Web
Brave Web Browser 1.20.108 Is Released With Fix For Major Security Flaw In Private Tor Windows
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 23rd of February 2021 07:04:11 PM Filed under
Several recent version of the Brave Web Browser have had a very unfortunate DNS-leak flaw in the "private" Tor-based browsing feature. The latest version 1.20.208 has a new version of the Chromium core it is based on (88.0.4324.182), a fix for DNS leaks in supposedly "private" web browser windows and two fixes specific to macOS. You should upgrade if you rely on Brave for "private" web browsing or use it to access Tor onion sites.
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You should upgrade and ensure that you are using version 1.20.108 or newer if you occasionally use the Brave Web Browser to access Tor onion sites or rely on it's "private" Tor-browsing mode for anything even remotely critical. You can acquire the latest version from brave.com.
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3 Best Free and Open Source Web-Based XMPP Clients
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Tuesday 23rd of February 2021 10:30:10 AM Filed under

XMPP (also known as Jabber) is an open and free alternative to commercial messaging and chat providers. It is a secure battle-tested protocol developed by an independent standards organization.
XMPP was designed for real-time communication, which powers a wide range of applications including instant messaging, presence, media negotiation, whiteboarding, collaboration, lightweight middleware, content syndication, EDI, RPC and more.
The “X” in XMPP stands for “Extensible”, which means the core protocol is updated and extended with more features through a transparent process at the non-profit XMPP Standards Foundation every now and then. This results in some clients not implementing every feature of XMPP; for example, a typical instant messaging client won’t implement Internet-of-Things functionality.
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John Goerzen: Recovering Our Lost Free Will Online: Tools and Techniques That Are Available Now
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 22nd of February 2021 05:36:32 AM Filed under
As I’ve been thinking and writing about privacy and decentralization lately, I had a conversation with a colleague this week, and he commented about how loss of privacy is related to loss of agency: that is, loss of our ability to make our own choices, pursue our own interests, and be master of our own attention.
In terms of telecommunications, we have never really been free, though in terms of Internet and its predecessors, there have been times where we had a lot more choice. Many are too young to remember this, and for others, that era is a distant memory.
The irony is that our present moment is one of enormous consolidation of power, and yet also one of a proliferation of technologies that let us wrest back some of that power. In this post, I hope to enlighten or remind us of some of the choices we have lost — and also talk about the ways in which we can choose to regain them, already, right now.
I will talk about the possibilities and then go into more detail about the solutions.
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Back in the late 90s, I worked at a university. I had a 386 on my desk for a workstation – not a powerful computer even then. But I put the boa webserver on it and could just serve pages on the Internet. I didn’t have to get permission. Didn’t have to pay a hosting provider. I could just DO it.
And of course that is because the university had no firewall and no NAT. Every PC at the university was a full participant on the Internet as much as the servers at Microsoft or DEC. All I needed was a DNS entry. I could run my own SMTP server if I wanted, run a web or Gopher server, and that was that.
There are many reasons why this changed. Nowadays most residential ISPs will block SMTP for their customers, and if they didn’t, others would; large email providers have decided not to federate with IPs in residential address spaces. Most people have difficulty even getting a static IP address in the first place. Many are behind firewalls, NATs, or both, meaning that incoming connections of any kind are problematic.
Do you see what that means? It has weakened the whole point of the Internet being a network of peers. While IP still acts that way, as a practical matter, there are clients that are prevented from being servers by administrative policy they have no control over.
Imagine if you, a person with an Internet connection to your laptop or phone, could just decide to host a website, or a forum on it. For moderate levels of load, they are certainly capable of this. The only thing in the way is the network management policies you can’t control.
Elaborate technologies exist to try to bridge this divide, and some, like Tor or cjdns, can work quite well. More on this below.
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5 Free and Open Source Lightweight Alternatives to WordPress
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 18th of February 2021 01:52:10 PM Filed under

Now don’t get us wrong, WordPress is one of our favorite applications. With good reason, it’s a high quality, open source blog publishing application. It’s a mature and highly polished application with development starting in 2003, and it has an active community. The largest self-host blogging tool, a full content management system, which can be extended through thousands of widgets, plugins, and themes, is a good fit for many projects. The software was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL.
WordPress instantly springs to mind when any project is planned that needs a content management system. However, WordPress can be complicated, offering more bells and whistles than actually needed or wanted. While it’s always tempting to stick with familiar territory, this can actually stifle creativity and does not enhance an individual’s skill-set.
When embarking on a new project, there’s a lot to be said experimenting with new software. Fortunately, WordPress is not the only option. There’s a good range of lightweight open source content management systems ready to be deployed that can transform a web site.
Some of the content management systems featured in this article are well publicised, but there are many good management systems that you may not have heard of that are perfectly suited for small projects.
Here is our verdict with our recommendations. They are all free and open source goodness.
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WordPress 5.7 Beta 3
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Wednesday 17th of February 2021 07:52:55 AM Filed under


This software is still in development, so it’s not recommended to run this version on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with it.
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Federated/Decentralised Communications With Movim and P2P VoIP
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 13th of February 2021 01:34:11 AM Filed under



