Salta al contenuto principale



Ghost racconta di come stanno facendo in modo che tutte le risposte vengano visualizzate.

questa settimana ci immergiamo nel vero sport del social web: mantenere le conversazioni leggibili una volta che iniziano a riprodursi come conigli decentralizzati. Allacciate le cinture, perché le catene di risposta sono un argomento di cui presto vorrete non sapere così tanto.

activitypub.ghost.org/surfacin…

@Che succede nel Fediverso?


Surfacing discussions


Welcome back to the Ghost Lab, where pull requests multiply faster than gremlins in the rain, and the phrase “just one more edge case, I swear” has been officially banned by HR (hi Beccy).

Last week, we swapped war stories about shipping ActivityPub; this week we’re diving into the true sport of the social web: keeping conversations readable once they start breeding like decentralized rabbits. Buckle up, because reply chains are a subject you're about to wish you didn't know so much about.

What's new with ActivityPub?


Discussions on the social web are surprisingly complex things, and recently we spent some time wrapping our paws around some of the finer details. The joy of this newsletter is that whenever we suffer, you get to share in that experience.

On the face of it, a discussion is just a chain of replies. You make a post, and someone else responds. You get a notification about the response, and that response shows up somewhere in the app, below the post you made.

All pretty straightforward. We know about your post, because it was made in Ghost, and we know about the replies, because they got sent directly into Ghost and they reference the post you made as what they're in response to.

So, a simple discussion is easy to render:


  • 📍 Your original post
    • Reply to OP
    • Reply to OP



Discussions are rarely one-layer deep, though. When two people go back and forth with each other, each one of those responses is a new reply to a previous post.

Something you may have noticed in Ghost for the past few months, though, is that it took a lot of clicking to follow a discussion between two people. We'd only fetch the immediate replies to the post you're viewing, so for a long reply chain, you'd only see 1 level of replies below the current post. To see replies to the next level, you'd constantly need to click deeper into the discussion


  • 📍 Your original post post you're viewing
    • Reply to OP you can see this
      • Reply to reply you can't see this, or below
        • Reply to reply-guy
          • Reply to that reply
            • Ok this is becoming a debate
              • No, you
                • Actually









As well as multiple layers of depth to a discussion, there might be multiple threads of discussion happening under your post. And this is where it starts to get interesting. You post from Ghost, someone replies to that post on Mastodon, someone else replies to the reply from Mastodon, on Mastodon. Now we're in a place where we (Ghost) aren't necessarily aware of all the replies taking place, because they're happening elsewhere.


  • 📍 Your original post
    • Reply to OP
      • Reply to reply
        • Reply to reply-guy





      • Reply to reply
Reply to OP
  • Reply to reply




It doesn't stop there, though. Your original post might actually, itself, be a reply to a post that came before it. So when you view that post, you probably also want to see what it's in-reply-to, otherwise the context of the discussion is going to be hard to figure out.

If the first post is "That's the craziest thing I've ever heard" and the replies are all "I've heard crazier" – you're likely to have questions about the topic at hand.


  • Parent post
    • 📍 Your original post
      • Reply to OP
        • Reply to reply
          • Reply to reply-guy


        • Reply to reply


      • Reply to OP
        • Reply to reply





And (you can probably see where this is going) that post you're replying to may, itself, be a reply to some other post. The discussion tree has infinite levels in both directions. Your post and its replies may be a tiny branch on the end of a far larger tree of conversation.


  • Great-grandparent post
    • Grandparent post
      • Parent post
        • Someone else's original post
          • Reply to OP
            • Reply to reply




      • Parent post


    • Grandparent post
      • Parent post
        • 📍 Your original post
          • Reply to OP
            • Reply to reply
              • Reply to reply-guy
              • Reply to reply-guy


            • Reply to reply
              • Reply to reply guy



          • Reply to OP






All this to say, we've done a bunch of work in Ghost to crawl our way up and down the branches of a discussion, pull the most relevant posts around yours, and make them visible inline on the post you're viewing.

Now, rather than just seeing the immediate replies to a single post, you'll start to see larger chains of replies that have been surfaced to make it easier for you to follow a discussion.

Replies-to-replies are connected with a line:

And when the discussion has even more levels available to explore, we show a link to allow you to expand that particular thread:

The same is true when you click on a notification, where we'll load the post you clicked on and the 'parents' of that post, so you can scroll up to see the context of what came before.

It's not perfect, of course, but it's now much easier to get a feel for the conversation(s) happening in and around the posts you're viewing.

That’s the tour for this week’s code safari. Hit publish, poke the new threads, and let us know where the discussion tree still gets tangled.

Coming up next week (and you may have already seen some hints of this):

Better notifications!


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Maurizio Testa, Maigret e il caso Simenon. Homo scrivens 2023


@Giornalismo e disordine informativo
articolo21.org/2025/06/maurizi…
Conoscere Georges Simenon come uomo e come scrittore è un’impresa non facile, sia per il calibro del personaggio che per la mole delle fonti. Oltre a innumerevoli articoli, interviste,



Il Giappone frena sull’IA militare: niente armi che uccidono da sole. Serve il controllo umano


Il 6 giugno 2025, il Ministero della Difesa giapponese ha pubblicato le prime linee guida ufficiali sull’uso responsabile dell’intelligenza artificiale (IA) nelle apparecchiature militari. La notizia è stata riportata da NHK e Yonhap News Agency il 9 giugno.

Le “Linee guida per l’applicazione responsabile dell’intelligenza artificiale nello sviluppo di apparecchiature” nascono dalla “Politica di base per la promozione dell’applicazione dell’IA” introdotta nel luglio 2024. Il documento punta a massimizzare l’efficacia dell’IA nei sistemi di difesa, minimizzando i rischi etici e operativi.

Le Linee Guida propongono un sistema di classificazione del rischio per l’IA militare, suddividendo le apparecchiature in due categorie: “a basso rischio” e “ad alto rischio”. I sistemi a basso rischio richiedono comunque un intervento umano durante il processo d’attacco, mentre quelli ad alto rischio possono selezionare autonomamente i bersagli. Questi ultimi saranno sottoposti a una valutazione legale più rigorosa, anche per verificare se rientrano nella definizione di sistemi d’arma letali autonomi (LAWS), la cui realizzazione è vietata.

Le apparecchiature a basso rischio, invece, saranno soggette a revisioni interne indipendenti, per garantire il rispetto degli standard di sicurezza e affidabilità. Nel caso dei sistemi ad alto rischio, la revisione include anche il rispetto delle normative internazionali, e sarà il Ministero stesso a vietarne lo sviluppo se superano determinate soglie critiche. Un aspetto centrale del processo è garantire che ogni tecnologia resti sotto controllo umano, evitando derive autonome incontrollabili.

