TiffyBelle

@TiffyBelle@feddit.uk

Mastodon: mastodonapp.uk/@TiffyBelle

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

TiffyBelle,

The number seems low, so I looked for some information about how common CO poisoning is in non-Airbnb hotels and motels and found this:

This study was conducted to determine the significance of the problem of carbon monoxide poisoning occurring in US hotels, motels and resorts. […] From January 1, 2005 to December 31, 2018, 905 guests were poisoned in 115 identified incidents, including 22 fatalities. […] Most poisonings were caused by natural gas fueled appliances and could likely have been prevented by an in-room carbon monoxide alarm. To reduce morbidity and mortality from unintentional CO poisoning in lodging facilities, government should mandate installation of in-room CO alarms, similar to the current requirement for smoke alarms.

This problem doesn’t appear to occur any higher in Airbnb establishments than any other hotel, motel, or resort, at least according to what this research suggests. It is worth noting, however, that the frequency of poisonings is a lot higher when you consider those that didn’t lead to fatalities.

With that said, CO monitors are fairly cheap and as the research states, a lot of these incidents could probably have been prevented by using them. In many countries in Europe at least, this is already a legal requirement. I don’t see why it shouldn’t be in the US too.

TiffyBelle,

I moved to KBin for a time when Lemmy had various issues such as auto-updating timelines that were hard to deal with and hugely broken algorithms for “Hot” posts, etc.

Somewhere around release 0.18.3 a lot of these issues were fixed and I ditched KBin. I figured in the long term, it was likely that Lemmy would have more development attention. It also used more straightforward terms like “communities” instead what KBin terms them (“magazines”), which just seemed to be unnecessary and confusing terminology for the sake of being different rather than because it made sense.

The KBin interface looks polished, but it hides a lot of fundamental issues with the software under the hood. I hope the project receives more dev attention and thrives in the long-term, however. It’s good for the Fediverse that choices exist.

Fedxit: Migrating to a new instance

Sooo if you skim the previous posts on here, you’ll know that Feddit.uk’s only Admin (@tom) has been missing for a couple of months and in that time we were defederated by lemmy.world (although we’re back now) and we are one upgrade behind (just a minor fix) with one much bigger one whistling down the pipeline that may...

TiffyBelle, (edited )

It’s really unfortunate it has come to this, but I’m glad people are putting in the effort to ensure the continuity of a UK-focused instance.

Will be unfortunate to lose the “feddit.uk” domain name, as I found it pretty neat and there are several other localized instances with a similar domain. Hope the new one’s decent also.

TiffyBelle, (edited )

Obsidian is really good. Very feature-rich and customizable.

I personally prefer Joplin for a couple of reasons. It’s fully open source and while it has less features and customizability, I also feel it keeps out of my way more to allow me to focus purely on taking notes and not messing around with other features. Obsidian encourages me to play with its extra features more, which for my case usually just reduces the productivity of my note-taking.

Probably just a me-thing. I tend to gravitate to more straightforward and minimalist solutions generally.

TiffyBelle,

Good question! There’s a few reasons, I guess:

  • There’s a large element of “because I can” to this, just to explore how stupid the scope of systemd is as a suite.
  • There’s a small practical element. GRUB itself is quite a hefty tool to accommodate all kinds of boot setups, and it works well. If you have a simple boot setup though you could probably shave a couple of seconds off of the boot time just by using the simplified sd-boot and loading the kernel via its EFIStub.
  • A learning exercise in self-signing EFI binaries, enrolling a MOK (if I use Shim), and setting up scripts to handle updates.

All boils down to my enjoyment of doing weird nerdy things though, ultimately. =)

TiffyBelle,

All well and good, but sadly this relies on the hosts managing DNS to include specific entries in their DNS configuration for keys to use during the encryption process. Unfortunately the vast majority of hosts probably won’t be bothered to do this, similar to DNSSEC.

