Melody Fwygon

Systemd is great; if AND ONLY if your distro is designed around it and designed specifically for systemd, with systemd in mind.

It’s understandably not so great…if your distro isn’t designed with the same principals as systemd.

Content is Paywalled.

I don’t think any alternatives exist that are easily viable.

Most require you to buy specific phones and flash the OS or buy them from a specific supplier who pre-images them.

Carrier compatibility is also a major issue if you’re in any country with a cellular network requiring that you use VoLTE services in general…these third party OSes can’t always get at the vendor binary blobs or simply won’t include them because legal and privacy preserving reasons.

You may have some luck with GrapheneOS or maybe LineageOS but those are the only mainstream “alternates” to Android that exist; which actually have a decent chance of working well and can usually be installed to a fair number of different devices; as long as you can unlock their bootloaders and root them day one.

If you main frustration is Youtube; I recommend trying Invidious or Piped, as these frontends for Youtube do not have such aggressive scripts; and can be hosted locally on your machine.

Hint: I strongly recommend self-hosting Invidious on your PC using Docker and Podman for ease of use and administration. You can also self-host other privacy oriented front-ends for other sites as well, such as redlib for reddit and any others you can imagine.

Seriously; don’t bother with the public instances. They don’t work well. Self-host the software on your local PC and use Tailscale if you need to help other devices access your self-hosted instance.

Similarly FreeTube would work as well and pairs nicely if you self-host Invidious locally.

No. You should not turn this feature off; no matter how infuriating you find it to be. You will eventually find it useful. It was put there for a reason; and your usage of the addon to find tab sounds is not a common thing people do. Additionally if your plugin begins to fail or is suddenly no longer maintained; you will have a UI element to immediately fall back on using to help you manage tab sounds.

No. Not without paying a hefty license upgrade fee (Retail copy) or doing something incredibly shady. (Piracy tools which I won’t specifically name but I’m sure you can find and likely know the dangers of obtaining for some users.)

Unfortunately no. Home edition will actively ignore Group Policies and Registry keys relating to privacy.

You would be better off using a 10 Pro license or pirating 10 Pro and keeping it from phoning home.

It is likely they have the ability to sign the public key of your console with a “Suicide Key” which would signal your console to commit suicide by burning some internal e-fuse.

It is also equally likely this is an over-broad version of “Legal Rear Armor” that means nothing explicitly about what they can do. This is because modifying your system has long carried risk of bricking and their security systems to prevent modifications have only increased in strength.

It’s likely the new security system in the Switch 2 is so naively hair-trigger sensitive that it absolutely will brick you or disable some functionality permanently if it thinks you even so much as modified a backup copy of a save file or encrypted binary stored on your SD card itself. It’s very likely that any kind of attempt to write invalid foreign files onto an SD may result in issues. I’d expect Switch 2 systems to spontaneously self destruct if exposed to bad quality or fake SD cards with insufficient capacity; or an SD card that is failing if what I am guessing is true.

Is this confirmed? No; it’s just idle wild speculation. But it is what I expect from Nintendo; given that their creatives have all been driven away from the executive positions of power and only money driven executives are left at the helm.

Given that the Switch has already been thoroughly cracked; it’s likely now more than a want or need, Nintendo now has a mania or obsession with making their consoles un-exploitable. Likely, this is because they’re too naive to avoid promising their consoles are ‘unbreakable’ to their third parties and publishers.

Unfortunately Nintendo is full of foolish pride and stubbornness. Tinkerers and video game preservers the world over will need to once again break the Switch 2 security to pieces to prove to Nintendo that this endeavor is futile.

In the meantime; don’t tinker with a Switch or Switch 2 you can’t afford to lose. Hell, don’t even buy one if you’re sensitive to it being un-tinkerable. Don’t gift them to any children in your life either. Instead; gift them something more useful; like teaching them how to emulate one of the older Nintendo Systems and gift them a Library of ROMs so they don’t have to torrent it themselves and ‘give the family computer a virus’ or ‘cause a scary letter to be sent to their parents’ with their inexperience. If you can’t bear piracy; then go pick up one of the old legitimate retro systems. Buy it somewhere used and pick up whatever used games you can for them at any occasion.

