TT-RSS Shuts Down, but the Project Lives On Under a New Fork “In a surprising move, Andrew Dolgov (known online as “fox”), the original developer of the popular self-hosted open-source RSS reader and news aggregator Tiny Tiny RSS (TT-RSS), announced that on November 1, 2025, he will dismantle all infrastructure powering tt-rss.org, including its Git repositories, cgit instance, and user forum.” TT-RSS was one of the options I was tossing up between, before I decided on FreshRSS. It has been going for a long time though, so kudos anyway to its dev for supporting it for 20 years already. But it is important for any users to note there is a fork available, and they may want to just check out the details for any migrations required. In most cases, for self-hosted instances, that may just be the change of the image name to source the updates from. See
Linuxiac
TT-RSS Shuts Down, but the Project Lives On Under a New Fork
Tiny Tiny RSS is shutting down, but a new fork will keep the popular open-source RSS reader and news aggregator alive and maintained.
 #technology #opensource #RSS
Sanity Prevails Finally! Your passwords don’t need so many fiddly characters, NIST says "The US National Institute of Standards and Technology has released its latest guidelines for password creation, and it comes with some serious changes. Gone are the days of resetting your and your employees’ passwords every month or so, and no longer should you or your small business worry about requiring special characters, numbers, and capital letters when creating those passwords. Further, password hints and basic security questions are no longer suitable means of password recovery, and password length, above all other factors, is the most meaningful measure of strength." It looks like finally the last 10 years of security researchers recommendations have been taken on board. Why now suddenly? I have no idea, but I am glad that sanity is finally prevailing. It was a few years back that the originator of that d**n 30 day password change idea admitted there were no grounds actually for it. Password length is really the key criteria. So a well-chosen phrase can now be easier to remember as well as being more difficult to crack. Of the course, the big challenge will be, how many years will it be before organisations actually adopt this change... See
Malwarebytes
Your passwords don't need so many fiddly characters, NIST says
There are new rules for your password—and the passwords of your employees. Read NIST's latest guidance on password security.
 #technology #passwords #security
No surprise: Research shows you cannot believe everything on social media “An analysis of how tools to make non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes spread online, from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, shows X and search engines surface these sites easily.” Everyone seems to be noticing social media has just becoming worse and worse all around. If it was not trolling, it was scams and worse, it was harassment, incitements to violence, and often there seems to be a decided tendency towards trying to rile users up through the use of various triggers (politics, war, religion, discrimination, etc are all great triggers that rarely fail). I used to blame this on just masses of people getting online, and it taking all sorts, including the bad sorts. But in fact, a lot today seems to be driven by bots and even AI. What the study also seems to show (it does not state directly) is those networks and search engines, which use algorithms to lift out viral posts, are the very worst by a long shot. This makes sense as algorithms will exponentially raise visibility of some posts versus networks that just show who you are following with posts sorted chronologically. The Enshitification of social networks and search engines (including manipulated AI) is truly here. So, it is good to remember that a LOT of what you read may well be fake and just calculated to rule you up, and also that there are quieter networks where this sort of thing does not happen as much. I'm also hearing more of my friends saying they just don't read newspapers or look at social media anymore. Many have decided to just skip it all. So don't be fooled either by all those likes and reshare numbers that you see. Don't feel guilty either to just block people — no don't waste your time trying to report them as I can tell you from experience reporting posts on both Facebook and X, NEVER resulted in any positive action (“the post did not contravene our guidelines”, is the standard reply, if you get one). The most effective way to solve such a problem, if it becomes too much for you, is to just delete your account and move to another network or search engine. There are plenty of options out there. See
404 Media
New Research Shows Deepfake Harassment Tools Spread on Social Media and Search Engines
An analysis of how tools to make non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes spread online, from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, shows X and s...
 #technology #socialnetworks #enshitification #deepfakes
20 Essential SSH Configurations and Security Tips for Linux SSH is an essential tool for anyone managing Linux servers, and using it correctly can make your work both easier and more secure. By following the tips in this guide, you can protect your servers from unauthorised access, simplify your logins with key-based authentication and aliases, and monitor activity with tools like fail2ban and session timeouts. Start with the basics, such as changing the default port, disabling root login, and setting up key-based login, and then gradually explore advanced features like two-factor authentication, SSH tunnelling, and verbose logging. The linked article is a really useful overview to skim though and see what you can use, and what can be locked down and even automated. See
20 Essential SSH Configurations and Security Tips for Linux
20 Must-Know SSH Security Settings for Linux Sysadmins
In this guide, we’ll cover essential SSH security tips every Linux beginner should know to keep their servers secure, efficient, and running smoo...
