WebSub (formerly PubSubHubbub). Should have been a proper replacement for RSS with push support instead of polling. Too bad the docs were awful and adopting it as an end user was so difficult that it never caught on.
No I’m sorry, I pull my feeds manually using a barebones reader. I’m guessing your best bet is one of the web-based readers as it would require a client with a TCP port that’s reachable from the web. I have never seen a feed who provided the rssCloud feature though.
I wouldn’t say that it never caught on. I run a feed reader and ~6% of feeds have WebSub. Most of these are probably wordpress.com blogs which include it by default.
YouTube also sort of supports it, but they don’t really follow the standard so I don’t think it counts.
But the nice thing about WebSub is that it is sort of an invisible upgrade to the existing feed (or any other HTTP URI) so it just works when blogs enable it.
Most major feed reader services support it. One problem is that you need a stable URL to receive the notifications. So it is hard to make work with client-side readers. But I don’t think there is really a way around this other than holding a connection open to every feed you follow. So I would say that it does its job well. I don’t really see a need to get to 100% adoption or whatever. If you have a simple static-site blog that updates every month or so I don’t think it is a big deal that it doesn’t support WebSub.
Theres quite a few sites that still use it and existing ones in the Fediverse have it built in (which is really cool). But your right, the general public have no concept of having something download and queue up on a service rather than just going to the site. And the RSS clients are all over the place with quality…
Markdown. Its only in tech-spaces that its preferred, but it should be used everywhere. You can even write full books and academic papers in markdown (maybe with only a few extensions like latex / mathjax).
Instead, in a lot of fields, people are passing around variants of microsoft word documents with weird formatting and no standardization around headings, quotes, and comments.
My main wishlist for markdown, is a better live collaborative markdown editor. Hedgedoc works, but it’s showing it’s age, and they don’t seem to be getting close to releasing v2.
Etherpad also has a markdown extension, but it doesn’t import / export that well.
Markdown is awesome, I agree! I did not realize you could extend markdown with anything other than html. The html extension is quite nice to do anything that markdown doesn’t support natively, but I wish there was an easier way to extend markdown. Maybe the ones you listed are what I need.
Markdown is terrible as a standard because every parser works differently and when you try to standardize it (CommonMark, etc.), you find out that there are a bajillion edge cases, leading to an extremely bloated specification.
Commonmark leaves some stuff like tables unspecified. That creates the need for another layer like GFM or mistletoe. Standardization is not a strong point for markdown.
I believe commonmark tries to specify a minimum baseline spec, and doesn’t try to to expand beyond that. It can be frustrating bc we’d like to see tables, superscripts, spoilers, and other things standardized, but I can see why they’d want to keep things minimal.
Asciidoc is a good example of why everything should be standardized. While markdown has multiple implementations, any document is tied to just one implementation. Asciidoc has just one implementation. But when the standard is ready, you should be able to switch implementations seamlessly.
What’s the alternative? We either have everything specified well, or we’ll have a million slightly incompatible implementations. I’ll take the big specification. At least it’s not HTML5.
Depends on the type of book. Since you need HTML for all non default styles. Therefore, it raises the bar… you need a bit of web dev knowledge which removes the biggest benefit of markdown: simplicity / ease of use.
Man, I’ve written three novels plus assorted shorter form stories in markdown.
There’s a learning curve, but once you get going, it’s so fluid. The problem is that when it comes time to format for release, you have to convert to something else, and not every word processor can handle markdown. It’s extra work, but worth it, imo.
Publishers are pissy about such things. Even self publishing (which is what I do now), the various outlets still have limits to what they will use. Amazon accepts something like three file formats, including their own, and pdf isn’t on the list.
I could just do pdf for directly giving them away to people, but even then, epub is usually a better pick in terms of readability since that’s the standard for actual books since ereaders tend to display it better than pdfs. Most people reading books via files would be using something that can give a better experience with epub vs pdf.