A completare il quadro, è prevista una valutazione tecnica da parte di un team di esperti, che verificherà la sicurezza, la trasparenza e la responsabilità umana nel funzionamento dell’IA. I criteri di valutazione includono sette requisiti fondamentali, tra cui: la possibilità di attribuire le responsabilità, la prevenzione dei guasti, e la tracciabilità delle decisioni delle IA. Si tratta di un primo passo importante verso una difesa automatizzata ma responsabile, in un contesto geopolitico sempre più complesso.

L'articolo Il Giappone frena sull’IA militare: niente armi che uccidono da sole. Serve il controllo umano proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.




The Most Trustworthy USB-C Cable is DIY


We like USB-C here at Hackaday, but like all specifications it is up to manufacturers to follow it and sometimes… they don’t. Sick of commercial cables either don’t label their safe wattage, or straight up lie about it, [GreatScott!] decided to DIY his own ultimate USB-C-PD cable for faster charging in his latest video, which is embedded below.

It’s a very quick project that uses off-the-shelf parts from Aliexpress: the silicone-insulated cable, the USB-C plugs (one with the all-important identifier chip), and the end shells. The end result is a bit more expensive than a cable from Aliexpress, but it is a lot more trustworthy. Unlike the random cable from Aliexpress, [GreatScott!] can be sure his has enough copper in it to handle the 240W it is designed for. It should also work nicely with USB PPS, which he clued us into a while back. While [GreatScott!] was focusing here on making a power cable, he did hook up the low-speed data lines, giving him a trustworthy USB2.0 connection.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen someone test USB gear and find it wanting, though the problem may have improved in the last few years. Nowadays it’s the data cables you cannot trust, so maybe rolling your own data cables will make a comeback. (Which would at least be less tedious than than DB-25 was back in the day. Anyone else remember doing that?) USB-C can get pretty complicated when it comes to all its data modes, but we have an explainer to get you started on that.

youtube.com/embed/ZikvlsVDiQY?…


hackaday.com/2025/06/17/the-mo…



Il Trump Phone made in USA è in realtà made in China

Il “Trump Phone” è praticamente un telefono cinese Wingtech REVVL 7 Pro 5G con qualche fronzolo dorato, venduto a 499 dollari contro i 171,65 del modello originale (un ricarico del 191% solo per dei loghi personalizzati e la colorazione patriottica).

Il lancio è stato un disastro: sito andato in tilt coi preordini, addebiti sbagliati e poi la gaffe epica della mappa di Trump Mobile che mostrava ancora “Golfo del Messico” invece del nuovo “Golfo d’America”. Mapbox non aveva ancora aggiornato la denominazione e Trump si è incazzato.

Un telefono made in China venduto a peso d’oro tutto “made USA” tranne il prodotto stesso.

@Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁)

hdblog.it/smartphone/articoli/…

reshared this

in reply to Informa Pirata

a parte la presa in giro del costo, io non mi fiderei a prendere un cell venduto da lui.

reshared this



Developers of the WordPress ActivityPub talks about how they plan to make WordPress websites a full member of the fediverse, videos of FediForum available, and bridging to Bluesky op a per-server basis.


Fediverse Report – #121

Developers of the WordPress ActivityPub talks about how they plan to make WordPress websites a full member of the fediverse, videos of FediForum available, and bridging to Bluesky op a per-server basis.

I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition this Friday!

The News


Fediforum has published the videos of the keynotes and the software demos. For a list of all the demos, you can check out the website. Some thoughts on some of the demoes that stood out to me. For some of the other cool demos (such as Bounce and Bandwagon), check out last week’s news.

  • The keynote by Christine Lemmer-Webber talks about how the social media style of the 2010s is no longer good enough. With this, she refers to both the fediverse as well as Bluesky. Lemmer-Webber makes the case we live in an age of surveillance, and both Bluesky and the fediverse do not meet the need for safety and privacy that comes with that. She says that shame is not an effective way to get people to use better platforms, and that we need to bring joy to the new platforms. Lemmer-Webber is now working on different protocols with the Spritely Institute, that use Object Capabilities. I’ll go into more detail on that once Spritely gets closer to public usage, but to hugely oversimplify: with Object Capabilities, you can enforce who has access to your data that you send out. Seeing one of the co-authors of ActivityPub actively advocating for further development of new open protocols indicates to what extend the space of the open social web is still in active development.
  • BadgeFed is a platform for issues badges using the Open Badges standard and ActivityPub protocol, where the badges can later be verified cryptographically. There are some interesting parallels with how people are developing badges on ATProto, and it seems to me that both networks are now in the stage that there are solid proofs that you can build systems for credentials on decentralised protocols. The next stage is seeing how people will start using these new systems.
  • For developers: ActivityFuzz is an upcoming project from Darius Kazemi, and builds upon the Fediverse Schema Observatory. These tools give a much greater insight into how all the different fediverse projects have implemented ActivityPub in practice, and shows all the differences. This makes building fediverse platforms that are compatible with other platforms more accessible.
  • Gobo is a client that allows people to post to multiple different platforms, including Mastodon and Bluesky. One of the challenges with cross-posting tools is that these platforms have different character limits, which Gobo has some nice ways of setting the cutoff-point for a longer text thats different for each platform.
  • Encyclia is a recently-announced project to make ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) records connected to the fediverse, with the demo providing a first view of what this looks like in practice.
  • The Build Your Own Timeline Algorithm takes your Mastodon timeline and uses various customisable algorithms to create custom clusterings for the post, allowing you to sort your timeline into various different topics.

The team implementing the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress has posted a blog with a roadmap what they are working on. The team has plans to majorly expand the plugin, and make WordPress a full member of the fediverse. So far, the interaction has mainly focused on publishing to the fediverse, which will now be expanded to also be able to follow, read and interact with the rest of the fediverse directly via a WordPress account. The main feature will be a reader experience, which is effectively a timeline feed within WordPress. It places WordPress into even more direct competition with Ghost, who also offers a timeline reader as part of their ActivityPub integration.

The Social Web Foundation released a draft of their work to implement end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging over ActivityPub. Their plan uses Messaging Layer Security (MLS), a protocol for encrypting messages, that is designed to be used in combination with other protocols for sending the encrypted messages. One of the parts that is missing for ActivityPub is the ability to send real private messages to each other, and an integration with MLS can help with that. It might take a while before it gets there, this first version of the draft is now ready for proof-of-concept implementations and interoperability testing.

Bridgy Fed, the bridging software that connects ActivityPub with ATProto, has gotten an update where server admins can opt-in to the bridge for their entire server. For some context: Bridgy Fed was originally designed to be opt-out, meaning that every fediverse account could automatically be bridged to the Bluesky network and visa versa. After massive pushback from the fediverse community, this was changed to opt-in, where people have to actively take action to have their account be connected to the other network. The debate laid bare to what extend the fediverse struggled with being a decentralised network, where decentralised means that there are different communities with values that at times are incompatible with each other. Instead the debate got largely framed in terms of what the value (opt-in or opt-out) should be for the entire network. However, with this latest update individual communities can now be independently decide for themselves if they want to be connected to other protocols by default.

