Plastic has been a revolutionary material over the past century, with an uncountable number of uses and an incredibly low price to boot. Unfortunately, this low cost has led to its use in many places where other materials might be better suited, and when this huge amount of material breaks down in the environment it can be incredibly persistent and harmful. This has led to many attempts to recycle it, and one of the more promising efforts recently came out of a lab at Northwestern University.
Plastics exist as polymers, long chains of monomers that have been joined together chemically. The holy grail of plastic recycling would be to convert the polymers back to monomers and then use them to re-make the plastics from scratch. This method uses a catalyst to break down polyethylene terephthalate (PET), one of the more common plastics. Once broken down, the PET is exposed to moist air which converts it into its constituent monomers which can then be used to make more PET for other uses.
Of course, the other thing that any “holy grail” of plastic recycling needs is to actually be cheaper and easier than making new plastic from crude oil, and since this method is still confined to the lab it remains to be seen if it will one day achieve this milestone as well. In the meantime, PET can also be recycled fairly easily by anyone who happens to have a 3D printer around.
The ATmosphereConf was last weekend, independent relays are starting to appear, and more.
Conference
This weekend was the first ATProto conference, the ATmosphereConf, in Seattle. Over two days there were a large number of speakers and sessions, with over 150 people in attendance, and a significant number watching the live streams as well. I could not make it to the US, so for a full overview of the event, I recommend this extensive article by TechCrunch’ Sarah Perez, who was present at the event. The entire event was livestreamed, and all talks can be viewed via this YouTube playlist.
Some assortment of thoughts I had while watching the livestream and VODs over the last few days:
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber gave a short speech, about her background as a digital rights activist, and how she is now “holding the door open, so people can see another world is possible”. Graber is clearly aware of her position, where she is seen as a figurehead of the network, while also wanting to build a decentralised network where there is place for competing platforms. Being a figurehead of a network, without becoming the de facto leader of the network, while also holding the leadership position of by far the largest organisation in the network, is a challenging position to balance.
Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee talked about where Bluesky came from and where it is going. One of the things he talked about is the consideration of why Bluesky decided on their own protocol and not ActivityPub. His answer focuses on practical considerations, especially how ActivityPub handles identity and account migration. Watching the ATProto Ethos talk by Bluesky protocol engineer Daniel Holmgren it struck me that the question could also be framed as a matter of lineage. Holmgren talks about how ATProto takes inspiration from the Web, Peer to Peer systems as well as Distributed Systems. Placing it in such a context makes it clear that ATProto has quite a different background and other ways of thinking than ActivityPub has.
Ændra Rhinisland talked about how community projects can become load-bearing for the network, without adequate support structures for the people who run such projects. She also runs the popular news feeds using Graze. Graze has been adding support for advertisements, and Ændra is one of the first to take advantage. In her talk she walked through how at current usage rates, the feeds could generate over $20k per month in ad revenue. She plans to use this revenue to support the queer communities building on ATProto, and showed early plans for a self-sustaining fund powered by Graze’s feed revenue, to support initiatives such as Northsky.
The talk by Ms Boba is a great indication of how much under-explored design space there is on Bluesky and ATProto. Her talk focuses on labelers and fandom communities, and has some great examples of how they can be used outside of moderation.
Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser gave an excellent talk, describing Bluesky as a skeuomorphism, meaning that it imitates the design of the product it’s replacing. This phase is a part of the adoption cycle for new technologies, but Fraser does not to stop at imitation but instead explore the new ways that communities can be build online. Fraser is specifically interested in building platforms that can serve mid-sized communities, ranging from hundreds of thousands to a few million people. The Blacksky community is an example of this, and Fraser hopes that Blacksky can inspire other communities to do the same. His framing of content moderation as community care and not a cost of business also resonated with me.
Erin Kissane’s talk goes into detail about vernacular institutions, local and grassroots organisations and practices that are often illegible to outsiders but deeply embedded in local communities. This allows them to be close to the needs of their community members, but makes them hard to see and understand from the outside. This outside illegibility is a double-edged sword: IFTAS served a crucial role for trust and safety in the fediverse ecosystem, but had to shut down to a lack of funding as a result of being illegible to financiers.
