keverets @keverets@librem.one

Almost five years ago, a prominent tech journalist told his readers to ditch Google Chrome for Firefox. Why? Because Chrome was turning into spyware.

This year, Chrome IS spyware, pure and simple.

The advice is more sound than ever.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/21/google-chrome-has-become-surveillance-software-its-time-switch/

Fascinating - iMessage phishing now includes specific instructions to get around iOS Lockdown Mode restrictions.

It's a big day Canada!! How many signatures can we get in 90 days to get a Parliamentary #Mastodon #Fediverse server!? #CanPoli #CdnPoli

"We, the undersigned... call upon the Government of Canada to enact policy and dedicate budgetary resources to enable the Parliament of Canada to provide an open, trusted, federated, social media presence for use by all members, senators, officers and other employees of Parliament as appropriate for communication to all Canadians.”

https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-4769

This isn't a joke

Microsoft instituted a new policy limiting academic accounts to 20 GB only

FOR ENVIRONMENTAL REASONS

McGill has no internal, local research data storage service because they went all-in on Microsoft services

And yes, CIHR requires that researchers hold on to original research data for 5 years after a grant ends

Meanwhile Microsoft is boiling the fucking oceans with its AI bullshit

TIL: https://github.com/wireviz/WireViz Like GraphViz but for wires 😍

OMG.

MS Kills 240,000,000 Computers

"Canalys analyst predicts that 👉 🔥 👉 240 million Windows 10 machines will end up in a landfill after the end-of-life date arrives. 👈 👈 👈 We already have a big issue with e-waste, and the report claims it's only going to get worse as people begin to throw out their old computers.
(Old means MS abandons)

MUST MUST MUST save those machines with Linux for schools, for give-away, for make up a reason . . . . DAMN

https://www.makeuseof.com/cant-upgrade-pc-windows-11/

Love this online recipe hack!
...

If you add “cooked.wiki/“ to beginning of ANY recipe url (before the https:/) it strips away everything but the recipe and organizes the ingredients and method into separate columns.

Also adds a dictation option too!

#cooking #recipe

OpenStreetMap data is free, we only ask that you tell people about us in exchange¹.

Some site use OSM without attribution, *and* hotlink to OSMF tile servers. 😭 Our data is free, but our servers cost time & money. 🖥 It's now even easier for you to report naughty sites like that. 📝 They can (eventually) be blocked from freeloading. We hope this will increase visibility of OSM! 👍 🎉

Read more: https://github.com/openstreetmap/tile-attribution/blob/main/README.md
#OpenStreetMap #OSM
¹ to simplify the OSM licence req's.

Did you know Privacy Badger replaces embedded tweets, video/audio players, and comments sections with "click to activate" placeholders?

Although potentially useful, these "widgets" often track your browsing. The tracking happens regardless of whether you interact with the widget. If you see a widget, the widget sees you back.

Privacy Badger blocks the widgets to protect your privacy, and replaces them with placeholders to put you in control.

Learn more at https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/01/privacy-badger-puts-you-control-widgets

From 2015 to 2022, I spent hundreds of hours on Duolingo, translating articles, answering language questions on the forums, and helping to improve the smaller courses by reporting mistakes.

There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo: the course creators who wrote their courses, the volunteers who created grammar guides (some smaller languages had an entire second course in the forums), the wiki contributors, the native speakers who answered questions in the sentence discussions.

All of their work made Duolingo the powerhouse it is today. Duo was built by a community who believed in its original mission: language learning should be free and accessible.

Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company. And now that work is being fed into their AI as training data.

Well, I've learned the true lesson of Duolingo: never give a corporation your labour for free. Don't ever trust them, no matter what they say. Eventually greed will consume any good intentions.

#duolingo #languagelearning #enshittification #capitalism

who did it better?

Firefox has a new hidden setting auto-rejecting cookie banners (not just hiding them eg Brave). Piloting in 🇩🇪 in Private Browsing but anyone can enable:
Go to the URL about:config
Set cookiebanners.ui.desktop.enabled ->True
Go to Settings->Privacy, turn on Cookie Banner Blocker.

If you're using Firefox, your first add-on should be uBlock Origin. At this point, it's not just blocking ads. It's basic Internet hygiene.

However, especially if you handle sensitive sites like bank/payment portals or one to several social accounts, your second add-on should be this little thing called Firefox Multi-Account Containers.

It's extremely useful. You can keep the defaults or wipe them all and make your own. So long as you don't sign in to things outside of containers, things opened in Firefox by default won't have access to your accounts. Sites you sign in to will only be signed in on that specific container. Links followed in Fun will not have access to your already signed-in sites on Bank. Links opened from your social account in Personal don't risk accidental interactions from a different social account under Professional.

Social containers are even more helpful for sites that don't support account switching. Even if they do, all you have to do is use a different account in each container and you can view both accounts side-by-side.

Oh, and it's published by Mozilla themselves within Firefox's add-on repository. You can trust it about as much as you trust Firefox.

And if you read - get off Amazon!

Libro.fm - like audible but it supports your local bookstore.

https://bookshop.org - buy books online but still support your local bookstore.

Don’t use ChatGPT to diagnose your kid’s illness—study finds 83% error rate

It was bad at recognizing relationships and needs selective training, researchers say.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/01/dont-use-chatgpt-to-diagnose-your-kids-illness-study-finds-83-error-rate/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Big news on the Vizio case - the court rejected Vizio's arguments in their summary judgment motion. The decision cuts to the core of the case, with clear and conclusive language. Now on to *our* motion for summary adjudication...

https://sfconservancy.org/news/2024/jan/03/vizio-sj-rejected/

Google has ramped up its paternalistic behavior this year, controlling what extensions are allowed to do and whether someone uses an ad-blocker on YouTube, all while collecting even more user data for advertising. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/12/year-review-googles-corporate-paternalism-browser

"Why don't people want to pay for streaming anymore?" cry the companies who split streaming into 40 different services that keep increasing in cost while randomly removing content without warning, and shoving ads into our paid services.

Yup, sure is a mystery. A real head scratcher.

#streaming #streamingIsDead

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