Reminder: WLUG Meeting Feb 12th, 2026: Topic: DNS Interception.
Hey Everybody, We've got a meeting! Date/Time: February 12th, 2026 @ 7PM Location: Technocopia, 44 Portland St. Worcester MA Virtual Location: https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA Topic: DNS Interception. Speaker: Steve Thibault At every turn, companies are looking for ways to monetize data. It should be no surprise that DNS is one of these. Recently a fellow WLUG member Steve Thibault discovered that their upstream provider was intercepting his DNS queries and worked to fight against this. Steve is going to tell us his story of how he discovered what his provider was doing and what he did to foil their prying eyes. As usual, after the meeting we'll head out for dinner and keep the conversation going! Thanks, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".
Hi all, A bunch of us are also chatting on signal (look in the email archives for a link to join!) and I feel like we're leaving the email forum users behind. And we need to keep the WLUG community working together and sharing together, no matter what their systems or resources are. I found this interesting article on replacing discord with something new. https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/ And I thought we as a group show evaluate some of these options as well. In order of requirements I think: - needs to be open - WLUG needs to control the data - needs to have clients across a swath of systems. - web based - CLI / plain text based - Apple/Android clients. - searchable - able to organize a bit into channels. - announcements - regular chat - questions or howtos Right now I enjoy the signal chat and how free form it is, but since I can only read it on my phone because getting a CLI client working is a pain... and I don't want to install the signal app on my work laptop. So what do people think? John
I feel like the obvious winner in this case would be Matrix. Synapse can be a bit of a bear to set up, but you get E2EE in both 1:1 and Rooms, things can be organized into Spaces and you're able to freely join and leave any room or space that's irrelevant to you. Administration isn't all that bad when you're running a Private server, but it comes with costs in terms of the resources needed to store and serve the various components of Matrix. Would be curious if anyone has any proclivities toward another service with similar offerings. On Tuesday, February 10th, 2026 at 3:49 PM, John Stoffel via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
Hi all, A bunch of us are also chatting on signal (look in the email archives for a link to join!) and I feel like we're leaving the email forum users behind.
And we need to keep the WLUG community working together and sharing together, no matter what their systems or resources are.
I found this interesting article on replacing discord with something new.
https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/
And I thought we as a group show evaluate some of these options as well. In order of requirements I think:
- needs to be open - WLUG needs to control the data - needs to have clients across a swath of systems. - web based - CLI / plain text based - Apple/Android clients. - searchable - able to organize a bit into channels. - announcements - regular chat - questions or howtos
Right now I enjoy the signal chat and how free form it is, but since I can only read it on my phone because getting a CLI client working is a pain... and I don't want to install the signal app on my work laptop.
So what do people think?
John _______________________________________________ WLUG mailing list -- wlug@lists.wlug.org To unsubscribe send an email to wlug-leave@lists.wlug.org Create Account: https://wlug.mailman3.com/accounts/signup/ Change Settings: https://wlug.mailman3.com/postorius/lists/wlug.lists.wlug.org/ Web Forum/Archive: https://wlug.mailman3.com/hyperkitty/list/wlug@lists.wlug.org/message/XQDKNE...
"eroc1990" == eroc1990 <eroc1990@protonmail.com> writes:
Did you read the article i posted? Part of the issue is CSAM being pushed into matrix servers and the management was hard to make work. But maybe that's gotten better and if we ran our own server it wouldn't be a problem? Something to talk about for sure on thursday. I'm not up on these tools at all, but I do want to make sure that email chats and signal chats are shared widely as possible. And one of the choices I failed to list is: - instant messages (signal) - email threads. Those are two aspects. When I got home sunday and found 130+ messages in signal to catch up on, it was pretty funny. But did I really need to read them all? Maybe. Did I enjoy it? Enventually once I read them. But I like the mailing list and how I don't need to be watching it constantly, nor do I get dinged with notifications. Whcih is both good and bad. LOL! John
I feel like the obvious winner in this case would be Matrix. Synapse can be a bit of a bear to set up, but you get E2EE in both 1:1 and Rooms, things can be organized into Spaces and you're able to freely join and leave any room or space that's irrelevant to you. Administration isn't all that bad when you're running a Private server, but it comes with costs in terms of the resources needed to store and serve the various components of Matrix. Would be curious if anyone has any proclivities toward another service with similar offerings.
On Tuesday, February 10th, 2026 at 3:49 PM, John Stoffel via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
Hi all, A bunch of us are also chatting on signal (look in the email archives for a link to join!) and I feel like we're leaving the email forum users behind.