Given the absurd number of sites that require a login for no discernible security reason at all whatsoever; I get it.

A “Common” password makes sense. This password should never be used to log into or protect anything secure however.

Similarly a “Common” password might be used to enable login more easily from certain devices; but ideally this “temporary” password should probably be something that is, yet again, different from the first “Common” password you use.

It boggles my mind that someone like this isn’t at least using a specific passphrase for secure work accounts only.

While I can personally understand a need for some password reuse across multiple domains; at least there should be some separation of larger “superdomains” such as “work”, “personal” and “throwaway” so that breaches don’t have such a catastrophic impact.

A system of generating secure, unrelated but memorable phrases (for you) for those times you can’t carry or use a password manager is frequently essential. That way you can recall the password on the fly when it is asked of you; all you need to do is think about the unrelated thing you attached that information to.

This is mostly useless to me; I already enforce all tabs into unique containers to isolate browsing and website contexts from one another; while still allowing me to make exceptions to the rule and “unbreak” things if that’s causing an issue, but still keeping things isolated from the rest of the browsing.

As for Tab Management; I use two windows and a plugin; Tab Stash Plus; which collapses tabs I stash into a bookmark.

Every so often when I reach a critical mass of tabs I personally go through them and play “Keep/Toss” with more odds on Toss. Only useful tabs get stashed and are then searchable from the plugin.

In general; since this feature now presents a possibility of an extremely UNWANTED AI integration I will be setting the config to off and leaving it off…using a relevant config policy tool or plugin to enforce this to off if needed. I hate AI features that I didn’t ask for and this one definitely doesn’t seem like it’s going to be helpful nor compatible with my current workflow.

Unfortunately this law is unconstitutional as ever. This is nothing more than a scare tactic; as it should not survive a true challenge in the SCOTUS. If it does survive such a challenge; burn them all, congress and all.

No; it’s not inarguable.

I do feel that some minor limitations around social media should exist; such as hours of the day you may not be allowed to read or post; but they should be simple age-gates created to privately verify a person’s age via a simple SSO/OAuth style token. If you can’t authenticate against some privacy respecting identity proving entity you probably aren’t old enough and any account(s) you create would be limited.

Not all social media needs to be age-gated either; but social networks could be forced by law to avoid monetizing your account or habits at all if you don’t willingly identify. (and by doing so; also CONSENT TO THIS MONETIZATION) In short; if you are not verified they’re required to assume you are a child and handle your data as such…with utmost respect to your privacy.

All that being said; I’m going to be watching carefully.

I still think they have time to backpedal, make it right, and clarify. I don’t permit my installations to talk to their data collection services anyways; via network policies. I have no problem tightening those screws and forcefully disabling their telemetry in other ways as well.

If I have to migrate; well; I already have LibreWolf installed. I might try a few other forks next; to see which ones ‘just work’ with the web properly to protect my privacy while still allowing all websites to work properly as intended so long as I give that website appropriate permissions as I see fit.

I don’t believe that anyone misunderstood the wording.

The problem lies within the broad meaning of the chosen words. If you are angry, you have absolutely every right to be.

Regardless of Mozilla’s intent here they have made a rather large mistake in re-wording their Terms. Rather than engaging with a legal team in problematic regions; they took the lazy way out and used overbroad terms to cover their bottom.

Frequently when wording like this changes it causes companies to only be bound by weak verbal promises which oftentimes go out the door whenever an executive change takes place, or an executive feels threatened enough.

Do not be deceived; this is a downgrade of their promise. It is inevitable that the promises will be broken now that there is no fear of a lawsuit. There’s nothing left to bind them to their promises.

