I agree that I applaud the move from SMS text to Signal. I am NOT saying the average person should be concerned with CIA spying. What I’m saying is that one should promote decentralized internet infrastructures that empower the individual over corrupt institutions, even though this threat model likely does not apply to you. XMPP is just as easy to use use as Signal.
If you use Signal messenger, you have to trust the Signal foundation, which uses Amazon’s AWS for the cloud. So you’re trusting CIA military contractors. I am NOT saying that Signal is a CIA tool. What I’m saying is that you are trusting and obeying a centralized authority, as opposed to being able to run code on your own server. And this contributes to the centralization of the internet and a loss of freedom.
It requires a phone number to log in. That already kills any hope for anonymity. I use it to message family and close friends, of which the fact that I’m messaging them is not surprising.
I think the commenter you’re replying to is supporting the point made further up. People aren’t using Signal for anonymity, because that’s not it’s advertised purpose. As we all (except the author of this article) know, its purpose is privacy.
Lol, privacy is definetely not what you’re getting with Signal. They know your entire connection graph, who you talk to, when and how much. They collect all of the phone numbers.
EDIT: It seems like people here don’t understand what privacy is. If I know when exactly you take a big shit on the toilet and where you do it, every single time, but I don’t know what it looks like when you are doing it, would that be a privacy concern for you?
The post office knows who I am, my address, and who sends mail to me. They even know who I send mail to, if I write my return sender details on the envelope. I am not anonymous.
But, if the person we use ciphers to encrypt our letters, and only the two of us can decrypt and read them, our communications can indeed be considered private.
There’s a fundamental difference.
Edit: to answer your crude (but funny) example, I have no expectation of anonymity when I walk into my toilet at home or the toilets at work. The very fact that I, as a man, walk into a stall rather than stand at the urinal, gives any of my colleagues washing their hands at the basin the reasonable confidence of knowing I am taking a shit.
The size of the shit, the faces I make, and the nature of the resulting product, however, are not know to anyone else except me. That’s the difference.
Okay, I get where you’re coming from. Signal is private enough for you, while I would feel more private if there is also no metadata about me.
For the toilet example, it’s more like that a foreign, unrelated person (like the Signal Foundation and by extension the government with a national security letter) knows about your shit-taking, not just family at home or colleagues who happen to be there. This would be a concern for me.
Yeah, I get it, but there’s just no way at all to ensure 100% total anonymity like you’re talking about, while also using a 3rd party carriage service of some sort (eg. mobile network; internet, etc).
We should go back to carrier pigeons with encrypted notes. That way, the sender and recipient “metadata” is only known to themselves (and the pigeons).
That’s why I’m using SimpleX Chat, there is no network-wide identity so no data can be collected. It’s a very clever architecture, actually exactly the carrier pidgeon scenario you describe, but in digital form. simplex.chat/#how-simplex-worksI’ve found my solution.
Not necessarily. You can use any server/pidgeon to send your message while your contact uses a different server to send. Also you can at any time change which servers you use and it is planned that the servers get rotated automatically in the future. There is no point in time where one pidgeon is responsible for multiple connections, you are using a bunch of pidgeons and swap them out all the time.
Sure, but everything is flawed. So we need to find the best solution that is least flawed. Signal is the best alternative to messaging apps that has the features most people want and most importantly people actually use it. It’s at a good intersection of useful and secure. If the article headline was “Evaluating security of Signal” it would be fine. But it’s basically “SIGNAL IS FLAWED! USE SOMETHING ELSE!”. That’s like when someone switches from Chrome to Firefox, which is objectively a better choice, and then they get told “Don’t use Firefox is BAD” and point them to Brave, and when Brave has a flaw they tell people to migrate again. So you get a minority of people using the bleeding edge apps that no sane person would want to spend the time to set up, and the majority just goes back to whatever is the easiest option, which would be Chrome, or in our example probably WhatsApp. It’s important to address concerns, but also to do it in a manner that is careful to not start a panic where one doesn’t need to exist.
I don’t like the idea of providers at all. I use SimpleX Chat, there are no identities or registration with a server. Thanks to clever design. Check out this comparison: github.com/simplex-chat/…/SIMPLEX.md#comparison-w…
I certainly agree there is cause for caution, as one should always exercise where trust is placed in such matters. But there are leaps of bad logic in that writeup, and the dog pile of FUD swirling around Signal feels nearly orchestrated.
Yeah, calling Signal’s founder’s politics confused and idiotic because he referred to China and Russia as authoritarian regimes doesn’t really make me trust this person and his biases.
That link you provided (which by the way is hosted on microsoft github in violation of his own principles) is very good! And repeats a lot of the same information from the simplified privacy site: simplifiedprivacy.com/signal-messenger-guide-to-a…
I am NOT saying the average person should be concerned with CIA spying. What I’m saying is that one should promote decentralized internet infrastructures that empower the individual over corrupt institutions, even though this threat model likely does not apply to you. XMPP is just as easy to use use as Signal.
If you use Signal messenger, you have to trust the Signal foundation, which uses Amazon’s AWS for the cloud. So you’re trusting CIA military contractors. I am NOT saying that Signal is a CIA tool. What I’m saying is that you are trusting and obeying a centralized authority, as opposed to being able to run code on your own server. And this contributes to the centralization of the internet and a loss of freedom.
You seem open minded, have you checked out SimpleX Chat yet? There you have no identity at all, so you don’t even have to register an account at some server. This gives much more autonomy and also has some privacy/security benefits. Check out this comparison: github.com/simplex-chat/…/SIMPLEX.md#comparison-w…
That headline misses the big problem. It’s not that Google was forced to give up search history data. If Google gets a warrant, they will comply. The real problem is that the justices acknowledged that the warrant was unconstitutional and permitted the evidence anyway. They claim the police “acted in good faith” while violating the constitution, which is a horrifying precedent.
If you’re thinking “alls well that ends well,” because they caught the arsonists who murdered a family of five, I can sympathize with that feeling, but consider that the murderer may have his conviction overturned on subsequent appeals.
