CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@HorayNarea @grumpygamer There is a potential hardware market here ... A USB connected button to attach to your monitor, which triggers the degauss emulator software ....

I smell a kickstarter project here!

@grumpygamer Better games ... probably also related to the real hackers of 80s and 90s able to squeeze the limit of x86 CPUs in "demo competitions" where the main program was not allowed to exceed 64KiB. And they squeezed that lemon to amazing heights!

Today's generation just wines about how expensive it has become to buy more RAM.

Even though I've been doing programming professionally for for quite some time, I'm not even worthy looking at these older hacker's boots.

@bekopharm @anthropy zoom is available on flathub.

@privacyguides I don't know exactly where you got Proton's claim from ... but this is what they say in their support section:

A kill switch is a security feature that protects your IP address in case you unexpectedly lose the connection to a Proton VPN server. In case the connection is interrupted, a kill switch blocks all external network traffic to and from your device *until the connection is automatically re-established to the same VPN server. *

(my highlight)
source: https://protonvpn.com/support/what-is-kill-switch

This is generally how kill switch works basically everywhere. As it doesn't tear down the virtual network interface (including the redirect routes, routing your internet traffic via the VPN) until it has established a new connection to the remote server.

What is being demonstrated here is that the user implicitly disconnects the connection before starting to connect to the new chosen server.

A more accurate test for kill switch is to block the network traffic for the amount of time it takes for the VPN client to start "recovering" the connection by establishing a new connection to the same server. That new server may have a different IP address.

The reason this isn't possible to achieve when switching servers completely is that the encryption certificates would result in a mismatch, thus tearing down the connection as the client wouldn't be able to identify if it's a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack happening, with a host trying to impersonate the real VPN server it should be connected to.

@brunogirin @brucelawson

That said .... serving pickled herring ... that's just pure evil.

@joakimfors @brucelawson

Said by a true Swede ...........

@brunogirin @brucelawson

Excuse me .... but what's wrong with «brunost on knekkebrød.» !??!??!!?

@sarahjamielewis @nemeciii

I hope sanity will win in the end. When these politicians realises that it will be easier control then direction the wind blows per week day, than to control what happens on computers in the homes of their population.

It's essentially just a dark comedy farce, almost like it's pulled out of an unpublished Douglas Adams manuscript.

@sarahjamielewis What I struggle to wrap my head around on this OS age verification stuff ... How will they verify that this age verification hasn't been disabled or tampered with?

How can they be sure it is working as intended on an OS which is fully open source?

Or will they do home visits to check that it is working as it should? Will you need a licence to own a computer, so governments know who has access to computers and how many? I heard families in California could get a $2500 fine if the age verification was not active - how would they know? You need to login on a website regularly to get access to Internet?

On the other side, I see a huge win in all of this.

The government may very well help fostering up a large force of young hackers who will want to take full control over their computers. Where the clever hacks fooling various audits and controls will flourish on the darkweb which will also most likely grow popularity. And if this goes much further than California alone, maybe this will even contribute to "the year of the Linux desktop"? I'm sure Microsoft will be thrilled!

I think I'll just grab some popcorn and watch how this all plays out. And I'll happily help and support kids wanting to learn a few things about computers

Trying to wrap my head around osc the command line for the openSUSE Build System.

Why on earth did they need to make it so complicated. Even the early days of git was easier to use than this. And they even did the cardinal sin of making it behave like svn in many aspects.

#opensuse #osc #oss #foss #opensource

@thor

Lenovo certainly has been one of the better ones for many years. But they have had models, including in the T series, where you basically had to replace a huge part of the laptop for a minor thing.

My X1C Gen 8 got a new motherboard because of a broken USB-C port. A T14 Gen 1 had to replace the complete top-part of the frame as the keyboard was glued to it - and to replace it, you had to unscrew basically every single component inside the laptop; everything was attached to this frame.

Also, the overall quality seems to have dropped after the T460 models. I've had one service on a T450 and a T460. But had 3 services on the X1C Gen8 and 2 services on the T14 Gen 1. Currently, a X1C Gen11 has behaved nicely and properly, but that's also the newest one. Issues typically occurs after 2-3 years of use.

