toastal

toastal , 2 months ago to Memes in Untitled Goose Game

What is their mission?

toastal , 2 months ago to Memes in A helpful graphic about writing alt text

Just as important is “decorative images” where you explicitly leave the alt empty https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decorative/

toastal OP , 2 months ago to Privacy in Ask: How do you handle your résumés?

Would be a good filter against those places that would actually get hung up on this

toastal , 2 months ago to Privacy in Youtube is now unusable without a frontend

The SponsorBlock integration is a major difference from NewPipe

toastal , 2 months ago to Memes in I'm the worm in the apple car.

OMG. I haven’t seen these images in like 20 years. My cousin loved these.

toastal , 2 months ago to Technology in Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins

npm, Inc. (a subsidiary of GitHub, a subsidiary of Microsoft)

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm

toastal , 2 months ago to Technology in Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins

Use them reluctantly & push back against it until you can free yourself from them. Let folks know you are unhappy about it or powers at be will think everything is okay. Surely we can agree fundamentally that Microsoft should not be controlling these spaces as it does with the platform lock-in.

toastal , 2 months ago to Technology in Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins

Microsoft products you can start saying no to: Windows, WSL, GitHub, Sponsors, Copilot, VS Code, Codespaces, Azure, npm, Teams, Outlook, Office, & LinkedIn.

toastal , 2 months ago to Memes in saving lives is hot

Staring in the face of late-stage capitalism, the human race tries to find a glimmer of optimism. Can’t afford a real date, find it too hard to connect while sober.

toastal , 2 months ago to Privacy in Why I no longer use a VPN (most of the time) and nor should you - YouTube

Sure if you need that protection, but there is a lot of fearmongering about VPNs that are misinformation to sell products most folks don’t need to be worrying about versus more pressing matters in security/privacy

toastal , 2 months ago to Privacy in Why I no longer use a VPN (most of the time) and nor should you - YouTube

Everything after Hello is encrypted tho. The metadata is important, but takes some leaps of assumption to know what that data means—moreso than the metadata of say WhatsApp since the payload could be just about anything & from anywhere, not just a P2P text/multimedia message. And DNS over HTTPS does exist now & has support in all browsers & mobile operating systems. If it’s the hostnames you are worried about, a simple SSH SOCKS5 proxy with remote DNS could work with many older technologies. Not saying there isn’t some worry, but there are solutions now, the ISP is getting close to nothing, & for most folks subscribing to a comericial VPN is not worth giving monthly money to these actors that you probably can’t trust.

toastal , 2 months ago to Privacy in Chromium Manifest V3 Explained for Toddlers

You can go to the Blink + V8 engine without using Google Chrome; in fact that’s exactly what you should be doing as Google’s browser has way more spyware built into it.

The thing that killed it for me was the lack of PWA support

I hear ya. I’m still butthurt about Fx killing SSB (site-specific browser) before it even had a chance. They had the feature locked behind a flag & then removed it due to low usage. It seems a lot of folks hadn’t even heard of it til the news was out about it being removed. It would have been great to use since you could run something akin to firefox --ssb https://url (I forget exactly the command, & you’d want to write it to cover Gecko forks), but it means you could ship some apps with just exec. Since the process was pooled with the main browser instance too, it wasn’t as taxing on resources as Electron.

toastal , 2 months ago to Privacy in Chromium Manifest V3 Explained for Toddlers

Brave Search has been alright, tho I’m not entirely sure how their algorithms are working & they index much slower so they probably aren’t doing full aggregation themselves nor does it seem that they are just using Bing like DuckDuckGo. Yandex is great for image search & I use their translation service even if it’s a little weaker just to spread my data across services instead of centralizing. Even if I preferred content written by a human, a lot of general queries it seems I am more prone to reaching for an LLM …even tho it could be a hallucination, a lot of the content written by folks on the highest SEO sites are just as much bullshit.

toastal , 2 months ago to Privacy in Why I no longer use a VPN (most of the time) and nor should you - YouTube

By who? Who is auditing the auditors? That’s not to say audits aren’t good, but when the code is proprietary, a lot of trust is required. I would prefer banking on solid, open tech which the TLS standard is. There is still use cases for VPNs, but outside like streaming piracy, you might be better served by the Tor network.

toastal , 2 months ago to Privacy in Why I no longer use a VPN (most of the time) and nor should you - YouTube

What metadata? The headers are as encrypted as the payload. That there was a key exchange between you & a server isn’t too useful.

“Usually” is a strong word for DNS as well since all OSs let you change it & the megacorporations like Google & Cloudflare have already compelled a lot of folks to use their DNS ta resolve faster since the ISP ones are slow (& the smarter, curious folks used that as a launching point to find other provider or self-host). Some platforms have even been shipping DNS-over-HTTPS to get around some of these issues (since the payload & headers are encrypted under TLS).