Pandoc + [your markdown editor of choice] is magic. Some editors even come with Pandoc as a dependency so you can export to more or less anything from the GUI. I think GhostWriter and Zettlr at least (I honestly can’t be sure, I’ve changed editors so often and now I just have some Pandoc conversion scripts in my file manager menu).
ReST (restructured text) is a good middle ground. I just wish it had more support outside of the python community. It could use some new/better tooling than Sphinx
IPv6. Lack of IPv4 addresses it’s a problem, specially in poorer countries. But still lots of servers and ISPs don’t support it natively. And what is worse. Lots of sysadmins don’t want to learn it.
If computers connect to others through the internet, the IPv6 address can reveal how many computers there are on the local network, and if certain traffic to different destinations are coming from the same computer, but also if one of the computers has gone offline but then resumes from sleep/hibernation.
To me their comment means they want to avoid that, and I agree, I want to avoid that too. To fix these, I would need to configure NAT on my router for IPv6.
Yes IPv6 address privacy extensions help somewhat, but
computers won’t use a different v6 address for every distinct destination, they will just start using a new one from time to time
computers won’t stop using the old v6 address immediately after wakeup
With v4 addresses these did not really matter, because everything was being sent from the same public IP, and and outside observer could only see what a “network” is doing collectively. But with v6 an address identifies a computer, across websites/services. Even if it’s just for a "short’ time, even if the address is randomized.
If you want privacy, you need some kind of VPN or onion routing. Even if everything you list were correct, the difference between IPv4 and 6 for privacy would be marginal.
I don’t think this is so black and white. I’m a regular tor user, but so often it’s not worth it to load webpages through a dial-up connection, and then there are the sites that block access for tor users for some reason.
Even if everything you list were correct
Which parts weren’t?
the difference between IPv4 and 6 for privacy would be marginal
You’re thinking of a firewall. NAT is just the thing that makes a connection appear to come from an IP on the internet when it’s really coming from your router, and it’s not needed with IPv6. But you would not see any difference with IPv6 without it.
You’re thinking of a firewall. NAT is just the thing that makes a connection appear to come from…
That connection only “appears to come from” if I explicitly put a rule in my NAT table directing it to my computer behind the router doing the NAT-ing.
Otherwise all connections through NAT are started from internal->external network requests and the state table in NAT keeps track of which internal IP is talking to which external IP and directs traffic as necessary.
So OP is correct, it does apply a measure of security. Port scanning someone behind NAT isn’t possible, you just end up port scanning their crappy NAT router provided by their ISP unless they have specifically opened up some ports and directed them to their internal IP address.
Compare this to IPV6 where you get a slice of the public address space to place your devices in and they are all directly addressable. In that case your crappy ISP router also is a “proper” firewall. Strangely enough it usually is a “stateful” firewall with default deny-all rules that tracks network connections and looks and performs almost exactly like the NAT version, just without address translation.
So OP is correct, it does apply a measure of security. Port scanning someone behind NAT isn’t possible, you just end up port scanning their crappy NAT router provided by their ISP unless they have specifically opened up some ports and directed them to their internal IP address.
You end up just port scanning their crappy router on IPv6 as well because ports that are not opened are stuck at the firewall either way, no matter if you use IPv4 or IPv6.
Just because every device gets a public IP does not mean that IP is publicly accessible.
An advantage that IPv6 has against port scanning is the absurdly large network sizes. For example, my ISP gives me a /56 prefix, that is 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696 IPv6 addresses. Good luck finding the used ones with the port open you need.
Even with just a /64 prefix you get 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses, way outside the feasibility of port scanning.
Compare this to IPV6 where you get a slice of the public address space to place your devices in and they are all directly addressable. In that case your crappy ISP router also is a “proper” firewall. Strangely enough it usually is a “stateful” firewall with default deny-all rules that tracks network connections and looks and performs almost exactly like the NAT version, just without address translation.
realistically, it wouldnt surprise me if ISPs started NATing on residential IPV6 networks, just for the simplicity, but still allowed end users to assign their own IPs if they so pleased. Given the surge in shitty IOT devices, that’s probably a good thing for most people. Though a firewall would also accomplish this as well.