Bluesky PBC has been working on a new version of the relay that makes it easier and cheaper to host, under the Sync 1.1 proposal. This new version is now starting to roll out, showing a significant drop in resource usage. Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold shared some statistics here. Independent ATProto developer @futur.blue set up his own relay as a speedrun. He shows that a full network relay can be run on a 50USD Raspberry Pi, with an easy-to-follow tutorial here.
That full network ATProto relays are cheap to run has been known for a while within the ATProto developer community, but that knowledge has not spread much yet. One reason for this is that independent developers have set up relays primarily for their own use, sharing access with a few friends, but no other publicly accessible full-network relays exist yet1.
Upcoming short-form video platform Spark is building their own complete infrastructure. Spark’s relay will publicly accessible, and hosted in Brazil. Having ATProto infrastructure outside of US jurisdiction is a conversation that has come up regularly, and often followed by the assumption that the alternative is to have infrastructure like a relay hosted in Europe. Spark is bringing in a slightly unexpected twist here, by having the first publicly accessible relay that is not owned by Bluesky PBC being hosted in Brazil instead.
Having other relays that are not owned by Bluesky PBC has been the subject of a lot of conversation, and the Free Our Feeds campaign was founded on the idea that a significant financial investment is needed to do so. Furthermore, it assumes that such a relay is not only expensive, but that it requires an extensive governance infrastructure to manage it. The current developments regarding relays call both of these assumptions into serious question: relays are cheap, not expensive. Furthermore it seems that there is enough incentive that organisations that are serious about building their own ATProto platforms are willing to run their own relays.
In Other News
Bluesky PBC has published a proposal on how they want to handle OAuth Scopes. OAuth Scopes is one of the main projects on the roadmap for the first half of this year. Currently, logging into an ATProto app via OAuth requires you to give that app permission to access all the data for your account. OAuth Scopes allows an app to only ask for the permissions that are necessary, and not the entire account. There are two problems that need to solve: the technical part of making it work, as well as the handling the UX to communicate clearly to people what data an app wants to access. The challenging part of the UX is how to handle the translation from the technical description of the data that is requested (stylised like ‘app.bsky.feed.getFeed’, for example), into a way that is understandable for the everyday user. The second challenge is that apps require permission not for one, but for many types of this lexicon data. A third-party Bluesky client that is restricted to only Bluesky data will still have to request a dozen of these Lexicons. A long list of technical lexicon names makes it impossible for regular people to have an informed opinion on what data is and is not being accessed. Bluesky PBC’s proposal is to group different lexicons into bundles, and create new lexicons that reference these bundles. Scoped OAuth can then request access to a bundle of lexicons, with a description that is legible for regular people.
Git repository platform Tangled is working on news ideas how a GitHub alternative might do things differently, and one of their first proposals is defining two types of pull requests. For another look at Tangled, this blog post experiment with what the platform allows.
One of the talks at the ATmosphereConf was by independent developer Rashid Aziz, who is the co-founder of basic.tech. Basic is a protocol for user-owned data, and seems to be fairly comparable to the PDS part of ATProto, with the major difference that Basic allows for private data on their version of a PDS. Aziz used the combination of these two protocols to create private bookmarks for Bluesky.
The new Record Collector labeler automatically displays if someone has been using other apps in the ATmosphere outside of Bluesky.
Rocksky is a new music scrobbler service on ATProto, that is currently in closed beta testing. It allows people to connect their Spotify account and automatically ‘scrobble’ (track) the music they are listening to.
The Links
Some tech-focused links for ATProto:
ATCryptography is a package with cryptographic utilities for the ATProto, written in Swift.
A blog post by independent ATProto developer Mary about ‘AT Protocol, OAuth, and well, decentralization’. Mary also published a repository car file explorer this week.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.
Cerulea.blue is a publicly accessible relay, using a custom implementation, but it is limited to non-Bluesky PDSes. ↩︎
Fake WiFi repeater with a cheap real one behind it. (Credit: Big Clive, YouTube) Over the years we have seen a lot of fake electronics, ranging from fake power saving devices that you plug into an outlet, to fake car ECU optimizers that you stick into the OBD port. These are all similar in that they fake functionality while happily lighting up a LED or two to indicate that they’re doing ‘something’. Less expected here was that we’d be seeing fake WiFi repeaters, but recently [Big Clive] got his hands on one and undertook the arduous task of reverse-engineering it.
