[FREEDOM TECH WRAP]
What's up everybody? For the week ending February 17th, my name is Marks.
This is Freedom Tech Rap, a weekly source for news and project updates in the freedom and independent technology space.
We live in a highly connected world. 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. If you want to support what we're doing, you can send us value through your Podcasting 2.0 app or through Noster.
Your support and your feedback are greatly appreciated.
Now, on to the news.
First up today is a major story about Julian Assange.
By the time you're listening to this, the court proceedings are likely in progress or have already happened.
But this story comes from the week that just passed.
This is out of Australia, where the federal MPs have passed a motion urging the US and the UK to allow Julian Assange's return to Australia.
Directly from the article, it says, "In short, federal MPs have voted in favor of a motion calling for the return of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to Australia.
The US government is seeking Assange's extradition from the UK on espionage charges that could see him spend the rest of his life in jail.
What's next? The UK High Court of Justice will hold a hearing into whether Assange can appeal his extradition to the US next week."
So those are the court proceedings that may have already happened by the time you listen to this.
The final quote from the article, "Regardless of what you think of Mr. Assange, justice is not being done in this case.
If Mr. Assange is extradited to the US, it would be a direct attack on media and freedom, as it would set a frightening precedent for all journalists that they too are at risk of being locked up for just doing their job."
I hope that proper due process is done here and that journalism is found to be respected.
Alright, next one. Along similar lines, this is a win for encryption against backdoors.
"The European Court of Human Rights declares backdoored encryption illegally. This comes by way of the Register."
Encryption has had a win in courts. From the article it says, "The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that laws requiring crippled encryption and extensive data retention violate the European Convention on Human Rights,
a decision that may derail European data surveillance legislation known as "chat control."
The court issued a decision on Tuesday stating that the contested legislation, "providing for the retention of all Internet communications of all users,
the security services direct access to the data stored without adequate safeguards against abuse and the requirement to decrypt encrypted communications,
as applied to end-to-end encryption communications, cannot be regarded as necessary in a democratic society."
So this is trying to get rid of the ability to sweep up all communication in the name of safety and then have a way to decrypt it all so that they are able to see everything.
So this is a small step in the right direction.
Next up, we have an interesting new wearable device from Brilliant Labs.
And it is a pair of glasses that you can wear. Augmented reality glasses.
The interesting thing here is that it is fully open source. They have open sourced the firmware, they've open sourced the platform, they've open sourced the clients that talk to it.
So if you want to check it out, it's at brilliant.xyz and they're fully open source AI glasses.
You can visually analyze the world as you see it. You can translate things that you see and things that you hear.
And then also search the web in real time as you're looking at them.
Last thing from the website, it says you can hack, build, and modify.
So all of this stuff is published on GitHub.
They have a previous product that is a monocle. And so these are actually going to be regular glasses that you can wear.
Really interesting.
Next up, talking about long-range mesh networks.
We've brought those up multiple times on here and we will continue to cover them.
So this is courtesy of user Jiraj and it says Bitcoin eCash sent via mesh network.
This is a YouTube video where they show a demo of eCash being sent over long range.
No internet required.
So from the YouTube video it says a demo of Reticulum Cashew and MyProject NutBand that combines them in order to use a Cashew Mint over Reticulum mesh network.
In this case over long range radio without internet.
This has huge utility in my mind as a backup for major internet issues as well as for people who are in remote areas where reliable internet just isn't available.
This is a freedom tool that really can empower anyone to maintain the ability to interact and transact with each other, which is really freedom of speech.
You know, the freedom to transact.
So regardless of where you are, regardless of who you are, this gives you an ability to continue to have that freedom of speech.
Really cool demo.
Next up, this comes courtesy of Tom's Hardware.com and the article says Wi-Fi jamming to knock out cameras suspected in nine Minnesota burglaries.
Smart security systems vulnerable as tech becomes cheaper and easier to acquire.
