[Music]
What's up everybody? For the week ending March 2nd, my name is Marks. This is Freedom Tech Rap.
Freedom Tech Rap is a weekly source for news and project updates in the independent technology space.
We live in a highly connected world and Freedom Tech lets you decide how you want to connect and where you want your data to live.
Freedom Tech Rap is an independent show, so if you would like to support what we're doing,
you can send us value through your Podcasting 2.0 app or send us a zap on Noster.
Your support and your feedback are greatly appreciated. Now, on to the news.
First up, OpenSats. OpenSats has announced new grants for the month of February.
This means that they are supporting more devs, more projects, more Freedom Tech.
They say, "Block by block, a brighter future is built."
There is a blog post on their website written by Rob and Gigi. Their usernames are Bolt C and/or Gigi.
So go check it out. If you aren't familiar with OpenSats, they are an organization that is supporting
developers and projects that are in both the Bitcoin and Noster space, as well as general Freedom Technology.
Very cool to see. If you would like to contribute to OpenSats, you can go to their website and donate there as well.
Next up, Strike. Strike is one of the more popular ways to not only buy Bitcoin, but to use the Lightning Network.
They are popular in the United States, but also in many other countries around the world.
They have a major announcement this last week, where they are bringing Strike to Africa.
From the announcement by Jack Mollers himself, the CEO of Strike, he says,
"Today we are launching Strike Africa, expanding our full suite of Bitcoin services into Gabon, Ivory Coast,
Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, and Zambia, with more markets to come in the future."
LFG! Yes, let's go Strike. Strike Africa. That's huge.
Africa is a place that has already shown to have a strong desire for Bitcoin.
I have connected with many Bitcoiners in Africa, especially on the Sub-Saharan portion of Africa.
So really pumped to see this.
Next, we have a new project called Cypher. This is courtesy of NoBSBitcoin.
Introducing Cypher MVP, stands for Minimum Viable Product.
You can check out cyber.space, their site.
Cyber.space aims to become a Bitcoin-only, self-hosted WordPress and Shopify alternative
for setting up a free Bitcoin blog or webshop with value-for-value donation and checkout procedure tools.
I personally am going to be checking this out to possibly run it as my website
for Freedom Tech Wrap and other projects that I have going on.
So excited to see this.
If you are looking to set up some kind of e-commerce site and want to do it in a more Freedom Tech way,
check out cypher.space.
Okay, from our friends over at Fountain, there is a new feature in Fountain called Fountain Radio.
So the CEO and founder of Fountain, Mary Oscar, wrote about this on Noster, saying,
"Introducing Fountain Radio. Fountain Radio is a community station for music, powered by Bitcoin.
Discover new music, support the artists directly, cue your favorite tracks, and chat with other listeners.
Log in with Fountain or Noster to listen live, support artists, and add/upvote tracks in the queue.
Artists, please upload your music to Wavelake to join the party."
So my take on this is that this is really cool to see.
There are so many world radio stations that you can stream online already,
but this one is super unique because it allows people from everywhere to contribute.
But then it avoids spam by making people pay a small amount of money to request and upvote.
So I think this is a really cool social experiment, and I hope that it goes well,
and I hope that we have a really cool station, and that it helps introduce more artists to Value for Value,
to Wavelake, and other music services where independent artists can be paid a significant portion of the money for their work.
Next up, we have Cashew.
Cashew is one of the eCash implementations out there that is getting a lot of development right now.
And so this is for getting your own Cashew address, and it is an SDK.
So this is courtesy of user Egg, E-G-G-E. I hope I pronounced that correctly.
But it is the Cashew address SDK.
And from the post, it says, "This is an easy way to integrate npub.cash,"
which is in a Cashew eCash address, "into your own projects.
It abstracts pretty much everything and supports different signing methods like nsec, nip46, and nip07 out of the box."
So you can go check it out on GitHub. I'll have the link in the show notes.
But you can also search Cashew, that is C-A-S-H-U dash address dash SDK.
Now on the Noster front, we have Noster.build, which is a popular media hosting site for Noster clients.
And they have announced new creator plans.
