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At Automattic, we are able to pick our own job titles. After hosting a few rounds of Among Us within my team yesterday, I am officially our in-house Among Us wrangler!

pic.twitter.com/T44b43c3Vz

— Nader Dabit (@dabit3) January 30, 2021

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Okay, this is me. 😅

I came across Brian’s comment on Backblaze reddit, where I learned of a few interesting things about how internet data traffic is billed between customers, hosts and transit partners. In particular, they explain how Backblaze and Cloudflare have peering agreements in place to enable free egress for customers. It’s great read!

The way the CloudFlare/Backblaze relationship works is that CloudFlare is very arguably big enough to be tier 1, and should be allowed to have the utterly free peering of a tier 1 provider, but they are “locked out”. They don’t get the sweet sweet deal the tier 1 providers get of running their businesses terribly and pocketing billions of dollars of profit without innovating. So normally, without contortions, if a Backblaze customer wanted to route a network packet to CloudFlare, it would flow over at least 1 of the tier 1 network providers and Backblaze and CloudFlare would both have to pay a lot of money. But here is the work-around: Backblaze is in several datacenters where CloudFlare has network cabinets (where their equipment is housed), and essentially CloudFlare and Backblaze run a network patch cable between our cabinets BYPASSING the tier 1 network, and therefore don’t have to pay the tier 1 providers to route packets between Backblaze and CloudFlare. That’s it, that’s the magic.

I love it when NextDNS actively blocks these Facebook requests. 👊🏽

A quick screencast of what I hacked on today: setting up exit nodes on my @Tailscale network, and switching my laptop’s internets between them. https://t.co/JfaF1t5MaN

Still WIP. Still TODO: exit node picker GUI on other OSes.

— Dave Anderson (@dave_universetf) January 20, 2021

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Exit nodes are coming soon on Tailscale! I have been waiting for this functionality for a while now. I would like to run Cloudflare Warp on a Raspberry Pi, and route all devices traffic via that Pi. Super looking forward to it!

https://youtu.be/n-0J0jJ9pmk

After leaving Facebook, Brian Acton, previously co-founder of WhatsApp, invested in Signal, the private messaging app.

Here’s how Brian went from being the founder of WhatsApp to an investor in Signal👇

— What is the business model of (@businessmodelof) January 12, 2021

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Great thread on how Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp, left Facebook post acquisition. He gave up 850 million dollars along the way, and invested 50 million in Signal, a non-profit.

Signal is a no-brainer. 🙂

I found this interesting 40 hours case study of Signal, by Built For Mars. Two key takeaways seem to be that prompts must be contextual. And, being a privacy-first product, it must be even more important to ask for permissions only when necessary. It’s actually better to read the post below, to get a visual overview of where Signal can improve on. A related Hacker News thread is open too.

I don’t remember how the competitors like Telegram and WhatsApp fare, but I am keen on giving it a look myself. Maybe sometime in the future.

That’s it. My grand mother is on signal. What the fuck is going on.

— David Wong (@cryptodavidw) January 18, 2021

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I’m loving it! 🚀

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I have always wanted to have a replacement for Twitter in my personal blog. So far been using specific categories to classify micro blogs from long-form posts, and I have strategically placed them with Gutenberg’s blocks. Inspired by Mike’s format here, I am taking this one step further by hiding the titles for micro blogs.

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I’m testing a status update, hoping that it doesn’t send an email out to subscribers. Let’s see what happens.

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We have been adding new servers and extra capacity at a record pace every single day this week nonstop, but today exceeded even our most optimistic projections. Millions upon millions of new users are sending a message that privacy matters. We appreciate your patience.

— Signal (@signalapp) January 15, 2021

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Signal has been down for over 20 hours, and the cause of outage seems to be steep increase in the number of signups in the last few days.

We are still working as quickly as possible to bring additional capacity online to handle peak traffic levels.

— Signal (@signalapp) January 16, 2021

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In a recent update, Android developers from Signal asked for the community members’ logs:

Hi folks! We’re trying to track down an issue where Android devices may be sending too many messages. Given we have no metrics, the only way we can get more information is for ya’ll to share your debuglogs. So please, regardless of whether you think your phone was acting funny, please post a debuglog here, or DM me if that makes you more comfortable.

If you are willing to help out as well, you may submit the debug logs here, or DM the author on their forum.

Signal’s explosive growth comes shortly after WhatsApp’s announcement of changes in their policies, which is further pushed by 3 months.

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So cool to see Signal‘s repositories on the top 5 for this week on GitHub! If you have benefited from this open source, free, privacy-respecting software, you may consider supporting them with donations as well.

