TCB13

TCB13 , 5 days ago

Innovation and privacy go hand in hand here at Mozilla

As well as profits and corporate interests.

People speak very good thing about Firefox but they like to hide and avoid the shady stuff. Let me give you the un-cesored version of what Firefox really is. Firefox is better than most, no double there, but at the same time they do have some shady finances and they also do stuff like adding unique IDs to each installation.

Firefox does is a LOT of calling home. Just fire Wireshark alongside it and see how much calling home and even calling 3rd parties it does. From basic ocsp requests to calling Firefox servers and a 3rd party company that does analytics they do it all, even after disabling most stuff in Settings and config like the OP did.

I know other browsers do it as well, except for Ungoogled and because of that I’m sticking with it. I would like to avoid programs that need no snitch whenever I open them. ungoogled-chromium + ublock origin + decentraleyes + clearurls and a few others.

Now you’re free to go ahead and downvote this post as much as you would like. I’m sorry for the trouble and mental break down I may have caused by the sudden realization that Firefox isn’t as good and private after all.

TCB13 , 5 days ago

Interesting… I wasn’t aware of ClearURLs for uBo. How good is that? Does it really filer all tracking elements like clear URLs does?

TCB13 , 5 days ago

I’ll have to test it. Better to have one less extension.

TCB13 , 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

Yes, yet telegram isn't a piece of shit of an app that runs slowly on every device, can't sync messages because "something went wrong" and doesn't depend on electron to run. Also, not funded by the CIA.

TCB13 , 5 days ago

Okay that’s fair, even if remove that and assume they hold zero influence / there are no cleaver backdoors Signal is still not good when it comes to performance and reliability.

TCB13 , 6 days ago

And here I was under the impression that using USB storage for anything else than installing operating systems was a thing of the past.

TCB13 , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

SMB (NAS), Syncthing, FileBrowser, snapdrop.net, email and sometimes public cloud services...

TCB13 , 6 days ago

And rEFInd, GParted Live... SystemRescueCd.

TCB13 , 6 days ago

Yes, that's true but I'm no longer doing that. Everything sync to the NAS using Syncthing that in turn is set with file versioning and weekly snapshots.

TCB13 , 7 days ago

Yes there is, in most countries you can first submit your code to the intelectual property office and then pay someone to audit it.

TCB13 , 7 days ago

Via the government ID system, the state exerts a monopoly on identity and an obsession with tracking people from “birth certificate” to “death certificate”. Disproportionate KYC regulations actively exclude people without government-issued ID from necessary services, including jobs, housing and healthcare and even everyday things like online shopping, receiving mail, buying a sim card, doing volunteer work, taking classes, or visiting the gym or library.

The author must be American... it is a given an accepted fact** across Europe that you're required to carry around and show if requested by authorities your govt id. **Nobody consider this a big deal, and yes, it is obvious that if you don't produce it then you won't be able to get a job as registering for a job requires the company to enter both your tax ID number and your social security number in at least one govt platform so they can pay your and retain the required amount for taxes and social security you can can later have a retirement...

Americans like to play very loose with identities and then you get tax frauds, identity theft and ultimately SIM swapping attacks that are almost zero in Europe because every single mobile carrier will require your govt id to buy a SIM card in the first place and will also require it if you need a new one.

In an ideal world, people would be judged on their actions and intent, rather than on circumstances of birth and decisions of bureaucrats. For housing, only your ability to pay rent would be relevant. For a job, only your skills and work ethic would be relevant.

Yes... and how you're expecting to have a pension and prove you've worked x years and some place if you don't provide a govt id?

For healthcare, only your medical condition would be relevant (it would be against the Hippocratic Oath to deny medical treatment to people without ID, especially if they are paying out-of-pocket in cash).

Yes... and how are you expecting the hospital to keep a medical record that contains important information about your health and is required to provide you with decent healthcare without actually requiring a govt id / identification?

TCB13 , 7 days ago

Sounds like all you’re saying is Europe doesn’t respect personal privacy or the right to go about your life not being harassed by government officials when you’ve done nothing wrong.

I'm saying that yes, and also that you can't benefit from certain things like tax breaks, pensions and proper healthcare without identifying people.

TCB13 , 7 days ago

Hospitals used to track you by name and address, with no problem. They did for me for decades. Using a government ID number isn’t necessary, organizations just like exerting control.