That said, the T14 Gen7 and T16 Gen 5 improvements begins to look more like the good old T4xx series again, in regards to repairability. That's definitely a good step in the right direction. Now that just need to happen with the X and X1 series too.

@iFixit

@Mediablikk Overskriften har iallefall sitt typiske VG trekk .....

@bweller @bmoreinis @mttaggart @catsalad

Well, there are other Linux distributions who won't care what California demands.

@rq Yeah.

What might convince me is when Mozilla begins to "walk the talk", admit their wrong moves and wrong doings - and that those bad moves gets real consequences in how Mozilla is organised and managed. Full transparency is definitely needed.

This is a follow-up post on the sad state of Mozilla

First, notice the date of the commit identified (as highlighted in a few posts below that toot referenced above).

Secondly, Mozilla has done further changes to their Privacy policy since this initial change. I am not fully convinced about them - since the Privacy FAQ at the same time is not aligned. The reason for my continued mistrust to Mozilla is that they have gradually, over many years, moved in a direction I do find privacy unfriendly. And they have ties/agreements/contracts/partnerships to companies who does not have a good track record on privacy topics. I generally trust people and organisations actions more than their words of what they want to do.

Thirdly, it should be fairly clear to most that AI/LLM is not preserving privacy well when data is sent to a remote server to be processed there. And even running parts of the LLM engines locally does not fully disentangle the privacy aspects fully - data is still being exchanged with a remote server (otherwise there would not need to be "AI service provider URLs" in about:cofig). Mozilla did force AI/LLM unto users, enabled by default with the only way to disable that in the beginning via about:config. And it took several releases before more user friendly approaches to disable it arrived. Due to this delay, I really wonder "does these new knobs really fully disable AI/LLM?". I have that doubt, because of how Mozilla has behaved over many years.

On top of this, the Mozilla leadership is extremely well paid while they have reduced their engineering teams working on Firefox and other products. That is a too strong indication for me to ignore, that profit and leadership compensation seem to be way more important than the core mission of making Internet a better place.

I have little trust in Mozilla for the time being. And I doubt I'm alone, due to the traction this toot thread triggered. Currently, I believe trust can be built up again. But it will take a lot of efforts now to repair what has been broken. For that to improve for me, I will need to see a lot of actions from Mozilla, where they clearly does changes in the whole organisation and communicates them clearly and that the communication is aligned across all aspects - including policy documents, FAQs, source code. Until that happens, I will use some of the Firefox forks. And leadership compensation need to be completely transparent and come down to a level which is not in an astronomic level comparable to large for-profit enterprise companies who generally cares little for anything than their own egoistic wealth.

If a person taking a leadership role in an organisation claiming working for a better Internet and fighting for its users is getting uninteresting unless there is a million dollar yearly compensation when the people doing the grunt work, delivering code resulting in a real product, has a 5th or 10th of that compensation, then I do question the values this person holds. And I will especially highly question the leadership when they need to reduce cost and choses to cut among the engineers doing the grunt work while the leadership not considering their own compensation.

So basically, I find the Mozilla organisation fairly rotten currently. It preaches the nice words but ends up doing something completely different.

#mozilla #firefox #privacy #foss #opensource

@beet_keeper Spotted that myself recently too! Wondered what that was all about.

@sandberg Next time ordering a beer, don't ask for 0.5l .... ask for 500ml!

RE: https://mastodon.social/@adbenitez/116127438180037113

#HotTake: #Email will die eventually, but not before the day there is a replacement working equally well on the distributed way without requiring registering accounts in a silo.

E-mail survives because of the distributed and kinda federated approach of collaborating across domains and scopes and actually being quite resistant and reliable when it comes to getting an e-mail delivered. Plus it's a pretty simple protocol at its core.

Yes, it got issues. But it's quite reliable at its core. And everyone knows how to use it, just as they know how to use a phone.

Is it just me, or isn't it incredibly weird that all the USB powerbanks and lots of mobile device batteries use the unit mAh ... and then values like 20 000 or 5 000.

20 000mAh is the same as 20Ah.

#battery #math #marketing #powerbank #chargers