The police obtained a warrant for everyone who searched for a thing from Google, and the search information was used against the accused in court. 14 states currently outlaw abortion, and there’s some cousin-fucking conservative prosecutor in Dipshit, Alabama, just salivating over the prospect of obtaining the IP addresses of every person looking up directions to clinics.
I wonder how many companies like Cambridge analytica or TPUSA just have access to these. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s some social engineering dark arts underground of pretending to be police and getting this data to study
Not long after Dobbs, someone posted a guide on r/WitchesVsPatriarchy on how to securely find* this information without opening yourself up to potential harm. Terrifying that that’s even a thing that needs to exist.
ISP provided networking routers are inherently garbage. They don’t want users messing with that, because your average user doesn’t even know what the fuck an ethernet cable is and will break everything by fucking around in it.
Run your own router and put theirs into modem only mode with routing and wifi disabled. If that’s not an option ask their tech support if you can buy your own DOCSIS/fiber modem (or whatever hardware you use) and return their hardware. If they also don’t allow that… well, switch or just suck it and deal with it while the ISP rubs their nipples some more.
In that case you totally don’t. But many ISPs only allow their own routers/modems or require some very specific abilities from 3rd-party routers usually only found on more high end (expensive) models. So sometimes the last resort is double NATing (which is fine for most users).
Probably, unless they have a static delegation or do prefix delegation properly, which if they did they probably don’t suck enough to require double NAT^ lol
^single NAT for IPv6, assuming they don’t NAT it themselves
Of course they have to configure the modem- they have to set it up right to talk to their own hardware. Itd be impossible to use otherwise.
The point is to insulate your actual LAN settings and router from the ISP so they can’t go fuck with it. This isn’t even a security thing - the ISP can and already is sniffing every packet you send - it’s just trying to maintain some semblance of usable control.
So I can’t disable wireless mode. This too is greyed out, and it also doesn’t let me disable wireless via the app. (When I try, it throws a popup that says “You must have at least one network.”
So is my best bet to get my own modem with router built in, or could I still connect a router to this, but never use the wifi connection through their equipment? I don’t have a lot of money, so I also want to be a bit mindful of cost.
Yes, get your own router, don’t use the app. If you’re technically inclined, the app will only restrict what you can do with the equipment. And with ISP owned equipment, they have api access to your equipment.
I deleted the app as soon as I got a normal router put in place and my network set up the way I want. I’m not sure why I even thought the app would do what I wanted, but the agent deliberately deceived me.
Fvck it, run your own router on top of that. Make a another local network and just connect it to the ISP Router, then connect all your devices to the new local. Voila.
Also run a VPN on the new router if you daisy-chain them.
So I will want a separate router vs. buying one that has it built in? I can use whatever router I want, right? That part doesn’t have to be from the list.
You are going to get more functionality if you buy separate devices. A combo router is going to give you less flexibility in the future. That is why you keep getting that recommendation.
Damn, you’re not wong! I’ve had this ISP at this address since 2019, and before that we had them at another address for 4 years. I could have probably bought my own modem and router several times over.
It is, and connecting the new router I got, I realize that what I have from the ISP is actually pretty substandard. I can’t wait until I can return it.
For real, dude. You can get a 2.5gbps home LAN setup these days for a few hundred dollars, and that’s going to be WAY better than the shit Comcast or whoever rents you. The only exception to that is if you’ve got fiber - I believe you’re locked into using their transceiver (because the tech is proprietary). But if you’re on traditional co-ax broadband, the world is your oyster.
Any combo modem router is typically trash and you NEED separate modem because if you get a combo you will be in the same situation. They will flash the combo unit with the same firmware wether you own it or not.
You will want an aris modem from there approved list and a good wireless router. When you swap out your modem you will need to call in so they can flash it with thier firmware (which is fine). You can then configure your router as needed.
I can't recommend a wireless router because I have a Unifi household and have been out of the consumer space for a while. I hear netgear nighthawk are still creame of the crop though.
Wow, so ISPs can usually flash custom firmware on a 3rd party router? I’m surprised that capability exists, although I can kinda see the rationale for why it does.
Can ISP’s really flash firmware to a 3rd party router? That’s wild. I’m not sure that’s happened to me before, and I’ve been forced to use Comcast/xfinity my whole adult life. I’ve had multiple Arris modems, and whenever I check their status page, it was always Arris branded, and stayed the same before and after hooking it up and registering it with the ISP.
I always assumed the rigamarole of registering a personal modem was simply a white listing process (give MAC address, receive internet). I’ll have to look more into it, I didn’t know there was anything else going on.
When I try, it throws a popup that says “You must have at least one network.”
Sounds like it might allow you to disable it after you plug your own router in. If not, customer service might be able to do it. Ask them to put it in modem only mode.
Some ISPs will not let you put the modem into a true bridged mode. I would try to disable as much on it as you can. As long as the traffic can pass through from the modem to your router that’s the important part.
I bought a refurbished cable modem for less than $30 off of amazon that's working well for me. I'd just go that route instead of using their equipment. Even if it breaks in a year, that's savings over renting ISP equipment.
That is literally fucked. There are some scenario’s where I can imagine an ISP wanting to force wireless on. a mesh network for their customers sounds like the most straightforward reason. if you cannot replace the router, faraday the shit out of it. put your own router behind the isp router and don’t forget to change the MAC address of the router (isp will probably block any 3rd party router macs on the network. seen it before)
The worst part that ISP’s do these days is have all their hardware broadcast “guest” networks that you can’t disable. They market it as a bonus since any of their own customers using their own apps can connect to any ISP-provided guest network anywhere to save mobile data, but it’s actually just a massive uncontrollable security hole.
