Seirdy

Given the attack surface of addons, I've downsized my addon usage.

• I've replaced HTTPS-Everywhere with the built-in HTTPS-first/only modes in FF and Chromium.

• In FF, I use userContent.css instead of Stylus.

• I use uBlock Origin's url-rewriting filters in place of redirection addons.

• In Chromium, you can choose to have an addon only be enabled on certain sites. I do this with Stylus and Dark Background Light Text.

EDIT: more information:

• I have a shell script that uses regex to "clean" urls in the clipboard and remove tracking params instead of the CleanURLs addon, since this is most useful when sharing links with others. I've gotten in the habit of previewing URL content before navigation (e.g. with a mouseover or by pasting into the URL bar) as well. If I want to navigate to a messy url, I just copy it and enter a keybind to clean the copied URL.

I use multiple browsers and profiles.

• Normal browsers: Firefox with Cookie Autodelete, uBO, Stylus, Dark Background and Light Text; Chromium with uBO and Stylus. Stylus is only selective enabled.

• For security-sensitive non-anonymous stuff, I run Chromium with flags to disable JIT and to disable JS by default, in a bubblewrap sandbox. This browser profile has no addons.

• For peak anonymity (e.g. when using one of my anon alts), I run the Tor Browser in a Whonix VM. For quick anonymity I just use the regular Tor Browser Bundle in a bubblewrap sandbox. In an act of mercy towards my weak 2013 Haswell laptop's battery, I no longer run Qubes. The Tor Browser should not ever be used with custom addons if you want anonymity.

Because the Tor browser should never run with addons and because I use a browser profile that has none, I don't want addons to be a "crutch" that I depend on too much.

I do global hostname-blocking at the DNS level, so I can live without an adblocker. DNS blocking doesn't do fine-grained subpage-blocking, conditional blocks, cosmetic filtering, redirects, etc. so a more complete solution is still worthwhile.

I also try to avoid injecting content into webpages with JS enabled, since that is extremely fingerprintable and opens a can of (in)security worms.

Some addons that I do not recommend at all:

• Canvas Fingerprinting Defender: injects JS into pages, which is very fingerprintable and can trigger a CSP report if you don't disable those. CSP reports can identify you even if you disable JS execution.

• Anything that you can do without an addon, TBH. They do weaken the browser security model.

A recent article on Corporate Memphis: Why does every advert look the same? Corporate Memphis.

Its popularity is the result of a feedback loop: it's popular because it's popular. It also makes people feel safe and comfortable (a form of brain-hacking, if you will).

Honestly, I wouldn't mind it too much if it wasn't so overused. Now I immediately feel distrustful the second I see it. It makes me assume that I'm looking at a page made by an advertiser rather than something honest. Product information shouldn't try to make me feel something, it should tell me why I should and shouldn't use something.

I agree that the PR process is bureaucratic, but that's not the workflow that Git was made for. It's a workflow popularized by GitHub.

The workflow that Git was made for was "make commits" + "export patches" + "send patches". This typically happens over a mailing list. Under this workflow, sending a contribution is a two-step process: git commit and git send-email. The recipient could be a mailing list, or it could just be the developer's email address you grabbed from a commit message. That's part of the reason why Git has you include your email in every commit.

My enterprise-grade notes setup:

mkdir ~/Documents/Notes
cd ~/Documents/Notes
$EDITOR name_of_note.txt

For lecture notes, I do this:

$EDITOR "$(date +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%:z').md"

I don't actually type out commands like these; I have alises for them. I sync my notes with git, so I don't have to learn another tool just for notes.

I updated the "What explicitly opting out actually entails" section to further elaborate on why adding this header might not really improve user privacy.

Server side categorization for sites with ads is where this Permissions action is aimed at. What this is saying is that if an ad tries to get a cohort id from an opted-out site, it will receive a meaningless default value. This knowledge is for the benefit of advertisers, not webmasters.

The solution is not to include trackers on your page in the first place, such as third-party ads. Permissions-Policy applies to the page requested and its contents.

As for cohort calculation, things are messy. If one site is opted out and another consequently has a greater weight, the implications wrt. fingerprinting are vague. Opting out doesn't necessarily reduce a user's fingerprint. FLOSS is one aspect of a user's interests, but there are countless others. There is/was no legal or technical obligation to obey either the DNT header or this permissions-policy header (strictly for the purposes of cohort calculation), since the latter isn't standard usage of the permissions-policy header and the former isn't even a standard header in the first place.

A coordinated effort is better spent getting users off Chrome than getting upstream software and webmasters to add this band-aid to their sites.

I updated the article to explicitly address this; check the "What explicitly opting out actually entails" section.

I wrote about both issues, and why Matrix isn't a perfect solution, previously: part 1, part 2. Starring WhatsApp, Firefox, Signal, XMPP, Email, and Matrix.

Also discussed on Lemmy: part 1, part 2.

Signal's problem is being a closed platform; Matrix suffers primarily from complexity. Both enable dependence on a single small group, and therefore enable user domestication. That being said, Matrix is considerably less bad than Signal.

For large public rooms, IRC continues to be the best option. All its issues are client-side; IRCv3 supports history, multiple devices, authentication without NickServ, and even typing notifications. All these features are supported on Oragono. For small, private E2EE rooms, all existing solutions have major trade-offs.

Qt Flatpak apps running outside of a KDE session (I run Sway) can't even use Breeze-Dark. The only dark theme they have available is Adwaita-Dark, and you can only use that if you add a commandline parameter to override the theme with an envvar.

I wrote an article in a similar vein a month ago: Becoming physically immune to brute-force attacks.

Stuffing the planet into a 100%-efficient furnace isn't enough to crack a 256-bit key.

I'm building off those ideas in what will be a little collection of programs that measures and generates passwords given physical constraints of a brute-force attacker (energy, power, mass, etc). The collection isn't really a collection yet; it currently contains almost one complete program: https://sr.ht/~seirdy/MOAC

Edit: URL typo

In addition to LanguageTool, you can also check out RedPen. Be warned; it has a lot of false positives, and isn't very intelligent.

FWIW, this is also a feature in Signal, another closed platform I covered.