I forget which crossing it was exactly. Might have been Windsor or might have been farther north. We drove several hours before switching to the shuttle in any case and didn’t get out to look around on the Canadian side of the crossing.

It could have been a biased sample. I mean, for all I know, one very obese family just happened to get on that same shuttle rather than it being a random sampling of what people were like in that area. Hell, they could have even driven several hours to get there themselves and thus didn’t represent the local population at all.

Could have been bias confirmation rather than culture shock.

I’d love a subscription-based privacy review service. Hell, combine it with a full product review where the consumers of the reviews are paying for it, rather than ad revenue, commissions from selling what they are reviewing, free products from the makers, or being outright fronts for marketers.

Like that report about all car companies selling cars that are spy machines was very good to know, as much as it sucked to see confirmation that that was indeed the case.

If there’s enough easy visibility on who is doing privacy right and wrong, then there might actually be more economic incentive to make good products instead of trying to sell out their own customers to make an extra buck.

I wouldn’t be surprised at it being a combination of both. It’s easy to be paranoid about this stuff because corporations have shown again and again that trusting them is a mistake, but Google and MS (plus many others like advertisers) do have a financial incentive to reduce trust in Mozilla so people go back to using their options and seeing those ads.

I was only in SF for one day and had an event most of that day, unfortunately, so I didn’t get to see much of the city. I think I saw the golden gate bridge from the plane. The hotel they put me in was nice, though, most comfortable bed I’ve ever slept in.

LA was hot and the traffic was pretty crazy. I was there for about a week for siggraph with work. Santa Monica was nice, it was cool seeing the Hollywood sign in person, and I do remember looking back at the city and seeing all the haze.

Six flags had rollercoasters that lasted longer than the longest one at Canada’s Wonderland (at least at the time, their 3 newest ones are a bit more comparable). I won a giant Scooby Doo stuffy because they had a game where I figured out the trick to it on my first play and returned later to upgrade my small Scooby-Doo to the large one (and bought the bag for the plane trip). The stuffy was pretty cheaply made though, so they might have still made money from the two plays I paid for lol.

Other bits and pieces I remember are the different vegetation they had (my first time seeing palm trees) and noticing the barbed wire on a bunch of flat roofs. Also it was weird to see commercials for prescription drugs.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot one of the highlights of the trip, going to Fry’s during it’s heyday. I was buying my own hardware at that time but it was the first time I saw an aisle of motherboards where you could actually see the boards on display. I think we ended up going there twice, once for cables we forgot to pack for our booth, then later for our own shopping trip.

Yeah, I was in SF and then LA and spent the free days of the LA trip hiking Hollywood Hills and visiting six flags, which probably skews more towards people fit enough to hike or fit in rollercoaster seats.

I also visited a market near the hotel that had prices low enough that my assumption at the time was it had to be mostly stolen and got a great duffel bag for like a quarter of what I’d expect to pay for that back home.

In Canada or the US? At least where I am, the Walmart shopping population doesn’t seem that different from the general pop, though I generally avoid going there so maybe I’m just not looking enough.

Disclaimer that I am aware of the people of Walmart meme, but kinda assumed that it was more of a “Walmart is popular therefore you’ll run in to people who live at the extremes” than a “Walmart uniquely attracts those who live at the extremes”.

Yeah, Lemmy isn’t getting the same kind of propaganda as other social media, but it does appear to be present here on some topics.

Like normal conservative propaganda gets drowned out since the userbase has a large portion of people who are here because we’re tired of corporate bullshit.

But it means we’re probably more susceptible to propaganda that accuses corporations of corporate bullshit, whether the accusation has merit or not.

This was in Detroit. It wasn’t as noticable in Florida, or on separate trips to California. Like I’m sure I saw some pretty obese people in those locations (as I do in various places in Canada), but it wasn’t to the point where my mind made specific note of it for me to remember over a decade later.

Yeah, that might be the best case scenario. Have ad blocking but add in some technical hurdles so that not enough people do it for it to be worth stamping out.

Though that makes me wonder if this will be effective at all because the technical hurdle to get Mozilla’s new ad system is only slightly less than the technical hurdle to install ublock origin. I’m guessing advertisers will either ignore it entirely and continue with what they are doing (because the data means profit for them) or maybe put some portion of their bandwidth towards it while continuing to do what they are doing with other providers.

The problem for me is that I’m tired of ads at all, so while I do think that having an ad system that is less abusive than the current one is a step in the right direction, I still don’t want to see any unsolicited ads and this feels like the initial steps to try to make it more palatable to eventually try to force users to accept ads back into their lives.

First thing I (another Canadian) noticed when we switched from the car to a shuttle to the airport (crossed the border by car to take a flight to Florida) was that there were multiple people on that shuttle that were at least as big as the most obese person I’d ever seen in person up to that point.

Even though our cultures overlap quite a bit, there’s something different in that aspect.

The drop-down text menu with dense options was good design. Adding the quick toolbar for more common tasks was also good design.

Moving everything from the text menu to the quick toolbar was bad design.

Just like the evolution of their search functionality. Started as an explorer feature (good), added to the start menu with a focus on program names (good), then they mixed web results from Bing and it’s unclear if a program I’m searching for is installed and it found that or if it exists and the result is a link to some website (bad, if I wanted to search the fucking internet, I’d launch a fucking browser), also insisting on using their browser (wtf, they should have been broken up 20 fucking years ago, instead the courts decided to just fucking ignore them doing the same shit they lost the lawsuit for only much worse now).

When trying to find a copy of Forza 4 (or one of them) after being disappointed with the cut down version they had on gamepass, I discovered it couldn’t be sold anymore because of a deal MS made with Porsche that eventually ran out.

Also set up a standardized licensing process that breaks the mini-monopolies of exclusive content.

Personally, I’d also limit copyright to specific works and not the characters, setting, etc. Then protect trademarks and use those to establish canon. Like in the MCU and DC universes, Spiderman and Batman don’t exist together, but in the Superhero Fan Universe, they are roommates and play genius billionaire vs superhuman with a sixth sense prank wars on each other.

Agreed. Especially considering uBlock origin is pretty much the main reason to use FF at all. They shouldn’t be delegating reviews of it to someone who would fuck up this badly.

Assuming this wasn’t a “test the waters” kind of thing to determine just how much they were reliant on ublock.

I’ve been using the main FF build for a while now but I’m wondering if I should start looking at the various fork options.

Just wait.

Needs Microsoft added to the list.

Wait does that mean I can only have up to 4 billion games on my client before the game list overflows and I start losing games at the end of the list?

With the hash one, it doesn’t look like that could be exploited by an attacker doing the bad hashing themselves, since any collisions they do find will only be relevant to the extra hashing they do on their end.

But that encryption one still sounds like it could be exploited by an attacker applying more encryption themselves. Though I’m assuming there’s a public key the attacker has access to and if more layers of encryption make it easier to determine the associated private key, then just do that?

Though when you say they share the same secret, my assumption is that a public key for one algorithm doesn’t map to the same private key as another algorithm, so wouldn’t cracking one layer still be uncorrelated with cracking the other layers? Assuming it’s not reusing a one time pad or something like that, so I guess context matters here.

I tried that without a password manager for a little while. But then my answers were too abstract to remember, so now I also use a password manager for that.