Jons Mostovojs @jonn@social.doma.dev

Under the new Restrict Act ("ban TikTok act") VPN users face 20 years in jail and up to $1million fine if they evade US internet censorship.

Compared to this, the great firewall of china looks like a picket fence.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686/text?s=1&r=15

One of the most important insights in the technology business is that there are many, many ways for users of your product to generate value for you without paying you directly.

A number of people have come out of the woodwork to ask me how they can "Help" the Internet Archive.

3 years ago, I wrote an essay about that. It holds up nicely:

http://blog.archive.org/2020/06/14/how-can-you-help-the-internet-archive/

🎧 PODCAST ALERT 🎧

@Gargron just got featured on Decoder with Nilay Patel, and the interview is incredibly educational.

It gives a brief history of Mastodon, and offer clues about where it might go next.

Here’s the transcript: https://www.theverge.com/23658648/mastodon-ceo-twitter-interview-elon-musk-twitter

@fediversenews

This gloomy post brought to you by a conversation with my son in which I asked something about the future—his future—& he looked at me and with no teen angst, just absolute earnestness, asked—"what future, dad?" & my heart just broke into shards

You know it’s pretty damn hard to parent (or teach, for that matter) when we’ve created a world where kids see no future. Their nihilism stems from a pretty damn clear-eyed view of things, but it sure makes it hard to get them to care about grades, college, adulthood. Why grit your teeth and focus on any of that when the world is literally burning and adults can’t be bothered to even turn down the gas a smidge?

Exploiting H.264 video decoders, yikes. https://wrv.github.io/h26forge.pdf

I'm watching a 12 year old trans girl testify to lawmakers that the bills they've passed are a constant reminder that she doesn't belong in her own state.

No kid should ever need to do something like that, and the people responsible for putting her in that position deserve to hear her words echoing in their heads for the sleepless nights I hope they suffer for the rest of their lives.

"I should be in school learning history, not out here making it"

(2/2)

Now I'm the terminal (1/2)

i've become too lazy and don't write funny book reviews anymore :-( check one of the older ones for example:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1999450832?utm_medium=email&utm_source=like_notification&ref_=pe_7171740_475446060

For #MARCHintosh this year I’m launching https://infinitemac.org. It features runnable versions of almost every classic System Software/Mac OS release, from 1984’s System 1.0 to 2000’s Mac OS 9.0.4.

This involved porting another emulator to the web (Mini vMac), tracking down 35 install disks, and the usual fighting with file systems. The blog post at https://blog.persistent.info/2023/03/infinitemac-dot-org.html has more details.

Also I'm currently using only Mastodon API to fetch this info because while ActivityPub does offer a way to provide replies to a status, none of the non-Mastodon instances I checked actually do that (at least publicly).

Pleroma/Akkoma seem to have a compatible API so I'm hoping to support them soon (perhaps even as a home instance?). Not sure about everything else.

The meaning of "local" vs "remote" can be quite mind-bending.

Everywhere in the extension "local" and "remote" is used from the perspective of the specific instance. In case of Mastodon each instance has its own ID for each entity known to it, local or remote, so we need to be able to determine the existing mapping between the two.

So "local" means "local to an instance". For example *every* status gets a localStatusMapping entry *for its instance*.
If it's not a home instance status, but it's known on the home instance it will get *two* entries - one for home instance with its ID, one for the *original* instance with the original ID.

Remote mappings are always a tuple of (local instance, remote instance, remote ID). This is used to resolve existing mappings on the "local" instance for the "remote" instance, so when we get a status from a remote instance we can substitute the (real) local IDs in right away.

I.e. if on home "A" we fetch context for "j" from "B" (where it's known as "k") which returns a reply "l" originating from "C", we'll add/update these mappings:

A:j -> B:k
B:k
C:l
A:B:k -> A:j
A:C:l -> ?

If user then clicks on the injected C:l toot (that will have a fake ID like "s:s:C:l"), the extension will attempt to fetch it via the search API. If that succeeds, A will assign it a new ID "m" and we'll add:

A:m -> C:l
A:C:l -> A:m

This looked way easier when I started.

🔥Обкатка британського основного бойового танку Challenger 2 на українській землі