Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Because of various privacy legislation, and people not wanting Google to track them as much, they stopped syncing the data to Google servers. As someone who’s worked at big tech companies, my guess would be that storing so many people’s location history was flagged as an issue during a privacy audit.

    It’s entirely local now. You can enable encrypted backups and back up the data, however you can really only have the data on one device now, and the web version is gone.


  • dan@upvote.autoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldHosting Mbin
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    11 days ago

    had to upgrade due to DDOS

    If you keep getting DDoS attacks, then I’d recommend getting DDoS protection from your hosting provider, or using Cloudflare. A lot of hosting providers can provide DDoS protection if you pay a bit extra per month.















  • Don’t. Use a VPN like Tailscale or Wireguard. Tailscale uses the Wireguard protocol but it’s very easy to configure, and will automatically set up a peer-to-peer mesh network for you (each node on the VPN can reach any other node, without having to route through a central server).

    The only things that should be exposed publicly are things that absolutely need to be - for example, parts of Home Assistant need to be publicly exposed if you use the Google Assistant or Alexa integrations, since Google and Amazon need to be able to reach it.



  • Web is a bit easier than native since the browsers handle all the platform-specific details across all common platforms, and you mostly just have to follow some guidelines that aren’t overly technical or arcane. Some examples:

    • Use ARIA roles where appropriate
    • Ensure sufficient contrast between text and background colours. Should at least meet the WCAG level AA which is a 4.5:1 contrast ratio, but ideally meet AAA which is a 7:1 ratio for body text and a 4.5:1 ratio for headings.
    • Ensure you use <label> tags to label for all your <input>s, alt attributes on all images, title attributes where appropriate (e.g. on <table>s to describe the data contained inside the table), etc.

    If you use Firefox, its developer tools have an “Accessibility” tab that can audit for common issues - things like missing labels on checkboxes and radio buttons, colours that don’t meet WCAG contrast ratio requirements, etc.

    It’s a good time to learn more about building accessible sites and apps given it’s becoming a legal requirement in some jurisdictions. For example, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) goes into effect later this year, and it mandates that sites and mobile apps for various industries (like ecommerce, airlines and other transport, media streaming, social media, banks, and some others) meet accessibility guidelines.

    I’m on an all Linux machine and the only accessibility software I know of is Orca and it’s so and so last time I tried it.

    It’s probably worth spinning up a Windows VM to test in NVDA. It’s one of the most popular screen readers and probably the most popular open-source one, but only works on Windows since it deeply hooks into the Microsoft Speech API, accessibility APIs, and and other Windows APIs.


  • This is a really well written article. It’s unfortunate that this person has to deal with all these issues.

    I suspect the reason that both MATE and the Debian installer have good accessibility support is because their codebases are quite old. In general, it seems like older software is more likely to have better accessibility support than newer software.

    Accessibility should be something that’s built into software from the very beginning, but I totally understand that not all developers have time for it or properly understand it. It’s unfortunate.

    Edit: I forgot to mention that accessibility is going to be mandated for some types of sites and apps in the EU thanks to the European Accessibility Act (EAA) coming into effect later this year, which should help somewhat. Won’t really help with Linux itself though.