etbe – Russell Coker

Ebook Readers in Debian

etbe — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 12:29:53 +0000

Laptop

For a while I’ve been using Calibre 8.5.0+ds-1+deb13u1 in Debian/Trixie running KDE for reading ebooks on my laptop, it generally works well and has a large font size. The only downsides of it for that use are taking more RAM than I would prefer (about 780M RSS which seems a lot for a relatively simple task) and having separate windows for the list of books and reading an actual book without any options to just open the last book and not delay me.

I tried Arianna 25.04.0-1 in Debian/Trixie, it has a significantly smaller font size and doesn’t allow high contrast colors as the default is black on gray with the dark theme in KDE. It also only allows left and right arrows for moving through the book while Calibre uses up/down, left/right, or pgup/pgdn so whatever keys seem reasonable to you are going to work. The RSS was 762M which wasn’t great but wasn’t the real problem. Rumours of Arianna using less RAM than Calibre seem exaggerated.

Librem5

On my Librem5 phone with Plasma Mobile Calibre 8.5.0+ds-1+deb13u1 both the initial setup screen and the main screen for selecting a book to read don’t work in the width of portrait view on the phone. After putting it in landscape mode it worked, but I couldn’t touch on a book title to select it I had to touch on the number of the book at the left of the list box. But once it was loaded everything was fine. On the Librem5 Arianna 25.04.0-1 just worked fine, although only using left/right swipes to change pages instead of up/down was annoying.

Furilabs FLX1s

On my Furilabs FLX1s with phosh Arianna 25.04.0-1 and Calibre 8.16.2+ds+~0.10.5-3 both gave the same result of not displaying text or images from the book, I’m not sure if it’s phosh or some other aspect of the FLX1s configuration at fault.

PinePhonePro

On my PinePhonePro running Debian/Testing with Plasma Mobile Arianna 25.12.3-1 worked without any issue and up/down swipes worked. Calibre 9.5.0+ds+~0.10.5-1 had the initial screen work fine in portrait mode but the main screen was too wide and needed landscape. Also the issue of having to touch the number applied.

Laptop running Debian/Unstable

Calibre 9.6.0+ds+~0.10.5-2 and Arianna 25.12.3-1 worked quite nicely on a Thinkpad running Debian/Unstable. One thing I discovered while testing it is that Calibre supports the CTRL-PLUS and CTRL-MINUS key combinations to change font sizes and that also works on the version in Debian/Trixie. Arianna doesn’t support CTRL-PLUS/MINUS.

Conclusion

The problems I had were Arianna on a laptop, everything on the Furilabs FLX1s, and Calibre’s UI not being well adjusted for mobile devices.

Communication and Hostile AIs

etbe — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:08:11 +0000

We seem to be entering an “AI” apocalypse of sorts, they aren’t going to kill us or even take our jobs. What they are doing is destroying the Internet commons by filling it with rubbish. This isn’t even real AI, just pattern matching and prediction systems, mostly LLMs.

The Problem

Scott Shambaugh’s saga of being attacked and defamed by an OpenClaw AI bot is interesting and raises some disturbing possibilities for future online discussion [1]. Imagine what it would be like if everyone who was in any way notable for free software work had 100 such bots going after them.

Dania Dumas wrote an insightful blog post about why OpenClaw is impossible to secure and why it won’t go away [2].

Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders wrote an insightful article about the AI generated text arms race [3] primarily concentrating on situations in which text that was assumed to be written by humans but was actually written in bulk by bots was performing a DOS attack on people who were reviewing it. There are many situations such as book publishing and publishing letters to the editor of newspapers where getting new material from unknown people is an important part of the job but where there are also people making low quality submissions that are almost a DOS attack at the best of times.

Currently the email spam problem continues to get worse and when LLM use increases it will get significantly worse. Email encryption isn’t viable [4]. The PGP web of trust never really worked well as it’s too difficult for most users.

The amount of “AI” generated content that’s being recommended to users on platforms like YouTube and Facebook is steadily increasing and the amount of LLM generated commentary that purports to be from real people on Twitter and Facebook is also increasing. Here’s an informative blog post by Erich Schubert about this [5].

