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,

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,

Brave and Vivaldi are very different companies. I don’t use Brave specifically because I’m not comfortable with the fact that, essentially, they’re an advertising company primarily looking to push their crypto.

It’s true that using a Chromium base poses some additional privacy challenges. Due to its customizability, it’s certainly possible to harden Firefox to a better level than any Chromium-based browser currently; projects like Arkenfox certainly help with this, as well as the tweaks ported to the browser by the TOR Uplift project. With that said, stock Firefox as shipped by Mozilla isn’t exactly privacy friendly without going to lengths to harden the browser. Mozilla collect an absolute ton of telemetry by default, complete with a unique identifier attached to each download. FF also comes with pre-installed addons with questionable privacy policies like Pocket.

I think concerns about fingerprinting are somewhat overstated, or at least over thought about. The reality is there’s an absolute ton of metrics that can be used to fingerprint a browser by advanced scripts and if a site wants to fingerprint you it will, and it doesn’t really matter if you’re using FF or Chromium. The only realistic way of avoiding this is by using browsers like TOR or Mullvad, which aim to all have the same fingerprint so you’ll be able to blend in with the crowd. Preventing naïve script fingerprinting is the best you can ever hope to do on any other daily driver browser, and addons like CanvasBlocker for Firefox or JShelter for Chromium are typically enough to prevent fingerprinting by opportunistic scripts.

TiffyBelle,

I’ve tried all three and I currently use the free ControlD Ads & Tracking DNS resolver and I’ve been very happy with it. It filters a fair amount of garbage domains in my experience and I don’t want to spend time finely tuning the blocklists a DNS resolver uses. I use it over Adguard DNS because I noticed it blocks a few more domains in my observation.

I think most people talk about NextDNS because of the level of customizability it offers, if you want to finely tweak the blocklists and whatnot your resolver uses. It also has a pretty good web interface showing you all kinds of stats and whatnot.

You also have to keep in mind that ControlD is newer in comparison to either NextDNS or Adguard DNS by a few years, so there’s likely less people discussing it as it’s a little less known.

TiffyBelle,

Swing and a miss, bud.

TiffyBelle,

Absolutely gutted the Lionesses lost in the final, but upon reflection upon the entire tournament it is an absolutely massive achievement to finish as runners up. This will inspire a whole new generation of grassroots players and women’s football fans, and hopefully inspire England to push on, learn some lessons, and hopefully get back there again in the next tournament. The Women’s World Cup overall has been a truly amazing tournament and a great showcase and celebration of women’s football. I’m sad it’s over.

If you enjoyed the tournament, check out the Women’s Super League (WSL) where a lot of these international players ply their trade domestically.

TiffyBelle,

Ah the classic naïveté of the “nothing to hide” argument.

Regardless of the presented reason, it is right that people question and are cautious about increased surveillance. Some people are willing to capitulate to more and more monitoring very easily. Privacy is important.

BEWARE ! People who create fake email account to login to social media.

A facebook employee explained me how tracking works. Its not the email address Meta is concerned about. Its the IP, device identifiers and location. Meta doesnt care about the email at all apart from sending you emails for notification. Even with a fake email they exactly know who you are. Let’s say you visit CNN.com which has...

TiffyBelle,

And FF containers are still no match for advanced fingerprinting.

The only way to protect against advanced fingerprinting is to use the TOR Browser or Mullvad Browser, to blend in with everyone else who shares the exact same fingerprint using those tools. The best you can do outside of those is to protect against less advanced scripts.

TiffyBelle,

I mean, I consider Mastodon pretty “customizable” in the sense that you state. It’s easy to follow individual hashtags surrounding specific topics, groups that people use to post about a specific topic or individual users. My home timeline is pretty much all topics I’m interested in due to who and what I follow.

Similar to Lemmy really. Your subscribed feed should be exclusively topics that interest you from the communities you subscribe to.

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,

Coconut water. So refreshing.

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,

The Lemmy experience has improved immeasurably since the pre-population-boom days, where I saw Kbin as a slightly more attractive option as the UI was more polished at the time. After Lemmy 0.18.2 hit and fixed the issues with the annoying auto-updating timelines, improved the sorting algorithms, and improved database performance I’ve used it exclusively.

The Lemmy software seems to have more people working on the code and things are being addressed and improved rapidly. This extends to more 3rd party app support too. It feels like the better supported platform and that seems like it’ll be the case moving into the future as well.

As a personal note I also don’t like some of the terminology used on the Kbin platform. “Magazine” is a confusing term that seems to have been chosen purely to be different. Sometimes it’s just best to stick to common terms to reduce the complexity and learning curve of a platform.

TiffyBelle,

I used to use Moon+ Reader on Android before I switched to a dedicated e-ink book reader in the Kobo Clara HD.

If you’re going to be doing anything more than very casual reading, do yourself a favor and get an e-ink reader like a Kobo or a Kindle or something. You really won’t regret it; they’re amazing.

TiffyBelle,

It’s very trivial to sideload EPUBs on a Kobo using Calibre. I think it is similarly easy on a Kindle. You’re not really locked into any ecosystem you don’t want to be with either, tbh. Calibre with the right plugins makes managing your book library and syncing books to devices pretty easy.

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, (edited )

Yes. In fact, using DNS-based blocking solutions are pretty much the only way to protect against first party trackers that use CNAME cloaking tactics if you’re not using a Firefox browser with UBo, since Chromium browsers have no ability to defend against this type of attack (with the exception of Brave as they implemented their own method of protecting against this with their Shields system.)

TiffyBelle,

ISPs can always see what domains you visit due to it being leaked in plain text via the SNI portion of the Client Hello sequence of establishing a TLS connection to a web server, whether your DNS requests are encrypted or not.

It’s important to remember that using encrypted DNS does not shield the domains names you visit from your ISP. I feel this is a fundamental misunderstanding that gives some a false sense of privacy. At best, from a privacy perspective, you might avoid DNS-based logging which are slightly more trivial to log than domain taken from SNI.

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,

Isn’t that basically the cycle of any game ever, though?

TiffyBelle,

If you believe wholesale every word of the doom mongering, sure.

I personally think this is more in line with Meta’s actual strategy with regards to its interactions with the fediverse.

TiffyBelle,

I’ve always felt very uncomfortable when people and news outlets describe someone as having “lost their battle” with cancer. To me it was almost a projection of weakness on that person for not “putting up a better fight” or something. I know obviously this is never the intention, but I think this highlights how the use of such language can be problematic.

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