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Movim | Basic Review & Beginner's Guide
Once you read about Movim, immediately you will find about Xmpp. It is Jabber, also known as Xmpp, a secure, decentralized, and federated technology everyone can use to chat online existed strongly since 1990's. To give you how great Xmpp network is, actually when you use WhatsApp you use Xmpp, so does with Google Talk and Jitsi, so when you use those you are using Xmpp. To give you a few of its benefits, Xmpp is not controlled by a single company (so unlike Twitter) it is hard to shut down by anyone.
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Daniel Pocock: Comparing private and peer-to-peer VoIP solutionsOne of the top questions people ask RTC developers around Valentine's Day is whether we finally have a private solution people can use to communicate with their partner.
There is fresh attention on the issue this year after Twitter and other large providers flexed their muscles and demonstrated that they are more powerful than the US President.
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Achieving independence from cloud services doesn't necessarily give you privacy. There are trade-offs to be made. John Goerzen recently published a blog about privacy issues in current P2P tools.
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Brave and Mozilla: uBlock, Mozilla Localization and More
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 12th of February 2021 03:06:03 AM Filed under

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Brave browser adds native support for uBlock and Fanboy annoyances lists and social list - gHacks Tech News
Brave browser's built-in ad-blocker has been boosted by some additional options. The Chromium fork's Brave Shield now supports three popular privacy-friendly filter lists, namely uBlock Annoyances List, Fanboy Annoyances List and Fanboy Social List.
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Mozilla Localization (L10N): L10n Report: February 2021 Edition
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Hacks.Mozilla.Org: MDN localization update, February 2021
Previously on MDN, we allowed translators to localize document URL slugs as well as the document title and body content. This sounds good in principle, but has created a bunch of problems. It has resulted in situations where it is very difficult to keep document structures consistent.
If you want to change the structure or location of a set of documentation, it can be nearly impossible to verify that you’ve moved all of the localized versions along with the en-US versions — some of them will be under differently-named slugs both in the original and new locations, meaning that you’d have to spend time tracking them down, and time creating new parent pages with the correct slugs, etc.
As a knock-on effect, this has also resulted in a number of localized pages being orphaned (not being attached to any parent en-US pages), and a number of en-US pages being translated more than once (e.g. localized once under the existing en-US slug, and then again under a localized slug).
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Karl Dubost: Whiteboard Reactionaries
I simply and firmly disagree and throw my gauntlet at Bruce's face. Choose your weapons, time and witnesses.
The important part of this tweet is how Mike Taylor points out how the Sillycon Valley industry is a just a pack of die-hard stick-in-the-mud reactionaries who have promoted the whiteboard to the pinnacle of one's dull abilities to regurgitate the most devitalizing Kardashianesque answers to stackoverflow problems. Young programmers! Rise! In front of the whiteboard, just walk out. Refuse the tiranny of the past, the chalk of ignorance.
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Developers Continue New Push With LibreOffice In The Web Browser Via WebAssembly
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 11th of February 2021 03:52:11 AM Filed under

While there has been LibreOffice Online as a collaborative, web-based version of LibreOffice making use of the HTML5 Canvas for its UI, there hasn't been much activity there recently outside of the Collabora Online commercial variant. But developers are working on a current port of LibreOffice to the web browser using WebAssembly.
Developers Thorsten Behrens and Jan-Marek Glogowski presented at last weekend's FOSDEM Online 2021 on the work being done to port LibreOffice to work gracefully with WebAssembly for running the open-source office suite within the web browser.
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Viper Browser: A Lightweight Qt5-based Web Browser With A Focus on Privacy and Minimalism
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 8th of February 2021 08:37:05 PM Filed under

Viper Browser is a Qt-based browser that offers a simple user experience keeping privacy in mind.
While the majority of the popular browsers run on top of Chromium, unique alternatives like Firefox, Beaker Browser, and some other chrome alternatives should not cease to exist.
Especially, considering Google’s recent potential thought of stripping Google Chrome-specific features from Chromium giving an excuse of abuse.
In the look-out for more Chrome alternatives, I came across an interesting project “Viper Browser” as per our reader’s suggestion on Mastodon.
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The "snob RSS" Hall of (constructive!) Shame
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 6th of February 2021 02:32:04 PM Filed under
It is half hilarious, half depressing, how many officially tech-savvy organisations advertise on their websites every possible way to follow them… as long as it is a non-portable, non-future-proof, intrusive walled garden. I am talking of those websites that never, never miss links and icons to their social accounts…
But never show in plain sight also a far better solution to follow them. A solution that, I am sure, they already have for free, courtesy of whatever website management system they may be using: the good, old, far superior Really Simple Syndication (RSS).
RSS is a much, much, MUCH better way to follow what one publishes online than Twitter, Facebook or any other social media. Because only RSS is unfiltered, not centrally tracked, free from addictive distraction and 100% usable from any device.
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today's howtos
| Kali Linux 2021.1 Release (Command-Not-Found)
How you choose to interact with Kali is completely up to you. You may want to access Kali locally or remotely, either graphically or on the command line. Even when you pick a method, there are still options you can choose from, such as a desktop environment.
By default, Kali uses Xfce, but during the setup process, allows for GNOME, KDE, or no GUI to be selected. After the setup is complete, you can install even more. We have pre-configurations for Enlightenment, i3, LXDE, and MATE as well.
[...]
When we use Kali, we spend a significant amount of time using the command line. A lot of the time, we do it using a local terminal (rather than in a console or remote SSH). With the options of desktop environments, there are also choices when it comes to the terminals (same with what shell to use).
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Kernel: Millennium Prize, Compute Express Link 2.0, HP Platform Profile Support
| Open Source Community Critical Of Chessbase, Fat Fritz 2
The development teams behind the two most successful and influential open-source chess programs, Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero, have issued statements denouncing the commercial program Fat Fritz 2 and the company Chessbase that is selling the program for 99,90 euros.
The statements (Stockfish blog, lichess announcement) assert that the engine in Fat Fritz 2 is Stockfish with minimal changes, that Fat Fritz 2 has violated the GNU General Public License under which Stockfish is released, and that Chessbase's marketing has made false claims about Fat Fritz 2's playing strength.
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