Visvanath Ratnaweera

For those who don't know what this is all about:

There is this technology called LoRa which makes tiny walkie-talkie like devices able to communicate over long distances on radio waves with very little energy (see Wikipedia). And the IoT branch has already produced cheap, capable hardware (see the video: Off-Grid Text Messaging with LoRa, T-Echo and Meshtastic).

These gadgets do what they claim: Connecting people in amateur radio style with very little resources and, most importantly, extending their reach by relaying the messages. Such "meshes" can span hundred kilometers or more if there are stations along the way.

Theoretically at least, since these devices run many days on small batteries, the network should function even if the power grid fails and (as a result) the cell service too fails. The practice needs to be proven though (or debunked). There is renewed interest among our students on this subject.  It is a mutli-disciplinary engineering problem and a complicated one. As such it is well suited for a series of student projects. The immediate problem we have is the number of devices - you can't simulate an emergency situation with only a couple of devices. That is why the call for help.

We are already way off-topic on Moodle forums. If you or anybody else want to donate devices, pl. contact me privately.

P.S. Proposed to the moderator to split the sub-thread at https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=470295#p1892951 from https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=470295#p1892938 and probably to be moved to the Lounge.

P.P.S. Even its ancestor post, https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=470295#p1892915, needs a thread of its own. I think, I sent a note to the moderator with the proposed subject line "A cluster of Raspberry Pi running Moodle 4.5 LTS, 5.0 and 5.1" yesterday.

Hi AL, hi everybody

Realized that I need to tell more about https://fosstodon.org/@EduNET_LK/115810448185293076 before a hardware donation campaign starts!

For us the major loss was the content in that ZBOX, configured as a Linux, web development and Moodle administration sandbox and presentation platform. A hardware person on site is testing right now whether the disk has survived. I might need one day to build it from scratch, only the past student work and sample solutions are gone. Few used laptops in the possession of students were lost. That's nothing compared to what they lost, the family ran away as water and mud flushed the house!

Coming back to EduNET work, the bottleneck is not hardware rather the human factor: people at all levels with enthusiasm, energy and are knowledgeable in IT, specially Open Source - a situation, which is not going to change overtime. AL's comment reminded me that RPi boards, starting from RPi 3, are always in big demand. Currently there is interest in LoRa devices, 433 MHz RF and ESP32 or NRF52832 based. Both at universities. At school level we can use simple Arduino kits for education. Our main aim at school level, Linux laptops on used hardware, is more demanding. We are trying to re-organize ourselves taking the cyclone as a chance. So the bottleneck there is our own capacity. We'll be happy to hear from the community, but don't expect an immediate big push.

https://social.chinwag.org/@mherbert/115825009007411252

Agentic AI is the catch-all term for AI-enabled systems that propose to complete more or less complex tasks on their own, without stopping to ask permission or consent. What could go wrong? These systems are being integrated directly into operating systems and applications, like web browsers. This move represents a fundamental paradigm shift, transforming them from relatively neutral resource managers into an active, goal-oriented infrastructure ultimately controlled by the companies that develop these systems, not by users or application developers. Systems like Microsoft's "Recall," which create a comprehensive "photographic memory" of all user activity, are marketed as productivity enhancers, but they function as OS-level surveillance and create significant privacy vulnerabilities. In the case of Recall, we’re talking about a centralized, high-value target for attackers that poses an existential threat to the privacy guarantees of meticulously engineered applications like Signal. This shift also fundamentally undermines personal agency, replacing individual choice and discovery with automated, opaque recommendations that can obscure commercial interests and erode individual autonomy.

This talk will review the immediate and serious danger that the rush to shove agents into our devices and digital lives poses to our fundamental right to privacy and our capacity for genuine personal agency. Drawing from Signal's analysis, it moves beyond outlining the problem to also present a "tourniquet" solution: looking at what we need to do now to ensure that privacy at the application layer isn’t eliminated, and what the hacker community can do to help. We will outline a path for ensuring developer agency, granular user control, radical transparency, and the role of adversarial research.

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/hub/en/event/detail/ai-agent-ai-spy (Recording linked at the bottom)

Going viral, 17 k views in 24 hours on YouTube!

More information and a question:

> select count(*) from mdl_question_versions where status='draft';
+----------+
| count(*) |
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| 888      |
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1 row in set (0.194 sec)

> select count(*) from mdl_question_versions where status='hidden';
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
| 68739    |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.196 sec)

Context Total  Visible Hidden 
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Total   583962  520218  63744

Out of which I expect 90% to be duplicates. Will the task remove_unused_questions remove them?