My isp decided to put me behind a CGNAT and broke my access to my network from outside my network. Wanted to charge me $5 a month to get around it. It’s not easy to get around for a layman, but possible. More than anything it just pissed me off that I’d have to pay for something that 1 day ago was free.
Set up a reverse proxy on another machine (like one of those free oracle cloud things). I can’t go into detail because I don’t know exactly how. I think cloudflare also has options for that for free. Either way it’s annoying.
Lots of really large sites are horribly misconfigured. I had intermittent issues because one of the edge hosts in Netflix ‘s round robin dns did not do MTU discovery properly.
My university recently had Internet problems, where the DHCP only leased Out ipv6 addresses. For two days, we could all see which sites implemented ipv6 and which didn’t.
Many big corpo sites like GitHub or discord Apperently don’t. Small stuff like my personal website or suikagame.com do.
Say this to my very large Canadian ISP who still doesn’t support IPv6 for residential customers. Last I checked, adoption in Canada was still under 50%.
50%?? I fucking wish. In Spain we are at 5%. I finally got IPv6 in my phone this year, but I want it in my home, which is still only available as IPv4 even if they’re the same ISP.
Unbelievable that we have to rely on Google and co for sth as essential as push messages! Even among the open source community, the adoption is surprisingly limited.
It is what is used for browser push messages, is already widely supported. Is compatible with existing push infrastructure and users and is end-to-end encrypted. IDK why Unified Push felt the need to create a new protocol when a perfectly good one already existed.
Although there is no “client side” spec. The Unified Push client side could be useful. But they should throw away their custom backend protocol and just use Web Push.
In the world of computers, why would remembering numbers be the stop for new technologies?
Do you remember anyone’s public key? Certificate?
I don’t even remember domain (most) names, just Google them or save them as bookmarks or something.
The reason IPv4 still exists is because ISPs benefit from its scarcity. Big ISPs already paid a lot of money to own IPv4 addresses, if they switched to IPv6 that investnywould be worthless.
Try selling static IPv6 addresses as they do now with IPv4. People would laugh at them and just get a free IPv6 address from an ISP that wants to get new users and doesn’t charge for it.
The longer ISPs delay the adoption of IPv6, the longer they can milk IPv4 scarcity.
IPv6 addresses are practically endless, therefore their value is practically 0. ISPs justify charging extra for static IPv4 because IPv4 addresses do have a value.
If ISPs charge for static IPv6, then one of them could just give that service for free (while keeping the rest of the prices the same as their competitors). That would get them more customers while costing them nothing.
EDIT: I can’t give you an example of an ISP that offers free static IPv6 because there are no ISPs in my country that offer IPv6.
damn if only we had a service that like, obfuscated and abstracted these hard to remember IPs that aren’t very user friendly, and turned them into something more usable. That would be cool i think. Someone should make that.
I hear you on this! Took me a whole day to get my router to delegate IPv6 properly. I’m sure that had it been better adopted, I wouldn’t be having such a hard time.
IPv6, needed for modern Internet not to collapse, would make many other important things easier. Easier to become an ISP, to selfhost, to build P2P networks, etc.
GNU Taler, a payment protocol just look at it go: 101010.pl/, or just imagine building a payment terminal of a Raspberry Pi
Matrix, to unify chat, conference and calling apps
some self-arranging darknet protocol becoming a norm like I2P, GNUNet or Yggdrasil, so we could have a backup when mass Internet blockage happen
I really hope matrix gets native VoIP. I saw like 2 years ago it was in beta, haven’t kept up with it though. I’d also really like voice channels like discord so my friends and I can replace discord but it seems like matrix isn’t interested in being a discord replacement
Matrix I have doubts about. The idea of Tox was nicer, but the implementation quality and the scandal at some point didn’t help.
Tox felt more playable, like piping files over it or a remote shell over it (I know, bad associations, but still), or even using it for VPN. I think there were clients allowing to do such stuff, and the protocol allows it.
EDIT: I mean, it’s still alive, just don’t see it claiming the place of FOSS old Skype replacement as it did.