So the summary of the story is that there are burglars who are knocking out Wi-Fi at homes and all of the security devices that depend on that Wi-Fi no longer work.
Reading from the article, a serial burglar in Edina, Minnesota is suspected of using a Wi-Fi jammer to knock out connected security cameras before stealing and making off with the victim's prized possessions.
Minnesota doesn't generally have a reputation as a hotbed for technology, so readers shouldn't be surprised to hear that reports of Wi-Fi jammers used to assist burglaries in the U.S. go back several years.
PSA or public service announcement, even criminals use technology and more are now catching on.
So homeowners should think about mitigations.
So my take here is that really you should understand the limitations of your technology.
You need to try and think adversarially and find ways to mitigate the weaknesses in your system.
In this specific case, maybe consider running a wired connection for some of the devices.
Maybe not all of them, but at least a few of them. So at least some of them stay online during an outage and still provide you a bit of protection.
And if you want to try out a Wi-Fi jammer yourself, they're available online.
Apparently not very expensive.
OK, next up is a project called Semaphore.
This comes from user SuperTestNet, who has been long in the Bitcoin community and has created lots and lots of projects on GitHub.
This one is a crowdfunding app on Bitcoin that has a unique quality.
This one allows for returns if a project does not reach the funding goal, which up to this point, any of the funding projects that you can do through GitHub or sorry, through Bitcoin or with Lightning Network.
Once those funds are gone, they're gone.
And then you have to manually try and send funds back to an address.
So from from the GitHub page, this is how Semaphore is looking to solve that.
Semaphore gives contributors two ways to give someone money irreversible and reversible.
If you choose irreversible, it sends the money straight to the recipient's Bitcoin address and there are no takebacks.
After the money confirms, if you choose reversible, it sends the money to a Bitcoin smart contract with two spending paths.
One lets the contributor take their money back at any time.
The other is a multi-sig path that can only spend the money if the contributor and the recipient both co-sign a transaction.
After sending money to the smart contract, the contributor creates a Bitcoin transaction that sends the money to the recipient, but only if the fundraiser reaches the goal amount.
The contributor signs this transaction and publishes their signature and thus the recipient can only take the money if he if he gets enough signatures on a valid contribution that he reaches his goal.
If he tries to spend the money in any transaction that doesn't reach the goal, the signature simply won't be valid and the Bitcoin won't let him take the money.
So really interesting. This is just a mostly proof of concept.
There are some demos on there that you can click on and go check it out.
So really compelling. And I hope that we can see more things like this in the future.
Next up is an article about the chat protocol and the chat service Matrix, which we've talked about on here before.
And this one's called the Matrix Trashfire. Comes by way of a blog written by and I apologize if I don't get the name pronounced correctly.
Christian Kontopp. And it's an article about the difficult time that a new user has when they try to start using Matrix chat.
So he came at it as a new user and really just had a lot of confusion.
The blog post talks about confusion during the onboarding process, specifically trying to download the client.
There were multiple clients, mostly with the same name. Some were available. Some were only available on other platforms, despite what he read online.
Also, in the onboarding process, it suggests certain servers that the user could use.
But a lot of these servers were labeled as vulnerable or unavailable, and some of them even had profanity in their name, which just seems very, you know, not like a great way to make a new user feel comfortable with the service.
What's really interesting here is after this lengthy post, the Matrix team responded in a very constructive way.
They thanked him for the feedback and then walked through some of the issues discussed and how they are trying to resolve them.
So give this a read if you want to learn more about Matrix. We really need people trying out these tools and giving honest feedback.
This is really how things get better. When a tool is built by a corporation, there's typically a budget for things like UX research and development,
and then rigorous testing after the development is done.
So I haven't looked into how much funding Matrix has, but I imagine it's nowhere near the proprietary systems that it's really trying to compete with.
So please test out these tools. Try to use them in meaningful ways. And then politely, but honestly, provide feedback in a way that is actionable.