And we need to keep the WLUG community working together and sharing together, no matter what their systems or resources are.
I found this interesting article on replacing discord with something new.
https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/
And I thought we as a group show evaluate some of these options as well. In order of requirements I think:
- needs to be open - WLUG needs to control the data - needs to have clients across a swath of systems. - web based - CLI / plain text based - Apple/Android clients. - searchable - able to organize a bit into channels. - announcements - regular chat - questions or howtos
Right now I enjoy the signal chat and how free form it is, but since I can only read it on my phone because getting a CLI client working is a pain... and I don't want to install the signal app on my work laptop.
So what do people think?
John _______________________________________________ WLUG mailing list -- wlug@lists.wlug.org To unsubscribe send an email to wlug-leave@lists.wlug.org Create Account: https://wlug.mailman3.com/accounts/signup/ Change Settings: https://wlug.mailman3.com/postorius/lists/wlug.lists.wlug.org/ Web Forum/Archive: https://wlug.mailman3.com/hyperkitty/list/wlug@lists.wlug.org/message/XQDKNE...
Signal is too much--I have thousands of unread messages, most of which were sent by 2 people. Signal is for real-time conversations (like IRC), not discussions to be read at leisure (like email lists or forums). Fedora uses Discourse (not Discord). Maybe that's worth investigating? I've been mostly able to live with its email integration. "https://www.discourse.org/about Open source at heart Discourse has been open source since 2013, with our full codebase on GitHub. Your community data is never locked into a proprietary system; you can self-host, migrate away if your needs change, or customize the platform in ways closed software won't allow. Hundreds of developers have contributed security patches, accessibility improvements, and new features over the years. It's how we believe community software should be built." On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 05:20:16PM -0500, John Stoffel via WLUG wrote:
"eroc1990" == eroc1990 <eroc1990@protonmail.com> writes:
Did you read the article i posted? Part of the issue is CSAM being pushed into matrix servers and the management was hard to make work. But maybe that's gotten better and if we ran our own server it wouldn't be a problem?
Something to talk about for sure on thursday. I'm not up on these tools at all, but I do want to make sure that email chats and signal chats are shared widely as possible.
And one of the choices I failed to list is:
- instant messages (signal) - email threads.
Those are two aspects. When I got home sunday and found 130+ messages in signal to catch up on, it was pretty funny. But did I really need to read them all? Maybe. Did I enjoy it? Enventually once I read them.
But I like the mailing list and how I don't need to be watching it constantly, nor do I get dinged with notifications. Whcih is both good and bad. LOL!
John
I feel like the obvious winner in this case would be Matrix. Synapse can be a bit of a bear to set up, but you get E2EE in both 1:1 and Rooms, things can be organized into Spaces and you're able to freely join and leave any room or space that's irrelevant to you. Administration isn't all that bad when you're running a Private server, but it comes with costs in terms of the resources needed to store and serve the various components of Matrix. Would be curious if anyone has any proclivities toward another service with similar offerings.
On Tuesday, February 10th, 2026 at 3:49 PM, John Stoffel via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
Hi all, A bunch of us are also chatting on signal (look in the email archives for a link to join!) and I feel like we're leaving the email forum users behind.
And we need to keep the WLUG community working together and sharing together, no matter what their systems or resources are.
I found this interesting article on replacing discord with something new.
https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/
And I thought we as a group show evaluate some of these options as well. In order of requirements I think:
- needs to be open - WLUG needs to control the data - needs to have clients across a swath of systems. - web based - CLI / plain text based - Apple/Android clients. - searchable - able to organize a bit into channels. - announcements - regular chat - questions or howtos
Right now I enjoy the signal chat and how free form it is, but since I can only read it on my phone because getting a CLI client working is a pain... and I don't want to install the signal app on my work laptop.
So what do people think?