Yes... and then you've those same hospital selling your data to insurance companies (or being owned by them) because that's mostly the way they've to keep track of people and have updated medical records across the country.

Meanwhile in Europe what you get is the govt manages your healthcare data and hospital simply access and update the data in a controlled and organized fashion by typing your social security number into a govt provided system. You, as patient, also get an SMS message asking for permission whenever they want to access information / do certain actions or just notifications of data access. Prescriptions use the same system, you walk out of a clinic / hospital without any papers, just go into a pharmacy and they can pull what's prescribed to you.

And no, in the US you don’t need to have ID to go anywhere. You can drive from California to Maine never having to show an ID - why should you?

Well I can drive across multiple countries in Europe using highways without ever stopping or showing IDs... however if some police officer appears and asks for it I'm required to show it by law.

Also, your social security number is not to be used as an ID - states so right on the card. Let’s think about the implications of that statement, vs what is occurring today.

Yes, because the US doesn't have the concept of a citizen ID / identity card and people are identified by stuff like a social security number or a driving license (lol)... there's almost no standardization when it comes to identifying people in the US (especially across states) and social security shouldn't be used to identify people mostly because in the US there's no useful central database thus those numbers might not be correct, unique etc.

In Europe countries have way more autonomy and sovereignty than any US state yet there's a cross-border framework for identifying people. Every country has it's own citizen card that follows certain rules, usually includes a single (or multiple) numbers that are used as citizen ID, social security ID for taxes. Those cards are also required to contain a chip (smartcard), allowing for the secure digital identification and authentication as well as the digital signatures - you can login into any govt service with your card a PIN and/or sign contracts with it for instance. Some people such as lawyers, doctors and accountants are even required by law to sign documents with those cards instead of handwriting because forging signatures is doable while forging a X.509 digital signature isn't possible.

TCB13 , 7 days ago

In the case of US gov., they’ve been caught repeatedly selling taxpayer info for money. THAT is the problem.

Yes, this is a problem but I don't think that you can fix it by making it harder to identify people... Because that also increases identity theft, general criminal behavior, make you unable exert other rights etc.

TCB13 , 7 days ago

Yes, a “non shitty verification system” like what EU countries do. Want to validate your identity? Sure show your ID card with a photo and smart card, insert into a smart card reader and the person can attest your identity against the info there. Same goes for using those cards to make signature forging a thing of the past.

TCB13 , 7 days ago

If you require KYC for buying and changing cards then SIM swapping becomes impossible as nobody can get a new SIM card with your phone number by social engineering the carrier.

TCB13 , 7 days ago

Yes, but those things need to have procedures and employee authentication. If someone employee is found to be accepting bribes for SIM swaps then it should be fired on the spot and hold legally liable for all the damages - you can easily add this into a work contract. If a carrier doesn’t do this and doesn’t log those kinds operations then it’s just poor management and people shouldn’t buy services from it.

TCB13 , 9 days ago

Excellent explanation, however, technically it does not constitute an "odd spot." Rather, it represents a "100% acceptable and evident position" as it brings benefits to all stakeholders, from accounting to the CEO. Moreover, it is noteworthy that investing in services or leasing arrangements increases expenditure, resulting in reduced tax liabilities due to lower reported profits. Compounding this, the prevailing high turnover rate among CEOs diminishes incentives for making significant long-term investments.

In certain instances, there is also plain corruption. This occurs when a supplier offering services such as computer and server leasing or software, as well as company car rentals, is owned by a friend or family member of a C-level executive.

TCB13 , 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

Some might say that.

TCB13 , 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

“This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally. This should not have happened.

I don't believe this is what that rare, what I believe is that this was the fist time it happened to a company with enough exposure to actually have in impact and reach the media.

Either way Google's image won't ever recover from this and they just lost what small credibility they had on the cloud space and won't be even considered again by any institution in the financial market - you know the people with the big money - and there's no coming back from this.

TCB13 , 8 days ago

Thank you for confirming my suspicions. :)

TCB13 , 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

And then I am the one exaggerating... I'll say it again, Proton is just another company that managed to find clever ways to profit from a group of people who value things such as "privacy".

