There was a recent related discussion on Hacker News and the top comment discusses why this sort of solution is not likely to be the best fit for smaller organizations. In short, doing it well requires time and effort from someone technically sophisticated, who must do more than the bare minimum for good results, as you just learned.

Even then, it’s likely to be less reliable than solutions hosted by big corporations and when there’s a problem, it’s your problem. I don’t want to discourage you, but understand what you’re committing to and make sure you have adequate buy-in in your organization.

Telegram isn’t open source, so I don’t think you’re going to find forks of it.

I stand corrected. Telegram’s client is open source (GPL) and what OP is asking for is reasonable.

That’s a valid point, though it looks like Popfile’s installation instructions call for manually installing libraries, presumably current ones. I think it processes only text, not PDFs or images, which are traditional sources of vulnerabilities. I’m fairly certain it doesn’t attempt to execute Javascript. It is, itself written in Perl, which is memory-safe.

It’s worth considering security because there’s so much malware out there trying to spread indiscriminately, but Popfile is less vulnerable than an Android app (which bundles its dependencies) or anything written in C (which is subject to all kinds of memory management bugs).

Abandoned doesn’t necessarily imply no longer useful. Sometimes, though rarely in the modern world software is finished.

I may give it a try. It does actually have the features I’m asking for.

I’ve been using one of the Javascript variants of this for a while. While that is a little heavier weight for the client than this completely static solution, it’s ultimately just a few kilobytes and minimal processing that’s fast even on old devices.

The EFF has a good document on this topic.

That site is claiming that phosphor-converted amber LEDs provide all the benefits of low-pressure sodium. They do not; one of the benefits of LPS is that astronomers have a very narrow frequency band to filter out, while PC amber is much wider. Monochromatic amber LEDs are more comparable to LPS.

Many people seem to be treating it differently now because the average person who catches it has milder symptoms than a couple years ago. The potential for long-term consequences seems to be left out of the conversation.

Being unable to lock the car door while it’s open contributed to a German car I owned in the USA being stolen. A family member thought the lock was broken and left it unlocked.

Wouldn’t the door always be closed if it’s locked?

I meant the inverse; if the door is closed, it cannot be opened from the outside without a key. American doors typically have a turnable doorknob on the outside and can be opened without a key unless deliberately locked.

A simple web search finds a bunch of screw-in bulbs using LED sources in 1800K, which is similar to an incandescent bulb on a dimmer at a low setting, or a candle. A typical incandescent at full brightness is 2700K. Daytime sunlight is 5000-5700K.

LEDs can be warm. Someone just selected a mismatched bulb.

I grew up in Alaska. I live in Germany.

• Germans think air conditioning makes people sick - not because it could be dirty if poorly maintained, but because the chilled air will do… something.
• German cars can’t be locked with the driver’s door open; German apartments can’t be unlocked if the door is closed.
• German tap water is both palatable and safe to drink; almost everyone drinks bottled water.
• In grocery stores, most Germans try to pack the conveyor belt at the checkout as tightly as possible and crowd the next person in line, as if space on the belt isn’t a renewable resource.

The EU lets them get away with requiring device attestation for their mobile apps. It’s not exactly the same thing since system requirements for native apps are traditionally narrower than websites, but it’s similar.

It uses the Mastodon API in a client-side script adapted from this one.

I’ve been self-hosting Mastodon for a while and mostly using it to share bird photography, but also to provide comments on a static site. Since Mastodon and Lemmy both speak ActivityPub, those get crossposted to /c/flashlight so Lemmy comments are also included on my site. Federation is cool.

I don’t follow many accounts that post Fediverse meta stuff on Mastodon. While I have some interest in the best examples of that content, the only way to attract a broader community is to promote accounts and content appealing to the interests of that broader audience.

We have good examples already of people hosting despicable things on TOR hidden services (or the “dark web” if you prefer). On occasion they get caught and we read about it in the news. TOR is old enough to drink in the USA. PGP is decades old and has open source implementations, but takes a bit of effort to use. People who are motivated to secure the content of communications have been able to do so effectively for a long time, and those technologies aren’t about to be uninvented.

Tools like Signal and Veilid make strong privacy protections accessible to the average person. My mother uses Signal. Let’s assume most of us agree that it would be worth giving up those protections to eliminate the use of telecommunication for terrorism, child sexual abuse, human trafficking, and organized crime.

How do you propose to do that when extant open source code has long provided similar capabilities to those motivated enough to put in the effort to use it?

I agree that you can’t have it both ways; for everyone to have privacy, horrible people have to get privacy, and they will do horrible things with it.

The thing is, people doing horrible things are already incentivized to take precautions, and it’s not possible to uninvent cryptography. Making it more accessible helps the innocent more than it does the guilty.

Flashlights are certainly a hobby for some of us, but they’re also a common tool most people have an occasional use for. Standardized, field-replaceable Li-ion batteries are common in flashlights targeted at a non-enthusiast market.

On-cell protection circuits are quite bad, protection should be inside the device.

I agree that devices should not over-discharge or over-charge cells, but the example you gave was people putting batteries in their pockets, presumably with metallic items like coins and keys that can cause short circuits. On-cell protection circuits handle that situation well enough; I recommend carrying batteries in plastic cases, but I’ve never heard of a manufacturer getting sued over a protected cell.

I often use unprotected cells myself, but I’m a hobbyist.

[New EU rules don’t] mean the batteries should be swappable. It will only make service workers’ life easier, not yours.

The new rules say that batteries should be removable and replaceable by the end-user. They don’t seem to encourage standardization of battery types though, so they could still be proprietary and ridiculously priced.

They’re very common in flashlights, including mainstream brands based in the USA (Streamlight, Surefire) and in a bunch of stuff from the Alibaba to Amazon pipeline. The former uses cells with added protection circuits, and such models will accept generic third-party cells. I’m a bit surprised I don’t hear about the latter exploding on a regular basis, but I have not.

Li-ion cells with protection circuits are safe enough for the average adult to handle without any special instruction; the risks are no different from the removable proprietary Li-ion battery packs that are common in power tools, and used to be common in laptops. There isn’t a safety reason preventing their use in other electronics like Bluetooth speakers, though the business incentive to produce a more disposable product is obvious. New EU rules mandate user-replaceable batteries in the future, though I imagine manufacturers will find ways to make it proprietary and expensive if they can.

The last time I bought one, I selected a “Polaris V8” for using a removable 18650 battery. I wish that was more common.

• Runtime: infinite (just bring spares)
• Charge time: 10 seconds or so to swap the battery
• Service life due to the battery wearing out: infinite
• Service life due to being a janky no-name product: 3-4 years

So that last bit was disappointing.