I did. I've also witnessed these attacks first-hand on other spaces. It's only a problem for public servers because anyone can join. If your space and rooms are private, that attack vector closes. -------- Original Message -------- On Tuesday, 02/10/26 at 17:20 John Stoffel via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
"eroc1990" == eroc1990 <eroc1990@protonmail.com> writes:
Did you read the article i posted? Part of the issue is CSAM being pushed into matrix servers and the management was hard to make work. But maybe that's gotten better and if we ran our own server it wouldn't be a problem? Something to talk about for sure on thursday. I'm not up on these tools at all, but I do want to make sure that email chats and signal chats are shared widely as possible. And one of the choices I failed to list is: - instant messages (signal) - email threads. Those are two aspects. When I got home sunday and found 130+ messages in signal to catch up on, it was pretty funny. But did I really need to read them all? Maybe. Did I enjoy it? Enventually once I read them. But I like the mailing list and how I don't need to be watching it constantly, nor do I get dinged with notifications. Whcih is both good and bad. LOL! John
I feel like the obvious winner in this case would be Matrix. Synapse can be a bit of a bear to set up, but you get E2EE in both 1:1 and Rooms, things can be organized into Spaces and you're able to freely join and leave any room or space that's irrelevant to you. Administration isn't all that bad when you're running a Private server, but it comes with costs in terms of the resources needed to store and serve the various components of Matrix. Would be curious if anyone has any proclivities toward another service with similar offerings.
On Tuesday, February 10th, 2026 at 3:49 PM, John Stoffel via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
Hi all, A bunch of us are also chatting on signal (look in the email archives for a link to join!) and I feel like we're leaving the email forum users behind.
And we need to keep the WLUG community working together and sharing together, no matter what their systems or resources are.
I found this interesting article on replacing discord with something new.
https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/
And I thought we as a group show evaluate some of these options as well. In order of requirements I think:
- needs to be open - WLUG needs to control the data - needs to have clients across a swath of systems. - web based - CLI / plain text based - Apple/Android clients. - searchable - able to organize a bit into channels. - announcements - regular chat - questions or howtos
Right now I enjoy the signal chat and how free form it is, but since I can only read it on my phone because getting a CLI client working is a pain... and I don't want to install the signal app on my work laptop.
So what do people think?
John _______________________________________________ WLUG mailing list -- wlug@lists.wlug.org To unsubscribe send an email to wlug-leave@lists.wlug.org Create Account: https://wlug.mailman3.com/accounts/signup/ Change Settings: https://wlug.mailman3.com/postorius/lists/wlug.lists.wlug.org/ Web Forum/Archive: https://wlug.mailman3.com/hyperkitty/list/wlug@lists.wlug.org/message/XQDKNE...
WLUG mailing list -- wlug@lists.wlug.org To unsubscribe send an email to wlug-leave@lists.wlug.org Create Account: https://wlug.mailman3.com/accounts/signup/ Change Settings: https://wlug.mailman3.com/postorius/lists/wlug.lists.wlug.org/ Web Forum/Archive: https://wlug.mailman3.com/hyperkitty/list/wlug@lists.wlug.org/message/LCJ64A...
What about Mattermost? *"For a long time it seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. This perspective has helped me to see there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way. So treasure every moment you have and remember that time waits for no one."*- Souza On Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 7:05 PM eroc1990 via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
I did. I've also witnessed these attacks first-hand on other spaces. It's only a problem for public servers because anyone can join. If your space and rooms are private, that attack vector closes.
-------- Original Message -------- On Tuesday, 02/10/26 at 17:20 John Stoffel via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
"eroc1990" == eroc1990 <eroc1990@protonmail.com> writes:
Did you read the article i posted? Part of the issue is CSAM being pushed into matrix servers and the management was hard to make work. But maybe that's gotten better and if we ran our own server it wouldn't be a problem?
Something to talk about for sure on thursday. I'm not up on these tools at all, but I do want to make sure that email chats and signal chats are shared widely as possible.
And one of the choices I failed to list is:
- instant messages (signal) - email threads.
Those are two aspects. When I got home sunday and found 130+ messages in signal to catch up on, it was pretty funny. But did I really need to read them all? Maybe. Did I enjoy it? Enventually once I read them.
But I like the mailing list and how I don't need to be watching it constantly, nor do I get dinged with notifications. Whcih is both good and bad. LOL!
John
I feel like the obvious winner in this case would be Matrix. Synapse can be a bit of a bear to set up, but you get E2EE in both 1:1 and Rooms, things can be organized into Spaces and you're able to freely join and leave any room or space that's irrelevant to you. Administration isn't all that bad when you're running a Private server, but it comes with costs in terms of the resources needed to store and serve the various components of Matrix. Would be curious if anyone has any proclivities toward another service with similar offerings.
On Tuesday, February 10th, 2026 at 3:49 PM, John Stoffel via WLUG < wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
Hi all, A bunch of us are also chatting on signal (look in the email archives for a link to join!) and I feel like we're leaving the email forum users behind.
And we need to keep the WLUG community working together and sharing together, no matter what their systems or resources are.
