Mikina @ Mikina @programming.dev

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5

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482

Joined

2 yr. ago

That's not how it works.

Your bank will implement WEI API. Facebook will too, same as Gmail or Youtube. Any browser that does not support or has removed the WEI API will not be able to display or use any of those websites. It's the same with Netflix or Spotify - if you try to use it in a more privacy-centered browser, it simply does not work - because it those browsers do not support EME API (which is a DRM that was implemented few years ago, but for media). Firefox was against it, by the way. Firefox also quickly backed down and implemented it anyway once it rolled out, because "We ArE FoRcEd tO Do It", due to their already dwindling marketshare and people complaining and switching to other browsers because their shit ain't working on Firefox.

Everyone keeps saying "I will never use a browser that does support WEI!", but somehow it feels like they don't really realize that their internet will simply stop working for most of the content they consume, since there's no reason for Google or Facebook to not use this opportunity to forcefeed more ads to people.

It's also why FOSS and hacking community is so important. It's exactly so we can fight against something like this, by simply hacking and reflashing our own devices, so we can get rid of all the software-imposed bullshit.

I studied gamedev and always wanted to make games, but I'm really glad that I've instead chosen cybersecurity for my first job thanks to a random optional course about pentesting I had in college. It's a skill that will be more and more important, and I highly recommend to anyone just reading a book or two about hacking, and getting their hands dirty on some IoT hacking labs and writeups as soon as possible.

My home camera was exactly what prompt me to learn how to reflash IoT devices, and set up a Home Assistant network that's entierly self-hosted. It's way easier than I though.

Exactly this. It probably varies from person to person, but tapping my foot when listening to music at a computer in rythm with the song, or just noding my head slightly makes me way more invested into the song. Doing anything in sync with music is satisfying - that's why games such as Beatsaber or BPM - Bullets Per Minute are sooo satisfying to play - if you don't get dancing, I recommend giving BPM a try.

And dancing is basically the same. You don't do that for others, but to enjoy the music more. And especially with drugs or alcohol involved (because it usually erases any kind of self-consciousness and focus on how you look, so you can focus just on the music), it just feels so great.

And as for ballroom dancing - being so well in sync with someone in addition to the music is an amazing experience. It takes time and requires a stable dancing partner, but once you eventually sync with eachother and know the steps well enough that you don't have to think about it and it just flows, it's an experience unlike anything I've had with a second person. And my dancing partner isn't even my girlfriend, but just a friend.

One comparison I can make is what I had during highschool, where I've wasted several years literally only playing League of Legends with my best friend for all of my free time. We played ADC/Support, and after few hundreds of hours we were so synchronized that we would could instinctively react to each other without thinking or talking about it, and it was a really weird experience. And really interesting, I've never experienced something like that with anyone else (before I started dancing, that is), and it's such an unique connection of minds and thinking that it's an amazing experience.

Cryptocurrency is a scam. Not just certain coins, but the whole concept.

And anyone investing into crypto is literally stealing from others. The people who made thousands of dollars on the crypto hype are not lucky - they literally stolen the money from someone down the line. Someone who probably needs them more, because it's the stupid people who will be stuck with worthless coins at the end. It will eventually be a zero-sum game. The only thing you can do with crypto is to sell it to someone else at a profit. It has no use or value. And it's a miracle that people are still willing to buy it at such a price. And since it has no inherent value, every time you sell it to someone at a profit, you are literally scamming them, or someone else.

Because there will eventually be people loosing literally millions of dollars, stuck with a worthless stash of crypto they can do nothing with. Their only option is to hype up others, scam them some more and hope that they will buy it, so they can steal their money and let it be their problem.

Anyone making profit on selling crypto is evil and should feel bad about it. Because the thousands of dollars he made on it may as well be someones life savings they couldn't afford to loose, but did. People should realize this, and not glorify the lucky individuals who got set up for life by getting in on it early enough.