OK, we have a new project announcement. This is called nsec.app and NosterLogin. nsec is spelled N-S-E-C.
And this comes by way of Bruggeman, who is the creator of Noster.band, and that is a site that indexes Noster, trying to make search available for it,
and also has lots of really useful usage stats about the overall Noster network.
From his announcement, he says, "Introducing nsec.app and NosterLogin. I've shown the prototype of nsec.app in December, and it's essentially an nsec bunker in your browser.
It is non-custodial. Your keys are stored locally in the browser, and apps can get access to your keys using NIP46.
We've now turned that prototype into a real thing, and I invite you to try it."
Shout out to this user, a long NPUB name, for the designs.
Now, we do help Noster app-- sorry. Now, how do we help Noster apps adopt NIP46 for remote key access?
That's where NosterLogin library comes in. If your app uses NIP07 to talk to a browser extension, then with just two lines of code, you can make it talk over NIP46.
Both of these tools support our new OAuth-like flow proposed by Pablo.
Below, you can watch a demo of how NosterLogin, added to my fork of Snork, works with nsec.app, or would work with any other nsec bunker.
Last thing he says, "What this all means is that people could join Noster on the web without installing extensions or mobile apps,
with their keys stored non-custodially in the nsec app, and then could log in to the other Noster apps without copying their private keys."
And then he provides links to a demo and links to the projects.
This is really cool. I love seeing all of the projects coming out for key management in Noster.
The last thing we want people to do is to become really comfortable with copying and pasting their Noster private key into different apps that they use.
We really want them using better key management. So, please play around with this.
Use keys that are not your primary key for your main account to start. Try them out with other things in case you accidentally break something or expose something.
But then, as these tools continue to get hardened, it's going to be very compelling for creating a better user experience for people joining Noster.
Now, on the Noster front, we have a new website for creators, and it is called Creator, C-R-E-A-T-E-R, and brought to us by our friends over at Noster.Wine.
This is a place where you can support creators with monthly subscriptions and access to extra content.
So, it's very similar to Patreon, but it's powered by Noster and Lightning.
From user Mazin, who's the creator of Noster.Wine, you can add the relay, creator.noster.wine, and browse free posts and content.
If you find a creator you want to support, you can subscribe to them and unlock exclusive content through the relay on your favorite Noster client.
This is really cool. I love how Mazin and team are really embracing a lot of the Noster protocol and a lot of the NIPs that have come out and been introduced.
And they're also helping to push it on the forefront.
So, please check out creator.noster.wine and support some of the creators there.
Speaking of creativity and content, we have MePremiereBitcoin.
This is a project that we talked about here a while ago, actually.
So, MePremiereBitcoin has introduced something they call the Node Network.
I'll read directly from their announcement.
"Hello, world! We've been hard at work the past year finding circular economies and education teams all over the world to build open-source Bitcoin education together.
We call this initiative the Node Network.
It is a group of educators from all over the world who believe that Bitcoin education should be impartial, high quality, and led by educators in the community.
Over the next days, we'll be sharing the progress that we've made together."
So, I first discussed MePremiereBitcoin on the No Strings show when I was doing coverage of Nosterica, the Noster conference that happened in March of 2023.
So, it's great to see that they've been building on that collaboration that was really accelerated during that event.
As they met more eager people there and people who were energetic and passionate about bringing financial literacy to the underserved communities in their areas.
So, please check out MePremiereBitcoin.
You can also support them on Geyser and in other ways.
Okay, we have a privacy and really a security reminder here.
This comes from user Seth for privacy, talking about being careful with your dice rolls.
So, this is a warning to both influencers and consumers who are trying to get more security without understanding the full picture when it comes to a Bitcoin cold storage wallet.
So, from his post, he says, "Stop trying to use dice rolled seeds unless you're an expert."
I'll pause here for a second.
