Web
Google for Slow Connections and Mozilla on Accessibility
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 27th of February 2021 08:33:44 PM Filed under


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Lyra: A New Very Low-Bitrate Codec for Speech Compression
Connecting to others online via voice and video calls is something that is increasingly a part of everyday life. The real-time communication frameworks, like WebRTC, that make this possible depend on efficient compression techniques, codecs, to encode (or decode) signals for transmission or storage. A vital part of media applications for decades, codecs allow bandwidth-hungry applications to efficiently transmit data, and have led to an expectation of high-quality communication anywhere at any time.
[...]
To solve this problem, we have created Lyra, a high-quality, very low-bitrate speech codec that makes voice communication available even on the slowest networks. To do this, we’ve applied traditional codec techniques while leveraging advances in machine learning (ML) with models trained on thousands of hours of data to create a novel method for compressing and transmitting voice signals.
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Google's New Lyra Voice Codec + AV1 Aim For Video Chats Over 56kbps Modems In 2021
Google's AI team has announced "Lyra" as a very low bit-rate codec for speech compression designed for use-cases like WebRTC and other video chats... With a bit rate so low that when combined with the likes of the AV1 video codec could potentially allow video chats over 56kbps Internet connections.
Google engineers formally announced Lyra on Thursday as this new codec to challenge the likes of Opus. Lyra leverages machine learning to make it suitable for delivering extremely low bit-rate speech compression.
Google's Lyra announcement noted, "Lyra is currently designed to operate at 3kbps and listening tests show that Lyra outperforms any other codec at that bitrate and is compared favorably to Opus at 8kbps, thus achieving more than a 60% reduction in bandwidth. Lyra can be used wherever the bandwidth conditions are insufficient for higher-bitrates and existing low-bitrate codecs do not provide adequate quality."
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Mozilla Accessibility: 2021 Firefox Accessibility Roadmap Update [Ed: Mozilla is not consistent. It speaks of people with disabilities, but was eager to go on with DRM (EME) inside Firefox despite is being an attack on disabled people]
People with disabilities can experience huge benefits from technology but can also find it frustrating or worse, downright unusable. Mozilla’s Firefox accessibility team is committed to delivering products and services that are not just usable for people with disabilities, but a delight to use.
The Firefox accessibility (a11y) team will be spending much of 2021 re-building major pieces of our accessibility engine, the part of Firefox that powers screen readers and other assistive technologies.
While the current Firefox a11y engine has served us well for many years, new directions in browser architectures and operating systems coupled with the increasing complexity of the modern web means that some of Firefox’s venerable a11y engine needs a rebuild.
Browsers, including Firefox, once simple single process applications, have become complex multi-process systems that have to move lots of data between processes, which can cause performance slowdowns. In order to ensure the best performance and stability and to enable support for a growing, wider variety of accessibility tools in the future (such as Windows Narrator, Speech Recognition and Text Cursor Indicator), Firefox’s accessibility engine needs to be more robust and versatile. And where ATs used to spend significant resources ensuring a great experience across browsers, the dominance of one particular browser means less resources being committed to ensuring the ATs work well with Firefox. This changing landscape means that Firefox too must evolve significantly and that’s what we’re going to be doing in 2021.
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New changes to Twitter make it even worse for free software users
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 25th of February 2021 11:38:56 PM Filed under

There are many complicated debates happening right now around Twitter and its role in public discourse. These discussions are important, but we also shouldn't forget a very basic and clear principle -- whatever its policies are about who can and can't post or how, it's of fundamental importance that Twitter should not require users to run nonfree software in order to use the site.
Unfortunately, on December 15th, Twitter removed its "legacy" Web interface. As opposed to its much larger and more complex default Web client, the legacy interface did not use proprietary JavaScript (or any JavaScript).
Previously, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) could tolerate the use of Twitter because of this legacy interface. While it was active, we referred free software advocates to it, or to third-party free software applications. Twitter's removing access to this interface means that users are forced to use the site's nonfree JavaScript if they don't have a dedicated desktop or mobile client, preventing freedom-respecting browsers like GNU IceCat from posting to the service.
But why use Twitter in the first place, if we know that it has these issues? As any charity can attest, engaging users on social media is one of the chief ways of getting their message across. The same is true for software freedom. We need to be talking about free software in places where everyone is not already a committed free software supporter -- we won't be successful if we are only in our own echo chamber, or preaching to the choir. It's important for us as activists to be reaching the people on these platforms, even if we have some reservations about using them ourselves. Twitter has its share of issues, but until we're able to drive enough users to the software freedom movement to where we can rely solely on word of mouth, we need to include them in our messaging strategy. We are, however, careful to make sure that you don't have to follow the FSF on Twitter in order to receive news or updates. Everything we publish is also posted on platforms based on free software principles, including Mastodon and GNU social.
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WordPress Bloat and Moving Off ikiwiki
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 25th of February 2021 12:38:54 AM Filed under

