Slashdot Mirror

You could sign up to our developer email list, I don't think we have a low traffic announcements list.

Anyone who wants to use our daemon as the basis of a port to other platforms is welcome to start one. We've also got an asterisk channel driver, if you'd like to use any other voice protocol like SIP to talk to other Serval phones or use Serval phones as extensions in an office PBX. But I wouldn't call either of those options polished.

I think the project has a lot of potential. We've invested a lot of time in the last year building our basic set of services to a demonstrable state. Though there's always something else that could be improved.

WRONG. The bcmdhd driver IS GPLv2.

See https://github.com/CyanogenMod/android_kernel_samsung_smdk4412/blob/jellybean/drivers/net/wireless/bcmdhd/bcmsdh_linux.c as one example.

The only place in which your statement is valid is the AR6k fiasco on the Tab 7 Plus and Tab 7.7 - These DO have a driver that is dual-license GPL and BSD from Atheros, Samsung chooses BSD. While it is insanely frustrating, I can't throw Samsung under the bus for GPL noncompliance with this one. However, I can for bcmdhd.

The first problem was that for some reason, I had to re-run "sudo dpkg-reconfigure ca-certificates".

Then I got an error "markerb ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII" after the command "bundle install --without development test heroku" tells me:

Using markerb (1.0.0) from https://github.com/plataformatec/markerb.git (at master)
ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII
An error occurred while installing markerb (1.0.0), and Bundler cannot continue.
Make sure that `gem install markerb -v '1.0.0'` succeeds before bundling.

Solution turned out here to add the following to .bashrc:

export LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

I stopped at the point where you configure the webserver, because SSL is required and I don't have an SSL certificate yet for my private webserver.

Chrissake, this installation is a royal pain in the ass. The number of convoluted steps is just plain crazy.

First, I have to walk through a long, loooong installation instruction for Debian here. Then I turn to the Notes on installing and running, only to end halfway with a crazy error message.

diaspora@sirius:~/diaspora$ bundle install --without development test heroku
Fetching gem metadata from http://rubygems.org/......
Fetching gem metadata from http://rubygems.org/..
Fetching https://github.com/plataformatec/markerb.git
error: while accessing https://github.com/plataformatec/markerb.git/info/refs

fatal: HTTP request failed
Git error: command `git clone 'https://github.com/plataformatec/markerb.git' "/home/diaspora/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194@diaspora/cache/bundler/git/markerb-6697fe76410a3ed08ce3f5fd8ee64ebddd200665" --bare --no-hardlinks` in directory /home/diaspora/diaspora has failed.

Compiling Ruby from scratch, installing cruft in /usr/local, installing something weird called RVM.... What the fuck happened to ./configure && make && make install?

Chrissake, this installation is a royal pain in the ass. The number of convoluted steps is just plain crazy.

First, I have to walk through a long, loooong installation instruction for Debian here. Then I turn to the Notes on installing and running, only to end halfway with a crazy error message.

diaspora@sirius:~/diaspora$ bundle install --without development test heroku
Fetching gem metadata from http://rubygems.org/......
Fetching gem metadata from http://rubygems.org/..
Fetching https://github.com/plataformatec/markerb.git
error: while accessing https://github.com/plataformatec/markerb.git/info/refs

fatal: HTTP request failed
Git error: command `git clone 'https://github.com/plataformatec/markerb.git' "/home/diaspora/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194@diaspora/cache/bundler/git/markerb-6697fe76410a3ed08ce3f5fd8ee64ebddd200665" --bare --no-hardlinks` in directory /home/diaspora/diaspora has failed.

Compiling Ruby from scratch, installing cruft in /usr/local, installing something weird called RVM.... What the fuck happened to ./configure && make && make install?

Chrissake, this installation is a royal pain in the ass. The number of convoluted steps is just plain crazy.