If that sentence didn't make any sense to you, then you should probably not start rolling physical dice when you're setting up a Bitcoin wallet.
Only do it if you've taken the time to fully understand why and how to do it properly.
What happens is that apps, Bitcoin wallet apps, have a way to generate your wallet seed for you, which is what generates your private key.
And you can trust the wallet to be random, but there is a chance that the wallet is secretly or maybe they're just ignorantly not being random with your keys and they could be compromised.
So, it's very unlikely, but it is possible.
So, some wallets provide the ability for the user to introduce their own randomness into the process by rolling dice on their own.
Seth points out a couple things and I'll read directly from the post.
He says, "In these instances where people lost funds, they used less than 10 dice rolls, meaning the private key had less than 25 bits of entropy,
when the minimum for strong security is 50 dice rolls, 128 bits of entropy."
And I'll just add, if you really want to get that full 256, you have to go to 100 dice rolls.
He continues, "As I've said many times, if you don't know the ins and outs of dice rolls, entropy, verification of the resulting seed offline, etc.,
please do not use dice rolls alone for seed generation.
99.9999% of users are better off allowing good multi-source, open-source random number generation."
He finished by saying that he's heard of zero compromised seeds that were generated using the built-in randomness of a good trusted client.
So please, my word to you is don't complicate your security more than is statistically necessary.
What does that mean?
When you complicate your setup, thinking that you need to have the best security in the world, you introduce more possibility of gaps and risks.
So try to keep things simple until the added complexity really becomes a necessity.
So keep things simple, folks, and you'll do great.
Last news item is kind of a fun project, but also a very powerful one.
This one is called Ad Nauseam, and it is a tool for tricking online advertising networks.
So from the website, it says, "Ad Nauseam is a free browser extension designed to obfuscate browser data and protect users from tracking by advertising networks.
At the same time, Ad Nauseam serves as a means of amplifying users' discontent with advertising networks that disregard privacy and facilitate bulk surveillance agendas.
As online advertising becomes ever more ubiquitous and unsanctioned, Ad Nauseam works to complete the cycle by automating ad clicks universally and blindly on behalf of its users.
Built on top of uBlock Origin, Ad Nauseam quietly clicks on every blocked ad, registering a visit on an ad network's databases.
As the collected data gathers shows an omnivorous clickstream, user tracking, targeting, and surveillance become futile."
So effectively, this thing just clicks on every single ad you ever see, and makes it difficult for them to get any focus on you because you make it seem like you're into every single thing.
So it's an interesting concept. I'm curious to see how this plays out. If you would like to try it out, go over to adnauseam.io. That's A-D-N-A-U-S-E-A-M dot I-O.
Okay, let's go on to boosts and zaps from the previous week.
The first one is from the note where I published this last week's episode. And this comes by way of user Sepper, who is someone who was mentioned on the show.
And Sepper zapped 2,000 sats. Really appreciate it. They actually zapped two zaps, 1,000 each. So I don't know if that was a mistake or intentional, but really appreciate the 2,000 sats.
If it was a mistake, let me know. I'll send 1,000 back to you.
And then we had a couple boosts on the podcast through a Podcasting 2.0 app. First one is from the wild hustle, 1,000 sats. Thank you, wild hustle. Really appreciate you.
And then Joel W., coming in with 333 sats. Appreciate both of you, your regular boosters and listeners. You rock.
Okay, on to our project updates. First one is a massive one when it comes to the Lightning Network. People are calling this Lightning V2.
And this is by way of Nifty, who is one of the big contributors to the Lightning protocol.
And this is a spec that was finally accepted and merged into Lightning.
From her post, she says, "After almost four plus years, 487 comments from 19 reviewers, the spec proposal for adding V2 opens, aka dual funding, to Lightning is officially merged as spec in Lightning Network."
So this is really big. It sounds like really low level. But what this allows is a Lightning channel to be funded from both sides instead of just one, as has been since the beginning.