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By the way, why does it say MIRA?

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VALORANT has a new event today! It’s a cute snowball fight mode, where you are spawned at random locations and shoot snow balls at the other team. This is very similar to death match, expect that this is a 5v5 mode. Gift boxes seem to spawn at random times as well, unlocking extra abilities. So far, I could obtain skates, rapid fire, ricochet and growball. No clue what the last two are. Check it out if you haven’t! No update required to the game itself.

Riot’s official announcement is below.

https://twitter.com/PlayVALORANT/status/1339236071431933952

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We just had a bugged loggy (or someone was hacking?) where we had two whites. I was swift and another player was Siege. I called the meeting, but the reports screen showed a notice that Siege called the meeting.

I was not seen on the reports screen either!

Odd.

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Mismatched electricity wires on MIRA HQ. This is so bad on my part, lol.

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https://youtu.be/aaKcBrI6CBM

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It’s just Spike Rush, but I am very happy about this win.

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I like this updated loading screen with all characters in a team.

Also for some reason, Gauntlet Showdown never worked for me. It loads the main show instead.

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I have been playing this fantastic game called Among Us in the last few months. It’s a game of deception, where there are two parties working on two tasks.

• Crewmates, who are in charge of completing tasks on the spaceship. Finish all tasks, and you win.
• Impostors, those who fake to be crewmates, but are actually sabotaging actual crewmates’ progress, or attempt killing them. When impostors lead crewmates by one member, they win.

It’s available across iOS, Android and PC/Steam. I mostly play with my friends, but online matches are not that bad either.

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Look at this shiny new badge on my GitHub profile!

Calypso was probably the first OSS project that I contributed to. I am super grateful for all the feedback that I have received through the years, even though they were minor changes like CSS and copy.

If you haven’t starting contributing to OSS yet, start today! Maintainers are always happy to help. 💛

You can read more about GitHub’s archival program here.

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The blog you’re reading at the moment was originally a Tumblr site. I moved it to WordPress when I joined Automattic. That was two years ago.

I was curious to see what has changed recently. Tumblr is very different from what I knew two years ago. I think I’m enjoying the experience so far.

On that note, I’ve a new blog called mostly for reblogs. I’ll be using it for posting thoughts on shows that I watch. I just finished season 1 of Dark on Netflix.

The current blog will continue to exist as my primary site.

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Apple announced encrypted DNS (DOH and DOT) for iOS! This is by far my most favorite announcement at WWDC 2020.

Right now, my DNS provider, NextDNS app for iOS, implements their feature as a VPN tunnel, which makes it impossible to use another commercial VPN like NordVPN/Mullvad at the same time.

A similar limitation applies to Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 app.

However, with the new encrypted DNS model that Apple is announcing, it looks like NextDNS can be used in conjunction with the other active VPN tunnels.

Their approach is great, covers all bases.

Someone like Firefox can ship a build that uses their CloudFlare partnership.

Someone like CloudFlare can ship an app the makes the entire system use their service.

IT departments can allow their internal domains to work.

👌

— Jer Warren (@nyquildotorg) June 24, 2020

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I have reached out to the NextDNS developers to hear their thoughts. Future looks exciting for iOS!

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I found an interesting Telegram bot last night. Signal Sticker bot helps you convert Telegram stickers to Signal. It’s as easy as it can get,

• Initiate a chat with the bot.
• Send a sticker, one that’s not animated.
• Wait for the bot to generate a Signal-specific sticker pack link.
• Click on it to install the pack on your Signal. 🤯

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I received GitHub.com new design for repositories and I like it! 💯 🚀

Particularly like the latest release section on the right sidebar. I do WooCommerce support as well, and part of my job often involves downloading the latest copy of the plugin. It must be easier with this prominent placement on the right sidebar.

As I understand, this is not available for everyone yet. This is a feature preview that you can sign up for.

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I generally do not like DHH’s tweets, but this case is a bit different.

Wow. I’m literally stunned. Apple just doubled down on their rejection of HEY’s ability to provide bug fixes and new features, unless we submit to their outrageous demand of 15-30% of our revenue. Even worse: We’re told that unless we comply, they’ll REMOVE THE APP.

— DHH (@dhh) June 16, 2020

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Monopolies mustn’t be allowed. Apple can crush software makers, small or big, just like that. On a closed platform like iOS, software makers are pretty much at the mercy of Apple.

I am glad to see DHH voicing Basecamp’s concerns in the public. Members from the EU antitrust division are looking into this issue, other companies are sharing their stories as well, and in the event something positive comes out of this, it’s not just Basecamp that would benefit.

It’d be all software developers publishing to the App Store.