First, I have to walk through a long, loooong installation instruction for Debian here. Then I turn to the Notes on installing and running, only to end halfway with a crazy error message.

diaspora@sirius:~/diaspora$ bundle install --without development test heroku
Fetching gem metadata from http://rubygems.org/......
Fetching gem metadata from http://rubygems.org/..
Fetching https://github.com/plataformatec/markerb.git
error: while accessing https://github.com/plataformatec/markerb.git/info/refs

fatal: HTTP request failed
Git error: command `git clone 'https://github.com/plataformatec/markerb.git' "/home/diaspora/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194@diaspora/cache/bundler/git/markerb-6697fe76410a3ed08ce3f5fd8ee64ebddd200665" --bare --no-hardlinks` in directory /home/diaspora/diaspora has failed.

Compiling Ruby from scratch, installing cruft in /usr/local, installing something weird called RVM.... What the fuck happened to ./configure && make && make install?

Chrissake, this installation is a royal pain in the ass. The number of convoluted steps is just plain crazy.

First, I have to walk through a long, loooong installation instruction for Debian here. Then I turn to the Notes on installing and running, only to end halfway with a crazy error message.

diaspora@sirius:~/diaspora$ bundle install --without development test heroku
Fetching gem metadata from http://rubygems.org/......
Fetching gem metadata from http://rubygems.org/..
Fetching https://github.com/plataformatec/markerb.git
error: while accessing https://github.com/plataformatec/markerb.git/info/refs

fatal: HTTP request failed
Git error: command `git clone 'https://github.com/plataformatec/markerb.git' "/home/diaspora/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194@diaspora/cache/bundler/git/markerb-6697fe76410a3ed08ce3f5fd8ee64ebddd200665" --bare --no-hardlinks` in directory /home/diaspora/diaspora has failed.

Compiling Ruby from scratch, installing cruft in /usr/local, installing something weird called RVM.... What the fuck happened to ./configure && make && make install?

There's an old, politically incorrect, cartoon with a husband freaking out in a car while his wife is driving the wrong way into oncoming , and saying, "I'm not going the wrong way... THEY are going the wrong way". Lennart Poettering wrote systemd, which is broken on machines with a separate /usr (without initramfs). Like the wife in the cartoon, his reaction is "My software isn't broken... the machines my software won't run on are broken. Repartition and reformat your machine.".

If that had remained strictly a Redhat-ism, nobody else would've complained. However, udev has been hijacked into the systemd tarball https://lwn.net/Articles/490413/ Because of the shared code with systemd, udev shares systemd's brokenness on machines with separate /usr, even if you're not running systemd itself. That's the vast majority of linux systems.

As the infomercials say... "But wait, there's more". Lennart Poettering has made no secret of his desire to do away with standalone udev. See
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-August/006066.html Basically, if you want to use udev (required by the vast majority of linux machines) you'll one day need to switch to systemd.

There are scattered efforts to run systems on mdev, bypassing udev altogether.
https://github.com/slashbeast/mdev-like-a-boss#readme
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev/Automount_USB

Opinion?

Their PHP compiler isn't secret. It's open source and freely available.

This kind of response was certainly expected, thank you for the feedback though!

We built this because we thought that we could help people start quickly to get up and running with programs to blink LED's with their Raspberry Pi, or read temperatures with sensors attached to the GPIO pins (oh, and learn a little python, ruby or what have you, in the process!). We want it to be the easiest editing environment to use and setup on the Raspberry PI (low barrier to entry). We haven't built the guided experience yet, but you can kind of see which area of programming we're focusing on by looking at the following github repository:
https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Raspberry-Pi-Python-Code

Also, you have to start somewhere with someone just starting out in this quite complex, and layered environment. What better way than to have an editor that is pre-loaded with some basic scripts that will blink an LED, or read temperature and humidity off a sensor breakout, on their Raspberry Pi with little effort in an environment they're already comfortable with (a browser)?

Sure, they could start by first learning basic unix command line, then their editor of choice, and git, and python, and then interfacing with the RPi's GPIO pins, and on and on. We're just trying to remove some of these barriers.

