Have complete control and ownership over your stream, allowing you to create the content and community you want. The frictionless built-in chat allows your viewers to be a part of the action. Include custom emotes and build chatbots to encourage engagement from your viewers. Owncast can work with different storage providers to optionally scale your videos to many viewers using only low-powered hardware. It allows you to offer a live-streaming experience that is without tracking, invasive analytics or advertising. Viewers can even participate without registering.

Point your existing broadcasting software at your Owncast server and begin streaming. In general, Owncast is compatible with any software that uses RTMP to broadcast to a remote server. RTMP is what all the major live-streaming services use, so if you’re currently using one of those, it’s likely that you can point your existing software at your Owncast instance instead. OBS, Streamlabs, Restream and many others have been used with Owncast.

See https://owncast.online/

#technology #opensource #livestreaming #gaming #conferencestreaming

Tia is a student, PR intern, and future princess — well, only if she gets back together with her royal ex. She's passionate, smart, and no stranger to sharing her love life with thousands of viewers. She's also not a real person — but that doesn't stop the likes, views, and comments asking for updates on her outlandish story from rolling in. Tia is one of 22 fictional TikTok personalities conceptualized, scripted, and managed by FourFront, a social media and live event-focused entertainment startup.

Many will remember too, in the last year an elderly woman on YouTube, appearing as a young girl, and then being exposed for it as the AI failed once during a live stream. And of course so many real social media influencers are presenting a completely fake life (usually showing their life as being much better and richer than real life). I can see why social media can cause so much anxiety for many people, judging themselves against fictional or faked profiles. It won't go away, as it's been a part of human civilisation long before social media.

But it is good to be sceptical and remember that a lot of what is seen, is just not real.

See https://www.insider.com/fictional-tiktok-characters-fourfront-influencers-2021-10

#technology #socialmedia #fakeprofiles #anxiety #influencers

The software generates attractive graphs showing the history of each hop. The attractive visuals makes it easy to follow network routes and finding the causes of downtimes and poor network performance. This is helped by the software’s tab support, which lets you analyse multiple routes simultaneously.

The modular architecture of Pingnoo allows third parties to extend the features of the software. The main application binary is very small and only serves as a loader for components (aka plugins).

There’s support for IPv4 and IPv6. We can change the interval, and the duration of the viewport. For the latter, the default is 60 seconds, but there’s also durations of 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 1 hour, 12 hours, and 24 hours.

See https://www.linuxlinks.com/excellent-system-utilities-pingnoo-traceroute-ping-analyser/

#technology #opensource #networkutilities #pingnoo #networks

The OAK-D Lite is a USB device intended to be plugged into a host (running any OS), and the team has put a lot of work into making it as easy as possible. With the help of a downloadable application, the hardware can be up and running with examples in about half a minute. Integrating the device into other projects or products can be done in Python with the help of the DepthAI SDK, which provides functionality with minimal coding and configuration (and for more advanced users, there is also a full API for low-level access). Since the vision processing is all done on-board, even a Raspberry Pi Zero can be used effectively as a host.

The project was already 100% funded in the first 2 minutes, and closes on 16 October.

See https://hackaday.com/2021/10/15/oak-d-depth-sensing-ai-camera-gets-smaller-and-lighter/

#technology #opensource #hardware #camera #OakD

Deepfence announced open source availability of ThreatMapper, a signature offering that automatically scans, maps and ranks application vulnerabilities across serverless, Kubernetes, container and multi-cloud environments.

ThreatMapper is an open source platform for scanning runtime environments for software supply chain vulnerabilities and contextualizing threats to help organizations determine which to address and when. Taking threat feeds from more than 50 different sources, the comprehensive suite of ThreatMapper capabilities and features are available on GitHub.

See https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2021/10/14/threatmapper-scanning-runtime-environments/

#technology #security #threats #opensource #vulnerabilities

Tomorrow is Free RPG Day, a day when publishers across the tabletop role-playing game industry release games for players both new and experienced, and they're all completely free. Although Free RPG Day was cancelled in 2020, it's back this year as a live event with some virtual support by way of free RPG sampler downloads from Dungeon Crawl Classics and Paizo.

PCGen is an application designed to help you build and maintain characters. It even has knowledge of the rules of the system it's assisting you with. Far from just a configuration file generator, PCGen is a database of open source rules and how they relate to one another over the course of a character's life.

PCGen can build characters for D&D 5e, Pathfinder 1e, Starfinder, and Fantasy Craft. When you first launch PCGen, you can download rule definitions for each game.

See https://opensource.com/article/21/10/manage-rpg-character-sheets

#technology #opensource #gaming #RPG

Client-side scanning (CSS, not to be confused with Cascading Style Sheets) involves analysing data on a mobile device or personal computer prior to the application of encryption for secure network transit or remote storage. CSS in theory provides a way to look for unlawful content while also allowing data to be protected off-device.

Apple in August proposed a CSS system by which it would analyse photos destined for iCloud backup on customers' devices to look for child sexual abuse material (CSAM), only to backtrack in the face of objections from the security community and many advocacy organizations.

The paper, "Bugs in our Pockets: The Risks of Client-Side Scanning," elaborates on the concerns raised immediately following Apple's CSAM scanning announcement with an extensive analysis of the technology.

"In this report, we argue that CSS neither guarantees efficacious crime prevention nor prevents surveillance," the paper says.

See https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/15/clientside_side_scanning/

#technology #security #privacy #clientsidescanning #apple

Launched in 2010 by Prof. Eben Moglen, FreedomBox is a global project to empower regular people to reassert control over the infrastructure of the internet. FreedomBox empowers its users to avoid the data mining, censorship and surveillance by centralized silos that characterize the web of today. It makes web servers personal, affordable and manageable, so that a user can host necessary web services at home on a device they own, powered by free software they can trust.

FreedomBox provides file sharing like Dropbox. Your data stays with you. Your family and friends also benefit. FreedomBox provides a VPN server. Connect securely to your devices at home from outside. Protect your browsing session when on untrusted networks. FreedomBox provides a secure, decentralized replacement for WhatsApp. Do group chats and audio/video calls from any device.

FreedomBox can host a blog or a wiki. Host your personal website right from your home. Synchronize your calendar and contacts to FreedomBox. Share media and take backups from all devices on your home network. FreedomBox can be your Network Attached Storage (NAS).

You have options to buy it as a cloud hosted service, or you can buy a hardware device and run it at home, or you can 'build' your own on a Raspberry Pi or better computer at home.

See https://freedombox.org/#features

#technology #selfhosting #freedombox #opensource #raspberrypi

Losing your Apple ID password can make your digital life a misery, because it can leave you locked out of the account that you use to manage your Apple devices, unable to access your iCloud data and manage your app and service subscriptions. In this scenario, Apple can't just reset your password for you, especially if you have two-factor authentication enabled. Setting up a recovery is one alternative solution, however in such cases you can't change your password unless you have a trusted second device as well as the recovery key.

In an effort to make things easier, Apple in iOS 15 allows you to set up an account recovery contact that can help make sure you always have access to your account, even if you forget your ‌Apple ID‌ password or device passcode. Your recovery contact is someone who can verify your identity and help you regain access to your account and all of your data if you ever get locked out.

It really works as a sort of remote 2FA code for recovery. So this is not quite the same as Google's ability to unlock your account for nominated beneficiaries after you become incapacitated.

See https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/set-recovery-contact-apple-account/

#technology #recovery #apple #lostpassword #AppleID