That shit would get thrown in a metal cage and treated as a radioactive DMZ network-wise if I was forced to use it
My ISP is the dumb pipe my internet comes from, it’s bad enough that they inject bandwidth cap warnings into the raw HTML of webpages like some sort of adware virus, they can stay the fuck out of my local network
Only HTTP, they intercept any unencrypted page in flight and inject a giant banner at the top that won’t go away until you acknowledge it, no local application required
This is 100% legal in the US, and in fact, some small regional ISPs actually made money injecting actual ads into webpages, literal spyware
When I had Comcast, I had to call them and have them turn this stuff off for me, fwiw.
I’ve owned a TP-Link that frequently lost all my settings. I’ve owned two Netgears and they’ve been great. I’ve owned two Linksyses and they’ve been great. That’s just my experience.
I couldn’t even access the Netgear settings without creating a Netgear account, so I returned it. My friend who has a Netgear said this didn’t used to be the case, but I could not bypass that requirement.
Fun thought. I’d try wrapping their wifi router in a faraday cage of chicken wire, test that the signal isn’t going out with a nearby smartphone, then plug ethernet from their to my own wifi router.
I haven’t tried it but if it chicken wire has enough metal in it, it should work, in principle. I don’t get great reception in my chicken run wrapped in chicken wire, if that makes for a good sign.
There is an optical network terminal with an Ethernet port on it. The optical network terminal does not appear to do any routing, just conversion of the signal between the electrical and optical interfaces. An ordinary PC can be plugged directly into it, use DHCP to get its IP address, and that’s it.
I was supplied a router by the ISP as well. It’s spent the better part of the last decade gathering dust in a drawer.
I can’t speak to the all in one dream machine, though I’m sure it’s similar in capability to my UDM pro, which has been fairly solid for me and only really has had trouble when I induced it myself. It’s definitely much more complex and open than most home routers, and allows you to set every single thing you can think of, the drawback though is that it’s not as automated as some home routers and you need to know what you are setting more in depth when you step off the auto modes. Overall I’ve been very happy with my unifi setup. I also use Protect and I’m looking to set up Access too soon(ish).
If you’re on the techy side and want an all-in-one solution? Sure, if you plan on expanding within their ecosystem later. Unifi’s biggest benefit is the ecosystem, being able to manage everything from one place is nice.
I worked on one clients unifi setup and loved it. Immediately got the usg 4 pro, 24 port switch and 3 pro waps. Highly recommend for a prosumer setup.support can be whack, but lots of YouTube and forums. Meraki too pricey for home setup but the support is top tier for critical business.
My immediate reaction was the same. I don’t trust the NSA at all, but I’m certainly not going to trust anything this site says when it’s shilling the article as an NFT.
It means you get a little certificate.
That says you own the article.
But you can’t edit it.
But you can show it to your friends.
But not if the site is down.
But the resale is gonna be like, whoa~
Maybe $50 less than you paid for it.
But the sentimentality is worth it.
You should definitely get two.
I don’t think anything about NFTs inherently guarantees their payload is unique. As I understand it, that part is enforced by the exchange, if at all. And there’s nothing stopping you from putting the same payload up on a different exchange. The token itself would be unique, at least within the same chain, but who actually cares about that? :P
I might be nitpicking, but IMHO it is perfectly reasonable to read this as questioning whether the token itself is unique, which is how I read it. The idea of non-unique NFTs then made me write a short quip about it, that’s all.
Anecdotally, I’ve used Firefox, Waterfox, and Librewolf on PC, and none have been slow.
I’ve used Firefox, Firefox Beta, and Fennec on Android, and if anything they seem faster and easier to use than Chrome (and they actually tend to work like an actual internet browser).
I’m not saying these commenters are all Google sockpuppets, but maybe they’re parroting misinformation, or maybe they’re using an Apple OS iOS, where Firefox is basically Safari.
Yeah I’ve noticed the same thing. I’ve been deliberately trying to do a bit of Firefox advocacy for a while (cos I honestly believe increasing its userbase is our only chance to avoid google ruining the internet). But yes every time there’s a bunch of people confidently complaining about how bad/slow Firefox is and advocating for brave or chrome.
Initially I thought it was just a bit of historical baggage but it happens very consistently and aggressively so I’ve had the same thought.
Meanwhile, I’ve been using Firefox for ages and have never experienced the problems these people keep complaining about.
There was a brief time when Chrome ran better than Firefox on an old 512MB laptop I had, but Chrome has since become an infamous RAM hog. Firefox is the lightweight one now, and has been for quite a few years.
Worth mentioning that, as much as it pains me to back Apple, Safari is also a good alternative for those it's available for (at least in this regard). It's one of the only browsers other than Firefox not using Chromium. And WebKit, it's renderer, is a pretty badass project.
Blink and WebKit completely diverged in 2013 after the fork. That document is virtually identical to its 2012 version and is marked as outdated in several places.
Oh huh, TIL. I had always assumed they were all webkit just due to the amount of compatibility code I've had to implement in CSS with -webkit styles. It makes sense that a fork like Blink would be backwards compatible with those though
People seem to be unaware that Firefox on Android (not IOS unfortunately) has support for several useful extensions. Ad blocking is the obvious benefit, but I use a Text-to-speech extension every day.
I think Apple will have to, since they’re also going to have to allow sideloading. However, knowing Apple, they’ll probably wait right up until the deadline the EU has set before actually giving us what we want.
I think some people also just haven’t used Firefox in a while, and it’s gotten better since the last time they used it. I’ve never had issues on Firefox, however I only became a Firefox user a few years ago. Meanwhile my girlfriend insists it’s buggy and slow, but she hasn’t used it in many years.
I’ve noticed a lot of people not wanting to ever revisit older paradigms. Like when the Reddit protests started a lot of people were adament that going back to forum type software would be a disaster and I felt taken aback. I loved that shit. The only reason I saw to do that with Reddit instead of a dedicated forum was because Reddit already had users that could wander into your community and slowly onramp. Here on the fediverse we get the best of both worlds, but there are people who hate the idea that !news and !news don’t aggregate together even though they might actually be about completely different subject matter because “we don’t want to go back to the phpbb days”
Well y know what? Maybe there are parts of the phpbb days that were worthwhile and good. Maybe hosting dedicated servers that are specifically about something is a positive thing as it makes there be more people excited to host a small part of the internet that people can make use of. Maybe what we needed was the easier on ramping, not the centralizes forums.