Potential Solutions

Surrender?

One option and possibly the default option is to surrender to this and just let everything we built on the Internet over decades get destroyed. Whether to surrender is a decision that can be made on a per-service basis.

Twitter is pretty much useless anyway, I quit Twitter because Elon deliberately made it suck [6]. In my opinion this is not surrendering to what’s being done there, I’m just stopping wasting time on it and using better options. I used to have about 300 followers on Twitter and I don’t think that many of them would ever choose to stop following me, so I presume that about 1/3 of the people following me have decided to totally quit Twitter and delete their accounts. I also presume that some of the remainder have done the same as me and just kept a mostly inactive account. If Elon suddenly stopped being a stupid asshole it probably wouldn’t change anything as the value of the system was connections to others. Some people will consider my abandonment of Twitter as surrender and I accept that it’s not an unreasonable opinion. I think that the possibly 100 Twitter followers of mine who deleted their accounts surrendered.

Facebook has been becoming a worse service, it’s business model is becoming increasingly exploitative and it’s interface is designed to be addictive. It’s probably best avoided unless you really need it. The only good thing about Facebook at the moment is that Facebook Marketplace doesn’t take a cut on sales and there are some really good deals on computers if you know what to look for. Unfortunately Facebook has a large number of users who are from marginalised communities and have no other alternatives for communication. It would be good to get them migrated to other platforms.

We could just give up on a lot of general communications services and have everyone accept that good content is drowned out by rubbish and have the Internet become divided between people who accept the rubbish and those who cease using large portions of the Internet environment to avoid it.

Using Non Commercial Services

Lemmy is a good FOSS federated alternative to Reddit which also covers some of the uses of Facebook. It needs more users to get critical mass but is still quite usable. A post that might get a dozen comments on Reddit may get 1 comment on Lemmy but that one comment will be a good one. Reddit doesn’t appear to be attacked much by LLM generated content at least not yet. Even if the Reddit model proves to be resilient to LLM attack the Lemmy software can be used to replace some things that are done on Facebook,

Mastodon is a good FOSS federated replacement for Twitter, it has a decent user-base including some VIPs. While it is aimed at the Twitter use case it can also cover a significant part of the Facebook use case.

There are some other FOSS social media programs which could take over other parts of the commercial social media environment.

Generally commercially run Internet services will have a financial incentive to allow the problems to get worse so we need to rely on FOSS software, non-commercial implementations, and government services.

Web Search

For a long time Google has had a monopoly on web search, but now they default to including an “AI Overview” at the start of the results which is sometimes useful but also sometimes very wrong. You can use the search URL “https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=web” to get google results without rubbish. But I presume that they will break that if it gets too popular.

Searxng is a AGPL licensed metasearch engine that aggregates results from other engines, here’s the Searxng source [7] and here’s a list of Searxng instances if you want to try one [8].

Even using meta search engines like Searxng won’t help if the original data is overloaded with spam, but alleviating the problem is a good temporary measure.

Web of Trust for the Web?

I’ve idly considered the possibility of having some sort of rating system for web pages that uses a web of trust so that you can securely use trust ratings of friends of friends etc. But given all the difficulties in using a web of trust for signing GPG key for software developers (the demographic that is most skilled at doing such things) it doesn’t seem viable.

Should we surrender the idea of having a usable public web?

In the early days of the web (before Google) it was standard practice to rely on recommendations from other people or from trusted sites to find other sites, that could be considered to be an informal web of trust. We could go back to that sort of usage pattern if Google and many of the big sites get overwhelmed by LLM generated spam.

Wikipedia

I believe that Wikipedia will be at the front lines of this battle. It’s model has always included anonymous contributions. Benjamin Mako Hill wrote an interesting blog post about research he did with Kaylea Champion into Wikipedia pages on taboo topics which have a larger portion of contributors choosing to be anonymous than non-taboo pages [9]. Wikipedia also has a long history of being abused for various reasons, one that I witnessed was someone putting false content into Wikipedia pages to immediately cite them in support of their facebook arguments. That sort of thing can be dealt with at human scale but a large scale attack by bots is a different problem to solve. Also with the recent developments in AI developing multiple web sites entirely populated for the purpose of supporting one fake entry in Wikipedia is plausible.

