Tech

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/1149

A tech service named Clerk put together a nice breakdown of how Passkeys work on a technical level. I've found many other explanations too focused on technical definitions rather than a conceptional overview or so simplistic they were unhelpful for me. This one feels like a nice balance between not enough information and too much.

The article is broken down into the sections below:

• What are passkeys?
• How does public key crypto work?
• A practical use of public-key cryptography
• How are passkeys more secure than a username and password?
• Clerk supports passkeys [this last section is irrelevant to anyone not interested in the service provided by Clerk]

Clerk provides some sort of user management service; I don't know nor care if it's any good.

Hi everyone. I'm launching Linguist Translate, an open-source, full-featured translation solution with an embedded offline translator based on the Bergamot Project created by Mozilla.

Site: https://linguister.io

GitHub: https://github.com/translate-tools/linguist

Today, Linguist is launched on ProductHunt. Support the project who really care about privacy: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/linguist-translate

Linguist is not just a wrapper over Google Translator like many other extensions. You can use any translation service with Linguist, thanks to custom translators! You may even deploy any machine translation (like LibreTranslate) on your localhost and then add this service to Linguist.

All features are included: text translation, full-page translation, selected text translation, Text-To-Speech, dictionary, history, and even more.

Ooooh... car BSOD vibes...

...which is why i prefer AM for hardware longevity.

With YouTube leveraging its dominance to make the service shittier and shittier, we're forced to consider our future. Yeah we have Peertube, but Peertube is shitty. I consider myself techy and I can't find a peertube instance that's not just one single users' "boring" videos.

So in order to move away from YouTube, we're facing two major issues. No three!

1. Service: Even in its state of enshittification, the YouTube app is still a million times better than Vimeo, DailyMotion, etc. Introduce ReVanced into the equation and YouTube has a lock-in.
2. Hosting: Hosting video is expensive as hell and that's a major hurdle to toppling Big Tech.
3. Audience: People stay where the people are, because that's how they generate money. Peertube sucks because I can't just put in a URL and find random content. Without audience you don't have discoverability, without discoverability, you don't have monetization, without monetization, you only get "boring" videos.

Okay, so the third point is a bigger one and I actually think we need to adopt the Blendle-esque model, until we overthrow capitalism and live our post monetary wealth utopia.

What's this Blendle-esque model you speak of? Blendle was a great app idea that was blocked by corporate greed. The idea was that if you wanted to read an article from a newspaper, rather than pay a subscription, you could just pay 10 pence for the pleasure of reading the article. Win-win? Wrong! Most newspapers wanted a subscription or nothing.

Okay, so how does that work with videos? The idea is that users would put money into a pot. So let's say I have £10 in my pot, at the end of the month, the app would divide that £10 across all the videos I watched in the month and send it to all the videographers. If my pot was £1 the share would be smaller and if it was £100 it would be larger.

Okay, so the service issue. When are they going to finally make Peertube user friendly and discoverable? Wouldn't they be forced to if content creators were attracted? Because it can't just continue to suck right? Anakin? Seriously, search for a video on the Peertube main site and someone in their infinite wisdom thought it would be great to give you a wall of text! Mate!

So now that we got all that out of the way, think of it like salad, this is the real meal now. Let's talk about hosting. Hosting video is expensive and its the barrier to toppling Big Tech. Though middle-size tech should've been trying to do it. If Vimeo added Peertube support, it would be a hegemon, but I digress… Pick the pitchforks back up and re-light the torches! Hosting videos is a huge resource expense. It's why we don't see a crazy number of videos posted to Lemmy, Mastodon and even PixelFed. But what if we could solve that? Not the Fediverse video bit (yes, Peertube, you are a joke to me, kidding!), that's just a byproduct, but what if we could all chip in and distribute the cost? Well, I recently, literally just before I started waffling in your eye. But I present the Interplanetary File System! IPFS for short. Think of it like torrenting, but more user friendly and more seamless. Anyway, I'm thinking this could be the missing piece and it could be the building block that allows video to return to the embrace of the open web? What do you think? Why aren't we leveraging this?

More info on IPFS here: https://ipfs.tech/developers/

For the record, I'm not affiliated with any project, protocol, entity or anything. Peertube didn't kill my puppy and I don't even think my mum even subscribes to my YouTube, so I'm totally looking from the outside in.

A robotic gripper developed by Washington State University researchers is able to gently grab the majority of apples out of a tree without damaging the fruit.

A quality assurance game testing company contracted by Microsoft’s Activision laid off an entire team of workers because they began organizing, according to an unfair labor practice charge filed by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) on Monday

The developer does this better than I could, just read the page.

ironic-what-a-time-to-be-alive.gif

I’m surprised this wasn’t mentioned in the keynote or State of the Union, but Apple’s model training data is either licensed or publicly available on the Internet. No personal information is used.

I don't think it's as ethically sound as the author thinks, but it's worth a discussion at least.

It's a two minute video