Bitrot

Bitrot , 3 days ago

Do xsnow and xpenguins next!

Bitrot , 8 days ago

Really great article, and thanks for posting the text of it.

Facebook is weird for me because it triggers my FOMO, but then if I use it all I see are a ton of random things with the most toxic people in the world living in the comments.

And similarly I just realized why my friends on instagram use stories and not posts, because for the most part stories is the only place I see content from people I know anymore (and again the FOMO).

I really relate to the sentence at the end, “there are people there but they don’t know why and most of what they are seeing is scammy or weird.”

Bitrot , 1 month ago

That combination works in Brave to search the forum (prefixing !ddg or !d) I’m surprised it doesn’t in Searx.

Bitrot , 1 month ago

Galaxy Watch, the original Pixel Watch and the Apple Watch have no charging contacts. It’s really the way to go.

The contacts have been an issue forever, like I remember it messing up a Fitbit a decade ago. Really crazy that it’s still a problem.

Bitrot , 2 months ago

Before his Twitter addiction it was much easier to think of him as a rich genius like you see in comic books, mostly since nobody knew what he was thinking. He’s also managed a celebrity-like persona that someone like robot Mark Zuckerberg could never pull off. That and money will always get hangers on.

Bitrot , 2 months ago

With that kind of leadership we should be thankful he can’t run for president, or he’d end up voted in.

Bitrot , 2 months ago

On iOS, hitting vol up, then vol down, then hold power for a second will instantly lock down and also no danger of accidentally calling 911 or whatever.

It’s also the fast way to get to the power option.

Bitrot , 2 months ago

It’s slower, actually.

Are you really trying to argue over ways of locking down the phone?

Bitrot , 3 months ago

That’s what all of the analysis is pointing to.

Since the analysis is not complete, the other thing people need to remember is that nobody knows if ssh was the only target or just the only one that was noticed. A ton of stuff uses lzma, including web browsers and password safes.

Bitrot , 3 months ago

Ablaze was high school students making random hobby projects. This one got popular and it has obviously had a negative effect on the dev (who is likely in university by now). Sounds like they are also feeling a sense of responsibility for things they aren't responsible for.

It also sounds like they don’t really understand open source.

Their Twitter makes it seem like they aren’t having much fun.

Bitrot , 3 months ago

The blog says specifically that FireDragon is not an issue. I am also curious about these forks.

Bitrot , 3 months ago

Because many people are also fans of free software. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

Bitrot , 3 months ago

There are probably BSD derivatives that act that way.

Bitrot , 3 months ago

It’s an open source browser based on Firefox with additional features and configuration tweaks.

Except they recently made part of it proprietary and hid the source code for that, so most other people cannot actually build the same one.

They claim they will make that part open source too, eventually, and it is due to behavior of another browser: https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp-core/issues/62

Bitrot , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

The CEO of Onerep had founded multiple brokers.

What isn’t mentioned anywhere except the original investigation, it also claims to be a Virginia-based company but is operating out of Belarus and Cyprus.

Bitrot , 3 months ago

It hasn’t had an impact since he is still very active. Also presumably he isn’t the only one with the update keys this time around.

Bitrot , 3 months ago

The Mozilla Corporation does not accept monetary donations, those go to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. This is a common misunderstanding.

Mozilla Location Services is currently run by the Corporation. I imagine making that dataset public could have privacy implications, since it is likely relying on wifi locations.

Bitrot , 3 months ago

The Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit company founded in 2005 by the Mozilla Foundation. I think part of the problem is more people don’t realize this. It’s the same reason you can’t donate to Firefox development, donations to “Mozilla” go to the Mozilla Foundation, not the company that builds Firefox.

Bitrot , 3 months ago

Firefox is developed by a for-profit subsidiary.

That company actually abandoned Thunderbird years ago, within the past two years Thunderbird moved to its own (for profit) subsidiary.

Bitrot , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

The profits are owned by the Corporation, which is why the Corporation does all the crazy spending and paying millions to executives, because as long as there is enough separation what they do internally does not affect the tax situation of the Foundation. After the for-profit pays taxes, the non-profit can get dividends and other payments from them, but it is not just a way to wash away tax from all the money.

The Corporation acts like a company because it is one. This is different than Konqueror, Epiphany, or most of the Firefox forks.

Bitrot , 4 months ago

I have no complaints about my HP laser printer, although due to the activities at the company at large I will probably not buy one again, assuming this one ever dies and I can find a well supported replacement.

HP has really good Linux support, unfortunately it is better than many companies that “support” Linux, and it is more like their enterprise drivers than the bs they push on consumers. This HP replaced a Brother MFP in fact, because most of the functions did not work in Linux.

Bitrot , 4 months ago

If they also provided the paper, this is definitely something I could see them doing. They’d
own the consumables at that point, and could probably take in some good money being able to tell advertisers exactly how many copies were delivered.

Fax spam is surprisingly still a thing, leave it to HP to bring it into the 21st century.

Bitrot , 4 months ago

They’d work for someone reading on mastodon.

Bitrot , 4 months ago

The Firefox official flatpak on flathub plays videos fine. It can even use vaapi if you install that.