The simple cardboard box which it comes in claims that it’s a 2.4 GHz unit that operates at 300 Mbps, which would be quite expected for the price. [Clive] obtained a real working WiFi repeater previously that did boast similar specifications and did indeed work. The dead giveaway that it is a fake are the clearly fake antennae, along with the fact that once you plug it in, no new WiFi network pops up or anything else.
Inside the case – which looks very similar to the genuine repeater – there is just a small PCB attached to the USB connector. On the PCB are a 20 Ohm resistor and a blue LED, which means that the LED is being completely overdriven as well and is likely to die quite rapidly. Considering that a WiFi repeater is supposed to require a setup procedure, it’s possible that these fake repeaters target an audience which does not quite understand what these devices are supposed to do, but they can also catch more informed buyers unaware who thought they were buying some of the cheap real ones. Caveat emptor, indeed.
We don’t often get our badminton rackets restrung, but if we did, [kuokuo702]’s PicoBETH project would be where we’d turn. This is a neat machine build for a very niche application, but it’s also a nicely elaborated project with motors, load cells, and even a sweet knobby-patterned faceplate that is certainly worth a look even if you’re not doing your own restringing.
We’ll admit that everything we know about restringing rackets we learned by watching [kuokuo]’s demo video, but the basic procedure goes like this: you zigzag the string through the holes in the racket, controlling the tension at each stage along the way. A professional racket frame and clamp hold the tension constant while you fiddle the string through the next hole, but getting the tension just right in the first place is the job of [kuokuo]’s machine. It does this with a load cell, stepper motor, and ball screw, all under microcontroller control. Pull the string through, let the machine tension it, clamp it down, and then move on to the next row.
Automating the tension head allows [kuokuo] to do some fancy tricks, like pre-stretching the strings and even logging the tension in the string at each step along the way. The firmware has an extensive self-calibration procedure, and in all seems to be very professional. But it’s not simply functional; it also has a fun LEGO-compatible collection of bumps integrated into the 3D-printed dust cover. That way, your minifigs can watch you at work? Why not!
Automating random chores is a great excuse to build fun little machines, and in that vein, we salute [kuokuo]’s endeavor. Once you start, you’ll find stepper motors sprouting all around like crocuses in a spring field. And speaking of spring, Easter is just around the corner. So if you don’t play badminton, maybe it’s time to build yourself an eggbot.
Lucrezia Ercoli è docente di “Storia dello spettacolo” all’Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna. Dal 2011, ricopre il ruolo di direttrice artistica di “Popsophia”. Ha collaborato con il programma televisivo “Terza Pagina” su Rai5 e Rai3 ed è una presenza fissa nel programma “Touch.
@Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁) Secondo un'indagine di Trend Micro, un miliardo di aziende nel mondo non la usa, anche se l'Europa è un'area virtuosa. Ecco quali rischi corre chi non adotta l'autenticazione a due fattori L'articolo Autenticazione a due fattori: la sicurezza digitale è
facendo immersioni sub ti rendi subito conto che il tuo assetto (tendenza a risalire o scendere, più o meno marcato) è pesantemente condizionato dai pomoni e da quanta aria usi per riempirli, mente respiri. non a caso prendere una bella boccata d'aria e cominciare la discesa è "contro-efficace". un sub svuota bene i polmoni mente si dà la spinta verso il basso, prima di cominciare a scendere, specie nei primi metri di discesa, quelli più difficili per definizione.
poi scopri che i primi rudimentali polmoni sono l'evoluzione sentite bene.... non delle branchie... ma della vescica natatoria. sapete a cosa serve la vescica natatoria vero? ignorerò chi non lo sa. quindi beh... alla fine tutto torna fin troppo magnificamente alla grande.
