baltakatei

The artists could have chosen not to sign their long-term rights away for short-term discounts on recording studio costs.

Nvidia: I have altered the deal, pray I do not alter it further.

Duolingo, the dominant player, can simply buy competition like busuu, bypassing the need they’d otherwise have to improve their software.

Amazon Prime is meant to invoke the sunk cost fallacy in your mind. Why shop around when you’ve already sunk over 100 USD per year into “free” shipping? This mental bias towards shopping with Amazon is the cost and is part of an overall anti-competitive strategy. See “The making of Amazon Prime, the internet’s most successful and devastating membership program”. Jeff Bezos has been explicitly anti-competitive on this point:

“I want to draw a moat around our best customers.”

You don’t leave a moated walled garden unless the Lord who maintains the moat permits you. And even then, they’ll strip you of your DRM’d digital goods (TV shows, movies, audiobooks, ebooks) as soon as you cross the drawbridge. The strongest supporters of Amazon are the ones who have thousands of USD of such digital goods locked up with them since they can’t leave without being stripped of things they bought.

Amazon replacements:

• Audiobooks: Libro.fm (no DRM)
• eBooks: eBooks.com (specifically, their DRM-free section)
• Shopping: basically any major online retailer’s website
• Electronics: System76 (for gaming machines), ThinkPenguin (for FOSS machines)
• Groceries: your local grocer, lol.

As for video streaming, it’s going to take a breakup of the Big Tech monopolies via revival of anti-trust laws to fix that. Hear the first chapter of The Internet Con (skip to 2m5s) by Cory Doctorow for more on that.

Can we have space settlement without the war and genocide? It’s not like killing Indians and robbing trains is a fundamental requirement.

Keyboards were so nice when you wanted to accurately input characters without putting your faith in auto-correct. God help you if you need to input something not in its dictionary like someone’s name.

I would argue the original theft was when the publisher coerced creators to sign away their copyright power due to the monopoly the publisher has on the market: i.e. if you don’t sign your rights away, you can’t play.

In theory, creators could punish publishers by going on strike, but publishers abuse copyright law to remove potential competitors striking creators might flee to. The DMCA’s overly broad application of DRM that also prevents creators from freeing their content from publishers also inhibits competition by increasing switching costs for customers who build up a library or DRM’s content that they cannot transfer to another publisher.

Breaking up monopolies by restoring anti-trust law to a pre-Reagan state would prevent the original coersion-theft of rights from creators since creators could reassign copyright from misbehaving publishers, enabling customers to transfer their purchased libraries to another publisher.

Reminds me of Mori Calliopeʼs 2021-12-22 primal scream over Adam Sandler jokes. “That was a blood-curdling scream. 大丈夫？”

Ultimately, the quality of your work is a function of you and your resources. Corruption and miscommunication plague all management systems. Corrupt management siphons resources away from otherwise good work. Government bureaucracy is another layer of management like any other. Customers are not just consumers but working people like you.

Hang in there.

When they were allowed to buy YouTube because their Google Video couldn’t compete was the turning point.

Unless anti-trust law changes, Google will just buy ChatGPT and Stability to reduce competition and form a new monopoly.

Next logical step is to modify the uploaded video itself to contain ads around the video frame or on automatically detected clear surfaces in the video.

Google will just buy such a competitor like Facebook did with Instagram.

FreedomBox facilities installation of a end-to-end encryption chat server Matrix which is compatible with Element.

FreedomBox is Debian FOSS that also supports Let’s Encrypt for HTTPS encryption. The goal of FreedomBox is to permit setup via only the webUI which it mostly gets right.

Chatting via Element this way is nice since you’re self-hosting the service and not relying upon a centralized server that could required a backdoor. I highly recommend it.

What’s with that si parameter?

I imagine more people would use Tor if they could get paid to provide bandwidth (like Orchid as described on FLOSS Weekly 633).

Maybe try out FreedomBox? freedombox is a Debian package which automatically sets up apache2, firewalld, fail2ban and Letʼs Encrypt. It also automatically adds pre-canned configuration files for applications you install with it (e.g. Mediawiki, WordPress, Matrix, Postfix/Dovecot). The theoretical goal of FreedomBox is to allow anyone to set up a webserver and administer it via a webUI. So, although I would say itʼs not quite there yet for command-line-illiterate users, I have found the software useful as a turnkey server to see what makes certain web applications tick, albeït in mostly vanilla form.