GNUNet - all you people mentioning it have peers? I tried to set it up a few weeks ago, couldn’t get peers.
About Tox, I am not a fan of mixing up universal delivering of packets and applications. Piping files or using as VPS feels like something that would be better done with proper full network and not be mixed with chat.
to be clear, I2P is not really intended for anything, it’s used for everything. It supports all kinds of things, and there are people doing all kinds of things on it. Though i could see potential technological limitations being a problem.
There are no IPv4 addresses left. So you eather go IPv6-only, which would make many services not work. Or wait in a long queue to repurpose address spaces marked as depracated which would soon run out too. And then you put clients behind double or triple NAT doing having shitty service.
A lot of orgs (mine included) are sitting on large chunks of IPs they don’t need (we have a /16 and several /24s) because they adopted early, got an ASN and prefix assigned by ARIN, and their addressing scheme is now so disjointed and scattered that they can’t sell off anything bigger than a /22, and that makes setting up BGP a pain. Juice ain’t worth the squeeze.
Such a simple solution for the cookie banner issue. But it prevented websites from tricking users into allowing them to gather their data, so it had to go.
Most of those cookie banners are not even needed, you only need them for tracking cookie, not login and session cookies. But of course everyone decided it is just easier to nag all the users with a big splash screen.
A lot of them are not even doing it right, you are not allowed to hint the user that accept all is the “correct” choice by having it in a different color than the others. And being able to say no to all shouls be as easy as accepting all, often it isn’t.
Basically, cookie banners are usually not needed and when they are they are most often incorrectlt designed (not by accident).
But of course everyone decided it is just easier to nag all the users with a big splash screen.
Nope, the thing is, you’ll very rarely find a website that only uses technically necessary session/login cookies. The reason every fucking website, yes, even the one from the barber shop around the corner, has a humongous cookie banner is that every fucking website helps google and other corporations to track users across the whole internet for no reason.
Yes, seen by people visiting EU websites or companies with an EU presence. And because whether or not they assign a cookie is easily verifiable by the person on the other end.
RSS (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) It is in use a fair amount, but it is usually buried. Many people don’t know it exists and because of that I am afraid it will one day go away.
I find it a great simple way to stay up to date across multiple web sites the way I want to (on my terms, not theirs) By the way, it works on Lemmy to :)
Honestly there is rarely a blog I want to follow that doesn’t have it. I do think it would be great to have more readers using it so that it becomes more significant, but for my reading it is actually pretty great.
Markdown really should have more widespread support than it does. It’s just the right mix between plain text and an office document, I took my college notes with it in fact cause of how fast it was to format stuff. But as far as I know, there’s no default program on any of the (major) OS’s or Distros for viewing it.
Maybe it’s just due to a lack of standards for formatting or something, but regardless I do wish it was used and supported more.
That’s what I mean by a lack of a standard for markdown. There needs to be at least a core standards for stuff (like bolding and italics), that is universal across stuff. Then if a program wants to add onto it, that’s fine. But just the core parts being standardized would help a lot.
There are some pseudo-standards for it. Github-flavoured markdown is probably the biggest of them. Then you get things like Obsidian-flavoured markdown that is based off of Github’s.
Heads up for anyone (like me) who isn’t already familiar with SimpleX, unfortunately its name makes it impossible to search for unless you already know what it is. I was only able to track it down after a couple frustrating minutes after I added “linux” into the search on a lark.
going based on preliminary understanding of this shit, it looks like it does all of the user handling on the client side explicitly, server side probably doesn’t do anything of the significant sort.
Or at least to a degree that provides reasonable assurance that X person is different from Y person based on the messaging alone. Though your typing style is going to significantly influence it regardless of that.
probably not accurate, just what i gleaned in about 3 minutes.
You’re going off-topic from the OP question :-) But to answer your new question : I do not trust Matrix enough when it comes to privacy. I know that this link is old but still. disroot.org/en/blog/matrix-closure
Then again I do not trust Signal that much either but sometimes compromises need to be made to get things done. With XMPP the end user can host their own server if they wish to, without meta data going to a centralized point. And video calls via XMPP and Conversations were a pleasure to use when I used it during the Covid-19 pandemic.