The upside of these attacks that I predict is that they will attract the attention of all the people who have skills related to developing counter-measures. While LLM bots are filling the inboxes of publishers with rubbish and messing up the stackoverflow comments section not a lot of people are bothered, but once the attacks on Wikipedia get serious everyone will take notice.

National AI

Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders wrote an interesting blog post about nationalised public AI [10]. While that won’t directly address this issue it will get the right technology in the hands of people who can use it in the right way.

Conclusion

This is going to be a difficult problem to solve, more difficult than the email spam problem we have been unable to solve after 30 years of working on it.

This is also a very important problem, we are currently in an age where we have access to information that most people couldn’t even dream of 30 years ago. We also have disinformation that combines some of the worst aspects of authoritarian regimes throughout history combined with the worst aspects of cult brainwashing. If we lose access to the information but the disinformation remains (or get worse) then the result will be terrible.

I don’t have great ideas for solving this. I have outlined some small ideas to mitigate things and I hope that others can expand on them.

Please write comments with any good ideas you have, or even ideas that don’t totally suck. A problem this difficult is not going to be solved in a blog comment, but a blog comment might point in the right direction.

The Death of Twitter

etbe — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 05:21:26 +0000

At the end of last year I uninstalled the Twitter app on my phone.

In the past Twitter used to be very useful for providing feedback to large organisations. I had responses from supermarkets, chain restaurants, online stores, major computer companies, and even the IT department of a court. In recent times I have had less responses from corporations which significantly reduces the value of Twitter to me and to many other users. It seems that Elon’s management style has discouraged not only advertising but also all forms of corporate interaction. Messing up the check mark on accounts to make it harder to work out which is a real corporate

Since Elon bought it Twitter has been increasingly pushing conservative Tweets and has done little to stop bot accounts. The incidence of useful discussions has steadily decreased. I know people who have quit Twitter entirely due to opposition to Elon, I am not doing that. I finally decided to stop using Twitter in any serious way when the notifications on my phone about popular Tweets started only being about Tweets from conservative influencers and Elon. This was obviously not any algorithm based on Tweets I was liking, it was based on political decisions. I didn’t uninstall the app due to political disagreement, I uninstalled it because it was through deliberate design promoting material that any algorithm would know was something I wouldn’t either like or “like”.

I still announce new blog posts on Twitter for my 198 followers at the same time as announcing them on Mastodon and Facebook. I get the most reactions to such announcements on Mastodon, the second most on Facebook, and hardly any on Twitter. I’m wondering how long it will be worth announcing blog posts on Twitter or whether I should stop now.

I am sure that many other people are making similar decisions and this is going to affect Twitter overall.

The web site www.russellcoker.com has information on all the ways of following me.

The Difference Between Email and Instant Messaging

etbe — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 08:37:02 +0000

Introduction

With various forms of IM becoming so prevalent and a lot of communication that used to be via email happening via IM I’ve been thinking about the differences between Email and IM.

I think it’s worth comparing them not for the purpose of convincing people to use one or the other (most people will use whatever is necessary to communicate with the people who are important to them) but for the purpose of considering ways to improve them and use them more effectively.

Also I don’t think that users of various electronic communications systems have had a free choice in what to use for at least 25 years and possibly much longer depending on how you define a free choice. What you use is determined by who you want to communicate with and by what systems are available in your region. So there’s no possibility of an analysis of this issue giving a result of “let’s all change what we use” as almost everyone lacks the ability to make a choice.

What the Difference is Not

The name Instant Messaging implies that it is fast, and probably faster than other options. This isn’t necessarily the case, when using a federated IM system such as Matrix or Jabber there can be delays while the servers communicate with each other.

Email used to be a slow communication method, in the times of UUCP and Fidonet email there could be multiple days of delay in sending email. In recent times it’s expected that email is quite fast, many web sites have options for authenticating an email address which have to be done within 5 minutes so the common expectation seems to be that all email is delivered to the end user in less than 5 minutes.

When an organisation has a mail server on site (which is a common configuration choice for a small company) the mail delivery can be faster than common IM implementations.

