdsourcing the labor is be part of the answer. If I find myself aligned with person X, say Rutger Bregman or Noam Chomsky for example, in principle they could share their portfolio (or at least the portion of their portfolio they are proud of) and I could efficiently browse through and mirror the investments I agree with. Then do the same for the Dalai Lama, Richard Stallman, or whoever. Perhaps I could list people and orgs whose portfolios might be aligned with me and study the intersection of their common investments.

If @throwaway44056@lemmy.ml just focuses on muni bonds for cities with competent cycling infra, I would love to make use of his findings. If he is followed by others, it would inspire him to work harder on finding ethical investments because it would amplify his advocacy.

Consider as well how Netflix uses customer’s movie scores to make recommendations. A mechanism like that could also be adapted to investments. If you like to invest in Copenhagen bonds, perhaps you would also like bonds in various Dutch cities..

There could even be shared blacklists, where a researcher works out which corps are greenwashing abusively and shares the findings.

There could even be a fedi component whereby a thread might host a discussion for each investment.

🌱

In light of this news, we need a browser that looks like a search engine crawler.

This would equalise the problem of websites giving preferential treatment to crawlers and lousy treatment to the rest.

My question is: assuming all hearders could mimick a crawler, would that be sufficient? Or do paywalls take IP address into account? And if so, would it work to subscribe to Google Cloud just to get an IP address in Google’s ranges and use that for crawling?

First, I believe that currently there is only one Loops client, the official one. Most of the successful Fediverse platforms have a handful, all developed by different people with different preferences in mind. So, right off the bat, it'd be good if there were more.

Second, and not everyone agrees this is a problem, but Loops has been spammed with TikTok reposts since its inception. Again not everybody minds, but I know a lot of people do.

Third, the official TikTok would be very good to get away from, for lots of reasons everybody already knows. There are already alternative TikTok frontends like ProxiTok that allow one to access content there privately. However, it doesn't actually get people away from TikTok, ultimately.

So I think there should an app that combines your Loops and TikTok feeds, by being a client for one and a proxy for the other. It might cut down on people's urge to repost stuff on Loops, encourage new users to actually try Loops, and maybe even eventually ween some people off TikTok.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/46344922

Does anyone have any recommendations for a good open source journaling app that can rival Day One Journal?

I'm looking for something end-to-end encrypted—I know Day One claims to be E2E, but I'm not sure I trust it.

I use Joplin for my general note taking, but It's not really a suitable alternative for journaling.

There is a game, Arimaa, that was invented after humans finally got beat at Chess by machines. The idea was, design it so that the rules would be very easy for humans, but very difficult for computers. Also, make it playable (albeit less fun) with a standard Chess board. Unfortunately, it didn't take that long for computers to beat us at that too... However, it's still a really really cool game!

The community is tiny however, and there hasn't been any way to play online for a while, afaik. I just want a simple Android or web app for playing against bots, or more ambitiously, against other people. If I were to do it myself, I'd probably use Haxe since that's what I know, but honestly I'm not very good at coding.

If one existed, we could start a Lemmy community for it, and try to revitalize the Arimaa fanbase a bit. Maybe even use it to organize some small tournaments.

FOSDEM presenter Jah Kosha will pitch the idea that the web can be made inclusive by introducing some middleware called #akoopa to share websites using torrents. This is severely needed. I cannot even read legal statutes that I am bound by because the gov publishes law on exclusive websites.

It’s similar to my youtube-torrent idea:

https://libretechni.ca/post/420147

Not my idea.. I just saw this on the FOSDEM schedule. Seems like a great idea.

GUI web browsers are too fucking monolithic. This has enabled just 3 big corporations to dominate everyone’s web experience worldwide. The presenter (David Thompson) makes the reasonable claim that giant browsers block liberation and shrink competition. But if we break the browser up in to many small pieces, we have a fighting chance at liberation from web oppressors.

Banks are on an unstoppable uncontrolled trajectory in pursuit of KYC over-achievement. That is, they over-collect far more data on people than legally required (before it gets leaked to criminals in data breaches). Banks’ privacy policies are rife with anti-consumer weasel words.

It’s such a shit-show that privacy proponents have no real choice other than to quit banks and operate entirely with cash. Not many people have that level of discipline.

Software can turn this situation around. For example, there are ~6000 privacy-abusing banks and credit unions in the US. If a robot harvests all the privacy policies, fetches AOS apps to check permission reqs, records those with websites MitMd by Cloudflare, and uses all that info to find the lesser of evils, consumers can participate in creating a competition for privacy (as opposed to a competition of meaningless soul-selling fractions of a percent of interest earnings). The heart of the problem is banks are only getting pressure from the side of oppressors and tyranny and no pressure from the side of the people they purport to serve. Software and data can remedy this.

