Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Cyble Inc ☛ What Is Freenet? How Safe Is It? 2024
Freenet is an intriguing software that aims to provide anonymous communication online through a decentralized and distributed network architecture. Since its initial release in 2000, Freenet has steadily gained users seeking privacy-protecting alternatives to conventional internet services. It has also raised some important discussions around anonymity, censorship resistance, and peer-to-peer technologies.
At its core, Freenet leverages a complex system of node-to-node file sharing whereby each participant’s computer becomes part of a distributed storage platform, and no single entity exerts centralized control over the network. This distributed infrastructure creates obstacles for surveillance or censorship efforts while simultaneously enabling the publication and discovery of content in a manner designed to obscure its true origins.
However, Freenet’s protections come with tradeoffs that users should carefully consider determining if its approach aligns with their privacy and security needs. In this post, we will explore in technical yet accessible terms how Freenet works at a high level and evaluate its real-world effectiveness in upholding user anonymity based on research findings.
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Jack Baty ☛ Status update on my move away from Evil mode | Jack Baty / Scribbles
The short version is that while it's been frustrating, I'm getting more comfortable using the normal Emacs bindings with each passing day. I've been using Vim or Vim-style bindings for more than 20 years, so this is a big deal.
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Medevel ☛ Dicom Image Reader: Free App to Read and View DICOM (dcm) Image File
The Dicom Image Reader is an innovative, open-source medical image viewer, meticulously built using modern technologies such as JavaScript, HTML5, NodeJS, and the Electron framework.
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Medevel ☛ OpenREM - Free Radiation Exposure Monitoring for the Physicist
OpenREM is a robust, cost-free, and open-source software application specifically designed for the critical task of patient dose monitoring.
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Education
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Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky ☛ Start to finish on self-publishing a technical book
The first step is to get the content, or at least a table of contents. Since this is a collection of my blog posts, most of the work is done. I only really had to make the choice of what to include.
Books are typically a certain length, and that's about how much I'm producing per year right now. That made the choice pretty easy: 2023 would be its own volume, and 2022 and prior years would also be one volume, since they're the same total word count.
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Kristof Zerbe ☛ Rising Cyberspear - kiko.io
In Germany, and probably in many other countries too, it is common practice to give jobs that deal with dead things such as money, machines and the like not only a higher social status but also a significantly higher salary, whereas all jobs that centre around people are given very poor attention. You really have to want to be a nurse, geriatric nurse or child carer and be willing to accept the poor pay and conditions. I don’t know why this is the case, but when my wife or Denis talk about their daily struggles with facility management, colleagues, parents and also children and I realise what salary levels they are in, I feel pity and sometimes also anger. So it’s no coincidence that in this job not only the sickness rate but also the staff turnover is immensely high. The fact that hardly anyone wants to do this under these circumstances means that you can quit your job at any time as a childcare worker, for example, because you’ll have a new one the next day anyway, as ALL organisations are desperately looking for skilled staff.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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Simon Willison ☛ Optimizing SQLite for servers
There’s a lot of useful stuff in here, including detailed coverage of the different recommended PRAGMA settings.
There was also a tip I haven’t seen before about “BEGIN IMMEDIATE” transactions: [...]
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Ciprian Dorin Craciun ☛ [remark] Context binding password-based authentication -- Volution Notes
Experimenting with password-based authentication implemented directly in Postgres, all sprinkled with a few twists.
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Mozilla
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University of Toronto ☛ Some notes on Firefox's media autoplay settings in practice as of Firefox 124
I've been buying digital music from one of the reasonably good online sources of it (the one that recently got acquired, again, making people nervous about its longer term future). In addition to the DRM-free lossless downloads of your purchases, this place lets you stream albums through your web browser, which in my case is an instance of Firefox. Recently, I noticed that my Firefox instance at work would seamlessly transition from one track to the next track of an album I was streaming, regardless of which label's sub-site I was on, while my home Firefox would not; when one track ended, the home Firefox would normally pause rather than start playing the next track.
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