https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean#installation

It’s yet another scheme to gather data about Chrome users for the benefit of advertisers. Aside from the fundamental problems with that whole idea which people most often point to, it’s also underhanded in a way that cookies, tracking scripts, and browser fingerprinting aren’t: It’s code that’s built in to the web browser itself which exists for no purpose other than to act directly against the interests of its users. It may be the first time that’s happened in such an obvious and unambiguous way.

It sounds like pretty close to the same thing except for the “if you intend to monetize it” part which is a very big difference. But I don’t think Twitch or Youtube or the other platforms where significant money can be made have any support for anonymous payment methods, so that situation is not so different in Germany compared to the rest of the world (outside of China and places like that.)

More importantly, we should stop giving Mastercard our data. Paying for everything with credit cards has been an obviously bad idea since thirty years ago at latest.

I have frequently found myself surrounded by Twitter and Instagram users, and they seem just as deluded as they do from here.

It is saying that VPN use was the only excuse given by the authorities when he was “ordered to pay” them a large amount of money. While I don’t know for certain that it’s true, I still haven’t seen anything here or elsewhere to contradict that.

How is it misleading? Based on the info we have it seems accurate.

Not spelling out the whole story to your satisfaction in the headline is no better than capricious law enforcement giving out penalties for something that shouldn’t be a crime ranging from nothing, to a $27 fine, to confiscating 3 years of income, to 13 years in prison?

It will have no practically significant effect. Websites do not have access to browser chrome css properties. The worst it might do is change the dimensions of the viewport in a way that makes your browser fingerprint slightly more unusual, i.e. the same thing that would happen if you set the UI to “compact” mode.

Is EVE Online still going? It appears to be. It’s a somewhat challenging game and very different than what you’re used to, but it really was fantastic for getting to meet good in-game friends way back when I played. Of course some of them would eventually betray you, take all your stuff, and leave your dead corpse floating in space, but even so it’s very much a team game that may be what you’re looking for if you happen to be into spaceships and/or spreadsheets.

Some test code made it in before they stopped it due to the public reaction, but it was never functional in mainline chrome.

The next question is whether they’ll be evil enough to try the same with the web environment integrity thing. We know you’re thinking about it, Google. Drop the Staff of Dread Zombies and back away from the corpse before somebody gets hurt.

It got rebranded as the “Topics API” and is now live in many people’s web browsers.

If you can’t avoid it and you don’t trust it, you could probably turn off its wifi and then connect to it only through your own router+VPN.

It’s the kind of game where nobody wins.

Eh, it depends. If you want maximum privacy then it’s probably a good idea. If you’re aware of the risks, have some trust in your ISP, don’t do anything that’s likely to attract unwanted attention, don’t care about making indiscriminate mass surveillance slightly more difficult, and live in a country where there isn’t too much censorship, then not really.

I’d believe about 50% of it. Yes, it’s true that many VPN providers are not completely trustworthy. No, that doesn’t mean that they’re all bad or that none of them are worth using.

If you have a need for one, take the time to choose carefully. Setting up your own avoids the burden of having to find a good one, but is even more work and comes with some downsides if your aim is to have any protection against people who might want to track you down through your hosting provider.

I hope someone is training a super-powerful AI on all my posts around the net, so that all my memes will be passed on through it to future generations.

They may benefit from it, but it’s pretty hard to believe that a bunch of sleazy “AI can do everything” snake oil salesmen, along with the politicians and lobbyists they’ve bought, got to be this influential and well-funded on their own. It’s not as if their arguments are all that convincing on their merits.

I’m not usually much of a conspiracy theorist, but damned if it doesn’t look a little like what might happen if a powerful cabal of billionaires was making concerted efforts to use their political influence to lock down the remaining parts of the world where people have some degree of liberty in order to prepare for installing the authoritarian fascism they think will keep them safe in the coming apocalypse.

Having read that hit piece aimed at Ungoogled Chromium, I will continue to use it for the rare occasions when I need something other than Firefox. It makes a few good points that security-conscious users should be aware of (although which of them still apply at present is unknown to me) but it does not look anything like what I would expect from an unbiased and diligent reviewer.

It’s quite good. I’d rate it the second most essential browser extension, after uBlock Origin.

If your web site is part of Vox Media or Condé Nast then you might want to consult your lawyers, but as I understand it this particular law would not apply to those which don’t have either $millions in revenue or a habit of sharing information about their users. Any danger posed by it to the more smol parts of the web would be would be more indirect, depending on the long-term social consequences of normalizing the idea of age verification.

I’m sure there’s probably more than one and I don’t even remember which it was that I saw, but a quick search turns up GNO which is said to be privacy-focused although it isn’t immediately clear how exactly it works.