An expert developer with loads of experience may not need this editor (but it is pretty convenient to just plug the pi into an ethernet port, and start hacking away in your browser...). But for someone that isn't sure how to navigate directories in a command line environment...well, this might help them out a bit (we even include a pretty powerful terminal emulator that may help them learn this!).

We're hoping to keep adding more advanced features as we go. We're releasing quite early in order to gather feedback to make it better suited for more people earlier in the process.

The Social API is very active over at Github
https://github.com/mozilla/socialapi-dev

This could be installed on your phone with Fire OS and sync with your home box

If Mozilla included this as standard in Fire OS it would take off.
Especially if Fire OS can also be installed on your no name box at home too.

g

For a straightforward do-everything mail server (runs in an OpenBSD VM), take a look at mailserv. I'd really recommend weaning everyone off POP3 - it's just horrible. IMAP is great, and there's very little that doesn't support it now.

I've never found a contacts & calendaring solution with multi-user 2-way sync that really works - it always seems to run into trouble in one way or another. Any recommendations?

I've had real reliability problems with Google Apps, and their backup options are really quite bad: you can't seem to back up in a native format, only via conversions which are lossy, and as an admin, you can't back up user accounts - you need to log in to each one and back them up separately.

I did see this recently (asterisk/FreePBX running on a Raspberry Pi), it's got to be worth trying at the cost!

> Would an ISP automatically adding the header be compliant because users are subscribed to that ISP?

> the user chooses to enable the setting via their browser.

I would think there's an argument for using a browser that uses an ISP being a "choice" but it's all semantics. W3C put intent in a technical standard...looks like the work of ISO (creating rules for consultants and lawyers).

Here's the discussion of the Apache patch to ignore the header for IE10 (even if it's changed to be enabled/disabled in an acceptable manner later, whoops):

https://github.com/apache/httpd/commit/a381ff35fa4d50a5f7b9f64300dfd98859dee8d0

Some attacking the language of the spec as vague (the proper approach imo):

https://github.com/apache/httpd/commit/a381ff35fa4d50a5f7b9f64300dfd98859dee8d0#commitcomment-1830233
https://github.com/apache/httpd/commit/a381ff35fa4d50a5f7b9f64300dfd98859dee8d0#commitcomment-1935314

> Would an ISP automatically adding the header be compliant because users are subscribed to that ISP?

> the user chooses to enable the setting via their browser.

I would think there's an argument for using a browser that uses an ISP being a "choice" but it's all semantics. W3C put intent in a technical standard...looks like the work of ISO (creating rules for consultants and lawyers).

Here's the discussion of the Apache patch to ignore the header for IE10 (even if it's changed to be enabled/disabled in an acceptable manner later, whoops):

https://github.com/apache/httpd/commit/a381ff35fa4d50a5f7b9f64300dfd98859dee8d0

Some attacking the language of the spec as vague (the proper approach imo):

https://github.com/apache/httpd/commit/a381ff35fa4d50a5f7b9f64300dfd98859dee8d0#commitcomment-1830233
https://github.com/apache/httpd/commit/a381ff35fa4d50a5f7b9f64300dfd98859dee8d0#commitcomment-1935314

> Would an ISP automatically adding the header be compliant because users are subscribed to that ISP?

> the user chooses to enable the setting via their browser.

I would think there's an argument for using a browser that uses an ISP being a "choice" but it's all semantics. W3C put intent in a technical standard...looks like the work of ISO (creating rules for consultants and lawyers).

Here's the discussion of the Apache patch to ignore the header for IE10 (even if it's changed to be enabled/disabled in an acceptable manner later, whoops):

https://github.com/apache/httpd/commit/a381ff35fa4d50a5f7b9f64300dfd98859dee8d0

Some attacking the language of the spec as vague (the proper approach imo):

https://github.com/apache/httpd/commit/a381ff35fa4d50a5f7b9f64300dfd98859dee8d0#commitcomment-1830233
https://github.com/apache/httpd/commit/a381ff35fa4d50a5f7b9f64300dfd98859dee8d0#commitcomment-1935314

So many people here are assuming they understand your requirements better than you do, and those are the ones who could successfully parse TFS.

