Senior technology professional and photography hobbyist.

Mastodon
Jonathan Eggers
Pixelfed

  • 2 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • In order to view video from the camera, it had to be a Wyze cam v1 (last sold in 2018), the “hacker” would need to know the randomly generated ID of the camera, which they could get if they were connected to the same WiFi as the camera - or try to guess it. With the ID, a “hacker” could access the SD card remotely and download video files. It also allowed them to turn the camera on and off and, on pan-tilt models, move the camera.

    Wyze took too long to disclose this (they found out about it in 2019 and didn’t disclose it for 18 months). Nobody knows if this flaw was ever taken advantage of. They tried to patch the hardware but weren’t able to do so. Wyze said they issued a patch within 1 month of learning about the flaw, but I haven’t determined exactly what was patched. They also noted in Feb of 2022 they couldn’t patch the hardware fully, and retiring the v1 cameras was the only option to resolve the issue.






  • I had to play around with it a bit to figure out how this is working. Basically, if you post to a Magazine’s “microblog” it uses the Magazine name as a hashtag. See: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/p/433361. Paste that link in your Mastodon client and you’ll see the #kbinMeta hashtag. So, if you want to follow the Kbin Tech magazine you’d have to follow the #tech hashtag in Mastodon. If you look at that Magazine you’ll see posts there from Mastodon servers. Those are posts with the #tech hashtag. Posts that don’t have a hashtag end up in the Random magazine.

    If you dive into the technology behind it all you start to see that all of these different platforms are designed to show the same content in different ways. They’re all based on the ActivityStreams protocol: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/.

    Take the image object. If you post an image to Mastodon you see the text that was posted with that picture then the picture. If you look at the same picture in Pixelfed (similar to Instagram), you’ll see the image first and displayed prominently, since it’s the focus, followed by the text. In Lemmy or Kbin you’ll see a small thumbnail that you can then expand to see the full image. Same image object type, different ways of displaying it.

    I guess the point is, depending on what your interests are (microblogging, sharing links, sharing photos, etc) you pick the platform that most suites your need. Or, have multiple accounts for posting different content.


  • Your home feed can default to “All,” which shows content from all communities across all federated instances (not just Kbin and Lemmy) or it can default to Subscribed, which shows content only from communities you’re subscribed to. Lemmy has a third option called “Local” which shows content from all local communities. Turning off federation for yourself in Kbin is similar to the local option in Lemmy, but allows you to still switch between All and Subscribed (ie, all local or subscribed local). Lemmy doesn’t currently offer a “local subscribed” view.

    The hamburger menu next to your name allows you to toggle between Subscribed and All. In the dropdown menu when you hover over your name, under Settings, you can select your default view (Subscribed vs All).

    My personal preference is to default to subscribed and see content from across the Fediverse that I choose to see. This way I’m not missing out on any communities or magazines on federated instances that interest me. I sometimes switch to All with the Commented sort to see what the current zeitgeist is (where are the biggest conversations happening). I don’t see much need to de-federate my view entirely since I can block communities/magazines, or entire domains, which means even under All I’m not bothered by content that I find annoying, offensive, etc.