The Links


That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

#2 #fediverse

fediversereport.com/fediverse-…




Maryam Hassani: continuerò a battermi in nome di mio padre


@Giornalismo e disordine informativo
articolo21.org/2025/06/maryam-…
Ha coraggio da vendere, Maryam Hassani, figlia di Mehdi Hassani, dissidente iraniano condannato a morte dal Regime. Ha coraggio e dignità, passione politica e civile, fiducia in se stessa e nel



Dead Amstrad Becomes Something New


When you run into old hardware you cannot restore, what do you do? Toss it? Sell it for parts? If you’re [TME Retro], you hide a high-end mini PC inside an Amstrad-shaped sleeper build.

The donor laptop is an Amstrad ALT-286 with glorious 80s styling that [TME Retro] tried to save in a previous video. Even with help from the community there was no saving this unit, so we can put away the pitchforks and torches. This restomod is perhaps the best afterlife the old Amstrad could have hoped for.

At first [TME Retro] was going to try and fit an iPad Pro screen, but it turned out those don’t have the driver-board ecosystem the smaller iPads do, so he went with a non-retina LCD panel from Amazon instead. Shoving an LCD where an LCD used to live and sticking an expensive mini-PC inside a bulky 80s case is not the most inspiring of hacks, but that’s not all [TME Retro] did.

Clever dongles keep the original ports intact while allowing modern connectivity.
First, they were able to save the original keyboard, thanks to the longevity of the PC/AT standard and a PS/2 dongle — after all, PS/2 is essentially AT with a different connector. Then they produced what has to be the world’s highest-bandwidth parallel-port dongle by routing the two gigabyte network ports through the original 25-pin connector. USB is a serial bus, so breaking out two USB ports via the pins one of the old serial ports makes thematic sense. The second serial port is set up to take a PS/2 mouse instead of the serial mouse you might have used in the 80s. USB-C is still available via an adapter that went into the original expansion slot.

We’ve seen this sort of modding before, of course, on everything from 1980s vintage Mac Classics and LCD-386 portable PCs to 1990s Jellybean iMac G3s, to the internet-famous Hotwheels PC. It’s always sad to see old hardware fail, but arguably these casemods are a lot more usable to their owners than the original hardware could ever be in 2025.

youtube.com/embed/K4rSkNn_MxM?…


hackaday.com/2025/06/17/dead-a…



FIOM in festa a Firenze


Dal 25 al 28, Torrino Santa Rosa, si mangia anche 😁

cgiltoscana.it/2025/06/17/dal-…

#FIOM #sindacato



LibreOffice dice addio a Windows 7, 8 e 32 bit. La svolta storica nel 2025 contro l’EoL


La popolare suite per ufficio LibreOffice si sta preparando per la prossima fase della sua evoluzione, e non sarà particolarmente adatta ai possessori di vecchi sistemi operativi. Ad agosto verrà rilasciato l’aggiornamento numero 25.8, in cui gli sviluppatori annunceranno l’abbandono di parte della precedente compatibilità con Windows e si concentreranno sulla transizione verso piattaforme moderne. Sullo sfondo dell’imminente fine del supporto per Windows 10, il progetto sta promuovendo attivamente un’alternativa, principalmente Linux.

La Document Foundation guida il progetto dal 2010. Ha preso LibreOffice sotto la sua ala protettiva dopo che Oracle ha definitivamente chiuso la sua divisione software per ufficio. Negli ultimi 15 anni, il codice sorgente è stato profondamente rivisto: molti componenti obsoleti sono stati ripuliti, è stato introdotto un nuovo ciclo di rilascio e l’architettura del prodotto è stata migliorata.

Il blog ufficiale della fondazione ha pubblicato un post in cui si suggerisce di considerare i sistemi liberi come un’alternativa a lungo termine, e fornisce anche un link alla campagna “End of 10” , supportata dalla comunità KDE. Il sito ha anche recentemente aggiunto una mappa interattiva per aiutare a trovare risorse locali, ma la sua struttura richiede ancora del lavoro.

Gli sviluppatori consigliano anche il servizio Distro Chooser, un sito che seleziona una distribuzione Linux adatta in base a una serie di domande. Tuttavia, il risultato è implementato con un livello di dettaglio eccessivo: l’elenco è lungo, gli elementi sono codificati in base al grado di conformità e, per una persona non preparata, questo complica notevolmente la scelta. Un elenco concentrato di due o tre opzioni consigliate sarebbe molto più utile.

Molti sono ancora scettici sia nei confronti di Linux che di LibreOffice. Ma il compito degli sviluppatori non è convincere nessuno: offrono un’alternativa: una suite per ufficio completa e open source , senza costi di licenza e restrizioni d’uso.

Per chi usa ancora OpenOffice, il blog offre un consiglio diretto: basta. Questo progetto è stato di fatto abbandonato da Oracle e trasferito alla Apache Foundation più di dieci anni fa. Da diversi anni non vengono rilasciate nuove versioni, e LibreOffice apre completamente gli stessi file ed è un aggiornamento costante su tutti i fronti.

Per chi è abituato all’interfaccia di Microsoft Office, LibreOffice offre una modalità ribbon per la visualizzazione dei comandi. E se il design non vi convince ancora, esistono alternative: OnlyOffice, WPS Office e soluzioni cloud come ThinkFree, che offre persino un piano gratuito. A proposito, questo servizio è attivo da 25 anni, il che di per sé ispira fiducia.

Ora, parliamo di cosa cambierà nella prossima versione. Con il rilascio della versione 25.8, il progetto interromperà il supporto per Windows 7, 8 e 8.1. Inoltre, lo sviluppo della build a 32 bit per Windows verrà interrotto: sarà ufficialmente considerata obsoleta. Ciò non significa che scomparirà immediatamente, ma chiarisce che le risorse del progetto saranno concentrate su configurazioni più pertinenti.

Windows 7 ha perso il supporto ufficiale nel 2020, sebbene una versione specializzata per i terminali POS sia rimasta disponibile fino al 2023. Nonostante ciò, il sistema rimane popolare in alcuni ambienti, e suscita persino una certa nostalgia in una parte della comunità.

Le cose si complicano con il suo successore, Windows 8. Questa piattaforma non è stata amata dagli utenti ed è stata silenziosamente sostituita dalla versione 8.1, il cui ciclo di vita si è concluso a gennaio 2023. L’utilizzo di queste versioni oggi rappresenta un serio rischio per la sicurezza , poiché non vengono più rilasciati aggiornamenti.

Per quanto riguarda l’architettura a 32 bit, nonostante la sua età, esistono ancora alcuni casi d’uso. Molti dei primi processori a 64 bit (come quelli dell’era Core 2 Duo) supportano solo RAM DDR2 e i moduli di capacità superiore a 4 GB sono costosi anche sul mercato dell’usato. Se la configurazione è limitata a 3-4 GB di memoria, la versione a 32 bit potrebbe funzionare in modo più efficiente di quella a 64 bit. Per questo motivo, è probabile che la build x86 rimarrà in uso per un po’ di tempo, almeno come compromesso tecnico.