Personally I’m rooting for something non-blockchain for the electronic payments system of the near-ish future: GNU Taler. It solves enough privacy problems to be useful, making it much better than what most of the world uses now, without immediately becoming the basis for a pyramid scheme, an instrument for pump-and-dump scams, a means of receiving big ransom payments, or a big flashing target for banking regulators.

Monero is better than most in some ways, but it’s proof-of-work so not really any better in that way. Ether is the one that doesn’t waste energy, Monero is the one that offers privacy. There’s at least one that tries to do both but even fewer people have heard of it.

There’s some good stuff in there and it’s easy to cheer for some big new regulatory burdens being put on Google and Facebook, but it’s slightly chilling to think what it’d be like if they eventually try to apply it to the fediverse. It sets up teams of what it calls “trusted flaggers” for example, whose job it will be to scour the net for anything they believe to be “illegal content” and order it removed. I imagine they’d start with places like c/piracy, but once such a vast apparatus for net censorship is set up who knows where else it might start looking. They’ll use it to go after sellers of “counterfeit” goods as well. Imagine your instance admins being forced to go through some kind of appeals process to take down posts they don’t like, but being required to instantly take down posts the government doesn’t like.

I don’t know, it’s pretty complicated but there are some reasons to be slightly worried about it I guess.

It seems like nothing much has changed since this was written: https://webdevlaw.uk/2022/07/21/fixing-uks-online-safety-bill-part-0-not-fixable/

When does this moment of bliss happen? I must’ve missed it. All I noticed when I lost my firefox profile for some reason and had to make a new one was about an hour of fiddling with the settings, installing extensions, and messing with userChrome.css to make it look reasonable.

Don’t ever trust a “smart” TV until you’ve installed Linux on it. All of the ones I’ve bought so far (the cheapest available at Wal-Mart, usually) are willing to display things without ever having been allowed a network connection. If you manage to buy one that isn’t, return it and complain vigorously.

It’s not particularly easy to find a trustworthy VPN, but it’s not particularly hard to find one you’d trust more than whatever random public wi-fi you’ve found while on the road. Your stock reminder that we can never trust anyone is not really useful here.

Using a good VPN is one way to sanitize the whole network environment when you have no reason to trust even the router you’re connecting to, avoiding quite a few risks besides that of someone passively analyzing your traffic.

So they’ve decided that this part of the bill will be unenforceable and useless, but they plan to go ahead and pass it anyway. I suppose they’ll soon need to do the same for the age verification nonsense as well.

They still want to impose these ill-conceived laws on us so as to appear to have done something, but the people who had somehow been convinced that this would do some good will be disappointed. If they stick with this course, they will soon have managed the impressive political feat of pleasing exactly nobody with the results of this excruciating years-long process of counterproductive legislating.

Peertube is for people who want to get away from Youtube. Invidious is for people who want a better UI for Youtube.

I’d be among the first to agree that Mozilla has made a lot of bad choices, but this video doesn’t cover the important ones, whines interminably about some trivial ones, and generally says very little that’s of interest. And I’ve already seen it linked to like 3 times on lemmy.

that could get you fired some day.

Among other ways it might make you better off, a tendency to boot linux on school-issued devices could also very much help get you hired some day. Although perhaps not in the education system. Seeing a teacher discourage it is even more depressing than seeing a student fear he’ll be punished for it. So long as you’re not breaking any laws, it seems like a fine idea.

Maybe. On the other hand, it’s much more privacy-friendly than that guy says.

Sane and reasonable people spent several decades advocating the use of cash instead of cards since at least the 1970s, until we mostly gave up. Who knows, maybe the newly invigorated crazy people will do better. They can’t do much worse.

Firefox being free software, it wouldn’t make much sense for them to try and do something like this. So obviously we know that Mozilla would never go along with such an absurd law and start doing censorship on behalf of France. … right, Mozilla? Slightly strange that you didn’t say so?

Who cares what big-time tech execs think about it? There ought to be protests in the streets about this. They’re trying to outlaw end-to-end encryption. They’re not even really trying to hide that any more. If they succeed, the UK won’t be the first country to do so. Signal isn’t threatening to leave because they’re worried about the potential ethical implications of the new rules. They’ll be leaving because their product will simply be outlawed. The UK will be joining the ranks of other notable countries who’ve gone that way, such as Iran, China, Cuba, Egypt, and Oman.

Someone more ambitious than me ought to make a “how to spot a capitalist” information film in this style.

Canada has not yet introduced its version of an “Online Safety” bill, but it will be coming soon. Right now would be a very good time to write to your MP asking them to do what they can to stop it from including any of this kind of stupidity.