I've been using an RSS reader every day for many years. I'm currently using Newsboat, a terminal-based RSS reader, and I'm very happy with it.
It's a good way of keeping out of the "algorithm bubble". It's also nice to to be able to follow Youtube channels without needing a login, and play the videos with mpv.
If some site was running a JS bitcoin miner in my browser without my knowledge or consent I would be pretty angry about that.
Yeah, I block all javascript by default for exactly this reason; it's a major malware exposure. I have a very short whitelist of sites that I'm willing to trust with that. I've already encountered Anubis a few times and, when I do, I just close the tab and move on. I'm not enabling javascript for random sites.
I run privacy badger, ublock origin, and decentraleyes. Most websites work, and I get some privacy. However, if I turn off javascript, almost no websites work. I used to run noscript, but it got too frustrating.
Well I have a very similar setup to you; except I don't use privacy badger and I block all javascript by default with ublock origin. My experience is very different from yours though. I find that most sites that I visit are at least usable without javascript, and I have whitelisted a relatively small number of sites where the extra functionality gained is worth it (and I think the site is trustworthy enough!).
In fact, I consider it a red flag when a site doesn't render at least adequately with just html and css.
Palemoon maintainer, Moonchild, rejected NoScript add-on and even put it on a warn list. Guess what? NoScript stops this Cloudflare bullshit.You need to have precise control over JS, it isn't all or nothing.
In fairness, at the time there were a lot of posts in the Palemoon forums complaining that some site or other "was broken" in Palemoon. And it almost always turned out that they were using NoScript. With NoScript turned off, the sites in question worked fine. I switched to uBlock Origin a long time ago and I've found it very effective, and I haven't experienced these Cloudflare issues.
a geo block is remarkably effective it also reduces the amount of infrastructure costs therefore allowing more resources for the UK license payer
Yeah, that's part of the problem with streaming. For decades, people in neighbouring countries could (and did) listen to BBC radio stations via good old-fashioned radio broadcast. This didn't require any additional infrastructure in the UK; propagation of broadcast signals did the work. Also, there were no copyright issues; there is a long-standing pan-European legal principle that if it is legal for the broadcaster to broadcast it, then it's legal for the receivers (wherever they are) to receive it.
But the move to streaming is killing that. Streaming does need significant infrastructure investment to scale. And because it is "on the Internet", it has given various media companies the excuse to force the use of DRM and geo-blocking as well. Just another example of enshittification.
I don't know that I would call XFCE "low over headed' these days. I would not call it bloat-y either but with all the XFCE projects included its a full featured desktop environment with just about everything you'd expect from something that isnt specifically chasing Windows or macOS.
I have not used cinnamon in a long time, but I am really stumped as to what more than XFCE you could really want in terms of a traditional desktop experience.
Agreed. It does everything I want from a desktop environment, and does it well, and still manages to have a modest overhead. And that matters. The laptop I'm typing this on would struggle with feature-heavy desktops like Gnome, but it runs XFCE like champ.
Something tells me that "issue" will quickly resolve itself if the temperatures consistently go above 35 degrees C for large portions of the summer.
A/C is not the easy fix that many people think it is.
TLDR: Without major improvements A/C will make global warming worse; A/C units already produce enough heat to measurably boost urban temperatures, and they leak out potent greenhouse gases. Plus, billions of new A/C units will create one of the largest sources of rising electricity demand around the world; it is estimated that energy demand from cooling will triple, reaching 6,200 terawatt-hours by 2050—or nearly a quarter of the world’s total electricity consumption today.
How fucking out of touch can these tech CEOs get. The vast majority of people who make music do it only for the fun of it, not for remuneration or recognition.
Well, yes and no. Yes, the CEO is an idiot.
But I think Gillian Welch probably voices the view of the majority of musicians in this interview when she says:
"... if you don’t enable musicians to make their living playing music, you won’t get to hear it. I am never going to stop playing music, but if I can’t make a living at it, then I will stop playing it outside my living room."
This is just the logical next step for Surveillance Capitalism
TLDR: Surveillance Capitalism is the amassing by Big Tech companies of vast quantities of individual behavioral data (usually without the individual's knowledge or consent) and, by data mining it, predicting and even directing future behavior for profit. This involves web tracking, app tracking, social media usage, data from smart devices, and more.
People's AI usage will just be another data stream for the prediction and influencing algorithms.
Good idea, but not in this round. The minors can't give consent, morally or legally. Temptations abound. You were a kid, you know what they are. There's a reason why parenting is important, and not all parents can catch their children doing many things online or not.
Children should not have anonymity in social media. And it's up to social media providers to authenticate this fact. Children will try to work around it, clever and bright. Clever and bright still means vulnerable.
You are quite right. Here in the UK we have recently had an horrific court case.
TLDR: This guy built a huge collection of CSAM material by catfishing young girls on social media; mainly Snapchat and Instagram. He targeted 10 to 14 year-old girls - posing as a young girl himself - catfishing them into sending him a risque picture of themselves which he then used to blackmail them into performing ever more depraved acts on camera. It is estimated that he may have up to 3,500 victims. One of his victims committed suicide. The evidence presented in court was just heartbreaking.
These kids had no idea that there were "wolves in sheep's clothing" online, and now they and their families are living with the consequences. If you live in the UK there's an excellent documentary on the BBC iPlayer about the case. It's something every parent of under-age kids should watch before they even think of letting their kids near social media.
Hmm, at first glance, html-load seems related to Facebook in some way. I've never had Facebook get in my way: Maybe, because I don't open Facebook.
Surely, the good answer is disabling JavaScript.
Maybe the problem is, your web-pages are being hijacked.
It's being triggered by an inline script on
This. 100%. I literally only built a new system last year because I wanted to play a new game coming out. If you aren't a PC gamer (most aren't) you would be perfectly fine on 10 year old hardware.
Agreed. I'm typing this on an Intel Core i3 system. Linux runs all the things I need comfortably. I moved from Windows 7 and never looked back.
The point that is too often missed in the "productivity" debate is that a major benefit of WFH is work-life-balance. Saving 2 or 3 hours of a commute at least two or three days a week is a huge deal for employees. Speaking from experience, I'm much more willing to put in some extra hours when my commute is reduced to logging in and out of my laptop.
And a mixture of outsourcing/offshoring and the Covid lockdowns have, for many of us, debunked the whole "we all have to be under one roof" argument. When half my development team is in India, telling the onshore guys that they can't telecommute from across the city a couple of days a week is just not credible.
"cutting the time it takes referees to write a determination from several hours to just five minutes, in some cases"
That's basically the AI doing everything with the referee performing little more than the most basic of sanity checking.
The only way this isn't dystopia is if the claimant can appeal to full human review, by humans who have no knowledge of the AI recommendation. Which basically means, this only works if it is used to rubberstamp some claims (which is a worthwhile goal).
I wonder what the AI will say for "I used to work at the unemployment office, but then my job got taken by an AI".
This is the problem. They are essentially black boxes; you can't determine why they produce particular outputs.
That's fine when an AI is generating potential recipes for medication, which will then be rigorously lab-tested before they get anywhere near real people. But for things like welfare, or mortgage, or hiring decisions, where the process has to be open to scrutiny and even potentially legal challenge, then the lack of traceability is a major red flag.
Not quite, the threat model is only part of it. What you actually need to do is competent IT risk management and that is much more than just a threat model.
True. I was using "threat model" as a shorthand for "well thought out security policy and management". The model is just the foundation; you have to implement practical solutions on top of it.
My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income. -- Errol Flynn Any man who has $10,000 left when he dies is a failure. -- Errol Flynn