 #technology #ssh #Linux #opensource
A Fascinating History in Photos of Tram and 'Bus Transport in Cape Town since the 1800s I was looking for the location of the old Tollgate depot in Cape Town when I came upon this really excellent Museum page on the GAB site showing a really well laid out chronological history of the various forms of tram and omnibus services over the years from the early 1800s up to around 2009. Apart from just the vehicles, they also cover a lot around the depots, the staff, and the company itself. I do vividly remember the City Tramways company when I used to catch the old double-deck Leyland diesel buses (the ones that chugged like the Routemaster buses), but I always thought that when they rebranded later to Golden Arrow Bus Services (GABS) that it was the usual modern naming trend. What I now see from this page was that in fact the Golden Arrow (the name) had a proud legacy itself that actually predated the City Tramways name back to 1929. Hovering over a photo also shows a lot more context and information about it. See https://www.gabs.co.za/Museum.aspx #CapeTown #History #Trams #Buses
CoolerControl is a Powerful cooling control and monitoring tool for Linux This open-source application not only has a very modern looking and configurable interface, it also has some powerful ways to control the cooling too. It can combine different device sensors (mixed profiles) to set cooling using multiple fans. Profiles for each device can be BIOS, fixed, graph curve, mix, or overlays. Thresholds can also be adjusted to eliminate false positive alerts or to smooth the response of the fans. The application can also run in headless mode on remote Linux systems, and there is a REST API that can be used to integrate remote monitoring systems. My video gives an overview of how I am using it, and what I am finding very useful. It should help you decide whether the application will be of use to you or not. Watch #technology #opensource #Linux #CoolerControl
The EFF's How to: Get to Know iPhone Privacy and Security Settings “Open up your iPhone’s Settings app and you’ll find dozens of different options with little guidance on what those options do. Some of these settings have a serious impact on your privacy and security, altering what data gets shared automatically with apps, data brokers, and Apple itself. What sorts of changes you should make depends on how you use your phone and your security plan. There is no one-size-fits-all collection of recommended settings to change, instead, we’ll explain what settings do to help you decide if they’re worth altering.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation has the user's back, unlike the case is often with Big Tech or government's themselves. This How To may be well worth reading if you use an iPhone. See
How to: Get to Know iPhone Privacy and Security Settings
Open up your iPhone’s Settings app and you’ll find dozens of different options with little guidance on what those options do. Some of these set...
 #technology #privacy #iOS
You Must Be Joking: Facebook’s new button lets its AI look at photos you haven’t uploaded yet “Meta has rolled out an opt-in AI feature to its US and Canadian Facebook users that claims to make their photos and videos more shareworthy. The only catch is that the feature is designed for your phone’s camera roll — not the media you’ve already uploaded to Facebook. If you opt in, Meta’s AI will comb through your camera roll, upload your unpublished photos to Meta’s cloud, and surface “hidden gems” that are “lost among screenshots, receipts, and random snaps,” the company says.” By accessing or using this feature, users will have opted in to this. The real problem is Facebook's horrific record of privacy abuses from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, to WhatsApp T&Cs sharing metadata with partners, to being under US CLOUD Act jurisdiction, to the video I have of Mark Zuckerberg assuring everyone they will always own their own data. This is just not a company anyone can believe, and the line mentioning “might hold onto some of that data for longer than 30 days” will mean all of your data will be in there forever. I deleted the Facebook app off my phone many years ago, and I block any of their login code found littered across all of the web too. Facebook's business model is all centred around profiling users to an extreme level of accuracy, and selling that data to “partners”. They are NOT in the social network business, but rather the data harvesting/sales business. Unfortunately, yet again, most Facebook users will just fall for the glitzy pictures and the pretty user interface, and go all in. Mark will testify again in Congress at some point with his carefully crafted responses, and the cycle keeps repeating. The only power that will make any difference is when the sheep all stand together and just delete themselves from his data harvesting machine. That, though, will likely never happen unless there is some cleaner better social network (not a microblogging service) that can support a few billion users and which is not funded from a profit driven US-corporation... The next best thing is we just give up on a general social network, and all revert to microblogging platforms (like the few have done already). See
The Verge
Facebook’s new button lets its AI look at photos you haven’t uploaded yet
Like we always say, read the terms and conditions, folks.
 #technology #privacy #facebook
Free Software Foundation announced its Librephone project to bring mobile phone freedom to users “Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF with the goal of bringing full freedom to the mobile computing environment. The vast majority of software users around the world use a mobile phone as their primary computing device. After forty years of advocacy for computing freedom, the FSF will now work to bring the right to study, change, share, and modify the programs users depend on in their daily lives to mobile phones.” There are of course a few such phone freedom projects on Android, but most have a few shortcomings still, and one of the shortcomings has often been that binary blobs are still included for various firmware drivers. Such devices of course eliminate all the corporate spyware and tracking that Google, Apple, etc tend to pack into their phones. Bearing in mind of course if you install the Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Google Search, etc apps into this phone, you are just wide open again. An issue for me though, on my last LineageOS phone, was my bank was detecting the phone was not locked down even though I had Magisk modules to mask the rooting. So we are also seeing in some cases that certain security apps may not run properly either. You just have to venture carefully into changes of phone OS and be sure what you need to use, will in fact work fine. But more options are always good to see. See https://www.fsf.org/news/librephone-project #technology #privacy #tracking #opensource #android
How to Control Kernel Boot-Time Parameters in Linux “Boot-time parameters are like secret keys to the Linux kernel; they allow you to control exactly how the system starts, how hardware is initialized, and how problems are handled. Whether you are debugging a stubborn boot issue, tuning performance, or experimenting with kernel features, these parameters give you low-level power over your Linux machine.” There is no GUI managed options here, but this linked article does give a pretty good overview of how it works and what some of the most common options do. See
How to Control Kernel Boot-Time Parameters in Linux
How to Use Kernel Boot-Time Parameters in Linux
In this article, you will learn everything about Linux kernel boot parameters, how to use them, troubleshoot startup issues, and optimize system pe...
 #technology #Linux #opensource