I run an opensource stack in-house because I need to customize what it does for my needs. None of the hosted products would work for me, and software freedom isn't something I throw under the bus for short-term gain. Currently it's a postfix/MailScanner/SpamAssassin/sqlgrey/dovecot/sasl/davical/asterisk/freepbx stack, but I've also never seen Sogo before, so thanks for linking that. I've been meaning to integrate Fumambol/SyncML and that does it built-in, so cool.

The other product I've considered is formerly-BBS-software Citadel, but I'm sufficiently suspicious of monolithic software to have not tried it out in production (the Unix way seems better). Sogo does more, though, so that raises the activation energy a bit.

On the phones side, I'm looking to replace the FreePBX system because it's increasingly buggy as new versions come out. There was a good interview with the 2600Hz folks on FLOSS Weekly recently about Kazoo. Their docs are very targeted towards a cloud-hosted version, which is fine, but I also haven't put in the energy yet to do a local install without docs. But it's on my very short-term list.

They seem to be headed in the right direction at least. Intergrating Sogo with Kazoo might be a nice direction and it doesn't seem like either community would be adverse.

Grandstream phones have the best bang for the buck, but aren't always quirk-free. That said, with a few tweaks they're very reliable and very cheap compared to Avaya. Their better models also embed linux, so I like to support them with my cash for doing so.

Hmm ... looks like it got partially reverted. The configuration change is present but commented out: https://github.com/apache/httpd/commit/3dd6fb6882ae2b453c90d51e777e88bc420a0cb1.

What makes this look like a hobby project, is the fact that there is no documentation.

First time visiting their website, under a minute I found:

https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/_pages

I don't really get how you missed that.

The Tahrir Project is trying to create an anonymous microblogging platform, similar to Twitter or Facebook. Google was sponsoring development on it over the summer so with any luck it won't prove to be vaporware like Diaspora.

I don't think static typing will fix things. You can do large projects in dynamic languages. In fact in my last job we had a huge software solution that was mostly python. We didn't have any problems with it nor was it any harder than doing Java development. It needs to make development more consistent across platforms, it needs to have basic dom functions build in (really, get elements by id but not class?) and it needs to tidy on some things that allow people write bad JS (i.e. this https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/3057).

There is a LLVM backend that dumps to javascript here https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki.

So, now you can probably run your python, lua, ruby, etc scripts on the client side, you just have to provide a LLVM front-end or a language that can be compiled with one of the pre-existing ones.

Sticking with C.

And now you don't have to be left out of the web page revolution... Check out https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki which is a LLVM backend for javascript. They have ported a big portion of the standard C libraries, STL, and a number of other things. Its pretty funny, but you can run boat loads of old emulators, games, you name it in a browser now.

Oops...too late.
http://madmarcel.github.com/
So when do I pay the $150,000, and whom do I pay it to? Or do I just get shot?

OLinuXino is completely open surce hardware and software alternative https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO

Right, Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous, and even then you have to put some thought and effort into keeping your addresses independent, or the connections will be uncovered by some fairly basic traffic analysis. There are "mixing services" to deal with the latter issue, but use of one is somewhat suspicious in itself.

If you want fully anonymous transfers you need something more like an Open Transactions server running in cash-only mode. This is a federated contract-based derivative system, as opposed to a peer-to-peer base currency like Bitcoin, so you do have to trust the issuer to adhere to the contract. However, that does open up a number of interesting possibilities, including contract tokens in fixed denominations which can be transferred untraceably between users. Due to the use of blind signatures, the server cannot connect the tokens being deposited with the account they were withdrawn from, or the client making the withdrawal, and the fixed denominations make traffic analysis much more difficult.