LaTeX. As someone in academia, I absolutely love it. It has some issues like package incompatibility, but it’s far far better than anything else I’ve used. It’s basically ubiquitous in academia, and I wish it were the case everywhere else as well.
It’s not a standard but still its an interesting software so I’ll post this here:
Joking aside, I love and hate it. Its paradigm is almost like using the C preprocessor to build a really awkward Turing-machine. TeX/LaTeX does a great job of what it was intended to do; it applies high quality typesetting rules to complex material and produces really good results. I love the output I can get with it and I will be eternally grateful that Donald Knuth decided to tackle this problem. And despite my complaints below, that gratitude is genuine. Being able to redefine something in a context-sensitive way, or to be able to rely on semantics to produce spacing appropriate to an operator vs a variable etc; these are beautiful things.
The problem is, at least once a day I’m left wishing I could just write a callable routine in a normal language with variables, types, arrays, loops and so on. You can implement all those things in TeX, but TeX doesn’t have a normal notion of strings, numbers or arrays, so it is rare that you can do a complicated thing in an efficient way, with readable code. So as a language, TeX frequently leads to cargo-cult programming. I’m not aware that you can invoke reflection after a page is output, to see what decisions on glue and breaks were made; but at the same time you can’t conditionally include something that is dependent on those decisions, since the decision will depend on what is included. This leads to some horrible conditionals combined with compiling twice, and the results are not always deterministic. Sometimes I find it’s quicker to work around things like that by writing an external program that modifies the resulting PDF output, but that seems perverse.
At the same time, there’s really nothing else out there that comes close to doing what LaTeX does, and if you have the patience, the quality of documents it can produce is essentially unbounded. The legacy of encodings, category codes, parameter limits, stack limits etc. just makes it very hard for package writers, and consumes a great deal of time for a lot of people. But maybe I am picky about things that a saner person would just live with.
A lot of very talented people have written a lot of very complex packages to save the user from these esoteric details, and as a result LaTeX is alive and well, and 99% of the time you can get the results you want, using off-the-shelf parts. The remaining 1% of the time, getting the result you want requires a level of expertise that is unreasonable to expect of users. (For comparison, I wrote an optimising C compiler and generally found it far easier to make that work as expected, than some of the things I’ve tried, and failed, to do properly in LaTeX. I now have a rule; if getting some weird alignment to work takes me more than an hour, I just fake it with a postscript file, an image, or write an external program to generate it longhand, in order to save my sanity.)
I think (and certainly hope) that LaTeX is here to stay, in much the same way that C and assembly language are. As time moves forward I think we’ll see more and more abstractions and fewer people dealing with the internals. But I will be forever grateful to the people who are experts in TeX, and who keep providing us with incredible packages.
I honestly just use it for my resume with a template I found, so my knowledge is extremely basic, but I really do love the concept that I can “compile” and actually see the source of my document’s formatting.
Nope and yep. It’s an incredible tool, but it’s got a vim-sized learning curve to really leverage it plus other significant drawbacks. Still my beloved one-and-only when I can get away with it, but its a bit of a masochistic acquired taste for sure.
Template tweaking, as I imagine academia heavily relies on, is really the closest to practical it gets. You do still get beautiful results, it’s just hard to express yourself arbitrarily without really committing to the bit.
Markdown and LaTeX are meant for entirely different purposes. It’s somewhat analogous to HTML vs PDF. While it’s possible to write books with Markdown, it’s a vastly inferior solution compared to latex or typst (for fixed format docs like books).
They host a proprietary service that does all the stuff, the compiler and spec are completely FOSS. So you need to create your own implementations, which is not hard.
I dont think they will close source the compiler. And thats basically everything thats needed?
I have 0 problems with people creating a fancy proprietary implementation to get people hooked. I will never use an online editor, but why care?