Once the crypto falls for good, there will be many lives ruined. And a lot of people will be defending it, "you should have sold earlier, just like I did", that's how they will justify it. No, it's not about selling earlier. Everyone who made a profit at selling crypto is responsible for it, and should be reminded that it's his fault. And every one of those lives ruined was the price for the profit anyone has made by selling crypto. And we need to keep reminding them as much as possible, when this happens.

They’d essentially have to by hand arrest every single node that participated to the source

I may be wrong on this, but I think that's exactly the risk associated with hosting TOR Exit nodes.

If they bust a darknet server, for example one hosting child pornography, they sometimes end up with logs of every IP that was accessing the said node. IP of every exit node that someone used to route their traffic. And they do investigate, and it will affect your life, even if you are not doing anything illegal - and even that line is pretty blurry in some of the countries.

If that IP is yours, you will get a visit from police. Being accused of anything in regards to child pornography is not a laughing matter. From what I've heard, they may take all of your electronics, you will get interogated and you have to prove beyond doubt that you did not know that someone is using your computer - the exit node - for such activites. In some countries, merely enabling someone to distribute or access child porn - which is exactly what an exit node is doing - is illegal. And while TOR has been in the public knowledge for pretty long time, you may get a judge who has never heard about TOR and has to research it for your case. And in addition to that, you are now literally investigated of distributing child porn. If someone finds that out, it will ruin your reputation and history has shown that being accused of something is enough for many people, no matter the result. Good luck explaining to your grandmother how does TOR work, or to HR at your company why you are being investigated for child porn distribution or why they confiscated your company laptop.

That's why there is so many warnings on never using your home IP for exit nodes - and that's exactly what would happen in Veilid.

In general, running an exit node from your home Internet connection is not recommended, unless you are prepared for increased attention to your home. In the USA, there have been no equipment seizures due to Tor exits, but there have been phone calls and visits. In other countries, people have had all their home computing equipment seized for running an exit from their home internet connection.

So, it esentially boils down to who is handling the investigation of your case. The police can either accept that it's an exit node and a waste of time and leave you alone, or they can make your life a living hell if they choose to.

people would have lots more free time, instead of looking for ways to fulfill themselves sexually.

As an asexual, I can tell you that unfortunately that's not the case. I suck at life, procrastrinate most of the free time I have and I've never really felt like it's any kind of an advantage that I don't have to deal with it, as far as "being more accomplished" is considered.

But I agree on your other points. I have amazing relationships with other people of both genders, because it turns out that it's really a lot easier to make friends when you don't need to fight the urge to bone them, or have an ulterior motives.

I think it's time to stop and think whether we really need all of those services? We've been slowly trapped into social networks and various unecessary services through dark patterns, and now we somehow can't imagine being without them, even though they actively make everything worse.

What was the last time you watched a Youtube video that actually was worth the time, and wasn't just a shallow content about something vaguely interesting, but something you'll probably could live without? Do we really need to agregate news and articles from the whole internet, while there probably are good local newspaper/news sites that will get you up to speed, without giving you clickbait articles? For example, we have a pretty great news company that is independent and funded entierly by users, and it's enough for keeping up to speed on world events without having to scroll through a lot of bullshit.

The more enshitificated the internet gets, the more I'm starting to realize that I really don't need almost any of it. Sure, some things are pretty usefull, like cloud storage, but almost anything I needed so far was solved by just getting a NAS with Nextcloud. The only thing I really need the internet for is messaging and email. And if I want to stay up to date, we have amazing smaller local sites for both gaming news and for world news, and those two are enough.

The more that I think about my internet usage, the more I'm realizing that I don't really mind its enshitification - because ever since it started happening, I've been just removing addictions from my life and replacing it with more niche or smaller sites that are updated less frequently, don't stalk me, and I've slowly started to realize that thanks to that I can do a lot more done and don't get trapped by scrolling through clickbaity dopamine rush made to keep me glued to a screen.

