kbal

joined 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 hours ago

Okay then. Thank you for resolving the dilemma of remaining ignorant or having "wolf erotica" in my search history.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

I'm inclined to believe it. Governments went absolutely nuts at the height of the Covid panic, Boris Johnson's government more so than most.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Indeed. But cups-browsed isn't necessary in order to be able to print things, it's for automatically discovering new printers on the network.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

cups-browsed <= 2.0.1 binds on UDP INADDR_ANY:631 trusting any packet from any source

Well that would explain why I didn't have it installed (although I did have other parts of cups until jwz coincidentally reminded us two days ago that it can all be removed if you don't have a printer.) I clear out anything that opens ports I don't need to be open. A practice I would recommend to anyone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

It's the "always will" where I disagree. This society we've built isn't anything close to sustainable no matter how much lip service is given to the idea that it should be. What can't go on forever, won't.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago

It's amazing how much of 21st-century politics consists of badly-disguised attempts to reconstitute fascism. Maybe that's why people like Elon Musk are so quick to accuse everyone else of "communism" — they're still living in the ideology of 1939 and so they naturally assume that everyone else must be doing the same.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 days ago

Wait, what? You think they're not planning on getting paid for providing this data to advertisers?

P.S. It looks like Mozilla's Data Privacy FAQ is going to need updating. It doesn't even mention this stuff. As the noyb complaint points out:

  1. The Respondent does not provide any information at all in its privacy policy with regard to "PPA". Neither in the general privacy policy (enclosure 9) nor in the privacy information for Firefox (enclosure 10) is any relevant information apparent.
  1. The last update of the Firefox privacy policy took place on May 13, 2024.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I would say it's more of a desperate attempt to continue the current paradigm of online advertising which deems indispensable the kind of data about conversion rates to which the industry has become accustomed, despite the recognition that their current means of collecting it must come to an end.

But either way, it's incompatible with the principles of free software. Users are not meant to put up with features that are there for the sole benefit of someone else; someone they might normally consider an adversary. The only incentive we're given to participate in this scheme is one that resembles blackmail. Except it isn't even advertisers saying "do this, or we'll spy on you like usual" — it's Mozilla saying "do this, and maybe we can persuade a few of them not to spy on you as much, and to give us a cut."

They are selling behavioural data about their users to advertisers. People are not going to be happy with that no matter how they try to spin it.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 2 days ago (4 children)

They added a feature to track conversions among Firefox users for online advertisers. Selling it as a "paradigm-shifting boost to online privacy" while accusing others of pushing a misleading narrative is absurd.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (7 children)

There certainly are many people who seem suspiciously eager to find fault with Firefox. But it's not really a surprise when its authors do things like this. They chose not to make this feature opt-in because they know that nobody in their right mind would opt into it. There is no benefit to the user in it, only risk. Mozilla seems to be leaving us to go off and join the advertising industry instead. People feel betrayed, and it feeds the cynical nihilism that comes so easily to social media users under the conditions of late capitalism.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Fucking garbage article and headline.

You got me to read the thing, just to see what could possibly be so offensive about it. It's a pretty good summary of the situation for an audience that might not be too familiar with Canadian politics. Don't blame the messenger.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's still operating for now, right? Because if I look at random government pages in a browser that profile that doesn't block the social media widgets I can see links to facebook, twitter, instagram, whatsapp, youtube, and threema. There seems to be no mention anywhere that a mastodon server exists.

They're complaining about the low number of users. Did they bother to tell people that it exists?

 

Yesterday I saw the CNN version of Have I Got News For You.

It's... not bad? Closer to getting it right than many previous American attempts at panel shows. The main weird American thing they do is that the panelists seem inexplicably eager to give correct answers, as if they're quite proud of themselves for having watched the news this week in advance of going on TV to talk about it.

 

As opposed to Bill C-63, which pushes [age verification bullshit] far into the future and behind closed doors through an opaque regulatory process, our new Conservative legislation will directly legislate [age verification bullshit] that online operators must adhere to.

 

If you routinely start #steam in offline mode and it suddenly stopped working in the past few days (first time I ever saw such a thing), you may be able to fix it by temporarily taking it out of offline mode as described on github.

 

Not only did Ichiriki win the finals, he won it 3-0! I love it that a Japanese top player was finally able to win the most prestigious international go title (for the first time actually), after decades of Japanese pros having a reputation of not really being a match anymore for Korean and Chinese pros. I enjoyed watching this review Michael Chen 1p AGA made about all the games in the match: That video is more than 2 hours long, but it’s not boring at all ...

 

https://github.com/Abev08/VolumeControlExtension

That's two longstanding items on my firefox wishlist taken care of by an extension: Actual working volume controls on the built-in media player, and a volume control for other crappy web players that don't have them.

#firefox

 

phase 1: Don't care about diet. phase 2: Try to lose weight. phase 3: Don't care at all about diet. phase 4: Ascetic diet of mostly rice and peanuts. phase 5: Vitamin A deficiency. phase 6 (current): Carefully fine-tuned diet designed with nutrition calculator.

I can't explain it, that's just how it went.

 

Act 1: It started with some fun little quests to introduce you to the narrative style. The fights were too hard, so I improved my character stats until I could handle them. It's not easy to know when there's no choice but to go along with whatever is suggested, and when you can do something else, but I guess I got it more or less right.

Act 2: A nice meaty dungeon crawl. My efforts to make my character stronger paid off, the difficulty was just right.

Act 3: Holy shit it's too hard suddenly. One does not level up quickly in my version of Skyrim, maybe that's why. At one point there's an option that suggests you can skip the whole thing, but I didn't take it and would guess it probably isn't so easy. I had to resort to stealth archery and I didn't bring a lot of arrows. Some horror game stuff of a kind I don't normally enjoy, but it was well-executed. It was a pretty long slog.

Act 4: Okay we're in Dark Souls now. Except the boss fights are even longer. I had a legendary weapon, shiny superhero armour, lots of magic resistance, a good healing spell, all the equipment a skyrim paladin could want, and yet even some of the non-boss fights took a lot of time and effort. Hit, dodge, run, heal, repeat. Forever. To be fair I do have the difficulty settings turned up pretty high. I wandered around lost for a very long time. Some of the battles were epic. There was only one area I had a really hard time with: There doesn't seem to be any resisting the tentacle attacks so they were pretty much instant death.

The ending was quite good and made it all seem worthwhile.

 

Today is the 97th anniversary of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti.

 

If anyone has a debian/windows dual-boot laptop and has been waiting until Microsoft's secureboot surprise is defused before booting into Windows, and you don't want to wait any longer, what you need is shim-signed_1.39+15.7-1_amd64.deb from bookworm-proposed-updates.

 

The problems on this site were created using neural nets to automatically extract positions for each rank from high-level games where the neural net thought the next move would be instinctive for a pro but might be educational or non-obvious for players of that rank.

Trying to get back into the game a little, and I've just noticed that https://neuralnetgoproblems.com/ is still online! Whole-board positions from real games, asks you to predict the next move. It's really good if you enjoy that sort of thing.

 

Well here's a linux modding tip: Turn off ESYNC and FSYNC when running DynDOLOD. If it randomly goes wrong in the middle of its hour-long run, that could be the problem.

 

First time since March 2023!

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