Danie

Portmaster is an open source application firewall built to monitor and control network activity on Windows and Linux “Every packet is visible to the service, and any packet can be stopped before it leaves the system. The software matches traffic to the app that created it by using eBPF and the proc filesystem on Linux or a kernel driver and the IP Helper API on Windows. This approach lets users see each connection while still setting rules per application. It also helps the service sort out unusual cases. Portmaster can recognize Snap packages, AppImage apps and scripts on Linux as well as Windows Store apps and system services that run under svchost.exe.” I love that it shows per application how many, and what countries, connections are being made to the Internet. It also intercepts DNS queries that may have bypassed your user settings. The linked article does link directly to the GitHub project, where you can get the files to install it. See

Help Net Security

Portmaster: Open-source application firewall - Help Net Security

Portmaster is a free and open source application firewall built to monitor and control network activity on Windows and Linux. The project is develo...

#technology #opensource #security

Decentralized YouTube Alternative PeerTube Adds Creator Mode “PeerTube is a free and open source video hosting platform that serves as an alternative to YouTube. Unlike centralized platforms, it allows anyone to create their own video hosting instance while connecting with others through federation. It is developed by Framasoft, a French non-profit organization focused on digital freedom. Before you ask, the organization keeps itself afloat on donations rather than advertising or scraping people's data. The project recently hit two milestones: PeerTube v8 was released, bringing collaborative features and design improvements. Just a week later, the mobile app received its long-awaited Creator Mode.” PeerTube has steadily been improving this year and playback has also been getting much better. A year or so back, it was still plagued sometimes with buffering. It works much the same way as Mastodon and other Fediverse networks do so you can host your own PeerTube instance if you want to. There are some biggish YouTube creators there too, but it does not pay money like YouTube does as there are no adverts shoved into everything. I also post my videos there at gadgeteerza@video.hardlimit.com. But yes, my follower count there is way lower than on YouTube, because I suppose so many love the YT ads. ;-) See

It's FOSS

Decentralized YouTube Alternative PeerTube Adds Creator Mode

The open source YouTube alternative offers some welcome updates for content creators.

#technology #peertube #opensource

Affinity, as an alternative to Photoshop, runs as an AppImage on Linux “Canva, after acquiring the team behind Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher, launched the free Affinity app that brings together all three of the aforementioned apps. And while it doesn't officially support Linux, the community has stepped up to fix that. So, if you're someone working in image and photo editing, Linux is one step closer to perfection.” Although the linked article does give a Python code snippet to install this via an installation script on Linux, many may feel more comfortable just downloading and running the AppImage version as this packages the WINE files with it, so it all runs sweetly. The first run will be slow as it creates the WINE folder files etc inside ~/.AffinityLinux-Appimage/, and thereafter it will start quickly. At initial startup, it prompts for a DPI setting, and it is probably best to leave that at the default (mine was 96) otherwise I notice it displays for a much larger screen. From

XDA

I thought I needed Windows for Photoshop, but this Linux project is just as good

Affinity on Linux is a game changer

and you can get the AppImage at

GitHub

Releases · ryzendew/AffinityOnLinux

A repository that helps users get affinity software working on GNU/Linux 🐧 - ryzendew/AffinityOnLinux

#technology #Linux #photoediting

AA Browser is a WebView browser experience for Android Auto head units Transform your driving experience with a sleek, modern browser designed specifically for the road. Built with cutting-edge Material 3 design and optimised for automotive interfaces. This browser will work on Android Auto head units, but note the warnings about not looking at it whilst driving. It may though keep younger passenger amused, especially those who are too young now to use social media in Australia. There are no trackers in the app itself, but it does not have ad blocking capability of the websites you may visit. You'd need to download the APK file, though, and sideload it to your phone. See

GitHub

GitHub - kododake/AABrowser: Android Auto WEB Browser

Android Auto WEB Browser. Contribute to kododake/AABrowser development by creating an account on GitHub.

#technology #androidauto #browsers #opensource

Hacker Busts Startup Running Huge Web of AI-Generated “Influencers” on TikTok “404 Media reports in an explosive scoop that Doublespeed has been hacked. This wasn’t just one account associated with the startup, but the entire backend used to manage its phone farm — so it provides an extraordinary glimpse at how the service is actually being used to manipulate social media at scale. Not only is Doublespeed a possible breeding ground for disinformation campaigns or financial scams, but they seem to be getting away with their phone farm operation without any pushback from TikTok.” Which all just goes to show yet again, many “influencers” are not even real people, the follower, likes and comment numbers also just cannot be trusted. I posted only about a month ago about how Twitter used to fake the post views to charge advertisers more money, for adverts that were not seen by those numbers at all. Once money and advertising get involved on a platform you don't pay to use, it all gets very murky. It's all about driving engagement up, and faking numbers, to fleece advertisers. I really don't think the owners of Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, etc are really interested at all about the social side of social media, nor the end user experience. Many of us remember how these networks were in their early days, when you interacted with real humans. Today, most of these accounts have AI-generated responses to any comments. If you still want human social interaction and some moderation of chats, you'll need to look to decentralised social media today. See

Futurism

Hacker Busts Startup Running Huge Web of AI-Generated "Influencers" on Instagram

A hacker found a way into the backend of AI startup Doublespeed, which offers customers access to a massive phone farm network.