Linux Mint LMDE 6 “Faye” BETA Released (blog.linuxmint.com)

Been awhile since I tried Linux Mint. Have no interest in using Ubuntu so went straight for the latest Debian Edition beta which was just released. This feels like such a solid release, which makes sense due to its Debian base. I really like Cinnamon and the suite of utility tools Mint ships with....

TiffyBelle,

Vivaldi is an awesome browser and the people and company behind it continue to inspire me with confidence that they’re truly committed to providing a Chromium-based browser that is as privacy conscious as it can be.

TiffyBelle,

I am absolutely not, but this may have changed as I don’t have access to real-time information as my knowledge was last updated in September 2021.

TiffyBelle,

Eh, I used to think this way until I actually tried GNOME for a bit. I’ve grown quite fond of its workflow. There’s definitely extensions that I feel I need for it to be fully usable from my perspective, but in some ways I see it as a positive to start out with a good foundation and then allow users to extend the functionality they feel they need onto that base. Not every user is going to want the same thing, so keeping the core minimalist makes sense.

If I wanted something like Windows, I’d use KDE. If I really wanted a GNOME Windows-like experience similar to the old GNOME2 behavior I’d use something like MATE or Cinnamon. I guess my point is that there’s plenty of DEs out there that are essentially copies of the same workflow. I respect the desire to innovate in GNOME3.

TiffyBelle,

I still use Slackware and it’s a great distro. I very much enjoy its batteries-included approach (a full install comes with pretty much everything pre-installed) and I enjoy its simplicity and ease of configuration and use. There’s a learning curve to get there, but once you understand how everything works it’s a distro that gets completely out of your way. The bonus is that if you understand Slackware, generally, your knowledge of GNU/Linux broadly will mean you’re never lost on any other distro either. Most of my frustrations with other distros actually stem from them patching something/doing something weird with config defaults, whereas Slackware ships stuff as it is from vendors with vendor defaults which I find a lot more palatable and predictable.

Philosophically, I like how Slackware is independent and beholden to no corporate entity. Controversies that have hit other distros in the past as a result of that just aren’t a thing with Slackware.

Slackware is a very rewarding distro to use even in 2023. It’s not for everyone, but I imagine there’s a fair amount of people like me who’ve probably been using it for ages and have had absolutely no reason to ever consider using anything else. Once you’ve got everything you want and configured stuff to your liking, it’ll just work forever fantastically.

TiffyBelle, (edited )

Encrypted DNS doesn’t really do much for privacy. It does, however, accomplish two main things:

• Ensures the authenticity of the DNS server you’re receiving a response from due to the certificate exchange.

• Preserves the integrity of the response as it would be difficult for it to be tampered with in-transit.

The domain names you visit are leaked in plain text regardless of your DNS provider and how you connect to them via the “client hello” process of TLS, specifically the Server Name Indication (SNI) portion. ISPs could, in theory, use this to see which domains you’re visiting, even if you’re using encrypted DNS, but not the specific pages within the domain.

Note that there are mechanisms like ECH (Encrypted Client Hello) and ESNI (Encrypted Server Name Indication) that attempt to solve the domain name leakage issue, but each require domains that wish to support these technologies to include an entry specific to those in their DNS records to facilitate key exchange for the encryption to be viable. You’ll also need a DNS client that supports ECH/ESNI. Very few domains and clients presently do this, meaning it is almost certain all/the vast majority of your visited domains would be transmitted in plain text at this point in time.

TiffyBelle,

Realistically, no. It would also be quite a stretch to assume everyone who created accounts here no longer checks reddit and stopped using it. I know I personally still use both.

TiffyBelle,

Plenty.

TiffyBelle,

Debian. I always come back to Debian.

It’s just a rock solid, multipurpose distro that has everything. If you have an issue with some older software versions, you can just track testing or sid and treat it as rolling release or use flatpaks for GUI apps.

