Giver of skulls

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Joined 102 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 1923

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  • This issue/this issue at the corporate Element fork seem to indicate that the process is entirely manual. As in, make a client side backup per account, make all accounts leave all rooms, log out all sessions, kill Dendrite, start Synapse, recreate accounts, restore backups, pray.

    Even if you don’t migrate the data, you still need to deactivate all the accounts. If you can’t keep the host signing key material, you also need to make sure all servers know about all users having left or you start getting tons of phantom events and possibly even make existing rooms impossible to join.

    As for client backups: I know Element can do backups/data dumps, but I’m not sure about restoring.

    Alternatively, you may be able to write SQL migrations to convert Dendrite to Synapse, but that sounds like absolute developer agony.



  • Email federates across providers. As do voice calls, texts, and RCS. The telecom industry was forced to do some kind of federation the moment different countries (with different monopolies) started needing to call each other. The terrible, terrible signalling systems that made this federation possible still allow for foreign governments to track human rights activists and journalists across the border today. The modern telecoms federation system is better, but it’ll only protect you when everyone in the world stops doing 2G and that’ll take another decade at least.

    Back when newsgroups existed in serious numbers (not for piracy reasons) they were a major federated discussion forum. IRC chats were and still are federated, though not many interconnected IRC channels remain.

    There used to be this “OpenID” standard that was designed to be federated. Basically, you registered an account with any identity server, and with the URL to that server you could log in to any service that used federated OpenID. That way, websites didn’t need to bother registering passwords and such, and you only needed to enter your password with an identity server of your choice. Great concept, never got any real interest, died out slowly, now you can’t even find information about it any more. OAuth2 rose from its rotting remains at some point.

    RSS is a semi-federated protocol, as are Atom feeds, its successor. You don’t really send much data to these servers, but it does allow you to follow arbitrary web pages or people. If you’ve ever subscribed to a podcast using a third party app or website, you’ve probably accidentally used either Atom or RSS.

    WordPress had this network of pingbacks that would share when one blog mentioned another, which worked across servers and domains just like a federated system.

    In the 00s there were these special walkie-talkies that would set up an independent mesh network to communicate without cell service or internet connectivity. That was more peer to peer than federation, I guess, but it’s a pretty cool invention that was only used to send messages between Barbie coloured pieces of plastic.

    Modern federated networks you may not know about include XMPP and Matrix for messaging, probably a system of interconnected patient databases if your government deals with healthcare, and I think the EU system that’ll let you log in to foreign government websites using your own government’s digital IT system could also be considered federated.

    Bluesky is technically federated over ATProto and through bridges like bridgy fed you can set up bidirectional communications between the Fediverse and the ATProtoverse.


  • If your connection is technically capable of matching upload and download speeds, you can usually just pay more for higher speeds. Basically, if you’re on fiber or one of those super rare long distance ethernet connections. Synchronous fiber is more expensive (because you’re getting more and planned egress data+capacity is more expensive than ingress data+capacity).

    If you’re on 4G/5G/coax, there are very good technical reasons why matching upload and download speeds is impractical. Possible, yes, but the total throughput of the entire network would be significantly lower, because half the network’s capacity would need to be reserved just in case someone in your neighborhood is uploading a video to TikTok. Sending data to you is easy, reserving time for everyone to claim an upload slot involves spreading bits across a multi dimensional grid consisting of things like time/frequency/phase across a probability grid with grid blocks as small as 62 microseconds in size (in the time dimension). You can’t set up a shared medium like that without either wasting most of the bandwidth or putting a central controller in place, with most of the bandwidth at their disposal.

    Sometimes cable ISPs do alter their frequency plans to reserve more upload capacity. Often this coincides with free analog services such as radio and TV getting killed off because they’re hogging important parts of the spectrum. Sometimes everyone gets a bit more latency and a bit less download capacity to accommodate for the higher upload. Most of the time you need to replace/update your modem to make use of any of the advantages and most people usually don’t bother even if they could use more upload capacity.

    If you’re on DSL (which goes up to what, 400mbps these days?) then the ancient dark witchcraft sending more than 28.8k down a rusty old phone line specced for the late 1800s should not be questioned. Praise be to the dark lords of telecommunication for the ungodly arcane rituals those fuckers pull to send broadband internet over those lines at all.



  • Just under half of men aged 18-29 voted for Trump, and who knows how bad that number would be if young people actually bothered to vote. The idea that conservatives are just old people who got theirs is just a skewed view from young progressives with conservative parents.

    Gen X was the age of hippies, protesting the Vietnam war, anti nuclear protests, and so on. In many ways they were more progressive than the current young generations.