Per chi utilizza ancora Windows 7, esiste un’opzione aggiuntiva. Oltre alle release principali, che escono due volte all’anno, il progetto offre una versione stabile con aggiornamenti meno frequenti e supporto esteso. Al momento della pubblicazione, la build stabile principale ha indice 24.8.7 ed è disponibile sulla pagina di download ufficiale .

Con il rilascio della versione 25.8, la 25.2, diventerà la nuova edizione stabile. Rimarrà compatibile con Windows 7 e probabilmente lo rimarrà per diversi anni a venire, consentendo agli utenti di prepararsi per un aggiornamento della piattaforma o una ricostruzione dell’infrastruttura.

E sebbene abbandonare i sistemi legacy possa sembrare un passo radicale, è perfettamente sensato. Il progetto punta alla sostenibilità e abbandonare il supporto per software obsoleti consente al team di concentrarsi su strumenti moderni.

L'articolo LibreOffice dice addio a Windows 7, 8 e 32 bit. La svolta storica nel 2025 contro l’EoL proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.



Reddit asks, we answer: Q&A on whistleblowing, SecureDrop, and sharing info with the press


From Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers to Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency surveillance disclosures, whistleblowers have been behind some of the most impactful revelations in American history.

Both Ellsberg and Snowden risked their safety and personal freedom to leak documents to the press. While whistleblowers face similar risks today, they can protect their identities using modern whistleblowing platforms like SecureDrop — a project of Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) — and anonymity systems like the Tor Network.

To answer questions about how the public can safely share information with the press and use available tools to do so, FPF’s Chief Information Security Officer and Director of Digital Security Harlo Holmes and SecureDrop Staff Engineer Kevin O’Gorman engaged with Reddit’s r/IAmA community members on June 10 in a Q&A session.

The following select questions from various Reddit users, and Holmes and O’Gorman’s answers, have been edited for brevity and clarity. You can view the full thread here.

If I were a whistleblower with top-secret information, how would I get it to the newspapers without getting caught? What’s the high-level process like?

Harlo: There are a lot of variables that you’d have to consider and would only know of once you’re in that position! But, please know that whistleblowing is a hugely heroic act and there are always risks. Not only is there the possibility of “getting caught,” as you say, there is the prospect of retaliation down the line, loss of livelihood, and a lot of trauma that comes with making such a huge decision.

Other higher-level processes have to do with the aftermath. In a newsroom, journalists and their editorial team deliberate a lot about how best to write the story with what the whistleblower has supplied them. This may mean weighing matters of security, reputation, and the protection of everyone involved.

About a year ago, Signal introduced phone number privacy and usernames, effectively enabling Signal users to be (almost) anonymous if they want to. And major news outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian accept tips through Signal. Can you tell me how SecureDrop is more secure and better at protecting the privacy of the whistleblower?

Harlo: They’re both good. It’s all about “right-sizing” your tipline support. SecureDrop can be beyond the budget or bandwidth for some small newsmakers, and that’s why we at FPF can help in building a solution that fits. Fundamentally, a newsroom should ensure confidentiality and encryption. Both tools will get you there.

Kevin: Further to Harlo’s point, Signal’s approach is definitely better at scale and in general, while SecureDrop is designed to solve a more specific problem. That said, SecureDrop has some advantages for leaking to the press.

Signal requires a dedicated app, which leaves traces of its use. A source facing potential seizure and examination of their devices will leave fewer traces using Tor Browser. SecureDrop relies on an airgap to protect its decryption key, which protects journalists and sources by quarantining file submissions and makes it harder to target journalists with malware.

There are always trade-offs in play between security and ease of use, Signal is a solid choice and, from a purely cryptographic perspective, there’s no faulting it.

The Democrats released their own “whistleblowing” form a few months back for federal workers. That seems like a supremely bad idea, yes? It just looks like a Google form. Are there any big failures that you are aware of?

Harlo: Not my show, not my monkeys. We work with the press and are restricted from working with political parties. That said, we can share some tips regarding safer whistleblowing practices that anyone can adopt if they’re building a platform for intake!

First off, “be available everywhere.” In the past, whistleblowers have been burned because their web histories pointed directly to when and where they reached out to their journalist. So, use the commons of the internet to give people the information they need to securely establish first contact. If you’re running a tipline advertisement on your own website, use an encrypted and safe URL that will not indicate that the public has visited your explicit whistleblowing instructions.

Third-party services like Google are not your friend for the most sensitive of data. Google can definitely be subpoenaed for all the juicy whistleblower details. Find an alternative. Make your submission portals available over Tor, too! Visiting an onion address can make a huge difference.

Lastly, encrypt all the things. This means data in transit as well as at rest. If you are going to plop the next Panama Papers on your hard drive, encrypt that computer like your life depends on it.

As we have recently seen in some dramatic examples, all of the world’s encryption can’t help if the users misuse it. When you help news orgs set up SecureDrop, doesn’t this basically mean that you have to be giving them constant support to them and to whistleblowers on how to use it?

Kevin: This is the gig 😀

By design, we have no contact with whistleblowers using SecureDrop. A key property of the system is that it is self-hosted with no subpoenable third parties in the loop, including us.

But we do journalist digital security training, publish guides for whistleblowers, and work with newsrooms to ensure they’re providing prospective sources with good operational security guidelines via their sites.

On the administration side, once set up, SecureDrop instances are actually pretty low-maintenance in terms of support — most updates are automated, for example. We run a support portal available to all administrators, but probably only about half of instances ever need to reach out. The system’s applications do need frequent security updates, and while the codebase is mature at this stage we do regular audits and make changes as a result, so there is an ongoing development effort there.

What do you all think about the security of good ol’ postal mail for whistleblowers, especially if they have a hard drive or doc trove to share? Is it always better to go with a secure digital solution or is there still a utility to the old-fashioned tactics like mail and IRL dead drops?

Kevin: A lot of newsrooms still offer postal mail as an option for tips, and there are definitely cases where it makes sense. If you’re dropping multiple gigabytes worth of files for example, systems using Tor are going to be slow and prone to network issues. (SecureDrop has a hard limit of 500MB on individual submissions, partially for this reason).

But it’s important that sources remember they still need to take steps to protect their anonymity when using postal mail. Obviously, adding a return address that is associated with the source in any way is a bad idea, as is mailing it from a post office or a mailbox somewhere you spend any amount of time. So sources should be posting their tips from mailboxes somewhere they don’t normally go.


freedom.press/issues/reddit-as…



#Iran, la tentazione dell'Occidente


altrenotizie.org/primo-piano/1…


Keebin’ with Kristina: the One With the Gaming Typewriter


Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Can you teach an old typewriter new tricks? You can, at least if you’re [maniek-86]. And a word to all you typewriter fanatics out there — this Optima SP 26 was beyond repair, lacking several internal parts.