Worth noting that long before the AI bubble started, a university in the US studied bank privacy policies in bulk using a scraper bot that just looked at the standardised privacy disclosure forms for which all banks must conform to a standard layout. The data has rotted by now so their research is not of much use.

The problem

You want to know whether an email transmission was shared with Microsoft or Google so you can act accordingly.

tx (n/a)

Doing an MX lookup before sending a msg will often give answers (e.g. if the recipient simply uses MS or Google without using a 3rd-party email firewall like barracuda or a forwarder). So an MX lookup can only be either CAGEMAFIA-positive or it can be inconclusive.

In any case, the proposed filtering tool does nothing to help with sending.

rx

For receiving, you have much more certainty of couriers involved but inspecting headers manually is tedious and error prone. E.g. if “outlook” appears in the msg id header it likely just means Outlook was the MUA not the network used.

The fix and concept

Just as spamassassin filters a msg to work out whether it’s spam, we could use a filter tool to work out which networks an inbound email traversed. It could add a header like: X-Path: Microsoft → Spamgourmet → Disroot You configure your mail client to highlight baddies in this header, like “Microsoft”.

So suppose you originally did an MX lookup which revealed “barracuda”, thus inconclusive on whether the other person uses a surveillance capitalist. You decide to take a risk and reveal your email address to the other party. Then they use it to email you which reveals they use MS in the routing. You can then demand that they erase your email address (under GDPR or anti-spam protection in some regions).

You could easily write another filter to add the sender and X-Path to a local database. You could also publicise the information to help others. E.g. microblog that “Gov agency X uses Microsoft for their email (masked by baracuda) -- snail mail recommended”.

the problem

The web is littered with enshitified Tor-hostile resources generally deployed with the naive idea that Tor users are criminals. The Tor community can barely function. The web is broken in countless ways and it’s not always obvious whether Tor users are targeted by the marginalisation because firewalls never state why they are blocking. Sometimes they block based on geolocation or user-agent strings, and sometimes a resource is simply down for everyone. Tor users are left assuming their exit node IP is the culprit.

Also a problem: some people actually have no Internet at home. For some it is temporary and for others it is a permanent way of living a mostly analog life.

the solution (for many cases)

Use the clearnet at a cafe with open access. Of course it’s unreasonable to haul a desktop computer into a cafe or to carry a laptop at all times, so it would be useful to send fetch orders from your PC to your phone. When the phone connects to public Wi-Fi, you tap to execute the queue of fetch orders. Then when back at your PC you download the fulfilled orders from the phone.

This could even be useful within the home, since the block or malfunction can be a number of things. A smartphone could try to execute fetch orders over Orbot, which may or may not fail. And if it fails, it remains an unfulfilled order to retry in a cafe.

Aria2 would be perfect for the underlying heavy lifting because it supports many protocols (HTTP, FTP, bittorrent), and it exists on both the PC and Android. The Android code is apparently just a backend. It’s broken or useless on its own and needs a controller such as the app proposed here.

insufficient alternatives

The usual workarounds have compromises. A VPN may or may not work but it’s still a bit far from anonimity. The VPN provider is essentially like another ISP who can snoop on you.

Download managers already exist on smartphones, but there is no seamless PC interoperability. And (AFAIK) they are just for simple files, not for webpages or Youtube videos.

There is Newpipe but it has no PC interoperability. You must search YT using the Newpipe UI.

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/617678

The shitshow is largely described here. That’s LaTeX-focused, but the whole FOSS infra is a disaster.

We need an app that can harvest bug reports from multiple sources and build a local database that aggregates all bug reports. That is, it harvests bug reports in github, gnu.org, Salsa, as well as distro-specific reports (e.g. Ubuntu bug reports from launchpad and Debian bug reports from debian.org).

Rationale

• Dupe reports (due to lazy people)-- Some trigger-happy testers/users do not bother to lookup whether a bug is already reported. And most of the rest only check one db, not all.
• Dupe reports (by design)-- The Debian guidance is to report bugs to the Debian bug tracker (to some extent, even if the bug is already reported upstream). If not upstream, it’s the maintainer’s job to mirror it upstream. It’s a good policy but diligent testers who check multiple trackers see some distracting redundancy.
• Query limitations-- searching for bug reports is limited to the GUI search form for each DB, each of which is limited in different ways. Just let me fucking grep.
• Offline users fucked-- Bug DBs are naturally online, so air-gapped/offline users have no access to the bug DB. A local DB that can be sync’d from bug trackers when the user is momentarily online.
• Full searching-- a local copy of all bug tracker datasets enables testers to search all records with a single query.