They're just a very large marketing effort with little to nothing to show but everyone is convinced they're actually protecting users while they keep pushing proprietary / half open and non standard stuff as solutions for problems already solved with truly open tools, standards and protocols.

TCB13 , 9 days ago

now, imagine if this user were using Gmail instead of Proton.

Now imagine if the user was using Gmail + PGP... same end result. Proton delivered no extra value whatsoever.

TCB13 , 12 days ago

With great power...

TCB13 , 13 days ago

This is a very cool project, but it would be cool to see it all in JS / client side instead of depending on a server-side Java powered component.

TCB13 , 14 days ago

The guys who decided to block GrapheneOS for no reason and don't provide reasonable explanations nor fix the issue.. yeah right.

TCB13 , 14 days ago

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/112378169615030832

TCB13 , 14 days ago

You will never get the same font rendering on Linux as on Windows as Windows font rendering (ClearType) is very strange, complicated and covered by patents.

Font rendering is also kind of a subjective thing. To anyone who is used macOS, windows font rendering looks wrong as well. Apple's font rendering renders fonts much closer to how they would look printed out. Windows tries to increase readability by reducing blurriness and aligning everything perfectly with pixels, but it does this at the expense of accuracy.

Linux's font rendering tends to be a bit behind, but is likely to be more similar to macOS than to Windows rendering as time goes forward. The fonts themselves are often made available by Microsoft for using on different systems, it's just the rendering that is different.

For me, on my screens just by installing Segoe UI and tweaking the hinting / antialiasing under GNOME settings makes it really close to what Windows delivers. The default Ubuntu font, Cantarell and Sans don't seem to be very good fonts for a great rendering experience.

The following links may be of interest to you:

• https://gist.github.com/sorenvonsarvort/fa6c5341403bf306e23034a1a1a9111b
• https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/06/12/font-smoothing-anti-aliasing-and-sub-pixel-rendering/
• https://github.com/mrbvrz/segoe-ui-linux

TCB13 , 15 days ago

but never really thought to use it in my home network

Because you don't need it. OPNsense and pfSense may make sense in some cases however you're running a small network and you most likely don't require those. OpenWRT will provide you with a much cleaner open-source experience and also allow for all the customization you would like. Another great advantage of OpenWRT you've the ability to install 3rd party stuff in your router, you may even use qemu to virtualize stuff like your Pi-Hole on it or simply run docker containers.

TCB13 , 15 days ago

Yes, this mostly works as a managed DNS solution for enterprise networks that actually does what people in large organizations need and solves a ton of issues.

TCB13 , 16 days ago

Finally someone going for the right approch with AI.

TCB13 , 16 days ago

Yes, it is very good. It's great to use perpetually half made software.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6daef459-bcc7-4460-9a2f-58a712263e80.png
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a2d4ffce-17d6-46e2-b79f-edb96c226ddb.png
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/ffc1ea5d-79b0-4d10-a580-2a2d93ef6bc4.png
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/157ccb7b-8a25-4898-b148-58d0de650490.png
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c3c8ea44-b287-42be-9482-12edc895f33b.png
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c998130b-5396-4514-97f8-01b4dd099f4d.png

TCB13 , 16 days ago

The point is that every single feature they try to add to it ends up as yet another buggy thing that never gets fixed. They should focus on making the core things works decently instead of adding new features. After all this time they didn’t get the sync to be as reliable as Syncthing, why would they venture into webmail’s and whatnot ?

TCB13 , 15 days ago

They improved it? You can’t even add a bullet list. No way to have a full screen typing experience. It’s slow like no other and basic formatting tools are already hidden. Is that what you call improvements?

TCB13 , 19 days ago (edited 19 days ago)

Well... Poettering will eventually work his way up to browser engines and then we'll get something efficient... Here's the announcement:

"There's a new component in systemd, called "engined". Or actually, it's not a new component, it's actually the long existing "WebKit" engine now done properly. The engine is also a lot more fun to use than "WebKit" or "Blink" because you can finally have hundreds of tabs open in your browser without running out of RAM.

Coming soon in Coming for systemd 981.

TCB13 , 21 days ago

Hard drive stocks are currently a mess. I don't get it, even Amazon has low stocks on everything be it small or large drives.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8773b7d4-a3e5-4a97-bc72-bc4be1080bf8.png

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9cc6850e-934e-40fa-98fe-77a2414a7d15.png

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e84d0292-7279-4dde-a974-5c7d77f2ca34.png

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c5dfe58d-55c6-473f-bb81-c81112f7c8ba.png

Local supplier increased prices to ridiculous values and still doesn't have the numbers. Anyone knows what's going on?

