Wow, beautiful analogy! I’m going to use that in my professional career if you don’t mind. Also with your permission I’d like to give you credit with a link to this comment, if that’s OK with you, of course.

I wonder if this has anything to do with Apple’s CSAM scanning. You know, hang on to the photos as evidence, and, for an added bonus, sell more iCloud storage because the “System Data” now exceeds the free iCloud data storage quota. Win-win!

If it is indeed a boneheaded mistake, then it’s probably because of over reliance on RPC-type calls from the front-end that displays the data, to the back-end that actually handles the data. User deletes photo, and the front-end, instead of actually deleting it, tells the backend to do it… and then hides the photo from view, maybe updates its index of photos marking them as “deleted” regardless of whether the backend actually deleted the photo.

Then an OS update comes along, and rescans the filesystem, and report a bunch of new photos to the front-end, that then happily add them to the GUI to the user’s surprise.

Modern APIs and software architectures are a bloated, unnecessarily complex mess, and this is the result.

Wasn’t Google Plus used to be called Circles? Man, I feel old!

What happens if you redirect all traffic to a sinkhole, rather than to 127.0.0.1? Do the devices still freak out when they talk to a web server which returns a 404? Just morbidly curious…

The Orion browser for iOS/iPadOS supports both Firefox and Chromium extensions, however, the support is quite buggy and limited. Nonetheless, a valiant effort by Orion devs.

According to LocalSend docs these are the ports that need to be opened: Multicast (UDP) Port: 53317 Address: 224.0.0.167 HTTP (TCP) Port: 53317 AFAIK macOS firewall is app-based, at least in the GUI. So depending on how you installed LocalSend, you may have to add it to the list of allowed apps: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/mac-help/mh34041/mac

You may be able to add the ports above to /etc/pf.conf manually, but AFAIK messing with pf on macOS is not recommended.

The other thing I wanted to ask is about Vallum. If you have it running on that Mac, would it not “take over” the macOS firewall?

It loads and UI seems to work, but it still doesn’t actually block ads or click them.

I’m guessing this is a school and not a university? At a university students have more clout/rights, at least on paper.

In any case, getting your own machine is the way to go. You can run whatever you want on it. You could still (cautiously) use the school network, as long as you use a VPN; basically treat the school network as a “hostile” environment. That’s assuming VPN use is not against the school rules. :)

Is there an IT policy at your school? I suggest perusing it for 2 reasons:

1. Understanding the consequences of tampering/tinkering with the spyware.
2. Understanding how much authority the IT department really has, and whether or not what they’re doing with the spyware constitutes overreach.

#2 in particular is for your own knowledge/benefit. Since you’re not an employee, but a student, you may have some inherent rights under this policy, which the IT department may be violating.

Yikes, that’s terrible!

Lots of Firefox fanboys on here I see…

Librewolf is probably a safer choice.

The Brave ad blocker is based on uBlock Origin, AFAIK, so no, you don’t need it.

Back then emails were limited to 2MB. Nowadays an average Office document is that size and email size limits have grown 10-100x.

Yup, I’m a proud subscriber of that community. Not sure that it has to do with this browser thread though.

No worries!

What does this have to do with the dark web?

Ditto here. On the other hand their built-in adblock seems airtight. I’d like to see how it fares against Google’s/Youtube’s anti-adblock measures.

I’m in Canada and haven’t been hit with those yet… either that or my adblocks are working really well. 😉

Devs aren’t the brightest when it comes to sharing their code. There was a open source router firmware dev that for some ungodly reason, distributed the binaries to his router firmware builds through OneDrive. Why, I still wonder to this day… especially since his source code was on Github. At least use releases, if you’re that lazy? Still far from ideal, but at least it’s marginally better and more convenient that %#€$& OneDrive. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Confirmed! That’s impressive…

Thanks, I was looking for a good AdBlock test, but lost it in my bookmarks. Will try the D3 on my iPhone.

AFAIK Firefox on iOS/iPadOS doesn’t support extensions. Or were you referring to macOS (desktop/laptop)?

Bitwarden extension for Firefox loads but doesn’t seem able to autofill… but it works (note: I have a self-hosted VaultWarden server, not BitWarden’s cloud service).

Maybe uBlock Origin will work? It seems to be advertised on their website.

Given that this thing is a beta and based on functionality so far, I am impressed. I wish there were a way to tweak the built-in ad and tracker blockers (e.g., add/remove custom lists), but this is already impressive for the iOS/iPadOS walled garden.

Fair enough. Are there extensions for Chromium/Firefox that do multi-device sync properly (e.g. strictly peer to peer)?

Did not know that… thanks!

I’d take waterfox off that list. AFAIK it’s dev sold out.

They implement profile syncing (bookmarks, cookies, history, etc) using blockchain. AFAIK the data is encrypted with your private key which is derived from a mnemonic phrase, so it’s probably ZK.

I like choice. I use Librewolf with Adnauseam for sites that are in the super sketchy category, and Brave for everything else.

Using Noscript is safe, sure, but I’m not into 1992 web browsing, except at nerdout parties where we try using an old 486 laptop running Windows 95 and Netscape 4.01 to browse today’s web.

My point is that there are reasonable steps and compromises one can take to protect their privacy somewhat. Achieving Snowden level protection is cool, but not my cup of tea; too much of a compromise and loss of functionality, sorry. Sure, you can drop a nuke (like NoScript) in retaliation, but that’s overkill and will break most modern sites out there.

Brave, on the other hand, is based on uBlock Origin with actively maintained filters. It’s also 100% compatible with custom filters too. It’s also nicely deGoogled out of the box, so that’s definitely a bonus.

I am one of those people.

I am sure those who bought bitcoin relatively early and are sitting on $100K+ worth of bitcoin disagree…

You can turns that off… also those ads are text notifications that are shown at predetermined (by the user) time intervals.

Brave for Chromium and Librewolf for Mozilla.

I think using Brave, just by virtue of ad blocking, probably isn’t worse than using Safari. I use Brave on iOS myself.