• 16 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: November 3rd, 2021

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  • Neither servo rendering engine (like gecko), nor verso (an actual rust based web browser based on servo) are quite ready for prime time. But I’m hoping they will be there sooner rather than later. I don’t use Firefox directly, but rather wrappers based on it, Librewolf for the desktop and Mull in part because I’m lazy (I prefer the ankerfox stuff and other to be done for me), and if I want to avoid chromium based browsers, dominating big time (MS browser edge is as well chromium base, electron is chromium in disguise, and now a days QT web engine underneath is chromium as well) well there’s no option yet.

    On the other side, nothing guarantees servo and verso (or whatever other servo based browsers in the future) will care about net free advocacy, neither user freedoms, just be concerned about being better technical solutions, :( But I still have high hopes as you might…

    Just being a good technical alternative is not good enough now days, :(


  • This is sad, not just because it’s a trend on Mozilla, but because it shows how mozilla has embraced the corporative kind of mindset. The advocacy team was fundamental for net free principles.

    Mozilla based browsers keep being the only practical alternative to web browser dominance, but it itself has degrading its status of resisting bad practices against users and the web in general. And emerging alternatives are also technical alternatives only, with no intention of net freedom advocacy, GPL sort of principles to protect the user and so on.

    Sad days indeed, :/



  • What they’re saying there is that when trying to auto detect the server configurations, there are unexpected connections to cloudfare IPs, which didn’t usually happen with K9. Who posted the concern associated this to telemetry, but the answers are pointing a different direction. But at this point it just guesses, :(

    I guess some more formal traffic inspection needs to happen to understand if truly there’s unexpected traffic, where it is directed to, and hopefully infer somehow its purpose. The guesses about what’s happening suggest it’s just about the auto connection, but again, just guesses.

    I explored the configurations, and I didn’t find anything about telemetry, and so neither how to disable it. K9 does not have an about:config advanced configuration like desktop Thunderbird does, so if there’s truly telemetry or some other sort of information leakage, then after proving it, perhaps developers realize they can do better. But so far nothing really proving telemetry or information leakage.



  • F-Droid produces its own builds, with its own signatures, so to get f-droid going, you’ll need to install from F-Droid. However the import mechanism seems really nice. Perhaps you can install from F-Droid the official release, which can co-exist with your upstream installed beta release, import from it from the F-Droid app, then remove the upstream installed beta release, and if you wan to keep on beta, then install the beta release from F-DRoid (be careful right now, given a bug made K9 show up as beta release as well, but the app ID is clear, just being careful is enough), and then import from the official release, then remove the official release and you’re all set. The idea is not to reconfigure a thing by doing those steps, and perhaps you wouldn’t like to go to beta, and remain on the official release, which is not that behind, and perhaps better tested.


  • Did that, thunderbird release no beta, and no issues since I don’t have google account. For people with google account requiring to re-sign in, and who don’t often do so, signing in is really hard if they don’t registered their phone number to google. It’s sad, I commented about it in some other post. Understandable in reality they are different apps, but in the end it should be the same user ID, but nevertheless it’s a PITA if people don’t have a device permanently logged in, :( For them it’s better to stay on K9,and hope K9 doesn’t go away, or else find out how the heck to login to google once again.



  • Sadly, when having a gmail account, the migration is not possible, if the user doesn’t keep permanently logged in somewhere. TB is not taking the current K9 OATH, and tries to establish it’s own authentication, which on a K9 + desktop TB user not logging often to google at all, it’s really almost impossible to login to gmail, since it ask as security the user 1st phone number, which could have never been registered to google, and beyond that it requests to use a different device which is already logged in, but it you go to the desktop, and attempt to login, it does exactly the same thing, the same stupid question or requesting for another device. So it gets into a loop of devices which can’t be resolved. And for this other user I tried to setup TB for, they don’t authenticate near often to google, but they use both desktop TB and K9 quite well.

    For now, for such users, until they figure out how the hell to login to their google account again, they better don’t try migrating to Thunderbird, since the import functionality is not quite enough to get google mail working fine, again if the user doesn’t login to google often. A bit sad, though it makes sort of sense, since the apps registered to google would be different. Sad in the sense that an already working setup for gmail on K9 can not just be imported as is to TB, and keep just working.

    While K9 remains working, there’s no issue for such users though. Hopefully that doesn’t happen,

    It works great when not having a google/gmail account, :)


  • Ohh, it needs to import though. I was afraid in case there would be sort of two different directories over the same data, or that on TB dir it would be to start fetching stuff. But it seems it literally copies over the directory contents, which is fine, since the then the other app could easily been removed.