NOTE: Open Transactions is still in early development, and is considered experimental software—more so than Bitcoin—though most of the principles involved have been well-known for some time and employed successfully in other digital cash systems. Do not reply on it for anything mission-critical at this time.

Hehe, good timing... Good opportunity to pick some brains...

I happen to have an iOS app under development that uses XMPP for a specific use case. It primarily uses MUCs, and I want users to be anonymous, and don't want users to have to deal with sign-up. I haven't really given it much thought, beyond realizing that there are some pitfalls, and that I want to avoid them.

At the same time, I do want users devices to be uniquely-identified, because I realize that it will occasionally be necessary to ban users, and I don't wnat them just signing back up. I think the the cost of a new device is a reasonable deterrent to bad behaviour. ;)

I'm using ejabberd for the server. The client is written on the Rhodes mobile platform (Ruby Rails-like embedded server, HTML/CSS/Javascript/jQuery Mobile for UI, and, yes, before you say anything, I actually get great near-native performance out of this. I've had to become an expert at getting performance out of JQM in the process... (This mostly involves using as little of JQM as possible...) The Ruby code and simple Ruby ORM over SQLite is blazing fast compared to JQM, BTW, it is absolutely not a bottleneck.

I'm using my own fork of XMPP4R ( https://github.com/watusi/xmpp4r ) that has some minor mods for Rhodes, as well as a BOSH module that actually works. (Yes, BOSH latency sucks. Hopefully, it will just be a fallback for getting through firewalls, but I am also concerned with connection drops on mobile devices being an annoyance in the MUCs. I don't really want to write my own connection manager for regular connections, since I have no Erlang experience...)

So, I'll be using standard XMPP, a standard server, SSL-encrypted messaging with perhaps a fallback to non-SSL for firewall issues. (Need to make sure user is aware when that happens, though.)

I do have two issues to solve that will take some server-side work. One seems fairly trivial: the app needs to be able to request creation of a MUC. The server will do a validity check against a list (MUCs aren't arbitrary, but I don't want to create them in advance. Imagine that the name of the MUC has to be a kind of fish) and create the MUC and give ownership to admin. (Yea, right now the app itself creates the MUC in demo, as the test server allows anybody to create one.)

The other is how to "bootstrap" the creation of ID/password, or some other authentication mechanism. All I really care about is:

1. I need to be sure that only my app is making the request for a new ID.

2. If at all possible, I need to be sure that the same device will always create the same ID. (So users can be banned when necessary.)

Basically, if you own the app - the real app and not a clone or jailbreak - you get to create one and only one ID per device. (Ok, maybe jailbreak too, because that will take away one reason for people poking around inside.)

The app is meant for casual and anonymous communication, but the thing is, you never know what applications people will find for it. (Actually, there are many scenarios for serious use.) So, I'd like to provide reasonable security.

I know I can't use a UDID, since Apple has banned their use. (And now it's a private API.) I am dubious on using any other hardware-related ID, because Apple might ban them in the future. I could use an Application UDID, but then the user just needs to delete and re-install the app to get a new ID.

For the problem of insuring that only my app can make a valid request to create a user, I figure I have to sign a message with some well-burried key. (Yea, yea, I know, that worked well for satellite receivers...)

The Ruby code is compiled to Ruby bytecode, so it won't be easy, but certainly not impossible to try to find it in code. (Of course, I wouldn't just code-in a simple constant.)

I'd love to hear some suggestions on how to do this the right way.

Also, let's just all act like github isn't versioned. *whistles*

Because, obviously, doing the hash in the browser is still a galaxy away. Hey, wait, maybe not. The cleartext password isn't supposed to leave the browser, no matter what connection-level encryption you're using. If it does, you're doing it wrong.

Firefox OS does not depend on the network, the whole system support "View Source" just like any webpage. There is no closed source server component.