Learning LaTeX and working around its quirks seems like a much better time investment than sidegrading to something that lives on premises given by a proprietary commercial project. If someone saw LaTeX and said “I want to make some version of this that is better”, without alterior motives, they would probably just work on improving LaTeX (which a whole lot of people do).
Fancy does not mean better, and often is in many ways worse than plain old boring.
Many projects need to be rewritten from scratch I think. But I also think an easier markup language for LaTeX could be possible, keeping all the nice templates etc.
The experience gained from the production and maintenance of LaTeX2e (the version you have been using for many years) had a major influence on our goals for future development and on new code which is now integrated into LaTeX.
A while ago we made the decision to drop the idea of a separate LaTeX3 format that would exist in parallel to LaTeX2e, but instead decided to gradually modernize LaTeX to keep it competitive in today’s world while maintaining compatibility methods for older documents.
I think this decision was pretty much a good one.
Overleaf does not modernize LaTeX in meaningful ways. It only adds cloud functionality and glossy appearance that you can get on dedicated editors anyways.
No, but Overleaf is just a proprietary fancy editor like the Typst one. Meanwhile typst is just as usable for building editor too.
I dont see any arguments against typst really. I am using Markdown all time and find it best, but lacking. Then LaTeX, honestly I dont want to learn as it must be a pain to write.
Now in typst, you can write academic papers etc just as well. All you need is free software, with good backing, modern tooling (rust, cargo), thus it runs everywhere. Its pretty cool!
Overleaf are not benefactors that develop LaTeX for economic gains, unlike the situation with Typst that rely on it (to my knowledge). LaTeX is also cross platform, supported in tons of editors and can easily be converted to other formats with pandoc. It is also somewhat supported in other formats using implementations such as KaTeX for Markdown and Mathjax in HTML due to being the defacto standard for math typesetting.
Writing papers in LaTeX is a joy, not a pain. The end result is also a beautifully typeset document rivalled by none.
I wrote my masters in LaTeX and while I appreciate the structuredness and the fact I could use vim, it was so quirky. Having to spend half an hour to fix a non obvious compile error, more than once, was a big distractor. I’m sure it gets better when you use it more but I don’t think I have ever used it since. I’m not in academia and I don’t need to solve compile problems when creating an invoice or writing a letter to local government.
IOT devices shouldn’t connect to wifi. ZWave or zigbee is much better suited to IOT stuff, but it seems to mostly get adopted in very limited, locked down proprietary shit like Hue Lights.
Yes but at least Hue (and IKEA and LIDL and many other brands’) lights work well with open Zigbee coordinators, like deconz and ZHA in Home Assistant.
I wish there were more Zigbee and Zwave and less WiFi IoT devices too. I don’t even have a Zwave coordinator because I never found anything I wanted with Zwave support.
There’s only one case I’ve found where Wi-Fi use seems acceptable in IoT: ESPHome. It’s open-source firmware for microcontrollers that makes DIY IoT sensors and controls accessible over LAN without phoning home to whatever remote server, without trying to make anything accessible over the Internet, and without breaking in any way if the device has no route to the Internet.
I still wouldn’t call Wi-Fi use ideal even there; mesh can help in larger homes and Z-Wave/Zigbee radios tend to be more power efficient, though ESP32 isn’t exactly suited for a battery-powered device that’s expected to run 24/7 regardless.
I second Matrix, though I’ve been waiting for e2ee direct p2p (the Dendrite project) do be worked on for a while. Having something like that, that’s truly decentralized while secure and hiding metadata where possible, would be a dream.
Yeah I’ve been following that. It seemed at the time the project didn’t implement nearly all the specs as dendrite which was still lagging synapse.
Might take another look though. I really did want to use it since it was written in rust. Seemed it should probably be more performant, everything else being equal.
I was actually surprised to find out QUIC is fairly close to being default.
Wikipedia
HTTP/3 uses QUIC, a multiplexed transport protocol built on UDP.
HTTP/3 is (at least partially) supported by 97% of tracked web browser installations (thereof of 98% of "tracked mobile" web browsers), and 29% of the top 10 million websites.
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