muks

I wish well-done XMPP/Jabber clients that do voice come up. If you are an XMPP protocol developer / implementer reading this, thank you for what is there so far. Please don't stop.

If you have been watching the news this week about Jeff Bezos.. I don't like that someone can share a message/picture/video on WhatsApp and crack into a phone. There are too many closed source vendor components in an Android phone even if you're using an open source phone OS like Lineage OS, and these may go stale over time or have something vulnerable in them on purpose.

WhatsApp always seems to need a phone. It works in a web browser in an inconvenient manner that still needs the phone to login. It is a centrally controlled system. While Signal is open source, it is also centrally controlled. I prefer and hope Jabber implementations get much better. Spam for Jabber can be managed the way it is managed for email. Some spam would get through, but it does on WhatsApp too.

Email hasn't gone away or lost its place because it's federated (distributed). It works on multiple platforms, and if you don't like a particular way of doing email, there are a lot of choices. Jabber is similar for instant messaging, but it can do with a renaissance. (I use Jabber at work and home, but the clients I use such as Conversations don't have the features and experience that WhatsApp/Telegram do.)

The oldest and most used services are federated - HTTP, email.. and at the start of a communication - DNS.

WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. are very entrenched services. It's not enough that you move from WhatsApp - your family, friends, businesses that you work with, all have to use the new service you are switching to, so you can chat with them on that other service.

It's easier to switch your search engine. :) DuckDuckGo has worked very well for web search for me. I use it about 95% of the time and Google Search the other 5%.

This isn't true for India. Until last year, all the cards I'd seen in India were either Visa, Mastercard or AMEX. This year my bank tried to send me a "Rupay" card which is an Indian processor; on speaking to the bank staff, it appears that the central bank (RBI) are asking banks to promote Rupay by default to avoid transaction data from leaving the country. But it's still possible to change to a Mastercard or Visa card.

Many businesses and individuals would still prefer to have a Mastercard or Visa at this time as most international websites that sell services and goods don't accept Rupay.

We got Misha in Hyderabad too in the 80s. My mother used to buy them for me regularly when I was a kid.

Wow.. wow.. there are others who have read the same things. :)

The hydro pneumatic rocket!

I tried to find Mir publishers books about 10 years ago. Apparently Mir got bought out and publishing ceased.

Another gem is "Fun with maths and physics" by Ya Perelman. It's available in a cheap reprint now, nothing that matches the original Mir publishers book.

I agree with you.

> Yeah, shellac isn't the most durable finish, but it sure is pretty.

+1

Condolences, but how is this hacker news? There's BBC and CNN for this sort of stuff.

I've been a Hetzner customer for several years. I'm yet to have a faulty disk experience with them, but that's not what this post is about.

This month I "purchased" another EX41 server. Something made me wonder if the hard disks on the machine allocated to me were old ones previously used for some other customer, so the first thing I did after installing Linux was to look at smartctl output. Not only were the disks new (power on hours) but as part of provisioning the machine, they seem to have performed a "long" self-test on the disk (see smartctl -t in its manpage). I was impressed by this, because they seem to have checked that I didn't get bad disks on arrival. This is probably expected of such a service provider.. but I've seen worse.