A sleek typewriter with a monitor and a mouse.Image by [maniek-86] via redditBut the fully available keyboard was a great start for a gaming typewriter. So [maniek-86] crammed in some parts that were just laying around unused, starting with a micro-ATX motherboard.

But let’s talk about the keyboard. It has a standard matrix, which [maniek-86] hooked up to an Arduino Lenoardo. Although the keyboard has a Polish layout, [maniek-86] remapped it to English-US layout.

As you’ll see in the photos of the internals, this whole operation required careful Tetris-ing of the components to avoid overheating and ensure the cover could go back on.

The graphics were a bit of a challenge, since the motherboard had no PCI-E x16 slot. To address this, [maniek-86] used a riser cable, probably connected to a PCI-E x1 slot with an adapter, in order to use an NVIDIA GT 635 GPU. It can’t run AAA games at 4k, but you can bet that it’ll play Minecraft, Fortnite, or Dota 2 just fine.

Parkinson’s Keyboard Design Starts With the Human Body


This is OnCue, designed by [Alessandra Galli]. For Andrea, design is a “vehicle for care, inclusion, and meaningful social impact,” and these values are evident in her creation.

A split keyboard for users with Parkinson's. The main difference is in the keycaps, which are like little trays for your fingers.Image by [Alessandra Galli] via Design WantedWhat makes OnCue different? Lots of things. For one, there’s a pair of wearable cuffs which use haptic feedback and visual cues to help alleviate symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. The keycaps are like little trays for your fingers, so it’s much harder to accidentally hit neighboring keys while typing.

The keys themselves have haptic feedback as well as the cuffs. AI-driven visual cues light up the most likely next letters, which is interesting. And everybody deserves a split layout.

Although wrist-based haptic feedback was the most well-received feature based on user feedback, it’s interesting to note that no single feature stood out as preferred by all. Users found the haptic feedback calming and relaxing, which is a huge win compared to the usual keyboard experience faced by users with Parkinson’s disease. Because the overall Parkinson’s experience is different for everyone, [Alessandra] took a modular approach to designing the customization software. Users can adjust the settings based on routines, preferences, and intensity of symptoms. And plus it looks to me like there’s a haptic feedback slider right there on the keyboard.

The Centerfold: Bonsai? Banzai!


A nice setup with a bonsai wallpaper and really nice lighting.Image by [mugichanman] via redditAgain, isn’t this just nice? The overall look, of course. I wouldn’t be able to use that keyboard or probably that mouse, but maybe that keyboard hiding on the right would work.

Regarding the real bonsai on the right shelf, [mugichanman] keeps it outside for the most part. It only comes indoors for a little while — three days at the absolute most. If you’re interested in the care and feeding of these tiny trees, check out this bonsai master class in a book.

Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad? Send me a picture along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!

Historical Clackers: the Columbia Index Typewriter


Remember the Caligraph? Probably not, so I’ll wait. Well, apparently inventor Charles Spiro was hellbent on building a better Caligraph after he saw one being used. But he couldn’t raise enough capital to create such a large machine, so instead he went down to the basement and came up with the Columbia Index Typewriter.
A handsome index typewriter.Image via The Antikey Chop
If you’ll recall, index typewriters are like label makers — you must choose each character using an index of some kind. Operating this machine was no different.

One simply turned the straight handle on the right side to choose the character, which was highlighted by a small hand. Then the user would just press down on the handle to print it, and this action locked the typewheel so it wouldn’t slip and print something different.

Interestingly, the Columbia was the first typewriter with proportional spacing. That means that the carriage advanced based on the width of individual characters.

Columbia typewriters were only made for three years, from 1884-87. Three models were produced — Nos. 1 and 2, followed by an improved No. 2. The Columbia shown here is a No. 1, which typed in uppercase only. The 2 came out in March 1885 and could do upper and lowercase. The improved No. 2 was more robust and better mechanically, as well as being easier on the eyes. By 1887, Spiro was working on the Bar-Lock typewriter.

Finally, One-Handed Keyboard Does It Flat Out


The journey toward the keyboard you see here began with an email to [HTX Studio]. It came from a father who wanted to see his daughter be digitally independent again after an accident took the use of her right hand.

A fanned-out one-handed keyboard in pastel colors.Image by [HTX Studio] via Yanko DesignHe asked the company to build a one-handed keyboard with a built-in trackball mouse, and even included a drawing of what he envisioned.

After several iterations, each tested by the daughter, the result is a compact, 61-key affair in a fanned-out arrangement for ease of use. Everything is within close reach, with special consideration given to the location of Space and Delete.

One of the early iterations had the user moving the entire keyboard around to mouse. While that’s definitely an interesting solution, I’m glad that everyone settled on the nicely exposed trackball with left and right click buttons above Space and Delete.

Another thing I’m happy about is that [HTX Studio] not only built 50 more of these in both left- and right-handed models and gave them away to people who need them, they went ahead and open-sourced it (Chinese, translated). Be sure to check out their fantastic video below.

youtube.com/embed/9vW12gQ4Klc?…


Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards? Help me out by sending in a link or two. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to email me directly.


hackaday.com/2025/06/17/keebin…



Shadow AI, i rischi per le aziende e come mitigarli


@Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁)
L’ascesa fulminea di DeepSeek ha messo in evidenza una quantità elevata di rischi nascosti nell’ombra. La Shadow AI indica un uso dell’intelligenza artificiale che sfugge ai controlli aziendali. Ecco i rischi che corrono le aziende e come mitigarli
L'articolo Shadow AI, i rischi per le aziende e



Dalle case agli uffici: come 40.000 videocamere di sicurezza diventano finestre pubbliche


@Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁)
Una recente ricerca ha segnalato oltre 40mila videocamere di sicurezza esposte a Internet senza alcuna protezione, con streaming sempre attivi e accessibili a chiunque. Ci sono ospedali, case private e aziende di ogni



Porti, sicurezza e diplomazia. L’Italia crocevia del corridoio Imec

@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo

Nel contesto del progressivo mutamento degli equilibri geopolitici globali e della ridefinizione delle rotte strategiche per l’approvvigionamento energetico e lo scambio di merci, il corridoio Imec (India-Middle East-Europe Corridor) rappresenta una delle più rilevanti iniziative



New data obtained by 404 Media also shows California cops are illegally sharing Flock automatic license plate reader (ALPR) data with other agencies out of state, who in turn are performing searches for ICE.#FOIA
#FOIA


In an industry full of grifters and companies hell-bent on making the internet worse, it is hard to think of a worse actor than Meta, or a worse product that the AI Discover feed.#AI #Meta


Meta Invents New Way to Humiliate Users With Feed of People's Chats With AI


I was sick last week, so I did not have time to write about the Discover Tab in Meta’s AI app, which, as Katie Notopoulos of Business Insider has pointed out, is the “saddest place on the internet.” Many very good articles have already been written about it, and yet, I cannot allow its existence to go unremarked upon in the pages of 404 Media.