I think it depends on the website. There are some websites where chrome will work better either because chrome works better with certain libraries/technologies or because the developers put more time into optimizing for chrome.
On the other hand Firefox might have less bloat around telemetry that gives it an advantage too.
If you want to online shop or research something to buy, or spend money in some way, Chrome and Google search is superior. If you are looking for information, news, anything not requiring payment, Firehox and duck duck go are the best
I’m going to have to strongly disagree here. Trying to research a potential purchase on Google or Bing will net you page after page of Amazaon Affiliate sites peddling junk. I’m into longboarding, and most of the results you’ll find trying to Google a decent longboard would result in wasting your money at best, severe injury or death at worst.
It’s not just longboards, either. I’ve noticed these promoted results trying to search PC parts, appliances, dog food, tools, and anything else you might be looking to buy.
There’s a reason people started appending searches with “reddit,” but honestly it’s better just to use a search engine that doesn’t net you these results, or ask somewhere else entirely like a community forum. Sadly, most people rely on results from search engines and will end up spending money on junk.
I’m also not sure why using Chrome would make online shopping easier. I literally make all my online purchases through either Firefox proper or Fennec, and I’ve never had a problem.
Oh absolutely true, and one would probably notice it more if one uses a lot of Google’s services (though Microsoft is even worse in my experience, with nerfing its services if you don’t use Edge), but this still doesn’t explain why just a normal user would proclaim Firefox is “slow as fuck” without anything to support this, and that’s what I’m seeing in nearly every thread that mentions Firefox.
Also slow compared to what ? I mostly think its just the UI that makes people think it’s slow. Cause I think most browsers load sites at an equal space, or prioritize different kind of caches.
This was true when Chrome first came up, they even made those ridiculous ads, which Opera (before they stopped developing their own engine) was ridiculing: https://youtu.be/zaT7thTxyq8
Firefox after they they rewrote their engine to be multithreaded (I think it was called project electron?) is faster than chrome that is currently very bloated.
What saddens me the most that, while there are ignorant people who don't know better and use what are they familiar with, there are also self proclaimed techno geeks, who are equally ignorant and don't seem to remember the times of Internet Explorer.
Tbf we’re in a new generation of techno geeks who weren’t around for a lot of things and lack the full context. I think about that every time a young person chides me for “stealing” from YouTubers or even Google itself by blocking ads.
Targeted ads that are also intrusive. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d even be too much aware of the issues surrounding advertising if they weren’t so hellbent on encroaching on the very usability of a site. When YouTube ran banner ads, I didn’t really bat an eye. It wasn’t until they inserted ads into the videos themselves that I took notice. On top of that, every news outlet started looking like those malware sites people warned you about in the 90s. In a way, I guess I’m thankful that ad agencies became so awful that we had no choice but to become concerned about their impact on our privacy. I can’t even imagine using the internet without an adblocker and alternate apps or frontends for the worst offenders.
I(31/m) have a buddy(25/m) who gives me shit for pirating stuff sometimes because he says I’m stealing from the creators. But I’m not because I wasn’t gonna pay for it in the first place 😂 I’m more than happy to pay for things and do all the time. I just cancelled my audible sub a couple days ago because I got an email that my credits were going to expire and I needed to use them soon. Like what? I paid you for those. So I just used them on the series I’m currently listening to and spent the rest of the night figuring out how to host my own audible 😂
I switched back and forth between Firefox and Chromium based browsers like Brave and Vivaldi. To be fair Firefox felt slow in comparison for a long time but that changed in the last few months. I think since about Firefox v114 I don't feel a difference anymore and that's why I'm using Firefox now. Best is to tell those people to try Firefox again because it recently became faster (in my experience).
I have suspected for a while it is astroturfing. Same as with GIMP and Libre Office where inevitably someone will trash the UI as it’s “soooo bad”. If you say a lie, and repeat it enough, people start to believe it.
Woah, hold on now. Gimp actually is unusablly bad. I say this as Linux Graphic Designer who would rather use Krita (anillustration software) to do photo edits.
I’m involved in open source software, and of the artists I’m aware of, most use GIMP, not Krita, because it has better features. Krita is a great option, but it doesn’t quite have the same features for producing quality art.
Also talking about GIMP, plenty of people have said "there's heaps of Photoshop alternatives" yet legit everything on Ubuntu I've has been buggy AF and feature poor. Like I get that FOSS software is hit and miss but this has been really rough
“Other people who have bad experience ces with something just be asteoturfing.”
Ivw consistently had an issue with Firefox that I described in a thread a few days ago that I can’t seem to identify or fix. Am I just not allowed to mention it?
Maybe their issue tracker is the best bet, or in a separate question thread about the issues. Raising it in every thread it comes up when people recommending it isn’t going to solve the issue or help anything, is it?
No, it won’t. I bring it up in this particular thread for 2 reasons.
I don’t like the insinuation that anyone who claims to have problems with Firefox must be bots. I don’t think that’s at all true, since I’ve run into multiple problems with the browser myself that I haven’t been able to solve.
I brought it up in the previous thread because I think that if people are considering switching, knowing what problems exist is useful. It isn’t meant to dissuade anyone, in fact I regularly recommend Firefox to my friends and family. But I don’t personally use it because of a pretty major problem, and I don’t think it’s bad to mention it when the topic comes up.
“I don’t like the insinuation that anyone who claims to have problems with Firefox must be bots.”
I did not say this, multiple people have interpreted it this way. It’s a little defensive. I said there is a targetted campaign against it where every time it is brought up it is trashed. You may be be a genuine person who is also trashing it, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t also a targetted campaign at play. I just find it hard to believe that some folk hate FOSS projects so much they have to smash it every time it’s brought up. Sounds exhausting.