So if you are wanting to be a creator, I have a creator account with them for uploading my content.
They have just announced new ones, and you can sign up here and support Freedom Tech builders.
They're trying to build and support this whole ecosystem, and you can do the same.
So really what you get out of this is you get a large place to store your media files,
and then you can download, you can upload, you can manage them, delete them, whatever you want to do with that.
Along with being a hosted service, you can actually download the source code for Noster.build and run it on your own if you'd like to.
Okay, on the privacy front, we have a news article about the company Avast, which offers privacy tools for users.
And this comes way of Ars Technica.
It's called "Avast Ordered to Stop Selling Browsing Data from its Browsing Privacy Apps," which seems a bit ironic.
Now, reading from the article, it says, "Identifiable data included job searches, map directions, and cosplay erotica.
Avast, a name known for its security research and antivirus apps, has long offered Chrome extensions, mobile apps, and other tools aimed at increasing privacy.
Avast apps would block annoying tracking cookies that collect data on your browsing activities and prevent web services from tracking your online activity."
Now, despite all this, it turns out their data was not anonymous and was potentially being sold for people to use.
So the FTC filed a complaint, and it says that "Avast acquired then-antivirus competitor JumpShot in early 2014.
It rebranded the company as an analytics seller.
JumpShot advertised that it offered unique insights into the habits of more than 100 million online consumers worldwide.
That included the ability to see where your audience is going before and after they visit your site and your competitor's sites, and even track those who visit a specific URL."
So the article goes very in-depth and talks about how they combined this data to really help them see what their users were doing, and it turns out it wasn't as anonymous as people thought.
So please understand the tools you're using.
Okay, speaking of understanding the tools you're using, we have Nostrudel, which is a Nostr client that you can now run on your own Umbral Home OS server.
So this comes way of user hazard149, HZRD149.
And they say you can run your own web client on your own home server inside the Umbral App Store.
So my take is that this really just gives you better privacy, gives you better security.
You are running the software on your own hardware, and you don't really have to trust anyone else,
especially because you're likely going to be putting something like your Nostr private key into this or allowing this app to sign Nostr events for you.
So if you'd really like to take the highest level of privacy and data security, you can download Nostrudel and run it on your own.
And I really can't wait to see, you know, I can't wait to have better key management for Nostr keys out there.
I know that there are some in the works and some that have been published already, but I'm excited for really to be able to run like my own Nostr key management on Umbral and on Start9
and then run it alongside something like Nostrudel or some other client OS or client client app. I think that'd be great.
Okay, now on the Bitcoin side, we have a major story that a lot of people were covering, and that is the fact that Coinbase had a major outage as Bitcoin began to pump in price.
As you're listening to this, Bitcoin's price has gone up even higher, and Coinbase, I think, had yet another outage.
But I'm just going to, I'm not going to go into the details here. This is just a reminder to get your funds off of exchanges.
If you have your Bitcoin on an exchange, I recommend finding a way to safely get that off there and store it securely on your own so that you are the one that's in control of it.
Only really keep amounts on an exchange that you want to liquidate in some kind of timely manner.
Last news story of the day, a US judge halts government effort to monitor crypto mining energy use.
So you might remember from a few episodes ago, we talked about how the Biden administration was going to start requiring public Bitcoin miners to send all sorts of data to them about where they are mining and how much energy they're using and much more information.
Well, coming by way of the Guardian, it turns out that that is no longer going to happen.
Federal judge in Texas says that a new requirement would cause irreparable injury to the industry amid surging electricity usage.
The US government has suspended its effort to survey cryptocurrency mining operations over their ballooning energy use following a lawsuit from an industry that has been accused by environmental groups of fueling the climate crisis.
Federal judge in Texas has granted a temporary order blocking the new requirement that would ascertain the energy use of the crypto miners, stating that the industry had shown it would suffer irreparable injury if it was made to comply.
And then it goes on to say that the government has halted its efforts.
That, I feel like, is a win.
Okay, let's go into Boosts and Zaps.
First up today, normally I do the Boosts first, but holy cow, we had a great Zap that I want to read first.