The Mozilla foundation wasn’t ever intended to remain “financially viable”; it was supposed to remain non-profit. They should be “rightsizing” and taking pay cuts instead of slipping a EULA roofie into their terms of use.

It is not only true; it is required by the WMF. Wikipedia and Wikimedia will go dark before it compromises those values.

Wikipedia can always be revived by it’s massive worldwide community; on Tor even. Trump taking down the WMF servers won’t help; the databases probably get backed up daily and would likely end up on torrents within moments of it being taken down.

As an editor with advanced rollback rights on Wikipedia; I can agree with the above statement.

It is Extremely Difficult; even with slighly escalated rollback rights such as mine; to push an agenda on Wikipedia.

WP:NPOV is a good read and the editing community and contribution culture on Wikipedia enforces it strongly.

EnWiki itself for certain has some very strong Page Protection policies that prevent just any editor from munging up the encyclopedia or changing history.

It’s safe to say that Wikimedia cannot be bent or broken easily by special interest groups…Vandalism and PoV pushing is quickly quelled by sysops on Wikipedia. There are more of us editors than Elon could ever possibly hope to take on.

Not even Elon Musk gets to ignore Wikimedia policies. That will never change. They are written in blood and sweat and cannot be manipulated. The entire foundation is set up in a way that it always, eventually, cracks down on corruption and greed. Not even a cabal of admins, bureaucrats and Wikimedia Stewards can help you.

This is unsurprising. A Chinese model will be filled with censorship.

I suspect they probably do far more than their title lets on; but damn that’s an extremely unfortunate title to have. I can’t imagine that particular part of the title sells well on the resume.

That said; I think numbers 2 through 5 could probably see their pay halved or cut by a third and they’d still be fine. I wouldn’t push anyone below 200k though. I didn’t suggest the Chairperson because it appears that Mozilla isn’t actually paying them, some other entity is doing so and it’s being reported here for “tax purposes”.

Note: This isn’t to suggest that they need to cut these folks’ pay right now; it’s just observing where Mozilla might reduce spending if it were to become necessary to keep things going for them. I am actually assuming good faith that each of these folks are well worth their current pay.

Hearing this sort of law go into effect just makes me sadly want to ban anyone from the UK from my small communities.

I’d hate to be forced to do it; but I certainly would immediately start swinging the hammer with IP range bans and banning anyone who is clearly professing to be from the UK.

Unfortunately the kind of laws they’re trying to pass do nothing to fix whatever problems they have Online; and are basically meaningless political posturing. I feel sorry for people in the UK and strongly recommend they start using VPNs; as it’s the only way to ensure they won’t get snared up in the ensuing waves of bans when compliance with the OSA law that they let get passed is mandatory

The shoe is clearly on the other foot. It’s not so easy to manage when politicians are allowed to get so uninformed that they go out of their way to pass bad laws.

If I can’t buy it, and own it, for a reasonable price - Piracy is acceptable. Copyright holders are required to sell/license their product in an accessible and reasonable manner in order to assert their copyright over consumers.

If I can’t legally obtain a copy for a period of time longer than a year - Piracy is acceptable. Withholding copyrighted products to make them artificially scarce or to manipulate sales of other products is the same as the previous scenario; it is a failing to sell your product in an accessible manner.

If the only manner of sale is ‘a streaming license of the content’ - Piracy is acceptable. If I cannot go to any retailer and buy a physical copy legitimately, expect users to ignore unreasonable terms of sale to access their content in a format of their choosing. This physically sold copy may be reasonably more expensive than the digital license edition; but not over significantly in excess of the cost of box/media/cover art. Make a profit; not a mint.

If the only version of physical media is over-encumbered with Rights Management or other digital restrictions - Piracy is acceptable. Sold physical copies must be playable on any compatible device as determined by the media format with minimal exceptions. We shouldn’t need to connect our BluRay players to the internet every month to pull fresh certs down and lose the ability to play new BluRays when the player runs out of cert storage or becomes unsupported.