There is a difference between “it’s great software, but i’ve notice a few issues” and “this project is trash”. The second is posted purely with the intent of trying to dissuade people from using it, and all they do is keep people using Chrome, which I think we can all agree has bigger issues.
Every time I introduce someone to LibreOffice I half expect them to hate it, and that I'll have to go through the alternative interfaces and try to make them accept it and potentially install OnlyOffice instead if that doesn't help.
Instead, I'm generally met with an "oh, this is nice", before they start typing away.
I get that some of the bigger nerds would prefer something different (I would personally love the power of LibreOffice inside a modern minimalist GTK app), but LibreOffice is working great for most users. Those passionate enough to see an issue with it probably prefer markdown or latex anyway.
I honestly prefer LibreOffice to what Microsoft Office has become.
When I went to grad school, I was told MS Office was required, so I purchased it, but turned out we just used basic word processing and a handful of simple presentations, so I ended up using LibreOffice for everything instead.
Same here. I found the Microsoft ribbon they introduced in 2007 to be a major anti pattern. It didn’t make things easier, it made things way harder. Our IT department tried to bust me for not using the official Microsoft software (outlook, excel, word, etc) so I outright uninstalled windows and put fedora on there. Granted, I was trying to do partitions and fucked it up, but whatever. The point is I wanted to get away from their “antivirus” spyware so I could use what worked for me. I got the idea when I saw the Dean of academics was using i3 as her window manager
I’m not, but it’s not like it’s an occasional thing. Every time it’s brought up, it’s trashed. Free software that does a better job than anything else free, and folk bash it. Either they like and are motivated by Adobe dominance, or they’re useful idiots.
It’s balanced to say “great program, but could do with a UI improvement”. It isn’t to say it’s unusable because of UI. I cannot imagine any free software advocate should be proud of taking that line.
We don’t need to praise the software specifically because it’s Open Source. We need good Open source Software of which there are plenty of great examples.
Blender, Krita, Libre Office, Audacity. These are great. Better than the paid competitors in a lot for ways.
Gimp and scribus are simply not. That should mean we start developing good FOSS software to fill that gap, as a collective.
Tenacity, not audacity. Audacity got took over by a company with questionable record and tried to add telemetry into it. Tenacity was the OS fork which stayed true to principles.
GIMP may not be your bag, but it’s highly used and many find it has much higher quality features than the alternatives. UI may not be popular, but it doesn’t prevent it being a solid bit of open source software.
Btw, what steps have you taken to improve open source graphics software? It’s easy to bash, it’s harder to learn and contribute.
Open source contributors > open source advocates > grateful open source users > almost everyone else > open source critics
Well, I guess your anecdotal evidence is as good as mine, because nobody in my design circle will touch the damn thing. Meanwhile Blender is the standard for 3d designers I know.
Blender is for models, not art. It’s different software. It’s great at what it does. Expecting that because one open source project can beat proprietary then all can is a pretty shallow view. A project relies on volunteers, sacrifice and funding.
You’re saying it’s bad because no one you know uses it doesn’t suggest no-one uses it, just you don’t know the users of it. Maybe your circle is as open minded to software as you are. Similar people surround themselves with each other. It says more about you than the software.
Linux on every rig, third parry clients for every service. K9 mail, graphene OS, Linux.
Every damn app and program outside of my banking is open source. I love open source. Gimp just simply sucks ass. Its why Gimp offends me so much. Its the one weak spot in my entire open source life.
Finally a voice of reason. I'm in the same boat. Linux everything, including any standalone products I can load it onto. I can count on one hand the number of non-linux programs I use. GIMP's interface simply sucks. They know that, they've been given feedback since 1995, they just don't care. @CrypticCoffee is in here acting like GIMP just needs some support from the community but the reality is that they've neglected decades of feedback and so they deserve what they get. If that's negative feedback, then so be it!
Blender's UI used to be a dumpsterfire too, right on part with GIMP in my opinion. They straight up redesigned that shit from the ground up and now it's an amazing and intuitive powerhouse program, and they're 7 years younger!
The fact that GIMP is 2d and blender is 3d works in gimp's favor if anything. 2D is a whole lot simpler, and blender goes into animation, mixing, audio, dozens of specialities.
TL;DR, GIMP has had decades to improve, they don't, and they deserve to reap what they sow, both positive and negative.
A wee bit of a difference in funding. There are alternatives to GIMP, not really as much for Blender. They cannot be compared. GIMP probably couldn’t afford a UI developer if they tried. You’re looking at least £3k pcm for someone who isn’t punishing themselves.
Do you want to tell me what sort of voodoo magic GIMP do to match the resources Blender get? Your opinions are based in feelings, not reality. You may hate GIMP, you may hate the UI, you may want the project to fail and take that mission as keyboard crusader, but it’s unfortunately just not a realistic position, but hey, your feelings can be unrealistic if they want to be. You can feel what you want. Some of us hate big corporations and injustice, others, it seems hate free software projects built by volunteers.
Krita gets ~4000 euros a month and their ui is beautiful, functional, streamlined, and dare I say on par with much, much larger offerings. Until recently Zbrush was a 1-time license purchase for years and years. Their software is incredibly powerful and their UI is well organized and feature rich, and their entire net worth is like $100k total...
I'm going to let you argue with the wall, because you'd rather talk feelings than make a coherent argument.
It’s a different tool. Krita is for painting. GIMP is for image manipulation.
I’m assuming you’re not a professional programmer though, as professional programmer salaries are much higher. If Krita does more, it’s though sacrificing time, giving it away free. Not everyone is in a position to do that. You either pay for good developers, or hope for the sacrifice.
Maybe I’ll try your approach and just bash projects, I’m sure that’s productive and helps open source improve. Feels a wee bit negative though…
You're not interested in debate or discussion. You're a dedicated white knight for gimp and all it's jank, and you've no interest in engaging with the points made by others. Your best counterarguments are to either attack the person you disagree with directly, or what boils down to a "nuh uh because it works for me!".
If you want to actually discuss this do it in good faith or stop wasting our time.