The Speaker Wars è la nuova band dell’ex Heartbreakers Stan Lynch freezonemagazine.com/news/the-… Membro fondatore degli Heartbreakers di Tom Petty, Stan Lynch, il batterista del gruppo, ha ora una nuova band, The Speaker Wars, composta da Stan Lynch – Batteria, Jon Christopher Davis – Voce, Jay Michael Smith – Chitarra, Brian Patterson – Basso, Steve Ritter – Percussioni e Jay Brown – Tastiera. Stan ha dichiarato: “Dopo 20
Anche se scopi e obiettivi ufficiali dei nuovi dazi, annunciati questa settimana sulle auto di importazione, non corrispondono alle conseguenze che avranno realmente nel breve e medio periodo, il presidente americano Trump ha deciso di procedere con …
Il ministro della Difesa, Guido Crosetto, ha ribadito oggi in Parlamento che l’Italia non sta perseguendo una politica di riarmo, ma sta lavorando per costruire una difesa adeguata alle sfide globali. In un intervento alle commissioni Esteri e Difesa di Camera e
@Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁) Poche, ancora, le aziende italiane con una strategia di cybersecurity matura: appena il 15%. È quanto si evince dal secondo rapporto Cyber Index PMI. Un'analisi completa rivela le debolezze delle piccole e medie imprese nella gestione dei rischi digitali, tra minacce crescenti
Come era prevedibile la presentazione del Libro Bianco sulla Difesa Europea, al pari del precedente ReArm Europe, ha rinfocolato in Italia polemiche, furore populista e divisioni su un tema vitale per il futuro della
questo spiega come mai le parole che non ti vengono mia in mente non c'è verso di insistere e facilitare il recupero, se non trovare un modo di ri-memorizzarla seguendo un percorso "più solido". per esempio per me la parola "ingenuo" è davvero difficile da recuperare quando mi serve.
@Politica interna, europea e internazionale Il Governo Meloni sale nella classifica degli esecutivi più longevi della storia della Repubblica italiana. Oggi, giovedì 27 marzo 2025, è diventato il quinto governo rimasto in carica più lungo: insediatosi il 22 ottobre 2022, ha infatti toccato gli 887
Hai mai usato il tuo router personale per connetterti a Internet? @Free Software Foundation Europe ha recentemente ottenuto una grande vittoria in Germania per Router Freedom. In questo 32 ° episodio del Software Freedom Podcast, Bonnie Mehring, Alexander Sander e Lucas Lasota parlano di Router Freedom e del nostro lavoro per proteggere la libertà di scelta dei dispositivi Internet.
Have you ever used your personal router to connect to the internet? Recently we achieved a major win in Germany for Router Freedom. In this 32nd episode of...
The internet is flooded with AI-generated images in the style of Studio Ghibli, whose founder said “I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.”#News
Oggi, giovedì 27 marzo ci sarà l’evento di presentazione del quadrimestrale di Startmag, “Passaggio a Sud Est” dalle 15:30 alle 16:30 sarà presente Renata Gravina per conto della Fondazione. La Fondazione Luigi Einaudi di Roma ha contribuito al
Alla fine non è stato troppo difficile salutare #Firefox dopo 22 anni di utilizzo.
Le nuove politiche che ha adottato @Mozilla non riesco proprio a digerirle; non amo il fatto che una fondazione (o chiunque altro) possa dirmi come devo usare il mio browser, e che in qualunque momento possa cambiare decisione senza nemmeno farmelo sapere. A questo punto, tanto vale usare un browser proprietario. Quale sarebbe il vantaggio di continuare ad usare Firefox?
Odio il fatto che i dati immessi nel browser non siano più miei. E tutto questo, badate bene, per un software #opensource !
Valutando tutte le complesse variabili della mia presenza on line e della geografia, ho scelto Vivaldi che ha importato tutte le password e la cronologia in un attimo, senza battere ciglio. Le impostazioni fondamentali ci sono tutte; mi mancano alcune funzioni peculiari di firefox, come la modalità lettura scura, ma sopravvivrò; non sono cose che non ci si dorme la notte.
Unica scocciatura, siccome avevo usato la funzione firefox relay, che trovavo comodissima, la Mozilla foundation stava nel mezzo tra la mia casella e molti servizi a cui mi ero iscritto, che così non conoscevano il mio indirizzo reale. Bella pensata, mi mancherà. Pazienza. Ho dovuto cambiare un po' di email, ma ne è valsa la pena.
Ci rivedremo, spero, quando vorrete di nuovo aderire alla filosofia OpenSource.