The Wikipedia page about Instant Messaging [1] links to the Wikipedia page about Real Time Computing [2] which is incorrect. Most IM systems are obviously designed for minimum average delays at best. For most software it’s not a bad thing to design for the highest performance on average and just let users exercise patience when they get an unusual corner case that takes much longer than expected.

If an IM message takes a few minutes to arrive then “that’s life on the Internet” – which was the catchphrase of an Australian Internet entrepreneur in the 90s that infuriated some of his customers.

Protocol and Data Format Differences

Data Formats

Email data contains the sender, one or more recipients, some other metadata (time, subject, etc), and the message body. The recipients are typically an arbitrary list of addresses which can only be validated by the destination mail servers. The sender addresses weren’t validated in any way and are now only minimally validated as part of anti-spam measures.

IM data is sent through predefined connections called rooms or channels. When an IM message is sent to a room it can tag one or more members of the room to indicate that they may receive a special notification of the message.

In many implementations it’s possible to tag a user who isn’t in the room which may result in them being invited to the room. But in IM there is no possibility to add a user to the CC list for part of a discussion and then just stop CCing messages to them later on in the discussion.

Protocols

Internet email is a well established system with an extensive user base. Adding new mandatory features to the protocols isn’t viable because many old systems won’t be updated any time soon. So while it is possible to send mail that’s SSL encrypted and has a variety of authentication mechanisms that isn’t something that can be mandatory for all email. Most mail servers are configured to use the SSL option if it’s available but send in cleartext otherwise, so a hostile party could launch a Man In the Middle (MITM) attack and pretend to be the mail server in question but without SSL support.

Modern IM protocols tend to be based on encryption, even XMPP (Jabber) which is quite an old IM protocol can easily be configured to only support encrypted messaging and it’s reasonable to expect that all other servers that will talk to you will at least support SSL. Even for an IM system that is run by a single company the fact that communication with the servers is encrypted by SSL makes it safer than most email. A security model of “this can only be read by you, me, and the staff at an American corporation” isn’t the worst type of Internet security.

The Internet mail infrastructure makes no attempt to send mail in order and the design of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) means that a network problem after a message has been sent but before the recipient has confirmed receipt will mean that the message is duplicated and this is not considered to be a problem.

The IM protocols are designed to support reliable ordered transfer of messages and Matrix (the most recently designed IM protocol) has cryptographic connections between users.

Forgery

For most email systems there is no common implementation that prevents forging email. For Internet email transferred via SMTP it’s possible to use technologies like SPF and DKIM/DMARC to make recipients aware of attempts at forgery, but many recipient systems will still allow email that fails such checks to be delivered. The default configuration tends to be permitting everything and all of the measures to prevent forgery require extra configuration work and often trade-offs as some users desire features that go against security. The default configuration of most mail servers doesn’t even prevent trivial forgeries of email from the domain(s) owned by that server.

For evidence check the SPF records of some domains that you communicate with and see if they end with “-all” (to block email from bad sources), “~all” (to allow email from bad sources through after possibly logging an error), “?all” (to be “neutral” on mail from unknown sources, or just lack a SPF record entirely. The below shows that of the the top four mail servers in the world only outlook.com has a policy to reject mail from bad sources.

