10 Hacks Every Signal User Should Know

“Signal is one of my favourite messaging apps because of its focus on privacy and security. I use it to message my closest friends regularly, and in the process, I've discovered a fair few hidden features that I now use every day. From shielding your phone number from other users, to preventing hackers from breaking into your account, these hacks will help you make the most of Signal.”

Very solid tips these, especially as most hacking of secure messengers actually takes place on the end-user device.

See https://lifehacker.com/tech/10-hacks-every-signal-user-should-know

#technology #security #signal

Hister indexes every web page you visit and lets you search the full text of your browsing history offline

“Have you ever wished your browser history was more than just a collection of URLs? As it is, the standard search history is kind of useless. Sure, you can see the title of the page you visited, maybe a bit of metadata, but not much more than that. For any actual functionality, like searching for a specific page you visited that you can't quite remember the name of, your browser's built-in history search falls flat on its face (like my six-month-old did as I was writing this sentence). That's where Hister comes in. This open-source, self-hosted tool does more than just track your activity; it indexes every site you visit, capturing the contents of the page for easy search and retrieval later.”

I was a bit sceptical on first reading this, especially where browser extensions are involved, but it is an open source project, and there is this privacy statement in their documention: Hister clients only communicate with the designated server, and the server does not “phone home” or share any of your browsing history with anyone else. The source code is publicly accessible, so we can be audited by anyone who wants to check!

What is interesting is that many self-hosted server applications that do this sort of thing, have quite resource intensive browsers running, and are often fooled by anti-bot detection. Hister actually has your browser doing this so no wasted resources, and you have the full power of your main browser at hand.

The server needs to be available, but could also run on your own PC so no NAS etc setup needs to be run. However, the server side can also run in a docker container if you already have that setup. It can on something as light as a Raspberry Pi.

As far as I can see it is only saving the text of pages you visit, and not PDF or HTML archives of the pages, so again this side is extremely lightweight.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/hister-indexes-every-page-visit-search-full-text-browsing-history/ or https://hister.org.

#technology #search #history #browsers #opensource

DBAN is a relic for HDD wiping, and ShredOS is the only software you should use

“When “wiping a hard drive clean,” a quick format doesn't actually erase anything at all. Instead, it just removes the drive's file index. That leaves the underlying data sitting there until something overwrites it. That's why recovery tools like Recuva and EaseUS can still dig up photos, documents, and entire folder structures long after you think they're gone. Software tools like DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) and ShredOS solve that problem by overwriting every sector of the drive multiple times with different patterns over the course of multiple passes.”

DBAN bring back old memories from decades ago when I did IT field support. It was what we used to wipe all drives we had to remove from PCs before auctioning them off or otherwise disposing of them. I'd completely forgotten about it until now. I seem to think Norton Utilities also had a wipe disk program.

Good to see there is a modern equivalent out now.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/dban-is-a-relic-for-hdd-wiping-shredos-is-the-software-you-should-use or https://github.com/PartialVolume/shredos.x86_64

#technology #opensource #security

The Creator of Wordle Just Came Out With a New Game, and It’s Difficult

“Cryptic crosswords, on the other hand, treat each clue as its own puzzle. Instead of straightforward definitions, the clues rely on wordplay that hints at the answer. The rules can be tricky to explain, and there are many different ways a clue can be constructed.”

Yes, not so easy as just plugging letters in or looking for patterns of letters. This requires a lot more thought. Still I started out with hit-and-miss until I got used to Wordle. It's like a new muscle that one must exercise a bit.

The tutorial examples were not too difficult, but they were mostly three word combinations. The daily puzzle for today is 6 words which must be reduced to 8 letters for a word that relates to “slant”. But even if you think you know what the word is, you still have to manipulate the 6 words with the transformations, to arrive at the correct word. This is a whole different kettle of fish.

This really makes the old concise crossword look like child's play.

See https://gizmodo.com/the-creator-of-wordle-just-came-out-with-a-new-game-and-its-hard-2000732082 or https://www.parseword.com

#technology #puzzles #words #games

Europe is building an alternative to Microsoft Office

“Office EU is a cloud-based office suite built entirely on open-source software and hosted exclusively on European servers, has launched as a direct competitor to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Its pitch is straightforward: keep data in the EU, run on transparent open-source components and comply with EU law by design. The platform combines file storage, e-mail, calendar, document editing, chat and video conferencing in a single browser-based interface.”

It is really time that the Microslop monopoly was broken. It is not just about digital sovereignty, but also this belief that one must by MS Office to do documents. It is just not true, and so many non-profits and governments are spending a lot of money on what could have gone directly towards societal services.