TCB13 , 21 days ago

With Amazon if you have prime shipping or next day delivery (whatever they call it) enabled

I don't have those...

TCB13 , 21 days ago

Yes, it looks a lot like artificial stock limitations to drive prices up.

TCB13 , 22 days ago

Yes, they're friends if the open-source projects are designed / made in a way that makes the "hyper-cloud" profit more. What BS of an article.

Those "hyper-cloud" providers (and SaaS providers in general) keep increasing profits by reconfiguring the entire development industry in a way that favors the sell of their services and takes away all the required knowledge developers used to have when it came to developing and deploying solutions. Companies such as Microsoft and GitHub are all about re-creating and reconfiguring the way people make software so everyone will be hostage of their platforms. We now have a generation of developers that doesn’t understand the basic of their tech stack, about networking, about DNS, about how to deploy a simple thing into a server that doesn’t use some orchestration with service x or isn’t a 3rd party cloud xyz deploy-from-github service.

Consulting companies who make software for others also benefit from this “reconfiguration” as they are able to hire more junior or less competent developers and transfer the complexities to those cloud services. The “experts” who work in consulting companies are part of this as they usually don’t even know how to do things without the property solutions. Let me give you an example, once I had to work with E&Y, one of those big consulting companies, and I realized some awkward things while having conversations with both low level employees and partners / middle management, they weren’t aware that there are alternatives most of the time. A manager of a digital transformation and cloud solutions team that started his career E&Y, wasn’t aware that there was open-source alternatives to Google Workplace and Microsoft 365 for e-mail. I probed a TON around that and the guy, a software engineer with an university degree, didn’t even know that was Postfix was and the history of email.

All those new technologies keep pushing this “develop and deploy” quickly and commoditizing development - it’s a negative feedback loop that never ends. Yes I say commoditizing development because if you look at it those techs only make it easier for the entry level developer and companies instead of hiring developers for their knowledge and ability to develop they’re just hiring “cheap monkeys” that are able to configure those technologies and cloud platforms to deliver something. At the end of the they the business of those cloud companies is transforming developer knowledge into products/services that companies can buy with a click.

TCB13 , 21 days ago (edited 21 days ago)

I've a very bad experience with GNOME boxes, both VMware and VirtualBox seem to outperform the thing and work better (drag and drop and resolution scaling, actual GPU acceleration).

TCB13 , 21 days ago

+1 here, intel on laptop.

TCB13 , 22 days ago

and there are plenty of extensions to add them back if you (for some ungodly reason) want them

All the extensions are plagued by the same issue they had before. Drag and drop from apps never working properly, the icon grid behaves incorrectly sometimes and other cosmetic glitches.

TCB13 , 22 days ago (edited 22 days ago)

It was always an unfinished project because no one gave a flying

No, I didn't misunderstood, I know it was yet another GNOME unfinished project. Both the native thing and the extensions always had/have the same problems - drag and drop from apps never working properly, the icon grid behaves incorrectly sometimes and other cosmetic glitches.

for anything that was of zero value.

Now this is the thing, desktop icons are basic DE functionality and even Apple - the guys that actually know how to design anything - agree they should be there... at least with an option to turn them ON/OFF. The removal of desktop icons was simply the "GNOME vision" being used as an excuse not the fix something that was hard to fix.

TCB13 , 22 days ago

You clearly never used those extensions.

TCB13 , 22 days ago

-- commented a couple of laughing faces in all good spirits // post removed "rule 2".

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/5e561fa4-f9df-47d5-bfab-08d367bdaea5.png

lol

TCB13 , 22 days ago

The funny thing is that you can't prove me wrong there, apparently not even provide valid arguments, just add a pile of ramblings and insults.

TCB13 , 22 days ago

And right now millions of people do and I don’t see widespread issues.

It's not a widespread issue, it's something with the desktop icon extensions and the original implementation. In both cases the drag and drop from/to apps never worked fine.

TCB13 , 20 days ago

You've to set BOTH things (-B and -S) with reasonable values in order for it to work.