Hi there Disrooters,

Ok. This isn't funny anymore. February has ended and instead of any hope for things on global scene getting any better things gone from 0 to 100 in 3 seconds. Are we going to repeat the meme from last post every time this year?!

Iranian people suffering tremendous loses trying to fight oppressive religious regime just few weeks ago now have become a center of US and Israeli theater in the Middle East. Pointless conflict with no clear objective and most importantly in no shape or form intended to help the oppressed but rather secure oil in the gulf yet again.

Government officials and rich folks left and right involved in the biggest sex-trafficking and straight up pedophile ring in the history are trying to censor the internet under the pretext of protecting said children.

Meanwhile, when all this is going on in the front, back on the sidelines Google is trying their best to prevent existence of third party app stores like f-droid, where all software is open source, free and ethical. Essentially killing the independence of what once has been the open platform. The rope on our necks is tightening very fast. Some people are putting up a fight so please read about it and see if there is anything you could do to help stop it.

... and it's just March?!
We could go on and on about how things get from bad to worse but that's probably what everyone has seen these days while doomscrolling. All we have to say is that all those people in power have influence over our life because we let them do it. We need to organize and help create the world we would like to see, without suffering, exploitation and violence. We cannot wait for someone to do it for us. That will never happen. If not us then who? If not now then when?

Support your local businesses, farmers, manufacturers and service providers.

Let's see what has been going on in Disroot and related free software projects this month.

  1. Vaultwarden
    Our latest addition to the service offerings, an online password manager, has gotten bunch of security patches. As a result of a paper published here, there's been quite few fixes added to Vaultwarden the past few weeks. We've updated to the latest version as soon as new patches have been released. This brings us to the point where we decided to bring Vaultwarden out our beta testing onto the wide waters of production ready solution. We are quite impressed with the amount of Disrooters going towards the new password manager solution head first and we salut your bravery! We hope you find this new tool as useful as we do and will enjoy using it. Remember though, make sure you always have a backup copy of your passwords. As convenient as it is, if things go kaboom you will be left with nothing.

  2. Cryptpad
    Cryptpad's winter release brings handful of every day improvements, bug fixes and focused on upgrading underlying Onlyoffice application to version 9.
    Notable improvements apart from the Onlyoffice update is improved document history browsing as well as redesign folder tree view in the drive. For more details check Cryptpad's release notes

  3. LibreTranslate
    For all those who try to use our instance of LibreTranslate to translate text to Spanish we have good news. The bug causing issues when attempting to translate has been resolved \o/. In the future we will look into improving quality of translations seeing as it's not always that great while we might have some additional computing power to spear for this.

  4. Kuma
    If you have a problem with one of our services and don't know if the issue affects you or everyone, it's always a good idea to check out the status page provided by the community around the Uptime Kuma project. On our status page you can see in real time the health of the service as well as any additional information regarding issues, planned or unplanned downtimes or information about upcoming maintenance windows. Notable improvements this time around is visible history of past incidents as well as improved uptime graph and sorting.

  5. Akkoma and Forgejo
    Our main frontend for Akkoma called Mangane provided by beautiful folks at bdx.town has received bunch of bug fixes. Just like Mangane, the team surrounding Forgejo has released version 14.0.2 introducing number of bug fixes.

Blocked by Hotmail

Microsoft is again not at its best behavior. Looks like things aren't going well at Microsoft. Perhaps due to replacing human staff with over hyped language model counterparts, last weeks Hotmail has been dealing with an issue where random domains have been affected by unexplained blocks. Although this time, unlike issue from few years ago, situation has been resolved within a week. Half of their internal services dedicated to "postmaster domain reputation platform" has been/is broken. We hope you all did not suffer much from the issue, however if you do, please always give us a shout so we can investigate and try to resolve the delivery issues.

Financial overview February

The overview in February does not look as impressive as the previous months. As it seems, the first and last month of the year are usually the ones with the most donations. Still, it would be great to see the trend set by the last two months continue through out the year. If you have a spare change and would like to support your best admins in the world with some warm, dark and bitter coffee, please don't hesitate. You may think your donation will not make any difference but thousands of coffees every month would do. So next time you are having a drink, just keep us in mind. Let's try to keep the January trend going!

Jitsi disabled

We are getting a lot of emails asking for the reason our Jitsi service has not been accessible. Perhaps it's a good moment to address this. Thanks to one Disrooter who drew our attention to it, we have discovered that for some time our instance has been used to share horific information. From disturbing sexual display hangout rooms all the way to child porn, violence and abuse rooms. Because of the nature of our implementation where anyone can create a room, any type of moderation was impossible. Even though we tried to combat the outbursts by blocking rooms, IP addresses, blocking room names, displaying warnings, seems like people involved in this were very determined to use the platform. As we have run out of all options, we had no choice but to disable Jitsi.
We still have not made a final decision about the future of the service. Leaving it open is out of the question. Requiring login on the other hand makes us wonder if it wouldn't be better to redirect resources to already existing Nextcloud Talk service we offer. We have not decided on the fate of the service so feedback from the community is of course more then welcome. We hope to make a final decision on the upcoming core team meeting (5th April).

It's sad that bunch of a-hole predators can ruin a decent easy to use and open service for everyone else.
To all other jitsi providers out there, please keep an eye on your rooms. Those individuals will surely hop on another instance!

Mumble

Last week we mention PrivateBin and Lufi as simple, lightweight and secure way to share text and file with others. Staying within the realm of light and fast services, we would like to bring up Mumble to your attention. Mumble is a low latency voice chat service. It's simple, fast, and optimized to work on low spec hardware and low internet speed connections.
How often do you really need video feedback during your online meetings? How often we apply filters covering our messy rooms in the background or put on shirt to look decent while we wear pajamas underneath. Let's be honest 9 out of 10 times we would be just fine with audio. This is where Mumble shines. Simple application that allows you to create a room on the server, invite others and have a chat in messy room with your hair standing in all directions or just simply wearing pajamas without the fear of being judged.
Because Mumble is so lightweight, it offers great stability connection without friction, freezes, and other annoyances we are so familiar with during calls. It's a battle tested service used by gamers and been around long before Zoom was even an idea. All you need is an app on your computer or mobile, working microphone and you are set.
Mumble offers wide variety of options without too much clutter. All you need for voice chat: push to talk, voice activation, easy muting, room moderation, sound source and quality settings etc. Although Mumble does not require passwords and logins, you can create a certificate for your username which allows your account to be verified by others (for example closed rooms that allow specific access based on the certificate).

Mumble is also a great solution to create community and simple hangout and large conferences given its low resource footprint requirement.
We've been using it for our monthly core team meetings for years and we couldn't recommend it more.

So next time you need to have a call with others, and you value the perks of audio only and low energy footprint, Mumble is the way to go. Check out more information and give it a shot. We have also a small "Coffee corner" room in out virtual Disroot office open to the public, where some of the core members sometimes hangout while working and bump into random Disrooters who pass by and have a little chat.

So buckle your seat belts as the world decided to get on a roller coaster bigger then ever. Take care of yourself, your surroundings and your loved ones. Those in the north, enjoy the spring which clearly has been poking through our windows the past days, and those in the south hope you had enough sun the past season to prepare you for dark evenings in the upcoming fall. Let's stay focused, stay active and organize. Tough times. create great opportunities for resistance!
To cheer you up, check out Pipe guy

See you next month!