Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 3

#HatTip to @alcinnz for the link to this.

For those who want to reduce the #Javascript on their sites to the absolute minimum but don't know how, there's some really good advice towards the end of Eevee's brief history of #HTML and #CSS layout tools:
https://eev.ee/blog/2020/02/01/old-css-new-css/

"There’s no good reason for any of this. These aren’t cutting-edge interactive applications; they’re pages with text on them. We used to print those on paper, but as soon as we made the leap to computers, it became impossible to put words on a screen without executing several megabytes of custom junk?"
https://eev.ee/blog/2016/03/06/maybe-we-could-tone-down-the-javascript/

#MakeJavascriptOptional!

But #Scoop, #theSpinoff, and now #Stuff, show us that there are other ways media organisations can be owned, managed, and even funded. A brave government would set up a media democracy commission, with antitrust powers to break up struggling media empires, instead of subsidizing their investors at public expense. The broken up entities could be sold to their workers or their audiences/ communities, or both, using the most suitable option from a standardized set of cooperative ownership models.

The fediverse.party crew have started work on a canonical timeline of fediverse history. If you'd like to help, please reply to this post with relevant dates and reference links, or go ahead and add your edits here:https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/Federated-Social-Web-Timeline

If you have trouble getting permission to edit the wiki, you can contact us via our new @fediverseparty account.

If your DNS service is stopping you from accessing a site, how do you know that it's been blocked by them? How can you find out why they are blocking it? Maybe services like this need to restrict themselves to blocking only Javascript (to prevent attacks using JS) and popping up a malware warning, like NoScript does when it detects cross-site scripting. That way, the user can review the HTML/CSS page (if any) and choose to block the site for them, or allow JS and continue to browse it normally.

Here's another software naming collision that's likely to cause a bit of confusion down the line ...
https://github.com/Tencent/matrix

#Matrix #WeChat

@tomosaigon agreed, but every little bit counts, especially for users on dial-up, rural ADSL, or metered mobile data. As the old saying goes, if you take care of the cents, the dollars will take care of themselves. If everyone points to another resource waster as an excuse to keep wasting resources, nothing will change.

3) localize servers. Where servers are needed, host them as close as possible to where their users are. Eg NZOSS hosts all its services at the CatalystCloud.nz datacentre in Aotearoa, because most of the people using them are located here. If all network services aimed at kiwis did that, it would significantly reduce the traffic on the cables connecting Aotearoa to the rest of the world's networks.

2) make software and storage local-first as much as possible.
https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/local-first.pdf

* again, more use of generic native apps
* increase the use of browser cache and persistent storage, to avoid the same data being downloaded over and over again on the same sites.
* make it easy to download media, rather than streaming it over and over again.

#LocalFirst

Some examples:
1) Get rid of all unnecessary Javascript
* rebuild all simple brochureware sites as static sites using only HTML/CSS.
* increase the use of native apps to reduce the avoidable transmission of web apps. Generic, multi-account ones implementing open protocols, not branded ones tied to nonfree services.
* get rid of all user tracking and ad serving

Anyone got any comments on these claims about GNU/Linux security flaws?
https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html

#GNU #Linux #security

I also learned about #OpenTopoMap.org, a project to render topological maps, released under a free license (CC BY-SA 3.0), using data from #OpenStreetMap and #SRTM (NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission):
https://github.com/der-stefan/OpenTopoMap

I assume the #SPDX standard includes a place to put the version number and release date for software packages, maybe this could be helpful?
https://spdx.org/using-spdx-documents

@ptman @Coffee @hubert

This post on the #Jami blog highlights some of the ways users have to manage #P2P apps differently from those that depend on servers:
https://jami.net/the-jami-quirks/

Also:
* #PrivateBin.info, a fork of #ZeroBin, a "minimalist, open source online pastebin where the server has zero knowledge of pasted data"
* #PasteBin.to, another zero-knowledge pastebin but it uses #CloudFlare
* #HasteBin, but it doesn't seem to work without allowing scripts from ajax.googleapis.com.

There are heaps of self-hosted pastebin options:
https://selfhosted.libhunt.com/haste-server-alternatives

Does anyone know of an offline map app like #OSMAnd+ for desktop GNU/Linux?

Help the #Jami team choose the new default #ringtone for their #P2P chat app:
https://framaforms.org/help-us-choose-jamis-default-ringtone-1565722509

Is there a metadata standard for tagging software releases, so that sites like the Free Software Directory ( directory.fsf.org ) can automatically list the latest release without human maintainers having to constantly check for new releases? Could this be part of the #ForgeFed spec?

This page, whose main contents are a text news article with a photo byline, is completely blank with all #Javascript blocked. It tries to run scripts in my browser from no less than 20 third-party domains:
https://www.informationweek.com/microsoft-updates-windows-without-user-permission-apologizes/d/d-id/1059183

#MakeJavascriptOptional!