# dig -t txt _spf.google.com|grep spf1
_spf.google.com.	300	IN	TXT	"v=spf1 ip4:74.125.0.0/16 ip4:209.85.128.0/17 ip6:2001:4860:4864::/56 ip6:2404:6800:4864::/56 ip6:2607:f8b0:4000::/36 ip6:2800:3f0:4000::/36 ip6:2a00:1450:4000::/36 ip6:2c0f:fb50:4000::/36 ~all"
# dig -t txt outlook.com|grep spf1
outlook.com.		126	IN	TXT	"v=spf1 include:spf2.outlook.com -all"
# dig -t txt _spf.mail.yahoo.com|grep spf1
_spf.mail.yahoo.com.	1800	IN	TXT	"v=spf1 ptr:yahoo.com ptr:yahoo.net ip4:34.2.71.64/26 ip4:34.2.75.0/26 ip4:34.2.84.64/26 ip4:34.2.85.64/26 ip4:34.2.64.0/22 ip4:34.2.68.0/23 ip4:34.2.70.0/23 ip4:34.2.72.0/22 ip4:34.2.78.0/23 ip4:34.2.80.0/23 ip4:34.2.82.0/23 ip4:34.2.84.0/24 ip4:34.2.86.0" "/23 ip4:34.2.88.0/23 ip4:34.2.90.0/23 ip4:34.2.92.0/23 ip4:34.2.85.0/24 ip4:34.2.94.0/23 ?all"
# dig -t txt icloud.com|grep spf1
icloud.com.		3586	IN	TXT	"v=spf1 ip4:17.41.0.0/16 ip4:17.58.0.0/16 ip4:17.142.0.0/15 ip4:17.57.155.0/24 ip4:17.57.156.0/24 ip4:144.178.36.0/24 ip4:144.178.38.0/24 ip4:112.19.199.64/29 ip4:112.19.242.64/29 ip4:222.73.195.64/29 ip4:157.255.1.64/29" " ip4:106.39.212.64/29 ip4:123.126.78.64/29 ip4:183.240.219.64/29 ip4:39.156.163.64/29 ip4:57.103.64.0/18" " ip6:2a01:b747:3000:200::/56 ip6:2a01:b747:3001:200::/56 ip6:2a01:b747:3002:200::/56 ip6:2a01:b747:3003:200::/56 ip6:2a01:b747:3004:200::/56 ip6:2a01:b747:3005:200::/56 ip6:2a01:b747:3006:200::/56 ~all"

In most IM systems there is a strong connection between people who communicate. If I send you two direct messages they will appear in the same room, and if someone else tries forging messages from me (EG by replacing the ‘c’ and ‘e’ letters in my address with Cyrillic letters that look like them or by mis-spelling my name) a separate room will be created and it will be obvious that something unexpected is happening. Protecting against the same attacks in email requires the user carefully reading the message, given that it’s not uncommon for someone to start a message to me with “Hi Russel” (being unable to correctly copy my name from the To: field of the message they are writing) it’s obvious that any security measure relying on such careful reading will fail.

The IM protections against casual forgery also apply to rooms with multiple users, a new user can join a room for the purpose of spamming but they can’t send a casual message impersonating a member of the room. A user can join a Matrix room I’m in with the name “Russell” from another server but the potential for confusion will be minimised by a message notifying everyone that another Russell has joined the room and the list of users will show two Russells. For email the protections against forgery when sending to a list server are no different than those when sending to an individual directly – which means very weak protections.

Authenticating the conversation context once as done with IM is easier and more reliable than authenticating each message independently.

Is Email Sucking the Main Technical Difference?

It seems that the problems with forgery, spam, and general confusion when using email are a large part of the difference between email and IM.

But in terms of technical issues the fact that email has significantly more users (if only because you need an email account to sign up for an IM system) is a major difference.

Internet email is currently a universal system (apart from when it breaks from spam) and it has historically been used to gateway to other email systems like Fidonet, Uucp, and others. The lack of tight connection between parties that exchange messages in email makes it easier to bridge between protocols but harder to authenticate communication.

Most of the problems with Internet email are not problems for everyone at all times, they are technical trade-offs that work well for some situations and for some times. Unfortunately many of those trade-offs are for things that worked well 25+ years ago.

The GUI

From a user perspective there doesn’t have to be a great difference between email and IM. Email is usually delivered quickly enough to be in the same range as IM. The differences in layout between IM client software and email client software is cosmetic, someone could write an email client that organises messages in the same way as Slack or another popular IM system such that the less technical users wouldn’t necessarily know the difference.

The significant difference in the GUI for email and IM software was a design choice.

Conversation Organisation

The most significant difference in the operation of email and IM at the transport level is the establishment of connections in IM. Another difference is the fact that there are no standards implemented for the common IM implementations to interoperate which is an issue of big corporations creating IM systems and deliberately making them incompatible.