All the server projects Mozilla does have actually are all open source projects, like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_Sync (bookmarks, history, password syncing)

https://github.com/mozilla/browserid Project To allow you to login with only an emil address to sites in similair fashion as OpenID/OAuth, SAML , but is probably easier to use for mere mortals and allows for proper privacy and which does not make you dependenant on for example Facebook.

So you can run their software on your own server.

Heck, I am running their Sync software on my own server and it works.

How about receiving aircraft transponder signals with one? Or marine traffic position reports? Both applications will work with this $20 dongle. There's quite a bit more to "radio" than Justin Bieber's latest track.

How about receiving aircraft transponder signals with one? Or marine traffic position reports? Both applications will work with this $20 dongle. There's quite a bit more to "radio" than Justin Bieber's latest track.

The Center for Sutton Movement Writing is a 501c3 education non-profit founded in 1974. They have been doing amazing work in a very open way. The have released their font software under SIL's open font license. They have released their server software under the GPL. They have released their standards documents under Creative Commons by-sa. They have even started working with the MeidaWiki foundation to develop the software needed for the first encyclopedia in a sign language, available online: ase.wikipedia.wmflabs.org. They've been operating on a shoestring budget and deserve support. A really impressive organization with a bright future.

The Center for Sutton Movement Writing is a 501c3 education non-profit founded in 1974. They have been doing amazing work in a very open way. The have released their font software under SIL's open font license. They have released their server software under the GPL. They have released their standards documents under Creative Commons by-sa. They have even started working with the MeidaWiki foundation to develop the software needed for the first encyclopedia in a sign language, available online: ase.wikipedia.wmflabs.org. They've been operating on a shoestring budget and deserve support. A really impressive organization with a bright future.

I have built a working extension that provides 'window.mozCrypto', which does SHA2 hash, RSA keygen, public key crypto and RSA signature/verification, see: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/domcrypt/ and source: https://github.com/daviddahl/domcrypt I plan on updating the extension once the Draft is more settled (after a first round of commentary & iteration)

I am pretty sure we have moved on from individual content viewers. If they were to process https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/ designed applications and use some tagging to define a distance relocating the perspective then this might have a value.

There are frameworks such as Reveal.js or Impress.js that try to present things nicely using CSS3, HTML5, etc. Taodyne didn't use markup languages on purpose. From that article:

Standard markup, yes, but still a new language
On the surface, this structure is well known, so that you can leverage what you already know about HTML.

But notice how the two examples above don't use exactly the same syntax. There's a reason for that: in both cases, the power of that code really lies in additional definitions using Javascript and CSS 3D. We no longer use a really standard language, but some kind of dialect. We still need to learn this dialect before creating presentations.

It's not like the required code is extraordinarily big. For Impress.js, we are talking about 700 lines of CSS and 800 lines of Javascript. Reveal.js is slightly more extensive, with 1238 lines of CSS and 1039 lines of Javascript, not counting a few libraries.

However, that still means that you need to learn new semantics on how to build animations. The benefits of using a "standard" language are somewhat mitigated. More importantly, it means that what makes the presentation really different, the interesting 3D animations and transitions, are not in the document description itself.

A new kind of programming language designed specifically for real-time, interactive documents has a number of benefits. For example, we don't have a linear execution model. Parts of the document execute in response to events, transparently. That way, if you have a document that refreshes only once per second, we use practically no CPU. And if only this or that part of the document executes. See Execution and Drawing Model on this description of Tao documents.

Optimization of a constraint involving date ranges is a bit more difficult than you might think, and having it as one unified type makes queries a lot cleaner and indexes a lot more efficient (if done as GiST indexes anyways)

Old: WHERE (a.starttime BETWEEN b.starttime AND b.endtime OR b.starttime BETWEEN a.starttime AND a.endtime)
New: WHERE a.timerange @@ b.timerange

The speedup when you're doing things like trying to find overlaps between two lists of tens of thousands of ranges each is phenomenal.