All words ending in “tion” or “ty” are both French and English. Apart from that, English gets many words from both Dutch and French that are similar. But there is no effort to exploit this because so many people are brainwashed to believe you should forget the existence of your 1st language when learning a new one.

I am firmly outside of that school of thought. When someone uttered the opening sentence of this post to me, I probably learnt ~6000+¹ words in French in 5 seconds. You cannot beat that. This would have taken years of playing charades using the popular immersion teaching style.

So the question is, are there any language learning tools whereby you specify two langauges and it produces a list or dictionary of true friends? The idea is that you can make a quick gain in vocabulary before progressing into unfamiliar/alienating words.

There are instances where I am writing a bilingual paper in English and French. The French column is a machine translation. Knowing some French (but not fluent), there are situations where the translation tool chooses a synonym for a true friend. If the machine had chosen a true friend, it would be easier for me to verify the quality of the translation and also easier for me to learn from. Considering my reader(s) are often native French and /possibly/ decent with English, there are also situations where I fail to choose an English word that would be easier for a francophone. So it would be useful as well if a translation tool would reverse the French back to English while trying to select true friends in English.

Furthermore, a reader of my French-English text may be a native Dutch speaker. So I would like an translation tool that adds some secondary gravity toward choosing English-Dutch friends when English-French falls short. Or another way to state this: I want a bilingual text that minimises the frequency of unique original words that are not borrowed by any of the relevant languages.

I realise gravitating toward true friends may cause a longer text in some cases, so I suppose I would also want to set a threshold of tolerance on additional words or syllables. In the end there would be some manual effort in the end anyway.

¹ $ grep -iE '(ty|tion)$' /usr/share/dict/american-english-huge | wc -l

Copious access points are deployed by naïve admins who are oblivious to the fact that not everyone runs the latest gear. The shitty practice of pushing wi-fi in an arbitrarily exclusive way needs pushback. The first step is exposure. We need to enumerate the various ways demographics of people are being excluded and collect a DB on it.

The wi-fi protocol is the first point of failure. E.g. 802.11b vs 802.11a/g/n.. All new hardware is backwards compatible with older protocols. When an 802.11b device cannot see a signal, it’s because some asshat proactively disabled 802.11b.

Most exclusivity occurs with shitty captive portals. There are countless ways to fuckup a website to make it exclusive. E.g.

• to impose SSL, which inherently imposes recent certs and CAs that exclude old devices. It’s essentially rock stupid when the captive portal is nothing more than a button that says “I accept the ToS”.
• to impose JavaScript, which encapsulates a whole industry of poorly trained people who have no concept of stability of standards and interoperability.
• to impose SMS confirmation, which makes the ignorant assumption that every single user has a mobile phone, that they carry it with them, and that they are willing to share their number willy nilly.

🌱environmental impact🚮

The brain dead practice of deploying public Internet access using needlessly exclusive tech is a form of forced obsolscence. It’s one of the factors that pushes people to throw away working devices in order to overcome these ecocidal Internet access deployments.

🔧the fix💾

An app that records SSIDs, their location, and all the detectable exclusivity characteristics. It should also take human input with notes to record exclusivity that is not auto-detectable. Ideally the local DB would sync with a central DB. It should also be possible to extract a GPX file for a given region which could then be imported into OSMand or Organic Maps.

We are drowning in enshitified websites. Cloudflare automatically enshitifies ⅓ of the worlds websites. On top of that, there are countless shitty anti-human features that plague the web. Some of them just annoy, and some actually make the website unreachable or unusable to various demographics of people (such as Tor users).

Most infuriating is when a GOVERNMENT website intended to serve the public uses access restrictions (like Cloudflare) or does something else to exclude demographics of people who are entitled access. The Tor community can no longer access most websites of the EU.

What we need

We need an app that will:

• attempt to visit a webpage from multiple different networks (VPN, Tor, residential clearnet, and a variety of different geographic regions).
• try a variety of different user agent strings (cURL, wget, firefox, lynx).
• compare the content between non-erroneous payloads. A significant difference should raise flags. If there is much less content, it could perhaps be regarded as an access denial without error. (e.g. a page simply says: “we don’t serve .. (your kind of people)”). Some common phrases could be searched for.
• detect exclusive walled gardens like Cloudflare and Sucuri
• accessibility¹/enshitification check: whether the contact page imposes a GUI or Google CAPTCHA (¹in terms of people with impairments)
• open data check: whether the contact page discloses a street address or phone number.
• check whether the page functions with uMatrix (maybe this is not possible).
• check whether a privacy policy exists.
• check whether there is a popup blocker blocker (that blocks those who block popups/ads).

