virtualbriefcase

@virtualbriefcase@lemm.ee

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Threads blocks searches related to covid and vaccines as cases rise (www.washingtonpost.com)

Meta acknowledged in a statement to The Washington Post that Threads is intentionally blocking the search terms and said that other terms are being blocked, but the company declined to provide a list of them. A search by The Post discovered that the words “sex,” “nude,” “gore,” “porn,” “coronavirus,”...

virtualbriefcase,

(OP: Sorry, paywall, can’t find another source yet. Someone got an archive?)

Quick tip: disabling JavaScript will get you past the paywall. Ublock Origin can disable JavaScript on a temp/permanent bases for specific websites, and I always set news websites to JavaScript off or else they’re a real pain to read.

Are Internet boards and Forums dead

i started using the internet in the late 2000’s and still remember when you search for something most of the times it would return with a forum post … now its just random websites … if you ever need real and concise answer you have to add site:reddit.com at every search and since discord or twitter are not crawlable by...

virtualbriefcase,

I’m pretty sure Google (and potentially other search engines) de-prioritized blogs and forums. There’s plentry of both out there, although less than there were originally, they’re just being cut out of some search results

virtualbriefcase,

The various European countries and the EU in general appears to be against encryption, looking to implemented some pretty heavy censorship, and getting pretty heavy handed in enforcing said laws (e.g. getting raided because you said the politician who broke the law was a dick).

As an American if EU laws can result in replaceable batteries and an unlockable bootloader that’s great, but the EU is definitely not friends of a free and open web.

virtualbriefcase,

I believe that cryptography and decentralization beats federalization and ICANN domain names as an end goal to a more decentralized internet. There’s already bridges between activity pub and nostr and they seem to play nice together. I can imagine a world in which it’s almost seamless between two or three decentralized & federated protocols.

And to those that are upset that a few relays ask for or require crypto transactions, keep in mind that some mastodon/lemmy/activity pub servers demand payment and I’d be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t accepted crypto donations.

X wants permission to start collecting your biometric data and employment history (www.theverge.com)

“Based on your consent, we may collect and use your biometric information for safety, security, and identification purposes,” the privacy policy reads. It doesn’t include any details on what kind of biometric information this includes — or how X plans to collect it — but it typically involves fingerprints, iris...

virtualbriefcase,

As much as I’m not a fan of what Twitter and social media platforms are doing, I think this is non-news with a misleadingly bad sounding headline.

Sure, they’ll collect employment history if you use them to search for a job, and sure they’ll collect fingerprint hashes and the like if you choose to use that to sign in, but from the sounds if it unless you specifically use those features that they’re working on you’re not effected.

How Mozilla Ruined Firefox (invidious.lunar.icu)

Firefox used to be on top of the world with almost a third of all internet users using Firefox. These days, they make up a pitiful 2.7% of the market share. What happened? In this video, I want to show how Mozilla’s terrible management and decisions have brought this once beloved browser down.

virtualbriefcase,

I don’t like that this video is so downvoted, but I do see where the downvoters are coming from. I too use Firefox (or more specifically, the Gecko engine at least) because it lacks app the Google pushed stuff (e.g. WEI, Manifest V3) and is better for privacy, but have had a bone to pick with Mozilla too on occasion.

So many features have been broken or intentionally disabled for periods of time (e.g. saveing pages as PDFs or desktop extensions on mobile being locked behind the Dev options). So many “features” have been implemented that I don’t like (e.g. ads, tracking, pocket), and so many critical features (e.g. PWAs) don’t exist entirely.

Their money making methods are also not my favorite. Ads, data collection, payouts from Google, and selling repackaged services (e.g. Mulvad VPN resold as Mozilla VPN). I know they gotta make money so I’m torn on if I should dislike that they’re doing that. But even Brave with Brave ads and Bat are opt in, in order to disable all ads, data collection & telemetry, and unwanted extensions in Firefox you need to go into about:config.

