Yeah, it’s dangerous for a community to tolerate and adopt closed-source software. We should have done a better job pressuring them to license it openly.

The OSM wiki pointed me to Maperitive first, but I wish it pointed me to qgis first. We should probably edit the wiki with a huge warning banner that the code is closed, the app is full of bugs, and that it is not (and can not be) updated.

Edit: I took my own advice and added a big red box to the top of the article warning the user and pointing them to QGIS instead.

Edit 2: Do we have any way to know when the latest version of Maperitive (v2.4.3) was released? Usually I’d check the git repo, but…

Edit 3: stat on the Maperitive-latest.zip file says that it’s last modified 2018-02-27 17:25:07, so it’s at least 6 years old.

Hi, Michael Altfield here. I was the sysadmin for OSE from 2017-2020.

Everything OSE does is transparent, so you can just check the OSE websites to see what everyone is currently working-on. OSE contributors log their hours in a worklog called “OSE Dev”. There you can quickly see who is working on what.

• https://osedev.org/graphs

The above graphs show 4 contributors in the past ~10 weeks (one is me; we had some issues with the apache config recently). There’s no direct link, but you can then check the wiki to see people’s work logs (just search for the person’s name and Log):

• https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Marcin_Log
• https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Catarina_Log
• https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Alexa_Log
• https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Maltfield_Log

I also like to look at the MediaWiki “Recent Changes” page to peak at what people are up-to as well:

• https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&limit=500&days=30

I told Marcin about Lemmy back in June 2023. Another OSE contributor even created an OSE community on the slrpnk.net instance, but it appears to have been abandoned. I’ll email him about this thread to see if he’ll bite and publish updates in this community since there’s clearly interest :)

Also, shameless plug: I started an org that’s very similar in spirit to OSE called Eco-Libre, with a focus on projects to sustainably enfranchise human rights in smaller communities. We’re currently accepting volunteers ;)

• https://eco-libre.org/join

Personally I wouldn’t run a lemmy instance because of this (and also many other concerns)

I recommend [a] letting the lemmy devs know (eg on GitHub) that this issue is preventing you from running a lemmy instance and [b] donating to alternative projects that actually care about data privacy rights.

The fines usually are a percent of revenue or millions of Euros, whichever is higher.

So if your revenue is 0 EUR then they can fine you the millions of Euros instead. The point of the “percent of revenue” alternative was for larger corporations that can get fined tens or hundreds of millions of Euros (or, as it happened to Meta, in some cases – billions of Euros for a single GDPR violation).

The fines usually are a percent of revenue or millions of Euros, whichever is higher.

So if your revenue is 0 EUR then they can fine you the millions of Euros instead. The point of the “percent of revenue” alternative was for larger corporations that can get fined tens or hundreds of millions of Euros (or, as it happened to Meta, in some cases – billions of Euros for a single GDPR violation).

That would be true if their instance wasn’t federating. If the instance is federating, then it’s downloading content from other users, even if the user isn’t registered on the instance. And that content is publicly available.

So if someone discovers their content on their instance and sends them a GDPR request (eg Erasure), then they are legally required to process it.

It’s definitely not impossible to contact all instances; it’s a finite list. But we should have a tool to make this easier. Something that can take a given username or post, do a search, find out all the instances that it federated-to, get the contact for all of those instances, and then send-out a formal “GDPR Erasure Request” to all of the relevant admins.

Did you read the article and the feedback that you’ve received from your other users?

Any FOSS platform has capacity issues. I run my own FOSS projects with zero grant funds and where I’m the only developer. I understand this issue.

What we’re talking about here is prioritization. My point is that you should not prioritize “new features” when existing features are a legal, moral, and grave financial risk to your community. And this isn’t just “my priority” – it’s clearly been shown that this is the desired priority of your community.

Please prioritize your GDPR issues.

Very nice. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like Boost is available on F-Droid.

Fortunately, in my case, my image was “orphaned” and never actually attached to a post or comment, so it wouldn’t have federated.

If the image has already federated then that’s a whole next level problem :(

Unfortunately, the Lemmy devs literally said it would take years to fix this issue. If you think this should be a priority for them, please advocate for them to prioritize it on GitHub.

Hi, unfortunate author here 😅

The issue happened in Jerboa. I opened a few tickets in the Jerboa app’s GitHub to address this:

• jerboa #1361: UI for deleting uploaded files
• jerboa #1362: Setting to hide "upload media" button
• jerboa #1363: Add "confirm upload" step to UX

Can you please tell us which Lemmy client apps you use that store the delete token and have a UI to delete uploaded images?

You definitely can do that, but if you’re afraid that you might stand-up and forget you’re using it, then you probably shouldn’t.

It’s probably enough to just use the default trigger that locks your screen. Or, once you get comfortable with it, set it to shut down your computer. Most people don’t need to shred their FDE keys, unless they’re facing torture.

In fact, we make it difficult to use “destructive” triggers (like the LUKS Header Shredder that wipes the FDE header) and intentionally do not include the ability to switch to it in the app. To use it, you have to do a lot of extra work. So most users don’t have this issue.

Why? It defaults to just locking your screen. So you stand-up, the magnetic breakaway cable separates, and then you just have to type your password…

If you’re the type of person that would forget to lock your computer before standing up and walking away, then it’s exactly what you’d want.

Yes, BusKill works with any USB drive.

• https://github.com/buskill/buskill-app

In fact, the BusKill cable is just a USB Drive. The only thing “fancy” that it has is a magnetic coupler in the middle of the 1-meter cable so that it will breakaway at any angle. But, if you’d like, you can build your own. The instructions are here:

• https://docs.buskill.in/buskill-app/en/stable/hardware_dev/bom.html

It’s run by the folks at dys2p.

Besides running ProxyStore in Leipzig, they have published some pretty great articles:

• Random Mosaic – Detecting unauthorized physical access with beans, lentils and colored rice
• Revealing Traces in printouts and scans
• On the security of the Linux disk encryption LUKS

You can follow them on Mastodon here https://chaos.social/@dys2p

Yes BusKill works similarly – any USB drive can use the BusKill software

• https://github.com/buskill/buskill-app

The BusKill cable is just nice because it includes a magnetic breakaway, so it works when the laptop is snatched-away at any angle. There’s actually a ton of anti-forensics software like usbkill and BusKill; we enumerate them all on our documentation’s Similar Projects section

• https://docs.buskill.in/buskill-app/en/stable/attribution.html#similar-projects

You may want to check ^ it out :)

I made a video of this (demo in Windows, MacOS, Linux, TAILS, and QubesOS) with the old DIY model here (sorry for the terrible audio quality)

• https://www.buskill.in/demo-2/

We’re currently working on an updated video with someone who is much better at video production than me; it should be finished in early 2024.

It has a magnetic (de)coupler, which allows it to break away at any angle if your laptop is physically snatched away from you.

Some of our users actually use the BusKill cable with a Yubikey:

• https://humandecoded.io/qubes-os-yubikey-buskill/

If that’s not clear, I highly recommend watching this 2-minute explainer video

• https://www.buskill.in/#demo

Theft of high-risk users’ data. Data could include private keys (eg theft of cryptocurrency assets), contacts of correspondence (eg sources of a journalist – such as whistleblowers), etc.

For more information, see the Who Uses BusKill? section of the documentation.

• https://docs.buskill.in/buskill-app/en/stable/introduction/what.html#who-uses-buskill