Tux in Brussels @tux@mastodon.multimob.be

Stealthing an OpenSSH server to force ssh_host_ed25519_key only. Some OpenSSH clients complain if their known_hosts file already contains an RSA entry for that host, and others (such as openssh 7.7p1-2 on ArchLinux) don’t. All clients are configured to use every cipher, though. Strange.

There are reports of up to 3 million European users closing their FB accounts.
Good but where are they going? Rushing to some other centralized service run by another web giant?
Our small communities cannot compete on the "network effect" criteria but we are people, and we have ethics. #Contributopia is an interesting initiative to promote other values about online interactions.
#DeleteFacebook

We should stop this fallacy of telling people that "The little padlock on the address bar means you are perfectly safe."
It’s the opposite: "Not seeing the padlock is clearly unsafe." No more.
HTTPS with poor encryption (think of SSLv2 or SSLv3) still exists and is really insecure.

Ironically, when I had found this article some days ago, Skype was falsely being presented as "open source". At least they have rectified this now.

Kids, stay away from #Ubuntu! Not only it has the Amazon search tool, but in addition there are plenty of tutorials in the wild, which encourage you to add even more proprietary software.
This one will even suggest to replace every part of your system with proprietary software (Steam, Skype, Hiri, Chrome and more).
https://www.linuxtechi.com/top10-things-after-installing-ubuntu-18-04

Strange case with #Falkon browser: our wiki is protected with Apache’s AuthName: saving #password in Falkon is okay. Then we want to save the password to the user account on the login page: Falkon cannot save two passwords for the same domain (even though URL differs; #Firefox can handle that, though), or it can but will harrass the user every time with the save dialog. Minor bug but annoying for my low-tech users.

The proposed EU copyright directive was rejected today. Good news but this will be discussed again in the next months. We should keep pushing. (Our opponents will push too.)

Years ago, Carl Chenet and others had warned to avoid #GitHub: another silo, a SPOF and its bug tracking software—one critical aspect to see the history of a piece of software—uses proprietary software.
Maybe that’s why #Microsoft liked it, after all…
#deletegithub #quitgithub

Oops, there was a typo. I meant that we should have had to upgrade the *firmware* to get the sound working. The ROM was fine.
And he’s still using it.

This is to counteract the usual "Oh, #Riot.im / #Linphone / #XMPP / #Ring is too complicated, let’s just use Skype" statement. I want to show that convenience should be worth much less than surrending one’s freedom. Hence the methaphor with people prefering a dictatorship because democracy requires some degree of effort.
Any idea where I could find existing material?

I am looking for web resources or cartoons which I could use to explain why an alleged "inferior" UX or interface should not be an obstacle for #FLOSS over centralised and proprietary apps or services.
The idea is to show that democracy is not comfortable (going to the voting polls, being exposed to different viewpoints), yet is preferred over dictatorship.

Many people are persuaded that #WhatsApp offers true end-to-end #privacy and that no-one can read private messages. If that were true, the US Government would repeatedly issue protests—on the contrary this is what they do about #Telegram—because alleged terrorists would escape its supervision.

The best distro? For me, only the one that gets out of my way and does not annoy me with useless stuff. But most generally, when people ask, I always reply that every user is different and my tastes or needs are not the same as yours.

On my own phone I had been using #Replicant for years. But for the average user, #LineageOS involves much fewer sacrifices in convenience, and it runs on many more—and more recent—phones. With proper configuration (PrivacyGuard), and especially user teaching of good methods (permissions, not installing proprietary APKs) it can be a good compromise between convenience and privacy/security. As long as the user keeps enough discipline.

A strange feeling yesterday when helping my neighbour’s son installing #LineageOS 15 on his phone. No sound, it would have required upgrading the ROM. We didn’t want to risk bricking his device, LineageOS 14.1 runs fine. At least one more happy user who’s now discovering free alternatives in #F-Droid.

Funny encounter: AlternativeTo is showing alternatives to popular proprietary apps or websites… and apparently even to itself: https://alternativeto.net/software/alternativeto/

I have been asked to rescue people who couldn’t transfer a 8 Gb video file. They tried to send it by email (didn’t work), then copy it onto a USB memory stick with a FAT32 system (didn’t work - file too large). We resorted to use mkfs.ntfs so that they could read it with their machine running W10. But with proper encoding, and for domestic use, such a video should never have been so large in the first place! #PEBKAC

My experience is that young adults who talk about politics or are already engaged in social issues can be reached, and will hear arguments about privacy, GAFA, and other issues about free software. Maybe they could serve as role models—or thought leaders—for young "consumers" who are not ready to listen.

It’s getting increasingly tricky to teach students or teenagers about FLOSS. They largely value convenience more than they value security, they suck over popularity on popular social media, and they live by the "nothing to hide" myth. Old approaches do not work with them, we’ll need to rethink *how* to get the message across.