For example, after installing a new app like WordPress, you could examine what exactly the FreedomBox scripts changed in the /etc/apache2/ or /etc/fail2ban/ configuration files.

fgallery

TL;DR: fgallery is a dumb static web gallery generator: EXAMPLE, SETUP.

There’s fgallery which is a small Debian package that takes an input directory (e.g. photo-dir) and creates a static website in a new directory (e.g. my-gallery).

$ fgallery photo-dir my-gallery

Description

From the Debian package details page.

static HTML+JavaScript photo album generator

“fgallery” is a static photo gallery generator with no frills that has a stylish, minimalist look. “fgallery” shows your photos, and nothing else.

There is no server-side processing, only static generation. The resulting gallery can be uploaded anywhere without additional requirements and works with any modern browser.

Among all the Debian packages similar to this one, this seems the most recently maintained (version 1.9.1 came out 2022-12-31). It is licensed GPLv2+ so the source code is available.

Upload to a web server

After running fgallery as described above, upload my-gallery to your static web page directory (e.g. /var/www/html/ with a typical apache2 setup) and open the index.html through a web browser.

Here’s an example gallery I made just now (setup procedure).

( Photo by Baltakatei / 🅭🅯🄎 4.0 )

Viewing locally with a browser

To view the gallery locally without uploading to a web server (e.g. a Digital Ocean droplet) or static content hosting service (e.g. AWS S3), you can do so with your own web browser. However, because the fgallery webpage uses Javascript and since modern browsers refuse to render Javascript in HTML pages at local file system addresses (e.g. file:///) due to same-origin policy, the easiest solution is to make a simple webserver via python3:

$ python3 -m http.server -d ./my-gallery

Then, you can visit the my-gallery/index.html file via a local http:// address at http://localhost:8000/.

Summary

fgallery lacks many complex features (no image database, no metadata editing, no dynamic server processes for editing images, etc.). However, I’d argue its lack of features is the main feature. It just takes a directory of photos and spits out a directory you can plug into your hosting service. Updating the the gallery is just a matter of running the same $ fgallery photo-dir my-gallery command again and re-uploading.

Edit(2023-07-07T12:05+00): Clarify python3 commend.

TL;DR: fgallery is a dumb static web gallery generator: EXAMPLE, SETUP.

Theoretically, I don’t think an MX record is absolutely needed to send, but it definitely is needed to receive. An MX record helps an email sending server to figure out which IP address to actually send email data packets towards based on the domain name in the email address (i.e. the @apple.com in steve@apple.com).

Even if you’re self-hosting your own email server and are using the same domain name for all services and are using port number to differentiate incoming traffic, incoming email won’t come in unless an MX record can explicitly tell other email servers where to send emails labeled with your domain name. An MX record can also be a handy way to redirect email traffic to a different IP address in case the one your server uses is blacklisted by other email servers (e.g. if spammers have used your IP address in the past).

An A record can associate an IP address with a domain name but an MX record is needed to tell a sending server that a domain name is prepared to accept email at all.

That said, if you examine the DNS setup instructions that a transactional email company will send you, you’ll see that they also want you to create other DNS records for purposes. For example, Mailgun has me store a public key in a TXT record (making it a DKIM record) used to cryptographically authenticate emails against emails sent by your server (that are forwarded and signed by Mailgun’s private key) to prevent email address impersonation, which might be important even if you’re only sending password reset emails and not expecting to receive email. (I recall receiving several emails from emperorpalpatine@senate.gov while in college, probably sent by mischievous CS students learning about email stuff themselves and realizing our school’s email setup was old and crusty) Mailgun also has me keep a CNAME record as well for some kind of delivery confirmation service (a transactional email service is basically a trusted man-in-the-middle); I forget the details. But, basically, thanks to spammers, there’s more to setting up your own email service than creating an MX record, even if all you’re doing is setting up a Lemmy instance that only needs to send password reset emails.

Source: someone who has bumbled through Discourse and Mediawiki email setup for small projects.