#technology #socialnetworks

Chrome and Edge browser extensions with 8 million users, collect extended AI conversations “Security firm Koi discovered the eight extensions, which as of late Tuesday night remained available in both Google’s and Microsoft’s extension stores. Seven of them carry “Featured” badges, which are endorsements meant to signal that the companies have determined the extensions meet their quality standards. The free extensions provide functions such as VPN routing to safeguard online privacy and ad blocking for ad-free browsing. All provide assurances that user data remains anonymous and isn’t shared for purposes other than their described use.” Yes, I know this will not be a surprise to many, but there have been many cautions specifically around using free VPNs. Visiting a website in a browser tab is usually a lot safer than installing a browser extension, and especially extensions that grant privileged access like ad blockers. So, if you are a user of: * Urban VPN Proxy * 1ClickVPN Proxy * Urban Browser Guard * Urban Ad Blocker you will probably want to read the linked article. And for others smiling smugly, just remember that even apps like WhatsApp quite openly state in their T&Cs that they share user metadata with upstream partners. The devil is often in plain sight, just buried deep in the lengthy T&Cs that most don't read. There are some companies though like Proton, Signal, etc who state that your privacy is not compromised, and then others who require no e-mail, phone number, etc as they do not identify you in any way at all. See

Ars Technica

Browser extensions with 8 million users collect extended AI conversations

The extensions, available for Chromium browsers, harvest full AI conversations over months.

#technology #privacy #browsers

Easier Than Nano! Fresh is a Fresh New Rust-based Terminal Editor for Linux “Fresh is a new Rust-based terminal text editor that takes a different approach. It uses standard keybindings like Ctrl+S for saving, Ctrl+F for searching, and Ctrl+Z for undoing. It works like a GUI editor but runs in your terminal.” Newer versions of Nano do, I think, default to similar easy to remember common keybindings. If not, it certainly can be set to use them, but every now, and again I still hit Nano with the old keybindings on some devices I work on. That said, I don't think Nano has any built-in file explorer, though. Fresh certainly looks well worth trying out. It installs on macOS, Linux and Windows (binaries on the GitHub site). See

It's FOSS

Easier Than Nano! Fresh is a 'Fresh' New Rust-based Terminal Editor for Linux

Rust-based editor combines fast performance with GUI-style shortcuts that just work.

#technology #opensource #texteditors

Valve Has the Secret to Playing Your Games Everywhere, and It’s Not Streaming “Last month, Valve showed off the Steam Machine, a console-like box with PC guts, along with a Steam Frame VR headset. The secret sauce of the headset is down to its Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 CPU, a mobile-focused chip based on ARM microarchitecture. Valve claims the Frame will be able to play your Steam games, both over local streaming and through an open-source x86 emulator called Fex. When you put on a Steam Frame, it will be running SteamOS, same as the Steam Machine. It’s basically a Steam Deck for your face, but it’s much more distinct than that because of the underlying hardware.” So, this could be a bit like what the Proton compatibility layer has done for Windows games on Linux (and that has been huge, with more than 24,300 games rated as at least playable with Proton). See

Gizmodo

Valve Has the Secret to Playing Your Games Everywhere, and It's Not Streaming

Sorry, Game Pass, but Steam may soon bring your games to every platform.

#technology #gaming #opensource

Glances vs Dozzle vs Beszel for Docker Container Monitoring This video explores some practical pros and cons between open source self-hosted Glances, Dozzle and Beszel for the monitoring of running Docker containers in terms of their performance stats, error logs, automated alerting, and troubleshooting of issues. It concludes with an overview of the Docker compose configuration files to run Beszel. I did not unpack the Hub vs Agent relationship for Beszel in the video (as I delved into that only the following day), but note that an agent is required for monitoring of services, but an agent will only connect to one Beszel Hub using a unique token and key combination (created in the Hub when adding a System, and then transferred into the Agent's config file). So if an Agent is running on a remote VPS you can link it to a local Beszel Hub, but if you also want to link it to a Beszel Hub running on that remote VPS, then you must create a second Agent container and link that to the VPS's Beszel Hub. Watch #technology #selfhosting #docker #opensource

ClipCascade is a self-hosted clipboard manager that syncs across devices without the cloud There are a couple of apps that do P2P sync of clipboard data or files between devices, but most, like LocalSend, require you to open the app on each device. Others alternatively require dropping the text or file onto a browser page. ClipCascade will work seamless with your device's clipboard, so this make sit fictionless to use. Only downside for some is that an iOS app is still in the woks (and I imagine that thee will be challenges with iOS). The service employs end-to-end-encryption so should be secure, even when using their free cloud service if you want to test it out. See

XDA

This self-hosted clipboard manager syncs across devices without the cloud

Say goodbye to cloud dependency and hello to seamless clipboard syncing across all your devices.

#technology #selfhosting #opensource #clipboard