So we're going to do Zaps on Nostr.
These are people who Zapped the note on Nostr where this episode was announced.
And that is 10,000 sats from user FranZap, F-R-A-N-Z-A-P.
And the message tied to the Zap is "Coffee on me."
I really appreciate that, FranZap.
We mentioned their project on the previous episode, which was Zap.Store, and I hope the development is going really well.
Next Zap is 500 from Sebastian.
Sebastian is a user that we've talked about before as well, and the message there is "It's getting each episode thumbs up."
Now, I believe there is an omitted word here, so I'm going to choose the word "better," saying it's getting better each episode because it was a thumbs up at the end.
But hey, if you think I'm getting worse, you can insert "worse" there, whatever you want to do.
Last Zap is another 500-sat Zap, and that is from Fabian.
Thank you, all three of you.
And then on to the boosts.
These are things that came in through the Podcasting 2.0 apps.
First up is 1,000 sats from The Wild Hustle, and the message is "Great rip." Thank you.
And then 333 sats from Joel W., and then again another 333 sats from Joel W.
So thank you, all. Really appreciate the Zaps and Boosts and the kind words.
Or maybe the words that weren't so kind. You never know.
Appreciate you.
Okay, moving into project updates.
First up, as promised last week, Pablo F7Z has updated Wikifredia multiple times, and so as you were listening to last week's episode, updates were already flying off the shelves.
So this week we're going to cover three updates for Wikifredia, 003, 04, and 05.
Now, these ones have a few things in them. We're going to cover two.
First one is Merge Support. Now you can easily fork someone's wiki entry.
And then Search. Wikifredia now supports NIP50 full-text search.
There was no relay indexing wiki entries for full-text search.
//relay.wikifredia.xyz. It's obviously open source, so anyone can run this."
Really cool. Can't wait to see this Wikipedia alternative continue to gain traction.
Next, another person that's updating frequently, or another project I should say, is GrapheneOS.
This new update is 2024.02.2.600.
And there is a big feature here. It is a new security feature for USB-C port security.
This feature allows users of Tensor, Pixel, 6, and later to have fine-grained controls on USB controller functionality, including totally disabling data lines or the port when the OS is in use.
And there are other fixes. So that comes from user Final talking about that on Noster.
Okay, in the AI world, we have Unleashed Chat with another update, 0.1.16.
And this one is some Noster integration updates.
You can log in with Noster through NIP07 browser extension, and those with existing accounts can connect their Noster account to their account page.
And there are also some bug fixes.
Stacker News has an update. They are allowing more Noster cross-posting.
You can undo a zap if you really didn't want to do that zap. They now have zap undos.
Any territories that you are managing or a part of, those show up in your profile now.
They have a reward algorithm improvement that they made and more.
So go check out Stacker News. It's one of my favorite sites to visit on a regular basis.
Next up is Noster Development Kit, NDK 2.5.
This is also courtesy of Pablo F7Z.
And in his note, he says, "Noster Wallet Connect support.
There is no easier way to make your project Noster Wallet Connect enabled.
Than doing it this way.
So just use NDK.NWC and experience the magic of NWC payments.
If you are building with NDK, I highly recommend updating and checking it out so that you can get Noster Wallet Connect support in there.
I love seeing how many projects are starting to use NWC.
It really just helps make everything so seamless.
Okay, on the visual front, we have Slidester.
S-L-I-D-E-S-T-E-R.
The update here is from user Florian.
She has been building this and it's a Noster client that shows you images from Noster notes in a slideshow format.
So you can also have it show you a specific profile or a specific hashtag.
And on her note, she says, "This version may be somewhat buggy, but I needed to push these new features out."
And the bullet points here are new home screen with topics with predefined set of tags.
New masonry view on desktop as suggested by Gigi, including author description and tags.
After logging in, people lists, kind 30,000, can be viewed as well.
There is experimental NIP64 login support.
And lastly, the settings dialog with custom tags is still there, but will at some point be integrated into the home screen.
Something I like about this, aside from the project being really cool,
I like the note about Gigi making a suggestion and making its way into here.
