🗒️ Notes

Remember that the Age verification, VPN ban, degradation of services, degradation of equality, are NOT targeted at the current generation. They know that we will find ways to survive because, there will always be people who help us.

These policies and laws are targeted at those who can help and the future generation who won't be told that there are alternatives.

The changes make our lives difficult, and for the coming generation, impossible. So the right approach to this is not just find alternatives and workarounds, it is to organize, and fight.

A reminder that if the VPN ban hits the UK, Google will have their developer verification thingy silently installed in almost all androids. This enables them to silently uninstall your VPN apps too.

You won't have much choice if you are using Apple, they already have this malware.

If you can, get a used pixel phone and install GrapheneOS in it. If not, and if you can go without the Google apps, have a look at custom ROMs.

A problem with people trying things out due to hype is that many people don't look or read much further into what they are getting into.

So here is a reminder that GrapheneOS provides Duress PIN/Password. It also has two-factor fingerprint unlock.

• Duress pin will wipe the device (and eSIMs) and can be used on any screen that ask your pin.
• Two-factor fingerprint unlock ask you for a different pin once your fingerprint auth is successful, confusing anyone that shoulder surf.
• The cherry on top is the PIN scrambling.

Use them wisely, and bad actors will wipe your device instead of gaining access to it, which is a good thing.

Saw a post in Hacker News about GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS. 

Here is the extract from the YOTI Support mail

Hi,

Thank you for contacting us and providing the requested information. 

Regarding your request: Due to past security concerns, Yoti automatically flags multiple verification attempts and any devices running GrapheneOS. These instances are automatically reported to both the authorities and our security team. 

Unfortunately, as multiple attempts were made from this specific device, your account has been flagged for suspicious activity. Consequently, this request is being closed down.

Sincerely,  Yoti Technical Support

Yoti is one of many companies that does age verification by using facial recognition and Identity verification. And Graphene OS is currently the most secure Android OS that prevents multiple security exploits that Android does not want to patch up. 

So, as you can guess, this is one of those “every accusation is a confession” scenario. It is impossible to do an age verification without handing over your personal information. And regardless of what these companies say, these details have almost always leaked. The security concerns we should have is about Yoti, not the OS that tries to keep people secure… Duh.

Well, only in mastodon, and obviously in archive.org too since it saves the entire page.

It still needs some work, like it would cut off links and other HTML elements because I am not handling it yet, but hey, it works!

I don't scrap the post reactions from mastodon though, though I am thinking about just taking the reaction count and linking to them with a background job.

The best way would be for Mastodon to send me webmentions, I know that lemmy does it, and there are services that can do this for me, but I do not want people self-hosting IndieWemblate to sign up for “even more services”. And I also do not want to overload small mastodon instances with more crawlers…

I don’t like most things google do, but this is something that I want to see done. Google announced two days ago that they are Introducing a new spam policy for “back button hijacking”, they will now be considered spam.

The back button hijacking is when websites overwrite the expectation of what that button should do. It’s rare on personal sites, but I have seen so many companies does this to “keep the engagement” within the site, though it has the opposite effect, user frustration.

Gentoo announced on the April 1st of this year that they will support Hurd. Well, they said that Hurd will be the primary kernel as an April Fools’ joke. But they were not completely joking, Hurd is now a supported kernel. It’s more stable on x86 than amd64, but they are getting there slowly.

While many think that people who use en-dash or em-dash are using LLMs, it’s pretty easy to do with a keyboard, and I use it quite a lot in my blogs.

Most keyboards available now has a compose key, and even if it doesn’t, the operating system can usually handle it by mapping the compose key to another less-used key.

In my SwayWM configuration, I have the following:

input type:keyboard {
  xkb_options "ctrl:nocaps, compose:ralt"
}

The first option makes the caps lock key behave as Ctrl key. The second option makes the right Alt key behave as the compose key.

To type an en-dash (–), I have to press and release the right Alt key, then type --. (two dashes followed by a period/full stop/dot).

To type an em-dash (—), I have to press and release the right Alt key, then type --- (three dashes).

To type Ellipsis (…), I have to press and release the right Alt key, then type ..  (two dot/periods).

I’ve been using it for too long that I instinctively try to type it that way on all other systems and be disappointed. Just lookup how to do it in your system, it can usually be done without any configuration or installing anything new!

I have got a number of scripts in my system to configure thing or to do some common tasks faster. But what’s the point of having scripts if you always need to remember the file name, the path, or even the alias? So this is a small script that will list all executable files in a single directory, and execute them on select.

#!/usr/bin/env sh

name=$(basename "$0")
path="${1:-$(pwd)}"

while true; do
    options=$(find "${path}" -maxdepth 1 -executable -type f -not -name "${name}" -exec basename '{}' \; | tr '-' ' ')
    choice=$(printf '%s\nExit' "${options}" |
        fzf --height=10 --header='Select What to do' --layout=reverse --prompt='choice > ' |
        tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | tr ' ' '-')

    [ -z "${choice}" ] || [ "${choice}" = "exit" ] && exit

    "${path}/${choice}"
done

Save it to $HOME/.local/bin/fexe. You could have scripts arranged in any folder you would like, and you may want to add alias to use them.

I have an alias set like alias fzettings='fexe $HOME/code/shell/fzettings'. and $HOME/code/shell/fzettings has several scripts that configure the system.

One thing to note is to write the script names in kebab-case (hyphenated-file-name-like-this) so that the script can replace hyphens with a space when listing them. If you do not like that behaviour, remove the tr commands (| tr '-' ' ') and (| tr ' ' '-') in the fexe script.

Just like all my other small scripts, it’s very simple, effective, and prone to security issues.

Kotatsu, the manga app that became famous after Tachiyomi was forced to shut down, has… shut down.

If you now navigate to the project, you will be greeted with the following important message:

In light of recent challenges — including threating actions from Kakao Entertainment Corp and upcoming Google’s new sideloading policy — we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Kotatsu and end its support. We’re deeply grateful to everyone who contributed and to the amazing community that grew around this project.

Kotatsu is just one of many specialized browsers that fought through legal challenges to help Manga fans read their favourite manga without distractions. I say specialized browser because that’s what Kotatsu and similar programs do, they just show the website content, cleans up irrelevant stuff, and add a way to easily navigate between chapters/pages. People who actually read the Manga and Comic from bot official and unofficial websites will also block/remove the distractions in one or the other way to enjoy what they want to read.

The same goes for Anime too. The reason for both Anime and manga being popular outside Japan is because of fans translating and aggregating them. Not because of the official Dub or the official translations that worsens over time.

As the world is becoming increasingly hostile to almost everything that could improve the daily life, it is no surprise that apps like Kotatsu and Tachiyomi who live in a gray area can’t survive.

So what now? Kotatsu shutting down does not mean that the Manga fans will just stop reading Manga, they will all just flock to some other app or website. What lacks in the industry is a true official Aggregator platform. Nobody wants to subscribe to yet another service to read just one or two Manga or watch a few Anime. So it is just a matter of time before we find an alternative.

Shameless plug, I am working on Ani-GUI, a GUI client inspired from ani-cli. Make sure to fork it 😉.