Before 9.2, I did this (for timestamp ranges only) using Jeff Davis's Temporal Extensions for PostgreSQL, which I've submitted a few patches to.

Nothing made public on there yet but presumably this is where it will be:-

GarageGames GitHub Respositories

The patch as been pulled: https://github.com/apache/httpd/pull/2

There's no need for responsible disclosure when it's been around for months on Github.

Just check https://github.com/venomous0x/WhatsAPI/blob/63639eafc9a08fd308df72458f1381ec8899940d/README.md and you'll see.

I'm not big on bragging rights, but if some of those issues bother you, in my response I detailed one of the main issues to a couple of those points is a lackluster api for handling concurrent requests while also playing nice with other bits android offers (share by intent for example). You can check this, https://github.com/dskinner/AndroidWeb

I've actually started much of the work with public private keys in a decentralized social network. With the exception of having it on a peer to peer network instead of a federation of websites the idea described above is exactly the same as the one I came up with for this project. With a peer to peer network, you don't have to worry about censorship (unless the whole network is censored), and you don't have to worry about the website owner selling your information.

To get around the spam problem, you can simply not accept connections from people who you haven't friended or aren't friends of friends (finding your first friend may be a problem).

Porn won't be an issue since everyone is basically hosting their own content. If you don't want to see something, you don't have to friend that person. My guess is accidentally seeing porn won't be much of a problem since most people will have friends with similar morals.

Everything is open sourced. It's only me working on it so the progress is slow. Here's the github link: https://github.com/macourtney/masques

Due to how diaspora was designed, you're still locked in onto a provider.
Supose I have an account an serverA, and want to move to serverB. Sure, I can export my data, and import it into serverB, but there's no way to delete force serverA. to redirect my profile to serverB, or even delete it. My profile's URL is still valid, so people might not know/be sure I moved.

The obvious fix for this is to use my own domain on some free provider (maybe delegating the same way one would delegate e-mail). However, this feature was deemed too complex and won't be implemented.

My only choice is to set up my own pod. Of course, I can't be bothered since it's not at all an easy task (and this comes from someone who runs his own XMPP/email servers).

2: The system was rigged from the ground up to give lots of coins to people hopping on first

You mean just like stocks in any startup?

4: The lack of open source clients.

All of the ones I know of are open source.

The "official" one for desktops can be found here: https://github.com/bitcoin

A Java implementation used by the most popular mobile client is here: http://code.google.com/p/bitcoinj/

The rest of your points were opinions - I just wanted to point out the verifiable falsehoods.

They are used for identifying a specific device, which can be used in turn as a type of account id. Each application on the device is completely separate from the others, if you have an application such as a social network the user would need to login separately for every app. This in itself, isn't so bad, the problem is that applications can tie this information to create databases that might tie together things. For instance, OpenFeint was using the UDID for single sign-in. A researcher found that the profile pictures from Facebook contained the Facebook userid. If a user using OpenFeint was using the Facebook profile image, then that UDID could be used to find the Facebook profile. OpenFeint fixed that loophole immediately by obscuring the URLs, but the general problem remained, anyone could write an app to gather UDID information and many did.

How to deanonymize with OpenFeint

There isn't any way that a user can stop an app from reading the UDID, a jailbroken phone can change them IIRC.

In response, Apple deprecated the UDID. Although many places have said that Apple rejects apps that use UDID, this is not completely true. Apple started rejecting apps that used UDID but didn't tell you. There are still many apps collecting the information.