If you somehow missed this while millions of people were protesting in the streets, state politicians were being assassinated, war was breaking out between Israel and Iran, the military was deployed to the streets of Los Angeles, and a Coinbase-sponsored military parade rolled past dozens of passersby in Washington, D.C., here is what the “Discover” tab is: The Meta AI app, which is the company’s competitor to the ChatGPT app, is posting users’ conversations on a public “Discover” page where anyone can see the things that users are asking Meta’s chatbot to make for them.

This includes various innocuous image and video generations that have become completely inescapable on all of Meta’s platforms (things like “egg with one eye made of black and gold,” “adorable Maltese dog becomes a heroic lifeguard,” “one second for God to step into your mind”), but it also includes entire chatbot conversations where users are seemingly unknowingly leaking a mix of embarrassing, personal, and sensitive details about their lives onto a public platform owned by Mark Zuckerberg. In almost all cases, I was able to trivially tie these chats to actual, real people because the app uses your Instagram or Facebook account as your login.

In several minutes last week, I saved a series of these chats into a Slack channel I created and called “insanemetaAI.” These included:

  • entire conversations about “my current medical condition,” which I could tie back to a real human being with one click
  • details about someone’s life insurance plan
  • “At a point in time with cerebral palsy, do you start to lose the use of your legs cause that’s what it’s feeling like so that’s what I’m worried about”
  • details about a situationship gone wrong after a woman did not like a gift
  • an older disabled man wondering whether he could find and “afford” a young wife in Medellin, Colombia on his salary (“I'm at the stage in my life where I want to find a young woman to care for me and cook for me. I just want to relax. I'm disabled and need a wheelchair, I am severely overweight and suffer from fibromyalgia and asthma. I'm 5'9 280lb but I think a good young woman who keeps me company could help me lose the weight.”)
  • “What counties [sic] do younger women like older white men? I need details. I am 66 and single. I’m from Iowa and am open to moving to a new country if I can find a younger woman.”
  • “My boyfriend tells me to not be so sensitive, does that affect him being a feminist?”

Rachel Tobac, CEO of Social Proof Security, compiled a series of chats she saw on the platform and messaged them to me. These are even crazier and include people asking “What cream or ointment can be used to soothe a bad scarring reaction on scrotum sack caused by shaving razor,” “create a letter pleading judge bowser to not sentence me to death over the murder of two people” (possibly a joke?), someone asking if their sister, a vice president at a company that “has not paid its corporate taxes in 12 years,” could be liable for that, audio of a person talking about how they are homeless, and someone asking for help with their cancer diagnosis, someone discussing being newly sexually interested in trans people, etc.

Tobac gave me a list of the types of things she’s seen people posting in the Discover feed, including people’s exact medical issues, discussions of crimes they had committed, their home addresses, talking to the bot about extramarital affairs, etc.

“When a tool doesn’t work the way a person expects, there can be massive personal security consequences,” Tobac told me.

“Meta AI should pause the public Discover feed,” she added. “Their users clearly don’t understand that their AI chat bot prompts about their murder, cancer diagnosis, personal health issues, etc have been made public. [Meta should have] ensured all AI chat bot prompts are private by default, with no option to accidentally share to a social media feed. Don’t wait for users to accidentally post their secrets publicly. Notice that humans interact with AI chatbots with an expectation of privacy, and meet them where they are at. Alert users who have posted their prompts publicly and that their prompts have been removed for them from the feed to protect their privacy.”

Since several journalists wrote about this issue, Meta has made it clearer to users when interactions with its bot will be shared to the Discover tab. Notopoulos reported Monday that Meta seemed to no longer be sharing text chats to the Discover tab. When I looked for prompts Monday afternoon, the vast majority were for images. But the text prompts were back Tuesday morning, including a full audio conversation of a woman asking the bot what the statute of limitations are for a woman to press charges for domestic abuse in the state of Indiana, which had taken place two minutes before it was shown to me. I was also shown six straight text prompts of people asking questions about the movie franchise John Wick, a chat about “exploring historical inconsistencies surrounding the Holocaust,” and someone asking for advice on “anesthesia for obstetric procedures.”

I was also, Tuesday morning, fed a lengthy chat where an identifiable person explained that they are depressed: “just life hitting me all the wrong ways daily.” The person then left a comment on the post “Was this posted somewhere because I would be horrified? Yikes?”

Several of the chats I saw and mentioned in this article are now private, but most of them are not. I can imagine few things on the internet that would be more invasive than this, but only if I try hard. This is like Google publishing your search history publicly, or randomly taking some of the emails you send and publishing them in a feed to help inspire other people on what types of emails they too could send. It is like Pornhub turning your searches or watch history into a public feed that could be trivially tied to your actual identity. Mistake or not, feature or not (and it’s not clear what this actually is), it is crazy that Meta did this; I still cannot actually believe it.

In an industry full of grifters and companies hell-bent on making the internet worse, it is hard to think of a more impactful, worse actor than Meta, whose platforms have been fully overrun with viral AI slop, AI-powered disinformation, AI scams, AI nudify apps, and AI influencers and whose impact is outsized because billions of people still use its products as their main entry point to the internet. Meta has shown essentially zero interest in moderating AI slop and spam and as we have reported many times, literally funds it, sees it as critical to its business model, and believes that in the future we will all have AI friends on its platforms. While reporting on the company, it has been hard to imagine what rock bottom will be, because Meta keeps innovating bizarre and previously unimaginable ways to destroy confidence in social media, invade people’s privacy, and generally fuck up its platforms and the internet more broadly.

If I twist myself into a pretzel, I can rationalize why Meta launched this feature, and what its idea for doing so is. Presented with an empty text box that says “Ask Meta AI,” people do not know what to do with it, what to type, or what to do with AI more broadly, and so Meta is attempting to model that behavior for people and is willing to sell out its users’ private thoughts to do so. I did not have “Meta will leak people’s sad little chats with robots to the entire internet” on my 2025 bingo card, but clearly I should have.


#ai #meta


The list of sites in the suspect's notebook, which can easily reveal where someone lives, are a simple Google search away, have been for years, and lawmakers could make changes if they wanted. They have before.

The list of sites in the suspectx27;s notebook, which can easily reveal where someone lives, are a simple Google search away, have been for years, and lawmakers could make changes if they wanted. They have before.#News

#News #x27


A DIY Version of the Franck-Hertz Experiment


The Franck–Hertz experiment was a pioneering physics observation announced in 1914 which explained that energy came in “packets” which we call “quanta”, marking the beginning of quantum physics. Recently, [Markus Bindhammer] wrote in to let us know he had redone the experiment for himself.