You can die on this hill if you want to. Gimp has its reputation amongst the public, and it's not for it's user friendly UI. Maybe you like the jank, but that doesn't mean it's optimal.
Also, another thing open source projects need is feedback from the public. The UI being horrid is feedback, and just because you feel the need to white knight and feel personally offended by this feedback doesnt make the feedback invalid. You can complain about the phrasing used, but if you use that as reason to disregard the feedback or get defensive and accusatory towards the person (the "what have YOU done" bit was particularly irrelevant) then you're part of the problem regardless how much you feel you're the solution.
Most of the public don’t know GIMP, the ones that do see the way it’s communicated from the community.
You say I can die on this hill. I said 2 points in the post you responded to.
Blender is great software
That people use GIMP.
What did I say that is wrong in that comment? What did you disagree with? Are you saying Blender isn’t great, or are you saying zero people use GIMP?
If you agree with both the sentiments I said, you either responded to the wrong message, or you’re going out of your way to argue with me, and not the points I made.
I never disregarded the points about the UI. The UI could do with improvements. UI doesn’t improve by people blasting a piece of software on the internet, it comes by giving your time to help improve it, or forking it, or donating to someone that can. If you’re not doing any of those things, you’re not actually helping to address the problem. It’s not constructive criticism or helpful. It’s just putting yourself on a sandbox as if your opinions mean more about the software than the people who take time to make it and improve it.
“(added 2017) Reminder: It appears likely that all recent commercial color laser printers print some kind of forensic tracking codes, not necessarily using yellow dots. This is true whether or not those codes are visible to the eye and whether or not the printer models are listed here. This also includes the printers that are listed here as not producing yellow dots.
THANK YOU FOR THE YELLING OF THIS INFORMATION. I CLEARLY WOULD HAVE OVERLOOKED IT LIKE FAINT YELLOW DOTS BUT YOUR CAPS HAVE HELPED ME BETTER APPRECIATE THE CONTENT.
That’s one simplification I think English could use. Having separate lower and uppercase glyphs is an additional complexity that isn’t really needed. Languages with Cyrillic do just fine with it.
that’s how i’ve been writing since about college, I think. My printed handwriting I mean - I so large/small caps only. It’s so much easier to read. but also my handwriting sucks.
I have been looking at it since I am fed up with Fire TV. Can you install it on any Linux distro? I thought it was for raspberry pi. I have an Intel Nuc running Opensuse
I like the look of this. Is there any way to control it through your phone (eg through a locally hosted server and a QR code to connect to the page) or an easy way to hook in and send the control signals so I could make crappy version of a page myself?
yep thats what i do problem is if you only get upto 720p on widewine l3 included with browsers. 1080p/4k on drm’ed streaming apps is not possible without these stupid boxes.
Yeah, I love small builds but the mini ITX components can get pricey. Counterintuitively, the big RGB gaming mega tower form factor can end up saving you money.
You could certainly do both, but there are advantages to having a separate lower spec, low-power machine do your media. It keeps your electric bill lower, and it keeps your very expensive gaming hardware running longer.
Especially with how expensive and power-hungry GPUs are today.
The only reason I haven’t just flat out installed LineageOS on my NVIDIA Shield TV is that it’d cause me to lose Dolby Vision & AI Upscaling. I know if I built a PC box unfortunately it won’t have these features either.
I’m currently just using the Shield with all Google apps and other garbage removed through ADB. Isn’t ideal but seems to work well enough without losing Dolby Vision or AI Upscaling or anything like that. That’s what I’d recommend if you stick with this Android TV.
This is why I’m stuck with Google TV as well. The only PCs that support HDR/Dolby Vision + AI upscaling have high-end graphics cards, and I just don’t have $800+ to blow on another GPU just for the living room. Not to mention the increase in heat output from the GPU, and then my power bill goes up.
Nope, I rather put up with Google’s bullshit with their laggyass interface and whatnot, than lose HDR.
Been using a HTPC + Fedora + Firefox + ublock origin for at least 7 years now. This computer is the only video source of my TV, and I haven’t regretted this move once.
But what about HDR? Neither Firefox nor even Linux itself support it. I didn’t spend $1800 on an OLED to not be able to take advantage of every feature it has.
Nothing serious, but the general consensus online is that it would be the smart thing to do. Note the keyword online. Given that I frequented Reddit and now Lemmy, there’s obviously a bias.
UK people were kinda drunk on their former glory and didn’t quite notice that basically everyone worth considering (US, EU, China) has the upper hand when dealing with them alone. Realistically speaking, they’ll have to join EU (or its successor) eventually if they want to stay relevant. We might be talking 10 years, 20 years, 50 or even 100. If I personally had to guess, it’s gonna be 20 to 40 years.
Edit: Forgot to mention that UK had a lot of exceptions because they joined quite early where they had a lot more political strength over the union. When they join, they’ll have to do it by the same rules as everyone else without exceptions which many of them are salty about (meaning those who are generally pro-rejoin but not under the same rules as other countries).
Yeah, they lack personal freedom in USA, it’s just the way it is. Freedom means it’s ok for your boss to spy on you, they’re free to do that and you are free to be spied on. Oh and they get to own a gun which makes them like really really cool and tough.
Well, our ~800 people company has unions too. But they don’t do sh#t for people. And I mean real sh#t. Except for once a year they have a meeting with free sandwiches they eat and then go home. Another year of unions well done… apparently by them.
But my friends working in big technical/industrial corp say their unions are quite strong and they at least care for employees a bit.
So yeah, there’re unions to this day, but their meaning is not met everywhere.
Are you sure your union isn’t helping? No union is going to be run by miracle workers, but that doesn’t mean they don’t improve conditions. I can’t say for sure, but I suspect this sentiment is part of why union membership fell apart in the 20th century “well my union doesn’t do anything for me anyways.”
Like democracy, unions do require some upkeep via people stepping up. If you don’t like how your union is performing, you could consider becoming a rep (admittedly based on my limited understanding as a non-union employee).