    And it works with TB non beta, I guess it works with beta for testers a well (though I like the release, and see how it goes). I’ll be using non beta for now, a bit behind, I prefer to use releases rather than beta releases, and on f-droid I enabled unstable upgrades…

    Anyone played with push vs. pull on TB? On K9, I ended up having both. With the last years changes, it removed the push option selecting from the fetching configs, but the push could be selected/deselected from each folder, and I keep them both. Pulling makes the requirement of not having restrictions on battery usage though.

    Not sure if that’s getting any better with TB (non beta or beta), and if push has gotten any better. In the end, imap push/idle pretty much depend on the server, and not so much on the client I’d guess…

    Thanks !



  • OK, many thanks !

    I’ll just do nothing for now then. I hope if at some point a migration is required, it’s sort of automatic, f-droid just starts using the Thunderbird app rather than the K9, without user intervention other than performing the f-droid upgrade, one and that would be it. But we’ll see.

    If you ask, knowing it’s the same thing, I would have gone with just one app, replacing the other one, and that would be easier and clearer, :)

    Thanks a lot again !





  • Oh, you mean using divestos-fdroid-repo? Well, before it became part of official f-droid I used to do that. I’m not sure how long it’ll take to fix the official f-droid.org builds though, since I’d like to go back to it. The sad thing is that to move from one repo to another one loses all configurations/settings, :( But perhaps it’s truly unsafe to wait until the build on f-droid.org gets fixed, if it ever does it.

    Anyone aware if there are efforts to get it back building for f-droid.org? Does it depend on the Fennec issue getting resolved?


  • I use mull from f-droid, and f-droid started showing that when upgrading Today to version 1.21.1. No idea why until this f-droid app upgrade.

    I guess the mull issue is the same. Both fennec and mull are at the same version on f-droid, 129.0.2, and both show in their anti-features that the app contains a known security vulnerability, indicating firefox has fixed several security vulnerabilities since 130.

    Is it right to hope that once fennec can get distributed on f-droid, then mull will follow? I’m not planning to move away from mull.

    Thanks !




  • Ohh, do you have miniflux self hosted somewhere so it does the feeds collection, and then on newsflash you hook with the miniflux reader?

    What I do to sync (I don’t read feeds on the phone) between desktops is to rsync these 3 dirs:

    ~/.config/news-flash
    ~/.local/share/news-flash
    ~/.local/share/news_flash
    

    That so I don’t lose the feed subscriptions neither the history of what I have already looked at, neither what I’ve kept as starred (there are interesting feeds I want to keep). If miniflux had sort of a client, similar to newsFlash, but that set everything in miniflux rather than locally, so that no matter different desktops (even phones) will have the same starred kept feeds, and the whole history and the like on miniflux… There’s a python client, but I don’t know if it gets any closer to newsFlash. I guess having miniflux, one can hook to it through any web browser as well, but I really like newsFlash interface, hehe.

    The sad thing is needing to somehow keep miniflux running somewhere, which is not feasible for me, and perhaps for others, but it’s interesting…


  • Just so you know you can get push notifications on Jami. Jami has been supporting unified push notification for a while now, but it’s opt-in, some might not opt for it considering reducing privacy a bit, as some actually disable the proxy and some phone specific feature intending to prevent battery exhausting too fast.

    For unified push support you can take a look at jami’s article about its unified push support. I use ntfy BTW.


  • This banning culture of hate is ridiculous, you can disagree with someone, or even just ideas, but procuring “canceling” and “banning” to everything we don’t agree is crazy. This mono culture of hate really saddens me. But perhaps you’re right on your appreciation.

    Some of these periodical rebirths of the debate about RMS, what are really looking for is discredit on the Free software, which is not the same as open source software. Drew is one of those, if I’m not mistaken because his blog is prolific, who believe free software has no hope, and the total triumph of open source, which in practice is correct, but ethically I’m not so sure. We should be aware of what’s behind all these attacks, and I believe it’s naive to think these attacks are just about RMS. Free software is ethical in the sense of the freedoms it seeks for the users, but that has no place on enterprises and corporations, open source has enjoyed a different fate because it’s not as strict on respecting those freedoms, which under enterprises and corporations are believed to be too restrictive and against their interests. And here we are over and over attacking the organizations (yes, the FSF is attacked not only because RMS is part of it, it was founded by him as well) and people defending those principles, because in the end our minds tend to disqualify everything way too easily, made easy with this banning culture of hate. I’ve read about how useless it is the FSF, and also about how useless it is the copyleft, and these recurrent intend to discredit the one who started all that of course discredits what came from him, one way or another. I wish I’m wrong on this, and that there was no pun intended towards free software…

    The original post was most probably included into the wrong community for sure BTW, this is an open source community, so looking to empathize about free software stuff in here is not going to happen, even less for RMS.