And this lays the foundation for a second feature called splicing, which you probably read about as well. And that is really part, you know, phase two of this update.
Splicing allows for a channel to be resized without having to close the channel and open a new one.
So really cool. I know this is a ton of work and really spec work is just kind of something for unsung heroes.
So we'd love to sing the praises of this hero for doing this work. Big shout out to Nifty and all the people that have worked with her to get this merged.
We had a minor celebration for this at Austin BitDes last week. So super cool. And really, congratulations.
Okay, our folks over at Umbral have announced 1.0 of the Umbral OS.
This is a major release coming out from them from their home server software. And at the same time, they also announced upgraded hardware that you could purchase if you want to for their Umbral Home project.
So from the announcement, it says, "Umbral OS 1.0 is a complete rebirth of Umbral OS, engineered from scratch for unparalleled stability, UX, and security."
And then the Umbral Home device is an Intel N100 chip, 16 gigs of RAM, 2 terabytes SSD, and it starts at $399 and is already shipping today. You can go order one if you would like one.
So Umbral will be releasing 1.0 to the world starting in mid-March with a phased rollout that you will receive depending on which kind of device you are running.
So that's really cool. If you haven't checked out Umbral, I recommend everybody give it a look. Other services like Start9 also exist.
Really, I recommend people run some kind of home server, whether you only do one or two things on it or many things. Please start playing around with it.
You can do it for free. Just go to Umbral and check out their OS.
Okay, next update comes from Zaprite. Zaprite is a service that allows businesses to accept Lightning and on-chain Bitcoin payments as part of their flow.
And this is a major one because they are now integrated in with Square. Square is one of the most popular POS systems out there.
And they are now going to support Credit Card, Automatic Clearing House, or ACH, Cash App Pay, Google Pay, and Apple Pay.
From the note with the announcement, "We're happy to announce an integration with Square's SDK which offers the simplest fiat payments for businesses and their customers."
If you aren't familiar with the term fiat, simply replace that with traditional, so traditional payments.
"Now businesses with Square merchant accounts can accept Bitcoin, whether on-chain or Lightning, side-by-side with fiat payments methods through Zaprite."
In the article, they talk about a use case, which is PlebLab in Austin, Texas, that they are using this integration.
Zaprite actually grew out of PlebLab, so it's very fitting that they would be using it. So, rock on.
Next project update is ListMonk. If you're not familiar, ListMonk is a self-hosted mailing list service.
Think of it like MailChimp, but one you can host yourself and run on your own.
This update is major. It's 3.0.0. Some of the release notes say, "The concurrent core, or the engine, has been completely rewritten.
Campaign pausing and cancellations are now near instant and lossless.
Concurrent campaign sending performance has improved significantly.
Major performance improvements for large databases, with the new Settings Performance Cache Slow Queries option.
On installations with millions of subscribers, enabling this speeds up database queries by several orders of magnitude.
On a production database with around 14 million subscribers, the speed up on the list page was 2000 times,
from 20 seconds down to 10 milliseconds." That's freaking huge.
And it's also really compelling that ListMonk is being used with lists that have that many users.
So, really cool. There's a lot of other updates in there.
Okay. Tails OS. If you aren't familiar with Tails OS, it is a Linux-based system that provides a ton of privacy.
And they have a 6.0 release that is in the Release Candidate stage.
So, if you would like more privacy with your Linux, please go check out Tails and try out the Release Candidate for 6.0.
Don't do anything mission critical on it right away, because it is a Release Candidate.
But go hammer on it and see if it's the right thing for you.
Okay, we have a new SDK update for Breeze. This is the Breeze SDK Core 0.3.0 release.
And in the notes, they say, "Fix Flutter plugin to work with SXS with BDK Flutter."
They store and expose LNURLPay domain in the payments. And they have a few changes to values that are returned in API objects, as well as new ways to handle notifications.
