m0xEE @m0xee@librem.one

Today, we're announcing Proton CAPTCHA, the world’s first CAPTCHA with built-in censorship-resistant technologies to prevent bot and spam attacks.

We needed a tool that tells the difference between humans and automated bots, but also a CAPTCHA option that meets the high security and privacy standards you expect from us.

This is only the beginning. You can expect more innovation in this space.

More: https://proton.me/blog/proton-captcha

Another one of those furry critters.

#cat #catuesday

Not a good photo, but a reasonably good blep.

#cat #blep #bleptember

@Mina @KDWang @chris_e_simpson @rugk
This comment was more or less a joke, but okay, if there are those who take my words seriously, I'll make a longer writeup.

Technically yes, they are open, but Google controls the reference implementation. If you come up with your own implementation and they want it gone — they will accomplish it easily, they'll just start changing theirs breaking compatibility and you won't be able to keep up with them — you simply don't have their manpower.
If you start extending your implementation, no one will use it as the one used in Chrome doesn't support that.
So it's open in words only, de-facto they have complete control over it, you can't compare it to ARPA stuff — it's nothing close to that. US military can't exercise such control over the protocols we use today.
Their efficiency is also debatable: WebP offers about 10% better compression on average — it's not a game changer, hardly enough to justify new codec to be supported in every browser. Imagine yourself developing a completely new browser today, if everyone uses WebP, you will have to support it too. And you have two ways: implementing it from the ground up spending developer-hours on that or you can rely on Google's implementation — last week a vulnerability has been discovered in their implementation that was rated high severity even by Mozilla. Now we take a step back to the fact that it only offers a marginal advantage compression-wise over existing codecs and now supporting it doesn't seem reasonable at all 🤷
I think the sole purpose of its existence is making developing new browsers harder. KHTML, predecessor to WebKit has been developed by KDE project. Is something like that possible today? I don't think so — modern web browsers are too complex and adding more to that complexity strengthens our reliance on Chrome with Firefox and its derivatives being the sole alternative. Well, Safari too, but it's only available on Apple's platforms.
Of course 10% compression gain is still reasonable if you're Google as you serve petabytes of data — for everyone else it simply doesn't make sense, no one else has such numbers to justify implementing new codec for such a marginal gain.
All in all, WebP is beneficial for Google and no one else.

WebM is only a container, I don't think it's necessary either, but being relatively easy to implement, I don't have anything against it. Let us talk about VP9 though — everything said about WebP above still holds and more: I've seen videos on YouTube for which VP9 stream size was bigger than H264 in side-by-side comparison of equally specced streams: YT format 248 vs 137. So it's not even always better — not in all use cases. Even on Google's own YouTube! And yet, that is the codec they want you to use, it's used by default and, sorry, I don't have any examples at hand, but there are videos for which VP9 stream is available, but AV1 stream (codec also often associated with Google, but over which they have much less control) of same resolution and framerate isn't — and I think it's being done on purpose!

Of course, I might be biased here — I most probably am, as there are few things that I hate more than Google, but I'm not completely unreasonable and I believe that most of codecs and technologies related to web and developed by Google or in cooperation with Google are open on paper only and exist for the sole purpose of market lock-in. And I strongly encourage everyone not to use any of them: be it WebP, Brotli, VP9, QUIC-HTTP/2 or HTTP/3.

#Google #Web #WebP

@m0xee @FalconMarkSix

U vil eat ze JabbaScript and u vil like it

https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/25/gmail_basic_html_discontinued/

The Titanium PowerBook G4 still looks like a total work of art even 20+ years later.

And don't get me started on the art that was Aqua in Mac OS X. Looks playful but still like a serious Operating System -- none of this flat, overly joyful and bubbly bs we have today with stupid overly saturated colors and is completely unusable.

Old Apple hardware and software aged like the finest of all wine.

M.T. Void's first album is actually pretty good. I didn't like it on first listen. I actually didn't like it even on my second listen, but now it's starting to grow on me.
It's a project of Tool's bass player Justin Chancellor and leader of Sweet Noise — a alt. metal band from Poland.
I'm talking about their debut, they were to release something new this year I thing, but I'm yet to listen to it.

@EricZhang456
Yeah, that might be VST-related. I don't have many of them and I use more or less often even fewer, only Novation BassStation comes to mind
I've been using VST extensively when Max/MSP and Live weren't tightly integrates as it was the only way to use my patchers in Live, but it didn't crash on me even then. Omnispere looks like a rather complex thing so it might be the case. The fact that Live is cracked might also be a contributing factor — I've always liked it, since version 4 when I first discovered it, so when Live 7 was released I shelled out full price for the Suite and I've been upgrading since then, I didn't upgrade to 10 though and I don't even know what's the current version, maybe 11 or 12 already — mainly because I'm broke , but I also don't really see the point, they sure add interesting things, but I already more or less have what I want and I don't need something like Apple Silicon support or support for newer Windows.
Even with Live 8 and 9 on Windows I've had extensive mixing sessions that lasted days — with breaks for me of course, but not for Live — I've been saving my work, but not quitting Live. And it still never let me down.
But sure it gets flakier with every new version. Live 7 had been rock solid, I don't even know what you had to do to crash it. Maybe current versions got even worse in terms of reliability
@10leej @splitshockvirus @karolat @newt

@adiz @olmitch

Porcupine tree CD seems to want to tell me something. That listening to it makes me elite?

Tales from 4chan
photo_10608@26-05-2021_04-36-40.jpg

I've just made my second attempt to use the new Thunderbird with new UI and… I just can't use it! I think I'm going to downgrade despite vulnerabilities, I have WebP shit disabled so I think I'm safe.
Everything — and by that I mean really everything, is so painstakingly bad, even things that could've been good like the card message list view, are bad.
First of all, it doesn't adhere to gtk theming and keeps using its own blue accent — which is bad, I don't think one could come up with worse choice of color. I'm running it in Linux now, but I think it looks bad in every single OS Thunderbird supports.
And there currently are next to no themes that change that color. Well, there is this nice Gruvbox theme that changes it to orange — at least something. But it has poor contrast for selected message in the message list.
Then there is no way to customize toolbar in the main windows — and there is no toolbar. At all — it's gone. Now to do something with messages you have to either right click or open then and then perform some actions — those windows still have toolbars.
Instead of toolbar, main window has a giant… well, bar, with only hamburger menu button on it — you can't hide it, there are only two options: have close window button in addition to hamburger menu button on it and to not have it. Oh, and yes — there is a giant search field on it. I don't know, maybe it's true that most people use search a lot when working with email… But I don't! And when I do, I'm fine with using the Ctrl+F or Ctrl+K or whatever shortcut they use — I don't want this thing on the screen all the time.
Then there is no way to access third party addon's UI — at all. I've been using Dark Reader for example, to make HTML messages and websites less white. I know it probably wasn't supported to begin with, but it worked — and it still kinda does, but I can't access its settings anymore.
All in all it's unusable in its current form, at least for me. When they announced the UI overhaul, I haven't been as skeptical as many others were — on the mock-ups it looked like they are going to declutter it — and Thunderbird could've used that. But that's not what they finally did — they have just removed most part of the UI instead
This time I have made a complete backup of the profile directory so it would be easy to roll back.