So many of these project updates, you can just chat with the people on Noster or over Twitter or other ways,
and your feedback can really alter how the project goes.
So please download these tools, log into the tools, try them out and provide feedback.
Okay, on the lightning front, we have Voltage coming out with an update.
They have a newly redesigned interface.
They say a single dashboard with easy access to your node, liquidity sourcing and analytics all in one place.
They also have created updates for team collaboration and updated pricing for their services.
If you are running lightning or wanting to manage your lightning channels through a lightning service provider, check out Voltage.
Okay, we have a Bitcoin wallet, Zeus.
We've done updates for Zeus here before.
Zeus 0.8.2 beta 1 is available for testing.
If you would like to help test it out, go check it.
They have it for iOS and Android.
And the bullet points here are zero conf lightning service provider support.
Point of sale, you can now print receipts on the Android version.
They have a multi-currency conversion tool with 33 new currency conversions and many other improvements.
So check out TestFlight or just grab the Android APK from their site or from GitHub.
Then on the wallet front, we have Wasabi Wallet 2.0.6.
And the big thing here is that they have support now for the Jade hardware wallet from Blockstream.
In their announcement, they say providing another companion app for Bitcoiners to pair their open source hardware wallet with.
Very cool.
And last update, we have Nos.social with an upcoming release.
And they say that this will be released as soon as QA is complete.
You have the ability to remove a like from a note.
Your NIP05 will be displayed on the profile.
And really, there's a whole laundry list of features in here.
So if you would like to help test out the new Nos.social, go check it out.
That is it for news and updates this week.
This is Freedom Tech Wrap.
If you find this weekly source useful, please share it with your people.
You can also support us through Value for Value in your podcast app or on Noster.
If you have any feedback, send it our way on Noster to marks@nosterplebs.com.
To close out, we have the Song of the Week where your stats directly support that artist.
So stick around and boost.
For the rest of you, thanks for listening to Freedom Tech Wrap.
And remember to live independent.
Later.
Okay, the Song of the Week.
This is courtesy of one of the more popular artists on Noster at the moment as well as on Wavelength.
And this is Man Like Quex.
This was actually one of the very first songs that I discovered when I opened up Wavelength.
This is the iOS beta.
When it came out, I downloaded it. I was like, "This is sweet."
And I just hit radio on there, and this song came on first.
And I immediately connected with it. I thought it was so good.
So I want to bring it to you today and this week.
Please boost while you're listening to it so you can send support directly to Man Like Quex.
This is Tokyo Citadel.
Man Like Quex. Tokyo Citadel. Let's go.
Yo, I'm looking at the skyline as I drive my Skyline.
I'm rocking, babing ape like Neo in a '08.
Tokyo drifting while Nakimoto gifted.
These dollars don't make sense. No longer on the fence.
Bitcoin only, homie. Michael Saylor told me.
Ain't no second best. It's my one and only.
Fiat taking nails. Bitcoin doing well.
I'm in Tokyo at the Citadel.
Ay, konnichiwa. White flag, red dot, GTR.
DCA to BTC. Stacking Saks is my nature.
Ay, konnichiwa. White flag, red dot, GTR.
DCA to BTC. Stacking Saks is my nature.
TikTok, next block. This is a major epoch.
My C phrase, I keep locked.
Don't worry 'bout what we got, what he got, what she got.
If it's Bitcoin, we good, bruh. If it's Bitcoin, we good, bruh.
If it's Bitcoin, we good, bruh. Like, ay.
We got a thousand flows. Done a hundred shows.
Check the proof it works. Yeah, man, it really shows.
Citadel living. V3. We keep on giving out.
You know what we're all about.
We orange, purple, kitted out. Increasing Bitcoin adoption.
So many plebs I've adopted.
TikTok, next block. You know we ain't gonna stop it.
Increasing Bitcoin adoption.
So many plebs I've adopted.
TikTok, next block. You know we ain't gonna stop it.
Woo!
My life, my life quakes.
Yeah.
Tokyo Citadel. Tokyo Citadel.
Viet keeps taking out Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is down.
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