I found this interesting article on replacing discord with something new.
https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/
And I thought we as a group show evaluate some of these options as well. In order of requirements I think:
- needs to be open - WLUG needs to control the data - needs to have clients across a swath of systems. - web based - CLI / plain text based - Apple/Android clients. - searchable - able to organize a bit into channels. - announcements - regular chat - questions or howtos
Right now I enjoy the signal chat and how free form it is, but since I can only read it on my phone because getting a CLI client working is a pain... and I don't want to install the signal app on my work laptop.
So what do people think?
John _______________________________________________ WLUG mailing list -- wlug@lists.wlug.org To unsubscribe send an email to wlug-leave@lists.wlug.org Create Account: https://wlug.mailman3.com/accounts/signup/ Change Settings:
https://wlug.mailman3.com/postorius/lists/wlug.lists.wlug.org/
Web Forum/Archive: https://wlug.mailman3.com/hyperkitty/list/wlug@lists.wlug.org/message/XQDKNE...
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John's point that we are leaving people out of the loop because they're not in the signal chat is a valid concern. Since I'm not paying for meetup.. I'd be down to clown to run a DO droplet that hosted a private *something* for us. I do like the real-time nature of signal, I feel it has given wlug the "community" thing that in the mailing lacks. For better or worse this feels like yelling into the ether instead of a conversation. We will definitely talk about this at the meeting tomorrow. I've long talked about running a zulip server.. maybe that's an option? Tim. On Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 9:33 PM Tracie Winslow <traciewinslow7@gmail.com> wrote:
What about Mattermost?
*"For a long time it seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. This perspective has helped me to see there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way. So treasure every moment you have and remember that time waits for no one."*- Souza
On Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 7:05 PM eroc1990 via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
I did. I've also witnessed these attacks first-hand on other spaces. It's only a problem for public servers because anyone can join. If your space and rooms are private, that attack vector closes.
-------- Original Message -------- On Tuesday, 02/10/26 at 17:20 John Stoffel via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
> "eroc1990" == eroc1990 <eroc1990@protonmail.com> writes:
Did you read the article i posted? Part of the issue is CSAM being pushed into matrix servers and the management was hard to make work. But maybe that's gotten better and if we ran our own server it wouldn't be a problem?
Something to talk about for sure on thursday. I'm not up on these tools at all, but I do want to make sure that email chats and signal chats are shared widely as possible.
And one of the choices I failed to list is:
- instant messages (signal) - email threads.
Those are two aspects. When I got home sunday and found 130+ messages in signal to catch up on, it was pretty funny. But did I really need to read them all? Maybe. Did I enjoy it? Enventually once I read them.
But I like the mailing list and how I don't need to be watching it constantly, nor do I get dinged with notifications. Whcih is both good and bad. LOL!
John
I feel like the obvious winner in this case would be Matrix. Synapse can be a bit of a bear to set up, but you get E2EE in both 1:1 and Rooms, things can be organized into Spaces and you're able to freely join and leave any room or space that's irrelevant to you. Administration isn't all that bad when you're running a Private server, but it comes with costs in terms of the resources needed to store and serve the various components of Matrix. Would be curious if anyone has any proclivities toward another service with similar offerings.
On Tuesday, February 10th, 2026 at 3:49 PM, John Stoffel via WLUG < wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
Hi all, A bunch of us are also chatting on signal (look in the email archives for a link to join!) and I feel like we're leaving the email forum users behind.
And we need to keep the WLUG community working together and sharing together, no matter what their systems or resources are.
I found this interesting article on replacing discord with something new.
https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/
And I thought we as a group show evaluate some of these options as well. In order of requirements I think:
- needs to be open - WLUG needs to control the data - needs to have clients across a swath of systems. - web based - CLI / plain text based - Apple/Android clients. - searchable - able to organize a bit into channels. - announcements - regular chat - questions or howtos
Right now I enjoy the signal chat and how free form it is, but since I can only read it on my phone because getting a CLI client working is a pain... and I don't want to install the signal app on my work laptop.
So what do people think?
John _______________________________________________ WLUG mailing list -- wlug@lists.wlug.org To unsubscribe send an email to wlug-leave@lists.wlug.org Create Account: https://wlug.mailman3.com/accounts/signup/ Change Settings:
https://wlug.mailman3.com/postorius/lists/wlug.lists.wlug.org/
Web Forum/Archive: https://wlug.mailman3.com/hyperkitty/list/wlug@lists.wlug.org/message/XQDKNE...
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participants (6)
-
Chuck Anderson -
eroc1990 -
John Stoffel -
steve＠patternsoft.net -
Tim Keller -
Tracie Winslow