So, if you're using the Breeze SDK, go check that out.
Next up, we have Noogle. Noogle is a service that lets you do search on Noster.
The address is noogle.lol. N-O-O-G-L-E.L-O-L.
And this comes from user "Don't Believe the Hype" on Noster.
New in this release, they say, "Searching for notes of people you follow just became way easier.
When logged in, Noogle will use your following list to suggest endpubs (or users) in the Advanced tab."
Searching on Noster has really been a largely missing feature.
So, there are multiple projects that are trying to solve it.
I love that they're trying this here and trying it in a really creative way.
So, go check it out at noogle.lol.
Next up, we have Cashew. Cashew is a big eCache project going on.
And they have released Nutshell version 0.15.0.
And there is a major thing in here, and that is support for Cashew v1 protocol,
as well as maintaining backward compatibility.
From the announcement, "With this release, we're also about to get serious.
We're preparing for distributing the mint in a cluster to run it in a high-availability and hardcore throughput setting
and allow for thousands of transactions per second."
Way to go. That's cool.
Love what Kali and others are doing on Cashew.
So, go check it out, please.
And if you want to try it over a long-range network,
you can check out the demo that I talked about earlier here,
where they did it over long-range radio without the need for any kind of internet connection.
Alright, two more app updates.
We have Wavelake.
Wavelake is the audio service that is an independent music platform for doing value for value,
and you can support artists directly.
They have released an app for Android, which is awesome.
The iOS app came out a little while ago.
The app for Android is currently in beta.
You can check it out in the Google Play Store under the beta testing feature.
Last one is an interesting new service called Wormhole.app.
And this is the way to send simple private files over the internet.
You upload it, you give someone a link, they download it.
These things have come and gone for years.
There have been so many of them.
This one has a really big size limit, up to 10 gigabytes per file.
I would just say use it with reasoned caution, as always,
because you're uploading your file somewhere.
But this is cool to see something else like this to make things really easy.
Okay, that's it for news and updates this week.
This has been 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 and send us feedback on Noster to marks@nosterplubs.com.
Now, if you're interested in listening to the song of the week and directly support that artist,
stick around and boost it.
For the rest of you, thanks for listening, and remember to live independent.
Later.
[music]
The song of the week is from an artist called Sara Jade.
This weekend, there was actually a value for value event in Phoenix, Arizona, in the United States,
called Culture Shock.
It was largely put together by Quiet Warrior from the Pledge Haim radio show.
I apologize if others were heavily involved and I'm missing them.
There were some sponsors as well of the event.
It was really a great event.
It streamed live on Toonster, where people have the ability to zap the artist live while they're on the stage.
So I tuned in on the stream and enjoyed listening to Sara Jade and her partner in crime as they performed.
I really enjoyed it, thought it was a great event.
Hope everybody had a good time that was there in person,
and that we really see more of these value for value events throughout 2024.
So this week, your track is from Sara Jade.
This is "Cash Back."
[music]
I was punch-strong, blind on the sides
Double vision in the headlights
Riding high on your reckless love
I bought all your lies
Now I'm passing the buck
I want my cash back for loving you
Cash back, I'll give you a few
Cash back, give me somebody new
Cash back for loving you
All the gifts material, yeah
I don't care, you can keep them all
As for yours, I'll throw 'em away
Remember when you just doesn't pay
I want my cash back for loving you
Cash back, I'll give you a few
Cash back, give me somebody new
I want my cash back for loving you
Diamonds, money, and your baby's new
I want my cash back for loving you
You
Cash back for loving you
You
Walking free 'cause I served my time
Took my things and I signed the line
A dozen roses too long overdue
I want my cash back for loving you
Cash back for loving you
Cash back, I'll give you a few
Cash back, give me somebody new
Cash back, got the things I'm no use
Cash back for loving
Cash back for loving you
you
[BLANK_AUDIO]