But the big problem has been up to now you had to self-host or install something, and there were an array of free choices to choose from. Surprisingly, many users do not want choices and it paralyses them. Contrary to belief, the other party receiving your documents does not actually need the same brand of software to read your documents!

Ideally you'd want to also use a proper open standard document format like ODF, but you could also use the MS OOXML standard that MS Office uses.

Hopefully with such an enterprise effort behind Office EU, it will get traction. This is a cloud based solution which uses NextCloud in the background, and anyone can self-host NextCloud themselves too, so there is no vendor lock-in.

See https://techcentral.co.za/europe-is-building-an-alternative-to-microsoft-office/278843 or https://office.eu

#technology #opensource #digitalsovereignty

AmneziaVPN is a self-hosted VPN that works in countries where WireGuard gets blocked

“It's also worth noting that AmneziaVPN has been security audited as recently as January 2025. While the auditors found a few risks categorized as critical and high, the platform has resolved all identified issues. Amnezia runs its servers as RAM-only, so all data is wiped on reboot. They also say they don't store or collect activity history, IP addresses, session data, and other metrics, which is good. It's XRay feature, which listens on port 443 for authorized connection requests. If it gets an authorized one it connects as normal, but if it gets scanned by anyone else, it redirects that packet to a legit website, like google.com or any other easily available site in your region that you chose. The beauty of this is that it also returns an authentic TLS certificate because it's issued by the site the packet was redirected to, making the censorship software think your VPN server is Google instead.”

It does look like a lot of attention has been given to making this an anti-censorship tool. Unfortunately this seems to be needed more and more by citizens in many countries today, whether 1st or 3rd World countries.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/self-hosted-vpn-works-where-wireguard-gets-blocked

#technology #VPN #anticensorship #privacy

Portracker — an open source self-hosted real-time port monitoring and discovery tool

I'm using this tool to identify which docker container ports are published or exposed (from the container) as well as which internal ports are available on your containers. This tool helps see where there may be port clashes, which ports are exposed and could be hidden, and helps find an available port to use for new containers. It has various ways of sorting, filtering and grouping the ports view.

Yes you could track all your open and internal ports in a spreadsheet, but if you have 40 or 50 containers running, and spin others up and down, it gets difficult to keep that spreadsheet up to date. Portracker gives you a live view of all system ports, and docker published and internal ports.

I also spend a few minutes explaining how and why docker ports are exposed, and how you would point to them from a reverse proxy such as Nginx Proxy Manager or your PC on your LAN.

Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Lz5zv7Q_oA

#technology #opensource #selfhosting #docker #networking

10 tricks you can do with FFmpeg on Linux

FFmpeg is an incredibly powerful piece of software and often sits in the background powering many graphics and audio conversion apps we use. So you may not know it, but you very likely are already using it.

This linked article though shows a couple of command line executions you can run with it to quickly:
* Play a video from the terminal
* Get media info
* Record your screen
* Extract images from videos
* Convert images into videos
* Convert videos into MP3s or GIFs
* Add subtitles to movies and shows
* Rebuild a video's index without transcoding
* Resize videos
* Trim and crop videos

It runs across Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, the BSDs, Solaris, etc. under a wide variety of build environments, machine architectures, and configurations.

See https://www.howtogeek.com/10-tricks-you-can-do-with-ffmpeg-on-linux/

#technology #video #audio

More than 800 gamers took an exam to prove they could complete an '80s adventure game without peeking at a walkthrough—and only 2 passed

“Designed by developer Woe Industries, the AGAT challenged players to complete an '80s adventure game without using a walkthrough. Players weren't told what adventure game they'd be playing in advance, and they were monitored via webcam and microphone by a legitimate online proctoring software to determine if they were looking up hints on a second window, using their phones to cheat, or getting help from someone off-screen.”

I remember playing Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest, etc back in those days, probably then on my Commodore C64 or Amiga. These were more difficult than Doom as you did have to think quite a bit. These games seemed advanced back then as prior to these it was text adventure games without any graphics. Also, no Google Search so you sat for hours being stuck somewhere in the game until you got past the block.

The linked article also has a link to a Twitch stream of the game during the test. Needless to say I already thought I knew where the key was, and see I was right.

Back then it was not about the fancy graphics, it was about the storyline, the puzzles, etc.

See https://www.pcgamer.com/games/adventure/more-than-800-gamers-took-an-exam-to-prove-they-could-complete-an-80s-adventure-game-without-peeking-at-a-walkthrough-and-only-2-passed

#technology #gaming #retro