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Did You Know About Reusable Blocks?
The WordPress block editor (a.k.a. Gutenberg) comes with a feature called “reusable blocks.” They are blocks, saved for later, edited in one place.
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Alternatives to ikiwiki?
Connected to the fact that I only can have static sites (no CGI, no forms, nothing else), I am, at this time, using Disqus to host the comments of my blog. I am also thinking of alternatives to this, like sending people to Twitter (or mastodon or email) or some site similar to Disqus, but with more of a Free Software inclination.
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Brave Web Browser 1.20.108 Is Released With Fix For Major Security Flaw In Private Tor Windows
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 23rd of February 2021 07:04:11 PM Filed under
Several recent version of the Brave Web Browser have had a very unfortunate DNS-leak flaw in the "private" Tor-based browsing feature. The latest version 1.20.208 has a new version of the Chromium core it is based on (88.0.4324.182), a fix for DNS leaks in supposedly "private" web browser windows and two fixes specific to macOS. You should upgrade if you rely on Brave for "private" web browsing or use it to access Tor onion sites.
[...]
You should upgrade and ensure that you are using version 1.20.108 or newer if you occasionally use the Brave Web Browser to access Tor onion sites or rely on it's "private" Tor-browsing mode for anything even remotely critical. You can acquire the latest version from brave.com.
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3 Best Free and Open Source Web-Based XMPP Clients
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Tuesday 23rd of February 2021 10:30:10 AM Filed under

XMPP (also known as Jabber) is an open and free alternative to commercial messaging and chat providers. It is a secure battle-tested protocol developed by an independent standards organization.
XMPP was designed for real-time communication, which powers a wide range of applications including instant messaging, presence, media negotiation, whiteboarding, collaboration, lightweight middleware, content syndication, EDI, RPC and more.
The “X” in XMPP stands for “Extensible”, which means the core protocol is updated and extended with more features through a transparent process at the non-profit XMPP Standards Foundation every now and then. This results in some clients not implementing every feature of XMPP; for example, a typical instant messaging client won’t implement Internet-of-Things functionality.
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John Goerzen: Recovering Our Lost Free Will Online: Tools and Techniques That Are Available Now
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 22nd of February 2021 05:36:32 AM Filed under
As I’ve been thinking and writing about privacy and decentralization lately, I had a conversation with a colleague this week, and he commented about how loss of privacy is related to loss of agency: that is, loss of our ability to make our own choices, pursue our own interests, and be master of our own attention.
In terms of telecommunications, we have never really been free, though in terms of Internet and its predecessors, there have been times where we had a lot more choice. Many are too young to remember this, and for others, that era is a distant memory.
The irony is that our present moment is one of enormous consolidation of power, and yet also one of a proliferation of technologies that let us wrest back some of that power. In this post, I hope to enlighten or remind us of some of the choices we have lost — and also talk about the ways in which we can choose to regain them, already, right now.
I will talk about the possibilities and then go into more detail about the solutions.
[...]
Back in the late 90s, I worked at a university. I had a 386 on my desk for a workstation – not a powerful computer even then. But I put the boa webserver on it and could just serve pages on the Internet. I didn’t have to get permission. Didn’t have to pay a hosting provider. I could just DO it.
And of course that is because the university had no firewall and no NAT. Every PC at the university was a full participant on the Internet as much as the servers at Microsoft or DEC. All I needed was a DNS entry. I could run my own SMTP server if I wanted, run a web or Gopher server, and that was that.
There are many reasons why this changed. Nowadays most residential ISPs will block SMTP for their customers, and if they didn’t, others would; large email providers have decided not to federate with IPs in residential address spaces. Most people have difficulty even getting a static IP address in the first place. Many are behind firewalls, NATs, or both, meaning that incoming connections of any kind are problematic.
Do you see what that means? It has weakened the whole point of the Internet being a network of peers. While IP still acts that way, as a practical matter, there are clients that are prevented from being servers by administrative policy they have no control over.
Imagine if you, a person with an Internet connection to your laptop or phone, could just decide to host a website, or a forum on it. For moderate levels of load, they are certainly capable of this. The only thing in the way is the network management policies you can’t control.
Elaborate technologies exist to try to bridge this divide, and some, like Tor or cjdns, can work quite well. More on this below.
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5 Free and Open Source Lightweight Alternatives to WordPress
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 18th of February 2021 01:52:10 PM Filed under

