Alexandria Catalogue - Highlights

To say that “many developers do not want to speak out for fear of falling afoul of Apple” is an understatement. Almost none do. And one thing I’ve learned this week — mostly via private communication, because, again, they fear speaking out publicly — is that there are a lot of them. Without touching upon the question of who’s right and who’s wrong in the specific case of Basecamp’s Hey app, or the broader questions of what, if anything, ought to change in Apple’s App Store policies, an undeniable and important undercurrent to this story is that the business model policies of the App Store have resulted in a tremendous amount of resentment. This spans the entire gamut from one-person indies all the way up to the handful of large corporations that can be considered Apple’s peers or near-peers.

We value sovereignty, privacy and security when accessing online content, using several tools to achieve this, like open protocols, open OSes, open software products, Tor and VPNs. ## The problem Talking about our social presence, we can manually build up our follower list (social graph), pick a Nostr client that is respectful of our preferences on what to show and how, but with the standard following mechanism, our main feed is public, **so everyone can actually snoop** what we are interested in, and what is supposable that we read daily. ## The solution Nostr has a simple solution for this necessity: encrypted lists. Lists are what they appear, a collection of people or interests (but they can also group much other stuff, see [NIP-51](https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/51.md)). So we can create lists with contacts that we don't have in our main social graph; these lists can be used primarily to create **dedicated feeds**, but they could have other uses, for example, related to monitoring. The interesting thing about lists is that they can also be **encrypted**, so unlike the basic following list, which is always public, we can hide the lists' content from others. The implications are obvious: we can not only have a more organized way to browse content, but it is also **really private one**. One might wonder what use can really be made of private lists; here are some examples: - Browse “can't miss” content from users I consider a priority; - Supervise competitors or adversarial parts; - Monitor sensible topics (tags); - Following someone without being publicly associated with them, as this may be undesirable; The benefits in terms of privacy as usual are not only related to the casual, or programmatic, observer, but are also evident when we think of **how many bots scan our actions to profile us**. ## The current state Unfortunately, lists are not widely supported by Nostr clients, and encrypted support is a rarity. Often the excuse to not implement them is that they are harder to develop, since they require managing the encryption stuff ([NIP-44](https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/51.md)). Nevertheless, developers have an easier option to start offering private lists: give the user the possibility to simply **mark them as local-only**, and never push them to the relays. Even if the user misses the sync feature, this is sufficient to create a private environment. To date, as far as I know, the best client with list management is Gossip, which permits to manage **both encrypted and local-only lists**. Beg your Nostr client to implement private lists!

'Surely this won't affect me; I'm white, male, and European?' Think again. Here are the examples we know about of people being detained at the US border, and put into camps

Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency. The Bitcoin protocol permanently caps the total supply of bitcoin (BTC) at 21 million coins, and has never been hacked. As a result of its scarcity and security, Bitcoin is often referred to as “digital gold”. Because there is a fixed supply of BTC, there is a strategic advantage to being among the first nations to create a strategic bitcoin reserve. The United States Government currently holds a significant amount of BTC, but has not implemented a policy to maximize BTC’s strategic position as a unique store of value in the global financial system. Just as it is in our country’s interest to thoughtfully manage national ownership and control of any other resource, our Nation must harness, not limit, the power of digital assets for our prosperity.

But here’s the uncomfortable reality the Bitcoin community must confront: technical capability does not equate to mainstream adoption.

Lunokhod 2 continues to be detected by lunar laser ranging experiments and its position is known to sub-metre accuracy. Ownership of Lunokhod 2 and the Luna 21 lander was sold by the Lavochkin Association for US$68,500 in December 1993 at a Sotheby's auction in New York[30] (although the catalogue incorrectly lists lot 68A as Luna 17/Lunokhod 1).[31] The buyer was computer gaming entrepreneur and astronaut's son Richard Garriott, who is also known by the name of his gaming character Lord British. Garriott stated in a 2001 interview: "I purchased Lunakod 21 [sic] from the Russians. I am now the world's only private owner of an object on a foreign celestial body.

There still remains a very small chance for asteroid 2024 YR4 to impact the Moon on Dec. 22, 2032. That probability is currently 1.7%. 

You use the natural oil in the nut

LoRa gear can be great for doing radio communications in a light-weight and low-power way. However, it can also work over great distances if you have the right hardware—and the right antennas in particular. [taste_the_code] has been experimenting in this regard, and whipped up a simple yagi antenna that can work at distances of up to 40 kilometers.

DMT

(Just an example) People who run the podcast feed on their own website steal potential income from me by circumventing a good podcast 2.0 platform like the Fountain app. It's probably well meant, to spread the word, but in general, it's profiting from content in the most lazy way possible.

Soon, however, such goodwill people will start to be disgruntled or at least less happy about the V4V model's returns. Let's face it, Value4Value was a marketing term invented by Adam Curry, along with Dave Jones, to launch a concept as an anti-movement against Apple's hegemony. It was meant to preserve free speech (that, it succeeded in; they've put the "free" in free speech). For themselves, because they had the first-mover advantage, it worked out fine. And until like the end of 2015, it worked very well.

The 1st hop only sees your connecting IP, but can’t decrypt your traffic. It forwards the still-encrypted traffic to the 2nd hop, effectively NAT-ing your connection and masking your IP address from the 2nd hop. The 2nd (exit) hop connects you to the internet, but never sees your personal info or IP address since it only knows that the connection is coming from the 1st hop. This splits “who you are” from “what you do”, meaning neither party can tie your identity to your browsing.

To increase developer power and software freedom, your entire computer needs to be inspectable and understandable. It should be composable and made of highly generic, unopinionated, easily understood, reusable building blocks. These properties need to be stable regardless of underlying hardware changes and should guarantee a high degree of backward and forward compatibility.