Hello, and welcome to Misintelligence’s first Month in Tech. It’ll be a roughly once-a-month (not monthly) column on Misintelligence featuring dahliaOS, IPFS, Matrix, the Fediverse, and other major developments in the technology and Internet world.
MSC Review
MSCs are “Matrix Spec Changes”. Here’s a short list of MSCs to look out for:
- Multiple single sign-on providers
- Room descriptions (distinct from topics)
- Rooms as groups, which Tesseract has already implemented as Tesseract groups using a room state
t4d.room, empty key, and thetypevalue of its content. - Message attachments
- Threading
Matrix Updates
- Matrix.to, Matrix’s sorta-temporary agnostic linking system, has received a facelift and rework.
- Synapse 1.24.0 and 1.23.1 were released, fixing an important denial-of-service vulnerability.
- According to a Matrix blog headline, “Gitter now speaks Matrix!”
- Dendrite now has its own homeserver at
dendrite.matrix.org. It’s come a long way over the last year. You should read about it on their blog.
dahliaOS 201215
The latest release of dahliaOS, 201215, features the following (copied straight from Telegram):
- Pangolin has been updated to commit f624938c1d8bf35c7033be89fb9c3d462f7f5bfd
- Added a new Files app! You can now browse files and create folders with ease!
- Added a new WIP Clock App, for managing timers and seeing the time
- Modified the behavior for tiling windows, now just long-press on Maximize and drag the window to the area you want it to tile.
- Added Arabic, Swedish, Albanian, Ukrainian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Norweigian, Punjabi*, Spanish, Turkish, Bosnian, and Portuguese
- Added a Wireless Connection dialogue, access from within the Settings app or Quick Settings
- Migrated translations backend to XML and Dart rather than JSON
- Added a toggle for Developer Options
- Revised Graft Layout (Functionality coming in future OTA)
- Added UI for OTA updates
- Fixed a bug where the system would restart instead of Pangolin when applying settings
- Tweaked the appearance of Settings
- Fixed a bug that caused applications to disappear on low-resolution displays
- Enabled Wireless networking for most devices (Macs are not yet supported, they require proprietary blobs)
- Fixed a zero-day vulnerability in Freetype
- Updated Buildroot to 201215
- Migrated to Kernel 5.10.1
- Added QEMU and LXC for Graft functionality
- Added wireless-agent
- Added OTA update tool
- Fixed performance on NVIDIA cards
- The system now scales automatically in Virtualbox
dahliaOS has come a long way, and with the new network capabilities, I might be able to run Tesseract, my chat app, on it!
Facebook’s Fiascos
Facebook, the social media company, is fighting two battles right now: one against Apple’s new privacy measures, which openly exposes their anti-consumer practices, and an anti-competition lawsuit from the FTC. Facebook currently owns Instagram and WhatsApp.
Co-founder of Instagram Kevin Systrom was cited as feeling threatened when offered to sell Instagram to Facebook, saying, “Will he go into destroy mode if I say no?”
Facebook has been running a misinformation campaign that threatens users that free apps will be forced to shift to in-app purchase models due to the lack of personalized advertising powered by tracking.
Since this is the first edition of Month in Tech, I’m not in the swing of things yet. I’ve probably missed a lot. If you have something you think should be shared in future Months in Tech, please let me know in the comments below. Keep an eye out for Month in Tech in January 2021! Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year!
Recommended read: Month in Tech (January 2021)