There are a few alternatives, with varying degrees of success:
* Each app makes a GUID, stores locally. Which works great for one-off apps, but doesn't allow multiple apps to collate data (either a benefit or drawback depending on who you are). It also means you will lose data on a reset.
* use a different ID, such as MAC. Essentially the same thing, with the same drawbacks, not recommended.
* Facebook and other networks have started using a Cookie stored in Safari. This means that the registration actually leaves the application and returns to it using a specially crafted URL. This way, each app can simply round-trip to Safari to grab the cookie. Complicated, but it works
* Use UIPasteboard. This is an API that allows you to store information that other apps can read. It's sort of a hack, but some libraries are using it.
OpenUDID SecureUDID

They are used for identifying a specific device, which can be used in turn as a type of account id. Each application on the device is completely separate from the others, if you have an application such as a social network the user would need to login separately for every app. This in itself, isn't so bad, the problem is that applications can tie this information to create databases that might tie together things. For instance, OpenFeint was using the UDID for single sign-in. A researcher found that the profile pictures from Facebook contained the Facebook userid. If a user using OpenFeint was using the Facebook profile image, then that UDID could be used to find the Facebook profile. OpenFeint fixed that loophole immediately by obscuring the URLs, but the general problem remained, anyone could write an app to gather UDID information and many did.

How to deanonymize with OpenFeint

There isn't any way that a user can stop an app from reading the UDID, a jailbroken phone can change them IIRC.

In response, Apple deprecated the UDID. Although many places have said that Apple rejects apps that use UDID, this is not completely true. Apple started rejecting apps that used UDID but didn't tell you. There are still many apps collecting the information.

There are a few alternatives, with varying degrees of success:
* Each app makes a GUID, stores locally. Which works great for one-off apps, but doesn't allow multiple apps to collate data (either a benefit or drawback depending on who you are). It also means you will lose data on a reset.
* use a different ID, such as MAC. Essentially the same thing, with the same drawbacks, not recommended.
* Facebook and other networks have started using a Cookie stored in Safari. This means that the registration actually leaves the application and returns to it using a specially crafted URL. This way, each app can simply round-trip to Safari to grab the cookie. Complicated, but it works
* Use UIPasteboard. This is an API that allows you to store information that other apps can read. It's sort of a hack, but some libraries are using it.
OpenUDID SecureUDID

Ask, and ye shall receive.

Let me know how it goes for you. Especially if you're not on Linux, as I've only tried it on Linux, and I'm not sure how the symlink detection works on other OSes.

Perhaps this is something you're looking for:
https://github.com/SoftwareMaven/DeDuper

google: github deduper

So, ran into a similar problem ages ago, and I wrote a python script to handle it. If you can't follow some rather dense python, this won't be for you.

https://github.com/scooby/fdb

It's mostly the 'fdb' script, there's some other cruft in there.

My approach stores the filesystem data in a sqlite database. It's not fast, but it is reasonably recoverable, which wound up being the most important aspect. The traditional Unix convoluted pipeline approach simply doesn't scale much past 100,000 files, in my experience.

It does actually understand inodes, in fact, it is pretty much a relational model of an inode based file system. The usage model is basically: read a portion of a file system in to the database. Update unhashed inodes. Hard link identical inodes.

The catch is that I also wanted it to work over time, so I wanted a permanent volume identifier for devices, users, etc, which makes it a bit OS X centric. I don't think there's any reason it wouldn't port relatively easily to Linux: you just need to use the Linux way of looking up system information. Basically, POSIX doesn't guarantee much about device ids, uids or gids beyond "it's not going to change while the process is running," and there's no standard way to obtain a UUID.

Also, if you *do* have multiple devices, it will try to hash them on separate threads. This won't work so well if the multiple devices are simply separate partitions :-(

Exactly. What I do is this:

1. Compare filesizes.
2. When there are multiple files with the same size, start diffing them. I don't read the whole file to compute a checksum - that's inefficient with large files. I simply read the two files byte by byte, and compare - that way, I can quit checking as soon as I hit the first different byte.

Source is at https://github.com/caluml/finddups - it needs some tidying up, but it works pretty well.

git clone, and then mvn clean install.

Exactly the same story for Homebrew, I tried to use OSX for my development because there were some added benefits of OSX (ie. a moderate amount of games available), but I went insane without having a reliable, fully stocked package manager at my disposal. One you get used package managers in open source systems, it's very hard to go back.