Notices by Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)
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Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Monday, 08-Apr-2024 20:48:32 EDT Hubert Chathi Managed to get to a place that wasn't too cloudy for today's eclipse, near the path of totality. I got a few pictures with my camera. I didn't bring any fancy equipment; I just brought my 20-year-old DSLR, with the kit lens. So the pictures are nothing spectacular, but I'm happy enough with what I got. Here are a couple that I took.
https://social.uhoreg.ca/photos/hubert/image/302717217666148d9aae753877064625
https://social.uhoreg.ca/photos/hubert/image/625465918166148dbab2f8a796833171 -
Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 20:18:37 EST Hubert Chathi I'm back!
In mid-January, the VM hosting social.uhoreg.ca, hosted by Google Cloud, was taken down for "policy violations". Their support was extremely unhelpful, and they would not tell my what the issue was. It looks like their support can only send canned responses because they would re-send me the exact same messages after I had responded to them. My best guess as to the issue is that it was github.com/friendica/friendica… and so I've applied the patch for that (I'm having issues upgrading to the latest release, but that's a separate thing). In fact, the main reason that I found out about that issue was due to a report that I got from Netcraft at around the same time as Google suspending my VM.
I don't know if Google's support is better if you're paying them real money (I'm just using their free hosting tier, so I only pay a couple dollars a month for bandwidth), but Google support was pretty useless at providing me with any information or help. Even though their messages kept saying that I could ask for assistance, they were entirely unhelpful. In fact, the only real information that they gave me was the time of the violation, and the fact that the violation was reported by a third party. I got more information from an automated notice from Netcraft (who I don't pay any money to), than I got from trying to deal with Google Cloud support.
Eventually, I got a message saying that they reviewed my information, and they decided to reinstate my VM. (They didn't by the way. I had to contact them again and tell them that my VM was still disabled.) Still no information about exactly why it was suspended in the first place. Which means that I hope that it was just friendica#13216, and not some other vulnerability that allowed someone to take over my VM.
In summary, I highly do not recommend Google Cloud. I will probably be looking into migrating my ActivityPub home elsewhere. Which may involve switching software to something that uses PostgreSQL so that I can run it on my main VPS. Bonfire looks interesting.
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Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 12:48:58 EST Hubert Chathi Governments should use interoperable communications, not proprietary systems.
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Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 06-Dec-2023 17:46:58 EST Hubert Chathi I've memorized enough that I can now solve a Rubik's cube without looking at the instructions. In the time that it takes me to solve a Rubik's cube, my daughter can solve three, and be half-way through solving a fourth. -
Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Monday, 27-Nov-2023 09:38:08 EST Hubert Chathi Thanks to Ada Lovelace's example, writing a program and never testing it is a time-honoured tradition among computer programmers.
♲ @gutenberg_org@mastodon.social: Ada Lovelace's notes were labelled alphabetically from A to G. In Note G, she describes an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. It is considered to be the first published algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, and Ada Lovelace has often been cited as the first computer programmer for this reason. The engine was never completed and so her program was never tested. via @wikipedia
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Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 22:33:27 EDT Hubert Chathi Finally figured out how to make flatpak Firefox use my non-flatpak Firefox's profile. Copy ~/.mozilla/firefox/{profileDirectory}
to~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/.mozilla/firefox
, and edit~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini
to add the new profile. Then runflatpak run org.mozilla.firefox --ProfileManager
and select the profile that was copied. -
Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 03-Oct-2023 18:58:05 EDT Hubert Chathi Wow! The Bank of Canada is actually acknowledging that inflation might be caused by corporate greed? It's taken them long enough, but I guess it's good that they got there. I guess the next question is: what are they going to do about it?
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Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Monday, 02-Oct-2023 22:53:38 EDT Hubert Chathi Trying out KWin + the Bismuth addon instead of XMonad. Initial impression is that it's usable, but will take some time to get used to. XMonad is way more customizable and powerful, but also has some annoying quirks. So we'll see if I can get KWin/Bismuth set up close enough to what I want. -
Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Thursday, 21-Sep-2023 16:33:10 EDT Hubert Chathi Is it just me, or does "I made a promise that I subsequently broke. I "moved too fast" when I broke that promise. I make the same promise that I previously made" sound a lot like "I won't do it now, but I'll probably try it again later, except more carefully next time"? www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto… -
Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Sep-2023 14:56:30 EDT Hubert Chathi @Ivan Enderlin 🦀 Would have wanted to have my son on Linux, but there are games that he wants to play that are Windows-only. :( -
Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Sep-2023 12:43:26 EDT Hubert Chathi Trying to set up a computer for my son and, argh, why is Windows so hard to use? Linux is so much easier. -
Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Saturday, 12-Aug-2023 10:11:52 EDT Hubert Chathi -
Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Friday, 04-Aug-2023 09:56:15 EDT Hubert Chathi The Olm section is now up: uhoreg.gitlab.io/matrix-tutori… -
Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Jul-2023 23:36:16 EDT Hubert Chathi Text for Olm encryption is done. Just need to write a few more tests. Next up will be to-device messages, and then showing how all the different encryption parts get put together. At that point, we'll almost have a replacement for the current E2E implementation guide. -
Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 25-Jul-2023 10:00:16 EDT Hubert Chathi "If we spent just one-tenth of the effort we spend prosecuting the poor on prosecuting the rich, it would be a very different world." -- Bruce Schneier
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Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Monday, 24-Jul-2023 20:31:24 EDT Hubert Chathi The Olm section of my Matrix Client Tutorial is functioning, but still needs a bunch of explanatory text and some tests written. Is it weird to talk about a section in a book "functioning"? Welcome to literate programming.
I love using literate programming for this tutorial. It just feels so natural. If you ever want to write a tutorial or other document for teaching something programming-related, consider using literate programming.
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Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Jul-2023 15:12:01 EDT Hubert Chathi @Hugo XMPP's OMEMO is based on the Double Ratchet system introduced by Signal, and used in most modern end-to-end encrypted messaging systems (before MLS). You could say that MLS is inspired by the Double Ratchet -- it came about from a desire to make something that scaled better than Double Ratchet for larger groups, and it uses some ratchet constructions. But MLS uses a tree structure that makes it more efficient, and also introduces some new features such as authenticated group membership.
XMPP might adopt MLS in the future, but I haven't heard of anyone trying to do so. But if anyone is working MLS in XMPP, I'd be interested to know.
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Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Jul-2023 11:35:48 EDT Hubert Chathi Also, this seems like a good time to highlight the fact that end-to-end encryption is essential for secure communications, and attempts by governments to limit or backdoor encrypted messengers are misguided. There was a time when governments fought against SSL (now TLS), but now it is everywhere and widely accepted. Governments are now fighting against end-to-end encryption, but hopefully that will see the same fate as their fight against SSL. -
Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Jul-2023 11:22:44 EDT Hubert Chathi I've given some talks about MLS in the past, including www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOMUG_… which is a hand-wavey high-level overview of how MLS works, and archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedu… about MLS in Matrix. -
Hubert Chathi (hubert@social.uhoreg.ca)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Jul-2023 11:07:15 EDT Hubert Chathi One common question that comes up with MLS is whether different messaging systems that use MLS will be able to interoperate. For example, with Matrix, Wire, and Wickr using MLS, could users of one system communicate with users of the other? The short answer is "no", since even if the encryption system is the same, the payload is different. However, there is another working group at the IETF, https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mimi/about/, that is working on that issue, so we may get interoperable end-to-end encrypted messaging in the not-too-distant future. Naturally we at @Matrix.org are in on that effort (though not me personally, other than in a peripheral role).