Notices by Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@octodon.social), page 6

@mala basically, we *NEED* ocap security in our operating systems, and it's the only viable future. If it comes handed down from a corporate direction without community involvement it might be done in a way that results in hard-to-work-around lockdown. If, however, the hardware and entire os stack are truly libre, it'll be the best advancement in user freedom since GNU

@selea IPFS on its own doesn't provide plausible deniability, since it isn't encrypted.

The tahoe-lafs like direction I'm exploring with Golem / Magenc is safer. It could be composed with IPFS though.

Given upload filter stuff, it might be that the safest way to host a decentralized network going into the future is plausible deniability, which makes me think the stuff I'm working on with Spritely (eg the Golem demo) is quite timely?

always really scary when you sign up on a website and they give you a low character limit for your *password*

The Genode Operating System Framework - Sculpt as a Community Experience https://genodians.org/nfeske/2019-03-19-sculpt-ce

And an associated tutorial https://genode.org/documentation/articles/sculpt-ce

Genode is hands down one of the most interesting FOSS projects around today.

@conservancy Yay! A @freedeb talk is always a good talk.

Merged two racket-csexp merge requests from fellow fediverse racketeers @clacke and @euhmeuh

https://gitlab.com/spritely/racket-csexp/merge_requests/1 https://gitlab.com/spritely/racket-csexp/merge_requests/2

It's nice when you have projects that you feel like are fairly obscure but it turns out people are reading and contributing to them anyway

BTW, if this interests you and you're a student, maybe you'd like to work on "guix deploy" as a summer project? @dthompson and myself are interested in mentoring "guix deploy" and related tooling for GSoC this year. https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Guix/GSoC-2019#Guix_Deploy

Just think! You could spend your summer hacking lisp/scheme/guix/functional-distros/etc!

Yesterday @dthompson and I (mostly Dave) worked on "guix deploy" and got it to a nearly minimally working state https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2019-03/msg00114.html

However, we're stuck on a weird issue involving (guile-)ssh. We could use help if you're interested in looking.

"Here get in contact with me over the fediverse"
"Is this a webfinger id"
"No it's my email address, email is the original federated social network amirite"

Surely you've been wondering, when on earth is @librelounge going to talk about ActivityPub? Especially since I'm co-host and that's a major part of my work!

Well, here's an episode that's *entirely* about ActivityPub! https://librelounge.org/episodes/episode-12-activitypub-part-1.html

It's the second in a series about federation. There's more coming!

> After a long disclosure process we release #SMoTherSpectre, a transient execution attack that uses port contention as a side channel (instead of caches) to leak register/memory data. Details: http://nebelwelt.net/blog/20190306-SMoTherSpectre.html paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.01843 PoC: https://github.com/HexHive/SMoTherSpectre

Via https://twitter.com/gannimo/status/1103350542036856832

Let me break that down for you: it's similar to Meltdown/Spectre but uses a technique that doesn't involve evaluating "untrusted code".

@mlemweb is currently using http://www.sweethome3d.com/ to make a model of our house and is kicking butt at it

This is some heckin' awesome free software

I wish, as all cat caretakers do, that our cat would understand that we do not want her butt pointed at our face.

If someone also wants to do a security audit of Magenc, that'd be very welcome: https://gitlab.com/dustyweb/magenc/issues/5

From #guile on freenode:

<wingo> moo
<stis> muu
<nalkri> µ

New episode of @librelounge is very on point for the fediverse! We talk about what federation is, how ActivityPub fits in, and @emacsen introduces his new WIP ActivityPub-using project ReviewPub https://librelounge.org/episodes/episode-11-what-is-federation-reviewpub.html

This is the first in what will be an ongoing series about federation, ActivityPub, and the decentralized social web. Hope you enjoy it!

I hate the "own your data" meme in the decentralized social web. A friend of mine pointed out how useless the phrase is a few years ago and I agree. "Ownership" sounds an awful lot like digital "property", which is nonsense when moving from physical to digital stuff because copying doesn't destroy the original. The path you go down there is the path to artificial constraints like DRM. Yikes!

We should be talking about user autonomy instead. That's a much better meme.

The continuation of #Spritely Golem will be to explain how the paradox of "mutable" content can be done in such an immutable distributed system, allowing updates or even deletes (via switching the content to Tombstone objects).

Here's my reading list, in case you want to follow along:

https://tahoe-lafs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/specifications/mutable.html
https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs/compare/master...ccxcz:crdt-dirs-spec

(thanks to friends on #erights on irc.freenode.net for these links)

Me: I don't understand why people aren't using the ActivityPub client to server part of the spec

Also me: The client to server paradigm (as opposed to p2p applications that have no client / server distinction) is at the root of the failure of the fediverse to take off and be resilient