The methods for managing email need to be improved. Having an “inbox” that’s an unsorted mess of mail isn’t useful if you want to track one discussion, breaking it out into different sub folders for common senders (similar to IM folders for DMs) as a standard feature without having to setup rules for each sender would be nice. Someone could design an email program with multiple layouts, one being the traditional form (which seems to be copied from Eudora [3]) and one with the inbox (or other folders) split up into conversations. There are email clients that support managing email threads which can be handy in some situations but often isn’t the best option for quickly responding to messages that arrived recently.

Archiving

Most IM systems have no method for selectively archiving messages, there’s a request open for a bookmark function in Matrix and there’s nothing stopping a user from manually copying a message. But there’s nothing like the convenient ability to move email to an archive folder in most IM systems.

Without good archiving IM is a transient medium. This is OK for conversations but not good for determining the solutions to technical problems unless there is a Wiki or other result which can be used without relying on archives.

Composing Messages

In a modern email client when sending a message it prompts you for things that it considers complete, so if you don’t enter a Subject or have the word “attached” in the message body but no file is attached to the message then it will prompt you to confirm that you aren’t making a mistake. In an IM client the default is usually that pressing ENTER sends the message so every paragraph is a new message. IM clients are programmed to encourage lots of short messages while email clients are programmed to encourage more complete messages.

Social Issues

Quality

The way people think about IM and email is very different, as one example there was never a need for a site like nohello.net for email.

The idea that it’s acceptable to use even lower quality writing in IM than people tend to use in email seems to be a major difference between the communication systems.

It can be a good thing to have a chatty environment with messages that are regarded as transient for socialising, but that doesn’t seem ideal for business use.

Ownership

Email is generally regarded as being comparable to physical letters. It is illegal and widely considered to be socially wrong to steal a letter from someone’s letterbox if you regret sending it. In email the only unsend function I’m aware of is that in Microsoft software which is documented to only work within the same organisation, and that only works if the recipient hasn’t read the message. The message is considered to be owned by the recipient.

But for IM it’s a widely supported and socially acceptable function to delete or edit messages that have been sent. The message is regarded as permanently the property of the sender.

What Should We Do?

Community Creators

When creating a community (and I use this in the broadest sense including companies) you should consider what types of communication will work well.

When I started the Flounder group [4] I made a deliberate decision that non-free communication systems go against the aim of the group, I started it with a mailing list and then created a Matrix room which became very popular. Now the list hardly gets any use. It seems that most of the communication in the group is fairly informal and works better with IM.

Does it make sense to use both?

Should IM systems be supplemented with other systems that facilitate more detail such as a Wiki or a Lemmy room/instance [5] to cover the lack of long form communication? I have created a Lemmy room for Flounder but it hasn’t got much interest so far.

It seems that almost no-one makes a strategic decision about such issues.

Software Developers

It would be good to have the same options for archiving IM as there are for email. Also some options to encourage quality in IM communication similar to the way email clients want confirmation before sending messages without a subject or that might be missing an attachment.

It would also be good to have better options for managing conversations in email. The Inbox as currently used is good for some things but a button to switch between that and a conversation view would be good. There are email clients that allow selecting message sort order and aggregation (kmail has a good selection of options) but they are designed for choosing a single setup that you like not between multiple views based on the task you are doing.

It would be good to have links between different communication systems, if users had the option of putting their email address in their IM profile it would make things much easier. Having entirely separate systems for email and IM isn’t good for users.

Users

The overall communications infrastructure could be improved if more people made tactical decisions about where and how to communicate. Keep the long messages to email and the chatty things to IM. Also for IM just do the communication not start with “hello”. To discourage wasting time I generally don’t reply to messages that just say “hello” unless it’s the first ever IM from someone.

Conclusion

A large part of the inefficiencies in electronic communication are due to platforms and usage patterns evolving with little strategic thought. The only apparent strategic thought is coming from corporations that provide IM services and have customer lock in at the core of their strategies.

Free software developers have done great work in developing software to solve tactical problems but the strategies of large scale communications aren’t being addressed.

Email is loosely coupled and universal while IM is tightly coupled, authenticated, and often siloed. This makes email a good option for initial contact but a risk for ongoing discussions.

There is no great solution to these issues as they are largely a problem due to the installed user base. But I think we can mitigate things with some GUI design changes and strategic planning of communication.