    Millenials are growing up to be just as conservative as gen x. Gen z is already turning towards conservatism (probably because progressives really suck at social media which is shaping young minds to an extreme extent). The only difference between gen x/y/z/alpha is that x and y have had more time to accumulate wealth and therefore possess more power.

    Don’t blame society’s issues on people because of something simple like their age or their race. No problem is as simple as that.


  • The younger people call them boomers. Hell, gen Z and gen alpha call millenials boomers. Everyone who is “old” is a boomer now.

    The older people only seem to be talking about millenials and younger, usually in the form of rage bait internet articles.

    The concept of generations is completely arbitrary. They used to be named after important changes in the age distribution of western populations, but after the boomers they just became “the next one” because nothing really happened. Older gen X behaves the same as younger boomers, and millenials range from “owns a house, has four kids, are starting to plan their retirement” to “just finished their education”, and I haven’t yet found a reason why gen alpha and gen z differ at all (at least the millenials could be tied to 9/11?).

    Now, nobody worth our time will take any of it seriously.



  • Corporate wants people to port their COBOL code into Java 8.

    Most of them have decided on a tech tech a decade ago and they’re not going to change anything about it unless they absolutely have to, whether that’s Java or C# or Python or Ruby…

    Rust is gaining traction, but mostly for new projects or big revamps, and there’s a lot more shitty old code to maintain than there are opportunities to develop anything new. Besides, most companies don’t need Rust (or C or C++ for that matter), JVM/.NET/NodeJS/Go is fast enough for even intense corporate workloads and doesn’t require people to put in the effort to make everything perfectly sound.





  • Standard Mirai wil target devices like routers and cameras. It won’t infect phones. If someone took Mirai and packaged it into an Android app (either because you downloaded a scam app or because the supply chain for the app was compromised), the Android sandbox should protect your phone. If all is well, removing the app should be enough to clear the infection. If that doesn’t work, the malware obtained root credentials and cleaning it will require a factory reset or even a factory reset + complete reinstallation of the system (basically, useless unless you’re knowledgeable in Android modding).

    My recommendation would be scanning the phone using a bunch of antivirus tools (starting with Google’s and MIUI’s) to see if the infection is still there. If you don’t trust it, back up the phone and factory reset it. Be especially wary of banking apps, logging in to important websites through browsers, and any government ID apps you may use. As always, SMS 2FA should also be treated with caution.

    As for your questions:

    1. Notifications can be faked. Hold the notification and click the settings icon to go to the app’s settings, that can’t be faked. If it brings you to a system package, it’s probably legit. Several Chinese smartphone companies have malware scanning from companies like Avast integrated into them.

    It’s possible that the notification was a false positive. Virus scanners can be wrong sometimes. Try scanning your phone with Google’s antivirus or any other reputable antivirus app on Google Play.

    1. It happens quite often that some malware company sells “advertising” to a small app which actually contains malware. Or a dependency of the Android app got compromised. Google Play’s malware scanning doesn’t catch all malware, unfortunately.

    An app that was not packaged with your phone cannot infect another without root access. However, malware can exploit unpatched vulnerabilities in your phone to gain root access, so if you haven’t downloaded any OS security updates the past 2-3 months, there’s a good chance your phone is quite easy to get root access on if a hacker knows about it.

    Given that Huawei has been banned from Google Play for longer than they normally serve security updates for their phones, my guess is that you’re probably quite behind. Last security update I can find for your phone was 2.5 years ago. You may be able to find custom ROMs to install on your phone that are more up to date in regards to security stuff (though those bring their own risks, of course).

    1. Hard to say. Mirai also works with plain IP addresses so if this mirai-gx is the same, you may not see any evidence of it in your DNS logs. Or it could just hard-code a DNS-server, that’d also hide the DNS traffic from pihole.

    2. It’s a name chosen by an antivirus company. There’s usually no explaining those. From what I can find online, it’s a dropper binary that will download other malware, rather than the normal Mirai, but there’s not a lot to be found about it online.

    3. No problem at all if you don’t get infected. Not a problem at all if you don’t do anything important with it. Probably fine if you reset the phone and the infection clears. Life-changing if you get infected and hackers start opening bank accounts using information from your email accounts to launder money through phone scams.




  • Deleted on the server, not necessarily deleted in Sync. If you’d clear the data in the app and log in again, the comment would just be a normal deleted comment (“deleted by moderator” or whatever).

    Before Sync came to Lemmy, it typically stood out because it would download a full browsable local copy of your timeline, and comments being visible that were deleted online were a common side effect of that. I guess these deleted comments still showing is just the classic Sync mechanism doing what it’s best at.