To me, Debian is almost perfect.

TiffyBelle,

Really? Much ado about nothing, it seems. Just seems you’re looking for drama.

Don’t like the admins of your instance? Don’t want to use an instance that may federate with Threads? Use a different one/host your own, which it seems you’ve said you’re going to do. That’s the beauty of the fediverse; you’re not behold to any instance owners you don’t wish to be. =)

TiffyBelle,

Ethics aside, this is still good commentary on privacy and on who you should trust with your supposedly “private” communications.

Private discussions, search histories, etc. can be quite incriminating even for those entirely innocent. People should be mindful of the services they’re using and how long they’re storing such sensitive data for. Privacy is important.

TiffyBelle,

It’s worth noting that the “trees planted” counter is basically an estimate as to how much ad revenue on average is generated from a user based on their number of searches. If you block ads at all, you’re probably not contributing to their revenue at all, thus planting nothing.

I like the idea, but don’t see it as worth sacrificing privacy or allowing ads. Tossing a few bucks every now and then to a charity might be a better option for some.

OC The fediverse is a privacy nightmare (blog.bloonface.com)

ActivityPub, the protocol that powers the fediverse (including Mastodon – same caveats as the first two times, will be used interchangeably, deal with it) is not private. It is not even semi-private. It is a completely public medium and absolutely nothing posted on it, including direct messages, can be seen as even remotely...

TiffyBelle,

I’m not sure this blog post is the “ah-ha!” revelation you think it is.

If you’re posting something, you’re choosing to put that out there on the public internet which should henceforth be considered “public.” This isn’t a privacy violation unless you choose to make it one by violating your own privacy by oversharing sensitive information.

This has been the case online since time immemorial. Once something’s out there, consider it non-retractable. This isn’t specific to the Fediverse/ActivityPub. Even in centralized forums/reddit the things you post were cached by web archive/scraped by unscrupulous sites/used to train AI, etc. even if you tried to delete them from the source server. “Deletion” has never truly been a thing on the internet, which is precisely why people should really consider what they post. Heck, there were specific sites dedicated to showing which comments were “deleted” from reddit in full.

I don’t consider any of these things “privacy violations.” A privacy violation would be if the email address you signed up to your instance with was being broadcast to other servers in the open. What you choose to put out there is up to you and the inherent danger with interacting with any form of social media.

TiffyBelle, (edited )

There are literally warnings when you try to DM someone on Fediverse apps that say it should not be treated as a secure medium:

https://feddit.uk/pictrs/image/10c7c4f1-22c8-48ac-9eb0-600d2cbbd74a.png

https://feddit.uk/pictrs/image/17e0957b-84e3-43de-b67e-1b14e64cb990.png

Even on traditional centralized platforms I’ve never treated DMs as “private.” Anything not end-to-end encrypted cannot be considered private and never has been able to be. Once again, these aren’t exclusive issues to the Fediverse.

With that said, I do see it as important to draw attention to these types of things. Users should absolutely know not to share sensitive information via DM, or make the mistake of considering them a secure medium on any platform, centralized or not.

TiffyBelle,

I think your points about frustration are valid, particularly at this time when there's a lot of reddit refugees. That said, it's Beehaw's choice what they're willing to put up with. I think defederation with entire instances is a very extreme response to their issues, but ultimately it's their choice.

I think with the admins' mentality over there, they will probably end up with a very large defederation block list. For that reason, it is probably for the best if Lemmy's most active communities were NOT hosted there. People should put the energy into building up other communities so the platform more broadly isn't reliant on extremely moderated instances like Beehaw.

Major communities should be on instances that welcome a wide range of views that are also willing to have a robust and diverse admin team to handle issues, imo. That would be the healthiest solution overall. Beehaw choosing to defederate now is a blessing in disguise; it's an early statement proving that instance is an unsuitable host for any community looking to be home to a broad-reaching and diverse member base.

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