E poi ci sono i fork, io continuo a sperare in qualche fork del browser più bello ed equo che ci sia mai stato.
Paul McCartney è il padre putativo dei fratelli Ramone freezonemagazine.com/rubriche/… Paul McCartney, probabilmente il più amato autore pop di sempre cosa ha in comune con il punk rock dei Ramones? Un po’ di pazienza lo scopriremo più avanti. “Sono orgoglioso dei Beatles“ ha detto Paul McCartney alla rivista Rolling Stone nel 1974. I Beatles appunto sono stati grazie alle canzoni composte da lui insieme a […] L'articolo Paul
Renate Rasp – Kuno freezonemagazine.com/news/rena… In libreria dal 1 aprile 2025 Riscoprire Kuno, il romanzo più disturbante della letteratura tedesca del dopoguerra. Storie Effimere annuncia la pubblicazione di Kuno, il romanzo d’esordio di Renate Rasp, la “specialista del male” che sfidò il sistema culturale tedesco. La metamorfosi di Kuno: il ragazzo che doveva diventare un albero Il patrigno di Kuno […] L'articolo Renate Rasp – Kuno proviene d In libreria dal 1
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Da inizio settimana a Gaza sotto attacco israeliano si tengono manifestazioni contro la guerra e per la situazione umanitaria. Molti puntano l'indice contro Hamas che però smentisce di essere il bersaglio delle proteste L'articolo GAZA. In migliaia protestano
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo L'ex presidente brasiliano di estrema destra, Jair Bolsonaro, è stato rimandato a giudizio con l'accusa di cospirazione e tentato colpo di stato L'articolo Brasile: Bolsonaro a processo per “tentato golpe” proviene da Pagine Esteri.
@Politica interna, europea e internazionale Romano Prodi ammette di aver “commesso un errore” nel tirare i capelli alla giornalista di Rete Quattro Lavinia Orefici, ma va anche al contrattacco contro chi ha “strumentalizzato” questa vicenda per attaccarlo. “Ritengo sia arrivato il momento di
Il contesto geopolitico attuale è segnato da un’accelerazione della competizione strategica, che si estende fino agli estremi conflittuali della guerra convenzionale ad alta intensità. Le minacce si sono moltiplicate e diversificate: dai droni quadrielica commerciali
questa annotazione può sembrar cadere qui out of the blue (e forse un po’ è così), ma va detto – o sono persuaso possa essere detto – che:
c’è un modo specifico di sentire, di avvertire la sintassi, e di naturalmente tornirne i labirinti, che è in profondità analogo al lavoro di Lynch non soltanto con la macchina da presa e con determinate sue carrellate lentissime in climax o anticlimax (per esempio), ma proprio con la gestione della trama, intesa come:
tessuto che non solo si smaglia ma si riannoda in punti imprevedibili, come un abito non euclideo. o non sempre – non tutto – euclideo.
a differenza della radice, verticale e gerarchica, il rizoma è intersecante, trasverso, anarchico e orizzontale.
in questo, una certa modalità della ricerca letteraria, che soprattutto metto al lavoro con prose brevi in un libro che uscirà prima dell’estate, le asimmetrie e astrazioni (e torsioni) sintattiche che ho sperimentato dialogano, credo proficuamente, con una idea post-novecentesca di montaggio, frammentazione e ripresa di unità. vorrò/vorrei poi sempre più che una quota forte, alta, di indeterminazione connotasse i materiali dei prossimi testi. (ma “textus” è un vocabolo inesatto, e la parentesi resta aperta
temo si sia palesata la possibilità di un nuovo ipotetico scenario di terza guerra mondiale: usa che invade l'europa da ovest, russia che invade l'europa da est, e cina che attacca la russia (e taiwan) da sud. giappone, africa, australia, resto dell'asia e america del sud neutrali.
Effettivamente, se esiste un settore nel quale il 90% dei programmi che servono è sviluppato ad hoc e in Cloud, è proprio la PA. Non vedo perché non si debba usare proprio Linux, con una distribuzione dedicata.
No phone, no app, no encryption can protect you from yourself if you send the information you’re trying to hide directly to someone you don’t want to have it.#Signal #PeteHegseth