Yes, I am pretty sure. I know most people there personally. It’s kind of sad it even exists, pretty much waste of money in this case.
//edit: it’s virtually impossible to become rep in this case. The company is like family business (not real family, but everyone knows everyone since forever kind of thing) and it is like stalemate for everyone both in union and in management. Unions know they won’t do anything without trying hard (and they won’t because most of them are nearing retirement and they want their peace) and management know unions won’t cause them problems, because they’re what they are.
Installing software to log and remotely access a computer is not illegal. Remember that the computer isn’t yours and that you signed a document permitting it.
Not restricting access and using it maliciously might be illegal though. Idk.
I get the impression that many Gen Zers like to know where everyone is all the time. It's totally normal for them to have each other's GPS locations. Snapchat has a built-in map feature where you can watch your friends move around in real time, and there are other apps that offer this, too. I was blown away when I learned this was so commonly used and people just leave it on, so their social group just knows precisely where they are all the time.
Hey now, don’t assume we all do that. I don’t need the people I talk to knowing that the only places I go are work, my house, and the Chinese food place every other Tuesday. They might think I don’t have anything to do with my life. They would be right, but I don’t want them thinking it!
They’ll learn the hard way. Hopefully the hard way is something serious to them but ultimately inconsequential like finding out a partner is cheating, and not like… being murdered.
Yeah. I’m Gen Z. I was really taken aback when my high school friends had apps on their phones that showed their real time locations to each other. I was like “WHY?” and they responded along the lines of “Well why not?”… I have no words…
Gen Z here. I have Apple’s Find My location setup with my closest friends only (and my mom). I don’t have a reason to hide my locations to my friends, it helps with casually meeting up actually. “Oh XY is nearby, let’s meet and hang for a bit” And my mom has my location for emergencies and vice versa.
I disabled the snap map though as I have people on there that don’t need to know my location.
I never really understood the “I have nothing to hide” mindset. I’ve always been for privacy. I self host everything I use, and when I don’t (e-mail) I PAY someone to do it for me. No Google services in my life, no apple, etc, etc.
However, more and more I’m wondering if what I’m doing is worth it. Really, the people who “have nothing to hide” seem fine, nothing bad has happened, and it seems far more likely my information was leaked from a hack (credit carma I’m looking at you). Credit cards know where I am, what I buy… Its endless. Plus now I have stress about my self hosted services going down.
So these guys who share their location and just live in blissful ignorance, are they on to something? I think life would be ‘easier’ for me on their side…
Yeah maybe it’s growing up in the closet, but yeah. My wife knows where I am in general all the time, but only because I give her heads up. Nobody else knows more than they need.
It’s not even that I have anything to hide. Aside from not letting my in laws know we’re poly or other such things I’m not really hiding anything. I just don’t see why anyone should know. If someone insists on knowing for no reason then that’s weird and not cool.
When you says “resonate”, do you mean you don’t understand the sentence? Or do you mean you don’t see why you should care?
Re meaning, the sentence seems blindingly obvious to me. But maybe it isn’t… It means you don’t want privacy because you have something illegal to hide in your house, but because you don’t want to invite anybody in. I really don’t know how to explain it anymore clearly without repeating it verbatim.
If you don’t see why this is important or you think it doesn’t concern you, send me your address and I’ll come around tonite to take pictures of your furniture without your permission.
I’m a bit off-put by your tone, but no, I was being genuine. Saying it doesn’t resonate means whatever was said doesn’t seem as profound or meaningful as it does to the person who said it. So the phrase really means that you want to shut everyone out? I guess that makes sense, given the hostility in your response.
You read me wrong my friend. It was nothing more than an honest-to-goodness reply to you. No hostility. Be careful with written discussions, because you don’t see the face of whoever is writing and you tend to slap the state of mind you yourself are in when you read it. Imagine I’m writing this with a smile and that’s pretty much how I wrote it.
You don’t find the quote profound and that’s fair enough. To each his own opinion. Me, I think it’s a perfect description of the core issue of privacy: having the choice not to expose what I don’t want to expose for no other reason that I don’t want to. I don’t want to shut everybody out, I want to freedom to do it if I so choose and not have to justify myself or suffer consequences.
I think you need to find a happy medium. I’ve accepted that I can’t control ALL the data I generate, so I instead aggressively block ads and any other marketing attempts towards me.
Yeah, it all boils down to your threat model. Not everyone has the time, resources, or know-how to self-host everything, so it’s about balancing convenience with privacy, which unfortunately is almost one or the other now.
This is kind of my point. I don’t feel there’s a happy middle right now and unless you go tinfoil hat information is going to get out.
My threat model is basically “do my best to be as private as possible”. But there is limits. I can spend $100 cash on gas or I can spend $100 on my credit card and get 2% back. Obviously I’m going to use my credit card. I still email people who use Gmail, People who have the facebook, instagram, X, etc on their phone has me as a contact, likely with my full name, email address, physical mailing address.
So why do I bother keeping my contacts in a selfhosted NextCloud? Why do I avoid the Google Maps app, or anything google when the wife uses all this stuff and I’m with her 90% of the time? I’m starting to think they have my information already anyway so why not welcome google into my life? I have to keep talking myself into the fact that self hosting is worth the extra work I’m causing myself.
For me it boils down to principles. You’re totally right and many companies I hate will have alot of my info due to others, but I’ll be damned if I cooperate with them.
Unfortunately it depends on the individual, so no one can really answer your question but yourself. For me, I draw the line when it personally becomes burdensome to maintain something. For example, I use Bitwarden to manage all my passwords, but I don’t trust myself enough to host and maintain a server and keep it online/secure, so I use their hosted service. I use google drive to store some miscellaneous stuff because of the free 15GB storage, but I don’t store any private files (personal photos, documents, etc.). I use ProtonDrive for more important stuff, and for very confidential files, I encrypt them first. I use google maps for navigation because of reliability and accuracy, but I use a separate google account for it. I know that doesn’t do much, but it keeps some level of separation for me personally. I still maintain a facebook account (although I barely use it) because of family, but I still use a facebook container on firefox and don’t use the mobile app. That plus all the privacy extensions.