Now don’t get us wrong, WordPress is one of our favorite applications. With good reason, it’s a high quality, open source blog publishing application. It’s a mature and highly polished application with development starting in 2003, and it has an active community. The largest self-host blogging tool, a full content management system, which can be extended through thousands of widgets, plugins, and themes, is a good fit for many projects. The software was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL.
WordPress instantly springs to mind when any project is planned that needs a content management system. However, WordPress can be complicated, offering more bells and whistles than actually needed or wanted. While it’s always tempting to stick with familiar territory, this can actually stifle creativity and does not enhance an individual’s skill-set.
When embarking on a new project, there’s a lot to be said experimenting with new software. Fortunately, WordPress is not the only option. There’s a good range of lightweight open source content management systems ready to be deployed that can transform a web site.
Some of the content management systems featured in this article are well publicised, but there are many good management systems that you may not have heard of that are perfectly suited for small projects.
Here is our verdict with our recommendations. They are all free and open source goodness.
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WordPress 5.7 Beta 3
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Wednesday 17th of February 2021 07:52:55 AM Filed under


This software is still in development, so it’s not recommended to run this version on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with it.
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Federated/Decentralised Communications With Movim and P2P VoIP
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 13th of February 2021 01:34:11 AM Filed under



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Movim | Basic Review & Beginner's Guide
Once you read about Movim, immediately you will find about Xmpp. It is Jabber, also known as Xmpp, a secure, decentralized, and federated technology everyone can use to chat online existed strongly since 1990's. To give you how great Xmpp network is, actually when you use WhatsApp you use Xmpp, so does with Google Talk and Jitsi, so when you use those you are using Xmpp. To give you a few of its benefits, Xmpp is not controlled by a single company (so unlike Twitter) it is hard to shut down by anyone.
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Daniel Pocock: Comparing private and peer-to-peer VoIP solutionsOne of the top questions people ask RTC developers around Valentine's Day is whether we finally have a private solution people can use to communicate with their partner.
There is fresh attention on the issue this year after Twitter and other large providers flexed their muscles and demonstrated that they are more powerful than the US President.
[...]
Achieving independence from cloud services doesn't necessarily give you privacy. There are trade-offs to be made. John Goerzen recently published a blog about privacy issues in current P2P tools.
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Brave and Mozilla: uBlock, Mozilla Localization and More
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 12th of February 2021 03:06:03 AM Filed under

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Brave browser adds native support for uBlock and Fanboy annoyances lists and social list - gHacks Tech News
Brave browser's built-in ad-blocker has been boosted by some additional options. The Chromium fork's Brave Shield now supports three popular privacy-friendly filter lists, namely uBlock Annoyances List, Fanboy Annoyances List and Fanboy Social List.
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Mozilla Localization (L10N): L10n Report: February 2021 Edition
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Hacks.Mozilla.Org: MDN localization update, February 2021
Previously on MDN, we allowed translators to localize document URL slugs as well as the document title and body content. This sounds good in principle, but has created a bunch of problems. It has resulted in situations where it is very difficult to keep document structures consistent.
If you want to change the structure or location of a set of documentation, it can be nearly impossible to verify that you’ve moved all of the localized versions along with the en-US versions — some of them will be under differently-named slugs both in the original and new locations, meaning that you’d have to spend time tracking them down, and time creating new parent pages with the correct slugs, etc.
As a knock-on effect, this has also resulted in a number of localized pages being orphaned (not being attached to any parent en-US pages), and a number of en-US pages being translated more than once (e.g. localized once under the existing en-US slug, and then again under a localized slug).
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Karl Dubost: Whiteboard Reactionaries
I simply and firmly disagree and throw my gauntlet at Bruce's face. Choose your weapons, time and witnesses.
The important part of this tweet is how Mike Taylor points out how the Sillycon Valley industry is a just a pack of die-hard stick-in-the-mud reactionaries who have promoted the whiteboard to the pinnacle of one's dull abilities to regurgitate the most devitalizing Kardashianesque answers to stackoverflow problems. Young programmers! Rise! In front of the whiteboard, just walk out. Refuse the tiranny of the past, the chalk of ignorance.
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