I recommend reading https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40672036-digital-minimalism . I've already read it several times, and never managed to get into fully implementing it. I did stop using Facebook, and reduced my Reddit usage drastically during those years, but this enshitification is only making it easier to just not using anything I really don't need. I'm looking forward to WEI and other "You can't do this" stuff that will come with it, because it's exactly the trigger that will make me stop and think "Do I really need to do this? Or are there better ways how to solve this.". And the answer is almost always "Nope".

What's the consensus on https://www.privacyguides.org/en/ and https://www.privacytools.io/ ? I was always just using privacytools' recommendations, but then discovered that the original people behind it somehow split into privacyguides, and both sites have almost entirely different recommendations.

So, which one to believe?

So, if I get it right, it's basically a TOR network where every user is both an entry node, exit node and middle nodes, so the more users you get, the more private it is.

However, wouldn't this also mean that just by using any of the apps, you are basically running an exit node - and now have to deal with everything that makes running a TOR exit node really dangerous and can get you into serious trouble, swatted or even ending up in jail?

From a quick google search, jail sentences for people operating TOR exit nodes are not as common as I though, but it still can mean that you will have to explain at a court why was your computer trasmitting highly illegal data to someone they caught. And courts are expensive, they will take all of your electronics and it's generally a really risky endeavor.

That sounds cool, thanks! Apparently, you can do the same with JetBrains Rider, which would also be great. I have to check that out.

I'm avoiding google as much as I can, so this definitely isn't for me. But, does anyone knows of any self-hosted similar solution? I'm already mostly working remotely on my desktop through Parsec, but having something like a FOSS web IDE running at home would be a little bit better solution for cases where the network speed/quality isn't good enough to work for the whole streamed desktop case.

Ever since I've discovered Parsec (or any other remote desktop streaming solution that isn't TeamViewer), I've switched from having to drag around a heavy laptop that still can barely run Unreal to just having a Surface, remotely WoL my desktop at home through a pooling solution that does not require any public facing service (my NAS is just pooling a website API for a trigger. Not efficient, but secure), and just connecting through Parsec.

RDP could also work I'd wager, but then I'd have to set up a VPN and I'm not really that comfortable with anything public facing. But if anyone asks me now for good laptop recommendations, I always recommend going the "better desktop for the same price, and small laptop for remote".

I've yet to find a place where I couldn't work comfortably through Parsec, it being optimized for gaming means the experience is pretty smooth, and it works pretty well even at lower network speeds. You still need at least 5-10Mbps, but if you have unlimited mobile data you're good to go almost anywhere.

ZSH is amazing. I'm unfortunately mostly stuck on Windows, and I didn't find any similar alternative for win shell, but ever since I tried the ZSH configuration that's default in Kali Linux, I've been hooked on ZSH.

I was making a post about exactly the same thing a few days ago - https://programming.dev/post/1235490 (not sure how to link it cross-instance)

What about Mullvad? I've been considering it for a while, especially because I really like the idea of vpn+browser resulting in the exactly same fingerprint as most of the other user of the same VPN, but I'm kind of unsure because I haven't seen almost anyone talk about Mullvad yet, which may be a red flag.

That was an extreme, if I really need to get somwhere on the outskirts away from the subway. I don't think I've ever had to travel for longer than 40 minutes in a long time, an average not counting work (which I have literally two tram stations near home) would be around 30 minutes. Definitely way faster than by a car.

How common/usable is subway in bigger cities? Here in Prague we have an amazing public transport, even with priority lanes for buses at some places and most importantly a pretty decent subway. I've never had an issue getting anywhere around the city in a short time (I can get anywhere in the city within 1.5 hour max (that is including suburbs around Prague), around 30 mins to places around the center), and the cost of an unlimited year-long ticket is just 150EUR.

You can't really prevent physical access to a machine. Using Bitlocker is a lot better recommendation, because it prevents this kind of attack in most of the cases.

My go-to solution is to simply replace some kind of accessibility feature executable, such as onscreen keyboard, with cmd.exe. It runs under SYSTEM.