The main thing is that it doesn’t have to be black or white. You don’t have to go full hermit, and at the same time you don’t need to fully embed yourself into the google ecosystem. Just do what you can and what you are comfortable with. As they say, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Yeah I think the bigger problem here is that it’s this hard to have reasonable privacy and governments like it that way. They don’t need a warrant to buy info, just to force release. I don’t like google knowing everything about me. I hate the cops being a check away from it.
The reason I close the toilet door is mainly because I know others don’t want to witness me peeing. If they didn’t care, I wouldn’t care tbh. Everyone’s priorities regarding privacy are different, but I think for every person at least something feels private.
That’s such a… foreign mindset to me. I can’t fathom being okay with having the door open and having other people just walking by. Hell, I close it when I’m the only one home.
I don’t know, it’s not like it’s a secret what I’m doing in there. Going to the toilet looks very similar for most people I assume, so it’s not like someone with decent imagination couldn’t know what it looks like anyway. I don’t see the huge difference in whether the door is open or not other than politeness.
This is one very good example why strong and secure encrypted communication apps should be the default. You should not have to be at the mercy of fb in order to talk to your mom about personal and private matters. It may not have mattered too much in this particular case as the tip came from a judas but it no doubt does, or will, in others going forward.
Not to mention that abortion is medically indistinguishable from miscarriage, if they didnt talk or act with intent to perform an abortion would anyone have noticed in the first place?
Edit: right, just noticed the sub this was posted on. y’all already know.
You’ve got a point. Using /s has nearly the same effect as explaining the joke which is guaranteed to deflate the fun of making the comment in the first place.
Not only because of this article, but merely an hour ago I have read also this post (numerous links provided in the post) about the dubious Brendan Eich.
I think LW is better out of the box. It has both UBO and Containers built in. Which is just awesome. I still use FF as my daily just because I have customized it beyond belief, but if I were to start over again I think I'd start with LW.
I think Brave did some aggressive marketing, including social media posts and comments. I did buy their narrative at first too - a browser that already tuned to block ads and trackers. But later I’ve noticed that it constantly connects back to brave server and it looked suspicious. Firefox is the best.
Yeah, exactly. If every browser is chromium based the web will be an unhealthy monoculture. Easy for a single player to dictate standards. Haven’t seen this mentioned as much, but its really important
Brave is great for less techy people because it’s defaults are good enough. It’s not necessary to tweak settings and install add-ons to get basic privacy. I definitely prefer Firefox, but it takes some knowledge to get it to surpass Brave’s defaults.
Add-ons give you a lot more choice and control than baked in options.
What’s stopping Brave’s blocker from just allowing ads from Brave’s services? Can you see under the hood to tell if it’s blocking everything or just surface level stuff?
A proprietary built in blocker is only as trustworthy as the people that made it, and as the links in this discussion suggest, Brave isn’t earning much trust.
The reason is they have proper build infrastructure managed by the Brave. With Ungoogled Chromium the binaries are produced by third parties, vary in version etc. People claim they would only use “open source software” but they do download binary versions nevertheless and don’t compile that code themselves. This increases the risk of a supply chain attack, where a malicious binary is submitted and nobody has really knows until it is too late. The other issue is they disable CRLSets because of “google hate” which we think actually increases the likelihood of a MiTM attack occurring because rogue certificates are not detected and invalidated as quickly as they could have been.
You can try Librewolf. It is a firefox fork with focus on privacy. You do not need to go through many settings when setting it up, as you need to do with firefox standalone.
Previously was using Firefox Developer’s edition which is also decent. But I like a minimalist browser that acts more like a framework to which I can just add what I want, and doesn’t come with a lot of bullshit I don’t need.
The reason we don’t recommend Ungoogled Chromium and instead recommend Brave on the privacyguides.org website is because they have proper build infrastructure managed by the Brave. With Ungoogled Chromium the binaries are produced by third parties, vary in version etc. People claim they would only use “open source software” but they do download binary versions nevertheless and don’t compile that code themselves. This increases the risk of a supply chain attack, where a malicious binary is submitted and nobody has really knows until it is too late. The other issue is they disable CRLSets because of “google hate” which we think actually increases the likelihood of a MiTM attack occurring because rogue certificates are not detected and invalidated as quickly as they could have been.
Everything is a process and personally thats no excuse to not criticize the bad actions of a project like brave, but in the topic of personal opinions like those from Brandon Eich’s, i think is completely emotional the reactions of the brave users, he has awful opinions with the same sex mariage thing and covid but that does not mean the damn product/service he’s part of is bad or have censorship. He better shut up and dont ruin a good project because he wants to “speak up” about his stupid rant about insane opinions that makes bad PR.
Yeah same. And if the CIA is interested in you, they will find you anyway. A certain amount of hiding is fine but man at some point its ridiculous for every day business.
There is an extension called LibRedirect that does this. It’s customisable, as in, we can set if we want to redirect to piped or invidious, and which specific instances to use. Not only just YouTube but other services like GitHub to Gothub, Twitter to Nitter, reddit to libreddit etc. The default settings are already great.
It is, but it already has all the services that most would use with big QoL features compared to Redirector. Namely quickly adding and removing instances, and quickly enabling and disabling redireciton for specific services. And is a lot easier to use in general especially for people who don’t know regex.
Plus Libredirect has a few features that redirector doesn’t, the ability to redirect to multiple different instances, and the ability to redirect embedded content such as any embedded youtube videos on any other website.
But as you said, redirector is more flexible if you need it for something other than the ~20 services that LibRedirect handles.
All of this only makes sense if you’re redirecting to a frontend, right? Not an alternative platform? For instance, it would be nice to redirect all Goodreads links to Bookwyrm, but I’m not sure if this is possible. (Already got it set to redirect to Biblioreads, but just curious since Bookwyrm is what I actually use.)
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