In the end, the app produces a checklist and concludes with a final result:

• ✔👍🎉 ❝The website under test is publicly accessible❞
• 🤷🫤 ❝The website under test is publicly accessible but dark patterns or similarly unsuitable/inappropriate anti-user mechanisms were detected. The website should be avoided.❞
• ❌ ❝The website under test is access-restricted or not entirely publicly accessible❞

The report could perhaps be timestamped, digitally signed by the entity running the app, and centrally recorded. Then concerned people among the public could use the report as an independent/authoritative source for claiming that a “public” resource is not actually public.

Some ATM machines demand your PIN as the very first step. More privacy-respecting machines let you enter your order details first and PIN entry is the last step. So if the order cannot be filled (e.g. not enough banknotes, not the preferred denominations, no balance inquiry service, printer out of paper, etc), then you can get your card back without having the card read.

When the PIN is demanded 1st, we can only wonder what information is being collected and what is being needlessly sent over the network. Some machines apparently silently check your balance/credit line automatically (if it’s a legit purpose, perhaps it tries to avoid offering an preselected withdrawal amount that is over a limit).

Some ATMs will reject a card instantly, before entering anything. Then they report a bogus error (“card fault”), which would seem to violate the GDPR.

So this is why we need a FOSS app for smartcard readers. Something that will show you what information is available on your bank card without entering your PIN, and then show you what additional information is available using your PIN. Ultimately, it would be useful to know whether to reject ATMs that demand a PIN as a 1st step.

Youtube has become hostile toward the Invidious community and also direct users over Tor. At the same time, YT is no longer purely some entertainment platform cat video frills. Governments and public schools are putting public content on YT that everyone should be entitled to access.

Google’s attack on Invideous involves targetting public servers. But Google cannot block everyone. So we need a killer FOSS p2p app that combines torrenting with conventional fetching. It has to be good enough that quasi normies are willing to run it.

The app should find, leech, and seed a torrent based on the video ID. At the same time it should do a parallel fetch using yt-dlp. If blocked by Google, the user can still get fed by the torrent. It only takes one unblocked user to seed the torrent.

Ideally the trackers are onion based. Perhaps to go easy on the network, the onion torrenting should be limited to low-res open format variants.

Many color printers surreptitiously print a stegonographic watermark with yellow dots to make all documents traceable to their source. Some threads covering this:

• (law) https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45605675
• (boycott call) https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45608582
• (asshole design) https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45653037

proposal:

In principle, a color printer could be made to print a blank page so that the page only contains the MIC watermark. It could then be scanned at 600+ DPI. A FOSS app could analyze the dot spacing and work out where to add dots to the uniform grid and produce a mask that can be easily layered on to all documents using ImageMagick.

Something like the “unwaffle” tool on https://goblin.tools/Formalizer would be useful to have so that large amounts of text can be condensed without relying on this cloud service.

For example, it would be useful for something like the Lemmyverse search tool, which I expand on here.

MythTV is a great tool for browsing broadcast TV schedules and scheduling recordings. It’s a shame so many people have suckered for cloud streaming services, which have a subscription cost and yet they collect data on you regardless. Broadcast TV lately has almost no commercial interruptions and of course no tracking. It’s gratis as well. If they bring in commercials, MythTV can auto-detect them and remove them.

FM and DAB radio signals include EPG. So the scheduling metadata is out there. But apparently no consumer receivers make use of it. They just show album art.

There are no jazz stations where I live. Only a few stations which sometimes play jazz. It’s a shame the EPG is not being exploited. Broadcast radio would be so much better if we could browse a MythTV schedule and select programs to record.

I suppose it’s not just a software problem. There are FM tuner USB sticks (not great). Nothing for DAB. And nothing comparable to the SiliconDust designs, which are tuners that connect to ethernet.

I have ongoing business with: banks, telecoms, energy suppliers, cloud services, etc.

They all have dynamic terms of service (ToS) and privacy policies. They may or may not notify me when they change it. If they bother to notify me, the msg always reads like this: “we are making changes to benefit you…” Yeah, bullshit. These notices never give the useful details. They hide them. Corporations don’t want you to be aware of how they are going to fuck you over more in the future.

The fix seems simple: we have a tool that once per month fetches the terms of service and privacy policies for all the suppliers we have a relationship with. The tool could extract the text and check it into a local git repo. Another tool could diff the different versions and feed that into an AI program that tells you in plain English what changes. It could even add a bit of character and say “Next month we’re going fuck you more by increasing penalties for late payments and shortening the grace period”.

It would also be useful if the AI would input the whole privacy policy and produce a Cliff’s Notes extraction of what’s important. It could take care to detect weasel wording and give the honest meaning (like when the policy says “we only share your personal data when legally permitted”, which really means “we pawn your ass to the full extent legally possible”.

Another nice to have feature: you feed it the privacy policies of 10 different banks, and it compares them and produces a detailed report that ranks them on the extent of the privacy abuses.