Notices by Nick (internic@mathstodon.xyz)

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ivpn/116538979337430327

In case anyone happens to be looking for a new VPN provider right now, @ivpn is one of the few VPN services recommended by @privacyguides for privacy.
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/
#vpn #mullvad #mullvadvpn

@autiomaa @mark @david_chisnall Honestly I'm kind or surprised there isn't a "pay Cloudflare for X connections without a challenge/captcha", because it would be another revenue stream for them.

Looks like there will be strong #aurora tonight. As of this morning they're predicted to peak between 1 am and 4 am EST on Jan 20 with a Kp index of 8. That's strong enough to be visible in most of the northern half of the US (if the skies are clear and there isn't too much light pollution) and possibly more if they exceed predictions a bit (which certainly can happen). #northernLights #spaceWeather

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/aurora-dashboard-experimental

@cwebber At the risk of asking a serious question, what's the deal with all these alternative ATProto apps? Are there any that have significant independent infrastructure?

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/04/beyond-bluesky-these-are-the-apps-building-social-experiences-on-the-at-protocol/

I'm guessing that the answer is that they mostly share the same infrastructure and just provide a different AppView and possibly a different lexicon (not sure that's the right term) as far as the data they store and can interact with. But given that I have a very limited understanding of how Bluesky works under the hood, I'd be interested in a (much) more knowledgeable perspective.

@GossiTheDog @simonoid Do these actually work on up-to-date iPhones? I know I've seen a lot of claims about tools to gain access to mobile devices that then turn out to only actually work on older OS versions (presumably old enough to have known exploits).