Bitrot , 4 months ago

Bundling it means Firefox is guaranteed to be there on a default install, so you can look up documentation and get online or pass through a captive portal. Fedora also tends to prefer their own flatpak repository over flathub although that might be changing.

Bitrot , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

They do, but I think Google is worse about it because it’s all random back and forth. Most of Microsoft’s recent changes have been renaming Office something or Azure something to Microsoft something. Often the product name itself hasn’t changed, or when it does it’s usually grouping a bunch of products with separate names under one product line with related functionality (Defender didn’t rename, but it also absorbed a lot, Purview and Entra were new absorbed a lot of other product names). Teams was Lync and then Skype for Businesses, but I actually think the simplifying and getting away from the Skype branding was a good move.

Microsoft also seems to have a more thought out process for new products in the first place and doesn’t have the reputation for abandoning things all the time.

Bitrot , 4 months ago

Yes, Copilot is their AI product line. The naming is awkward because the word itself sounds kind of weird, but in general it would be AI for Use Case. That’s how most of their products are named now.

They have something like a dozen Purview products and eight or more Defender products. They’re all grouped by function for use case/environment.

Bitrot , 4 months ago

It is owned by companies that can afford for it to not be profitable, but with raising interest rates financing is more expensive so everyone is tightening purse strings. Not surprised they are doing the IPO now.

Bitrot , 4 months ago

When it was copper they did, because the switch had pretty good power redundancy and backup generators. I live near a large Verizon cell switch and it still has very large generators because an outage there would be way worse than just some towers going down.

Bitrot , 4 months ago

It’s a win for Apple, but isn’t it also sort of a loss because they’re not popular enough to count?

Bitrot , 4 months ago

No. If your name is Dave Jones they have to look around those broker sites for Dave Jones. If those sites were using hashes then they could use hashes too.

This is no different than any credit or identity monitoring service. The need to give them basic information should be obvious, people have to decide if the company is trustworthy or not.

Bitrot , 4 months ago

They are talking about the password lookup: https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords

But, it's the same deal. You have to trust they are actually doing what they say. Mozilla uses haveibeenpwned for their basic Monitor service too.

Bitrot , 4 months ago

Discover only removes it from ten sites.

Bitrot , 4 months ago

What stuff? Snap? The official flatpak? The official deb repository?

Bitrot , 4 months ago

Very helpful! I've been on the fence for a while, the recent addition of Android Auto makes it somewhat easier though.

Bitrot , 4 months ago

Apps can tell if they are not running on an official, Google blessed OS. Most don't care, but for something like that they may have locked it down (contactless payment apps like Google Pay also won't work). Generic NFC can still work for other uses.

Best to look around the GrapheneOS community and see if there are workarounds.

Bitrot , 4 months ago

I went looking for reviews and stumbled into that video too, very disappointing. Note that he is still listed as a director in the Foundation and active in the repo, so it sounds more like he has stepped away from a public facing role, which seems like a good change either way.

Although I also saw what he did when he left CopperheadOS, deleting the update keys. That kind of made me question if I should skip this one.

Bitrot , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

It's such a shitty situation. ICANN is not going to sell .home or .corp as they found a crapton of traffic when they checked for it, but IETF never finished an RFC for them - however people easily stumble into the draft RFC that lists what they were thinking of, and assume stuff like .lan is good to go too. They're safe by ICANN policy, but unsanctioned.

.home.arpa is safe, per RFC, but user unfriendly to normal people. There are a few others but none a corporation would realistically use. I've used . internal for lab testing stuff for ages, so this is extra good news for me I guess.

Really I wish they'd have just reserved the most common ones rather than getting caught in some bureaucratic black hole.

Bitrot , 5 months ago

There is some controversy recently due to partnering with Brave for search results, and the response to comments. Brave tends to be controversial any time it comes up anyway, outside of Eich's political views.

company x founder personal political views was not a factor in this evaluation for this or any any provider we added (for betteor or worse) and merit of technology was the main factor. Politics finding its way into tech is one of the reasons we do not have innovation any more

People can go whatever direction they want with that.

Bitrot , 5 months ago

They violate the open source licenses for the projects they use.

Bitrot , 5 months ago

One of many: http://bbs.onyx-international.com/t/install-linux-or-alternate-os-and-gpl2-kernel-source - nothing has changed

Bitrot , 5 months ago

Meta overly relies on technology for its reports and their algorithms are shit. So is the appeals process. Somewhere the right wing scared them with their censorship claims and they barely touch their platform even for blatant violations of their policies.

Bitrot , 5 months ago

The dongle really isn't that bad for people that want the wired experience, but most people don't care.

Bitrot , 5 months ago

They all have flaws, that's ostensibly why they also provide firmware updates. I think it's likely their software team even fixed the original flaw while their make more money team extended it into locking down products even more.

Bitrot , 5 months ago

Before they switched to the two column layout I swear the message used to be about the same as what they updated it to. But it's been a long time since I used Chrome.

Bitrot , 6 months ago

He is, very obviously.

Some of his recent rants have been about technology that is actively unfriendly to people who are not good with technology. That doesn't mean he cannot figure it out, but it means his parents can't.

Inevitably people show up to suggest a giant convoluted solution based on the power of open source. Menu poorly worded on the ecobee? They should be using home assistant anyway!