Enlarge (credit: stockcam / Getty)

Snapchat’s parent company, Snap, yesterday suspended two apps that allowed users to send anonymous messages to other users on the platform. The move came in response to a lawsuit filed Monday against Snap and the two messaging apps.

The lawsuit seeks class-action status to represent all 92 million Snapchat users, and it demands that Snap ban both Yolo and LMK from its app store. The developers of both apps, the suit alleges, did not implement adequate safeguards against harassing and bullying behavior.

The suit was brought by Kristin Bride, the mother of Carson Bride, a 16-year-old who suffered from cyberbullying on the Yolo and LMK apps. Over half the messages he received on Yolo were “meant to humiliate him, often involving sexually explicit and disturbing content,” according to the lawsuit. After a particularly personal string of insults, 16-year-old Carson searched in vain for how to reveal the identity of his bullies. Just over two weeks later, he took his own life. His last search was “reveal Yolo username online.”

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Snapchat on an iPhone. (credit: Maurizio Pesce )

Social media company Snap (which runs Snapchat) and game development software company Unity have joined Facebook in warning their investors that Apple's imminent ad-tracking change will negatively impact their businesses.

As previously reported, Apple plans to use the next iOS update (iOS 14.5, due out in early spring) to implement a requirement that all apps on the platform gain user opt-in to track users with IDFA (ID for Advertisers) tags. IDFA tags are used to track what users do across multiple apps in order to target advertising more effectively.

Social media giant Facebook has told its own investors that the coming change to Apple's operating system could very negatively impact its advertising revenue, because this kind of tracking-based ad targeting is one of Facebook's main ingredients for success.

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Enlarge / You might draw a fairly similar schematic diagram to give someone a simplified idea of how a traditional Linux distribution is put together—but it wouldn't be as close to literal accuracy as this Ubuntu Core diagram is. (credit: Canonical )

Canonical released Ubuntu Core 20 today, which is now available for download. If you're already familiar with Ubuntu Core 20, the standout new feature is added device security with secure boot, full-disk encryption, and secure device recovery baked in. If you're not familiar with Ubuntu Core yet... read on!

The key difference between regular Ubuntu and Ubuntu Core is the underlying architecture of the system. Traditional Linux distributions rely mostly on traditional package systems— deb , in Ubuntu's case—while Ubuntu Core relies almost entirely on Canonical's relatively new snap package format.

Ubuntu Core also gets a full 10 years of support from Canonical, rather than the five years traditional Ubuntu LTS releases get. But it's a bit more difficult to get started with, since you need an Ubuntu SSO account to even log into a new Ubuntu Core installation in the first place.

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After months of work, Movim 0.15 is finally out!

This version was planned as a 0.14.2 but was finally retagged as a major release regarding the number of changes, improvements and new features introduced. This #release note will also sum up the changes introduced in the minor 0.14.1 version.

So what's new in Movim?

User features

Local nicknames

In the configuration panel you can now set a local nickname, this allows you to shorten the identifier you are using on your current pod and gives you a nice looking url for your blog (https://nl.movim.eu/?blog/edhelas%40movim.eu/ becomes https://nl.movim.eu/?blog/edhelas).

Chats reactions

In one-to-one chats and chatrooms you can add and remove #reactions to your contacts messages. A first implementation was using the Message Attaching XMPP extension. During the Lyon XMPP Sprint, the feature was refactored to implement the incoming XEP - Message Reactions. During this sprint we also worked with the #Dino and #Poezio developers to make the feature fully compatible with their clients.

Publication sharing

You can now easily share any article found in Movim inside a conversation by clicking on the send button just bellow the article.

This uses the References XMPP extension.

Snap!

Do you want to quickly snap a picture and directly send it to a friend in a discussion or in an article? The new #Snap feature allows you to do that from any devices. Switch between your different cameras, shoot and send. It's that easy!

The Android application has been updated as well to integrate this feature properly.

Small improvements

• You can now slide a one to one discussion to close it quickly, just like the Conversations client allows you to.
• Search navigation has been improved, there is no page reload anymore to open a new discussion from the Search panel.
• The Community page was fully redesigned to be snappier and propose contents that might interest you.
• The UI now handles small disconnections way better . The conversations are not fully reloaded anymore when the connection is brought back.
• In the configuration you can now define the Chat page as the default one to open when launching Movim, this is quite useful on mobile.

Fixes, fixes, many fixes

Lots of small things were fixed here and there.

• The chat notifications counter was fully refactored to prevent some counter issues, each message is now independently checked as read (or not) in the database
• The composing/paused chat state are now handled more properly in Movim. Those states are also displayed during chatrooms discussions. This fixes a 3 years old ticket.
• Websockets are now reconnected properly if the browser is doing some intensive throttling, this was especially the case on Chrome on mobile devices.

Architecture and technical changes

From ZeroMQ to Websockets

One of the biggest changes technically wise was the replacement of #ZeroMQ sockets with WebSockets. This technology was used internally for the inter-processes communications. In the end this replacement allows us to become independent from the php-zmq library without any noticeable performance impact.

This simplifies even more the deployment of Movim and helps with the packaging of the project.

New base web server directory

For the administrators, please notice that the main file, index.php is not at the root of the project anymore but in the public/ directory (as well as many other files). These small changes allow the Web server to expose only the public files without extra configuration. So please point your root repository to that public subfolder.

This change was about securing the basic setup by default .

SQLite support removed

The #SQLite support, introduced in the version 0.14, has been removed for now. We had lots of issues to maintain consistency and fix our migrations for that specific database.

Some work has been done on the Eloquent library to fix some of those migrations issues upstream but it is too early to have something sufficient to bring back SQLite support in Movim.

You can still fully use Movim with #MySQL and #PostgreSQL.

What's next?

Movim has now reached a stable state, both UX/UI wise as architecturally wise.

There is still a lot of improvements to do, especially regarding the integration between the social network part and the chat part. Plus, we are always interested to hear about new ideas or improvement suggestions!

For the 0.16 version we are planning to improve video-conferencing and bring it properly for the mobile devices. Some work is also planned to improve the Communities navigation.

We need your help

To continue developing and hosting our infrastructure and to support the project we would be really pleased to cover our monthly expenses, it's not much.

We already have a few hundreds users connected daily on our main servers. If each of them could give a few euros per month it would easily allow us to reach that goal.

You can help us by giving monthly on our official Patreon page or by using Paypal.