news
Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers and XMPP
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James G ☛ Make your own web quizzes!
When I announced that I was open-sourcing a quiz maker earlier this week, I noted that there were several limitations to what I had built. Most importantly, my quiz maker was a Python script, which substantially limits how many people can use it.
After writing the blog post, Kami has made a HTML quiz maker that works in the browser. You can read the write-up on her blog, and try out the quiz maker for yourself. I helped out with the styles, which I really enjoyed. It is always nice to have a new design challenge!
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EFF ☛ Hate “The Algorithm?” RSS Is One of the Tools You’ve Been Looking For
Poke your head into just about any online social network—or any general conversations about internet culture—and you’ll likely find a boogieman: the algorithm. Since at least the moment Facebook introduced (and apologized for) its News Feed, “the algorithm” has been shorthand for the ways the tech giants control what we see and when we see it. In the age of enshittification, there is a push to reclaim our feeds and networks. Good news: there’s a tool that’s been around for decades that can help wrangle many of your feeds into something manageable: Really Simple Syndication, more commonly known as RSS.
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Daniel Stenberg ☛ A curl mountain movie
Over time we get more vulnerabilities reported. Since every flaw has a version range during which the problem existed and with more issues that have overlapping version ranges, the mountain grows. It changes shape every time we do a release or we publish a new vulnerability.
At this moment in time, curl version 7.34.0 is the release that contains the most number of known vulnerabilities: 101. The worst one ever if you will. Out of a total of 206.
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Declan Chidlow ☛ Web Browsers on Augmented, Mixed, and Virtual Reality Devices
Unlike browsers for other platforms, browsers for virtual reality need to consider a spatial context. Interfaces are not limited to a single surface, or even to multiple surfaces. The interface can wrap around the user, enveloping them, be scaled to a screen the size of the moon, or shrunk down infinitesimally small. The screen can curve or lie flat. A screen can be one of a thousand orbiting a user, and it can be grabbed, resized, and thrown around at will. For as much as a webpage might be viewed in a living room via passthrough, it might be viewed from a lawn chair on the moon. A browser viewport is much more abstract of a concept.
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Standards/Consortia
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Gergely Nagy ☛ Chatting on the wire
In the end, it turned out one of the major contributors to DeltaChat is a vocal supporter of The Crawlers, so that made the choice simple: I’m sticking with XMPP. If I’m sticking with XMPP, I’ll stick to the same software too: Prosody. But this time, this time I will set it up correctly.
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