In the original experiment a mercury vacuum tube was used, but in his recreation of the experiment [Markus] uses a cheaper argon tube. He still gets the result he is looking for though, which is quite remarkable. If you watch the video you will see the current readings clump around specific voltage levels. These voltage levels indicate that energy is quantized, which was a revolutionary idea at the time. If you’re interested in how contemporary physics regards, particles, waves, and quanta, check out this excellent presentation: But What Actually Is a Particle? How Quantum Fields Shape Reality.

Before closing we have to say that the quality of [Markus]’s build was exceptional. He made a permanent enclosure for his power supplies, made custom PCBs, used ferrule crimps for all his wire interconnects, included multiple power switches and dials, professionally labeled and insulated everything, and even went to the trouble of painting the box! Truly a first class build. One thing that surprised us though was his use of rivets where we would almost certainly have used bolts or screws… talk about confidence in your workmanship!

If you’re interested in quantum physics it is certainly a topic we have covered here at Hackaday. Check out Quantum Mechanics And Negative Time With Photon-Atom Interactions or Shedding Light On Quantum Measurement With Calcite.

youtube.com/embed/4ivK8oBjy3Y?…


hackaday.com/2025/06/17/a-diy-…




Una lettura per l'estate: Il codice della strada

Limiti di velocità, strisce pedonali, frecce, cambi di corsia, monopattini elettrici, ciclisti, semafori rossi e il re della strada: sua maestà il cellulare

Sulle nostre spiagge, con l’avvicinarsi delle ferie estive, molti si dilettano nel leggere qualche libro. Suggerirei ad una folta schiera di persone, forse dovrebbe essere quasi obbligatorio, di dedicarsi alla lettura del Codice della Strada. In effetti le nostre strade, i marciapiedi, le isole pedonali sono diventati luoghi dove a prevalere non sono le norme stradali, meglio se condite con un minimo di buona educazione, ma la legge del più forte, del più furbo, ovvero il regno della maleducazione, del rozzo, del cafone, del prepotente. Ci sarebbero tanti altri vocaboli meno gentili.

@L’angolo del lettore

giano.news/2025/06/17/il-codic…

reshared this



Da anni il mio telefono è un #Fairphone


Siccome qui nel Fediverso siete un po' tutti matti con queste storie di diritti umani, ambiente, ecc. ecc. ( 😀 ) mi permetto di raccontarvi del mio telefono, nel caso vi interessasse.

E' un telefono fatto da un'azienda olandese, la #Fairphone appunto, con in testa l'idea della sostenibilità, sia a livello sociale che ambientale.

E' un telefono assemblato da persone che ricevono uno stipendio dignitoso, che lavorano in ditte che garantiscono diritti sindacali, non vengono coinvolti bambini, i materiali provengono da produttori che si impegnano per la sostenibilità ambientale delle loro attività, c'è molto materiale riciclato e infine è progettato in maniera modulare, in modo da poter essere riparabile e finire più tardi possibile in una discarica (si rompe la fotocamera? Vai sul sito ti compri il pezzo di ricambio, apri il telefono, togli la fotocamera vecchia e monti la nuova)

Ora... io non vi consiglio assolutamente di comprarlo, è un telefono "difficile" (nel senso che è fatto da una piccola azienda che non ha le possibilità di giganti come Samsung o Apple), costa un botto (a parità di prestazione da Mediaworld ne trovate che costano la metà ma del resto se vuoi pagare degli stipendi dignitosi ai lavoratori da qualche parte quei soldi dovranno venire fuori...), l'affidabilità non è proprio delle migliori (ma negli anni è aumentata molto) e se avete un problema il supporto tecnico vi risponde con due settimane di ritardo (però esiste una community dove si trova gente parecchio preparata e disponibile).

Detto questo, se siete di quei "woke" che mettono i diritti umani e l'ambiente davanti a tante altre cose forse questo telefono (che, ripeto, io vi sconsiglio di comprare) potrebbe interessarvi.

C'è anche una versione "de-googlizzata" che usa /e/OS.

Ha 5 anni di garanzia.

Se decideste di comprarlo poi non venite a dirmi che è colpa mia, io vi ho solo detto che esiste, non vi ho detto di comprarlo.

Fate circolare un po' il messaggio, magari a qualcuno dei vostri contatti interessa.

fairphone.com/

in reply to Max su Poliverso 🇪🇺🇮🇹

io sono un felice possessore di un fp4 con e/os

tutta la famiglia è passata ad fp4 (anche) x i costi di riparazione...

già, perché, inoltre, compri i ricambi e te lo puoi riparare da solo

in reply to Max su Poliverso 🇪🇺🇮🇹

esperienza simile con FP3 e /e/OS e concordo con te, è una soluzione "difficile" ma è un benchmark di come dovrebbe funzionare (e quanto dovrebbe costare) un'economia sostenibile


Constitutional law professor Anthony Kreis: Trump wants ‘strategic chaos’ to dismantle institutions


netzpolitik.org/2025/constitut…



✍️ Manca poco all'inizio della #Maturità2025!
Un in bocca al lupo speciale a tutti gli...

✍️ Manca poco all'inizio della #Maturità2025!
Un in bocca al lupo speciale a tutti gli studenti e le studentesse che domani mattina, mercoledì 18 giugno, svolgeranno la prima prova scritta degli #EsamiDiStato2025.

#MIMaturo



Map surveillance cameras today


We will be in Harvard Square at 6pm today, June 17th, to map surveillance cameras. Meet us at Cambridge Kiosk (former Out of Town News).

On Saturday, June 21st, we will be at the Boxborough Fifers Day. Tell us if you will help us at the table.


masspirates.org/blog/2025/06/1…



A Gentle Introduction to Ncurses for the Terminally Impatient


Considered by many to be just a dull output for sequential text, the command-line terminal is a veritable canvas to the creative software developer. With the cursor as the brush, entire graphical user interfaces can be constructed, or even a basic text-based dashboard on which values can be updated without redrawing the entire screen over and over, or opting for a much heavier solution like a GUI.

Ncurses is one of the most well-known and rather portable Terminal User Interface (TUI) libraries using that such cursor control, and more, can be achieved in a fairly painless manner. That said, for anyone coming from a graphical user interface framework, the concepts and terminology with ncurses and similar can be confusingly different yet overlapping, so that getting started can be somewhat harrowing.

In this article we’ll take a look at ncurses’ history, how to set it up and how to use it with C and C++, and many more languages supported via bindings.

Tools And Curses


The acronym TUI is actually a so-called retronym, as TUIs were simply the way of life before the advent of bitmapped, videocard-accelerated graphics. In order to enable more than just basic, sequential character output, the terminal had to support commands that would move the cursor around the screen, along with commands that affect the way text is displayed. This basic sequence of moving the cursor and updating active attributes is what underlies TUIs, with the system’s supported character sets determining the scope of displayed characters.

Ncurses, short for “new curses“, is an evolution of the curses library by Ken Arnold as originally released in 1978 for BSD UNIX, where it saw use with a number of games like Rogue. Originally it was a freely distributable clone of System V Release 4.0 (SVr4) curses by the time of its release in 1993, based on the existing pcurses package. Later, ncurses adopted a range of new features over the course of its subsequent development by multiple authors that distinguished it from curses, and would result in it becoming the new de-facto default across a wide range of platforms.