I also have mixed opinions of their activist work. Despite what the video says they do actually use their money and resources in the free software space to perform audits and offer grants to products. They’ve also always been anti open web to a certain extent. Back when they were doing podcast and some Nazi sites got taken offline through domain providers they took a cautiously pro stance to that. I’ve no love for Nazi’s but when you start using the Internet’s centralized powers to nuke non-illegal content from the internet itself it sets a bad precident and is certainly anti open web. Even though that’s an edge case, and the slippery slope fallacy is technically a fallacy, it’s still continuing onwards as they argue bloggers and individual creators should be de-ranked out of the fear they could be providing information counter to “official” information; and that they should be outright censored if they do go against said official information.

(yes I don’t believe the earth is flat or that lizard people control the world - but look back in history and think about all the times the “official” narrative was wrong. WMDs come to mind. Open debate is important)

Again, I’m saying this as a person who uses FF and would like them to claw back a huge share of the marketplace. It’d take a lot to get me to switch to Chrome. At the end of the day though, I don’t want the Libre option to have a huge list of drawbacks. But at the end of the day, how many non-technical users will think the same way, and if the market share drops too much more and if Google makes even more changes how much will Firefox even work on the web without it becoming unusable.

But I come at this, and assume the video does as well, from the point of “I hope this thing I use and like becomes better”.

virtualbriefcase, (edited )

Exactly, but in America for a while all of the outlets and a vast majority of the politicians were saying the same thing (that there were WMDs) for a while - or at least that was what I’ve pieced together since I was too young to to understand politics at the time. My point was more so that it was wrong, but in the event something like that was the only narrative allowed on American social media platforms and search engines society could be worse off by it.

virtualbriefcase,

Pro tip: Adblock + JavaScript disabled (Ublock Origin can do both) will block most paywalls

virtualbriefcase,

Most paywalls can be bypassed by disabling JavaScript, which Unlock Origin can do on a site by site basis if you click on the advanced icon

If you were to create a cloud community, how would you do it? (thought experiment)

Somewhat recently I learned about tildaverses which if you’re unaware are communities where everyone gets an ssh account on a server to do things like hosts sites or gemini capsules, and access to services like a community IRC server or the ability to host their email there. This kinda got me thinking of community run clouds...

virtualbriefcase,

I doubt they’re doing anything to secerative in the background. Not a fan of Bat or their affiliate link scamdle, but also not a fan of Firefox’s ads, telemetry, trademark claims against Firefox forks, and accepting Google money for bad defaults - as I’m not a fan of Vivaldi being closed source and their adblock that doesn’t block all ads.

Brave is great for somebody who doesn’t know/want to configure defaults beyond optionally disabling Bat. If you can then Firefox & derivatives might give a better experience.

Brave is also Chromium based, but being a heavy fork it doesn’t hold onto the worst parts, making it more alright.

virtualbriefcase,

I believe IOS was being forced to allow different browser engines by the EU so there may be more options soon

virtualbriefcase,

Virustotal is great to scan anything you download that does not contain sensitive information, and ClamAV + TK will work locally to scan anything that contains sensitive information (e.g. documents sent by others) or things too big for Virustotal.

Like others are saying, there’s less of a need for antivirus on Linux since there’s less easy entry points (e.g package manager over downloading an installer) and less (but far from 0) malware made for Linux. But we all probably download app images or get documents related to job searches at some point and I personally prefer to scan almost file that I get from a remote computer.

virtualbriefcase,

Usually. Proton by Steam (versions of wine tuned specifically for games) makes just about anything run flawlessly with one click to turn it on in the settings and occasionally some fine tuning for particular games like setting it to run a particular version of proton. This works on any Linux distro.

Outside of Steam, and when trying to mod Steam games, it’s a lot more hit or miss.

virtualbriefcase,

That, and like others mentioned their flexibility, plus the fact that they’re fairly reliable (maybe less than some good Iaas providers but a fair bit more than your consumer vps places). Moments ago I went to the hetzner site to check them out and got:

Status Code 504 Gateway Timeout

The upstream server failed to send a request in the time allowed by the server. If you are the Administrator of the Upstream, check your server logs for errors.

Annoying if it’s you nextloud instance down for a minutes, but a worthy trade off if you’re paying 1/4 of the price. Extremely costly for big business or even risking peoples’s lives for a few different very important systems.

virtualbriefcase,

Glad to hear you like it :)

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