The current version is maintained by Thomas Dickey, and the ncurses library and development files are readily available from your local package manager, or downloadable from the ncurses website. Compiling and running ncurses-based application is straightforward on Linux, BSD, and MacOS courtesy of the libncurses and related files being readily available and often already installed. On Windows you can use the MinGW port, with MSYS2 providing an appropriate terminal emulator, as well as the pacman package manager and access to the same ncurses functionality as on the other platforms.

Hello Curses


The core ncurses functionality can be accessed after including the ncurses.h header. There are two standard extensions in the panel.h and menu.h headers for panel stack management and menus, respectively. Panels are effectively wrappers around an ncurses window that automate a lot of the tedious juggling of multiple potentially overlapping windows. The menu extension is basically what it says on the tin, and makes creating and using menus easier.

For a ‘hello world’ ncurses application we’d write the following:

This application initializes ncurses before writing the Hello World! string to both the top left, at (2, 2) and the center of the terminal window, with the terminal window size being determined dynamically with getmaxyx(). The mvprintw() and mvwprintw() work like printf(), with both taking the coordinates to move the cursor to the indicated position in row (y), column (x) order. The extra ‘w’ after ‘mv’ in the function name indicates that it targets a specific window, which here is stdscr, but could be a custom window. Do note that nurses works with y/x instead of the customary x/y order.

Next, we use attributes in this example to add some color. We initialize a pair, on index 1, using predefined colors and enable this attribute with attron() and the COLOR_PAIR macro before printing the text. Attributes can also be used to render text as bold, italic, blinking, dimmed, reversed and many more styles.

Finally, we turn the color attribute back off and wait for a keypress with getch() before cleaning up with endwin(). This code is also available along with a Makefile to build it in this GitHub repository as hello_ncurses.cpp. Note that on Windows (MSYS2) the include path for the ncurses header is different, and you have to compile with the -DNCURSES_STATIC define to be able to link.

Here the background, known as the standard screen (stdscr) is used to write to, but we can also segment this surface into windows, which are effectively overlays on top of this background.

Multi-Window Application

The Usagi Electric 1 (UE1) emulator with ncurses front-end.The Usagi Electric 1 (UE1) emulator with ncurses front-end.
There’s more to an ncurses application than just showing pretty text on the screen. There is also handling keyboard input and continuously updating on-screen values. These features are demonstrated in e.g. the emulator which I wrote recently for David Lovett’s Usagi Electric 1 (UE1) vacuum tube-based 1-bit computer. This was my first ever ncurses project, and rather educational as a result.

Using David’s QuickBasic-based version as the basis, I wrote a C++ port that differs from the QB version in that there’s no single large loop, but rather a separate CPU (processor.cpp) thread that processes the instructions, while the front-end (ue1_emu.cpp) contains the user input processing loop as well as the ncurses-specific functionality. This helps to keep the processor core’s code as generic as possible. Handling command line flags and arguments is taken care of by another project of mine: Sarge.

This UE1 front-end creates two ncurses windows with a specific size, draws a box using the default characters and refreshes the windows to make them appear. The default text is drawn with a slight offset into the window area, except for the ‘title’ on the border, which is simply text printed with leading and trailing spaces with a column offset but on row zero.

Handling user input with getch() wouldn’t work here, as that function is specific to stdscr and would foreground that ‘window’. Ergo we need to use the following: int key = wgetch(desc). This keeps the ‘desc’ window in focus and obtains the key input from there.

During each CPU cycle the update_display() function is called, in which successive mvwprintw() calls are made to update on-screen values, making sure to blank out previous data to prevent ghosting, with [url=https://linux.die.net/man/3/clrtoeol]clrtoeol()[/url] and kin as the nuclear option. The only use of attributes is with color and bold around the processor state, indicating a running state in bold green and halted with bold red.

Finally, an interesting and crucial part of ncurses is the beep() function, which does what it says on the tin. For UE1 it’s used to indicate success by ringing the bell of the system (inspired by the Bendix G-15), which here provides a more subtle beep but can be used to e.g. indicate a successful test run. There’s also the flash() function that unsurprisingly flashes the terminal to get the operator’s attention.

A Much Deeper Rabbit Hole


By the time that you find yourself writing an ncurses-based application on the level of, say, Vim, you will need a bit more help just keeping track of all the separate windows that you will be creating. This is where the Panel library comes into play, which are basically wrappers for windows that automate a lot of the tedious stuff such as refreshing windows and keeping track of the window stack.

Applications also love to have menus, which can either be painstakingly created and managed using core ncurses features, or simplified with the Menu library. For everyone’s favorite data-entry widget, there is the Forms library, which provides not only the widgets, but also provides field validation features. If none of this is enough for your purposes, then there’s the Curses Development Kit (CDK). For less intensive purposes, such as just popping up a dialog from a shell script, there is the dialog utility that comes standard on Linux and many other platforms and provides easy access to ncurses functionality with very little fuss.

All of which serves to state that the ground covered in this article merely scratches the surface, even if it should be enough to get one at least part-way down the ncurses rabbit hole and hopefully appreciative of the usefulness of TUIs even in today’s bitmapped GUI world.

Header image: ncurses-tetris by [Won Yong Jang].


hackaday.com/2025/06/17/a-gent…





Europol, il percorso dei dati rubati: focus sull’adozione di LLM e altre tecniche di AI


@Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁)
I dati rubati acquisiscono valore per la loro potenziale monetizzazione. Ecco cosa emerge dall'ultimo report targato Europol
L'articolo Europol, il percorso dei dati rubati: focus sull’adozione di LLM e altre tecniche di AI proviene da Cyber Security 360.



Due programmi, un solo contractor? Boeing punta al monopolio della sesta generazione Usa

@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo

Dal salone di Parigi-Le Bourget, Boeing rilancia sul futuro della superiorità aerea americana. Dopo aver ottenuto a marzo la commessa per l’F-47, il nuovo caccia di sesta generazione destinato all’US Air Force, il colosso statunitense si propone



Quando il candidato perfetto è un hacker: l’HR come porta d’ingresso nei sistemi aziendali


@Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁)
Gli attacchi informatici non arrivano sempre dalla “porta principale”. A volte, bussano alla reception con in mano un CV ben scritto. È una tecnica adottata recentemente dai criminali di FIN6, ma anche in Italia da gruppi



Il pane e le bombe


@Giornalismo e disordine informativo
articolo21.org/2025/06/iran-bo…
Brucia il cielo di Teheran: il signor Mileikowsky – è polacco il cognome di nascita di Netanyahu – ha appiccato un altro incendio. I caccia con la stella di Davide seminano morte e distruzione sul corpaccione inerte dell’antichissimo leone persiano. Gli ayatollah – quei