You’re right, but HTTPS implementation added real, tangible benefits that everyone could understand. I think ECH is a little more abstract for the average user, which is why I compared it to DNSSEC which has notoriously poor buy-in.

Obviously I hope ECH becomes a well-implemented standard. I’m just rather cynical that it’ll be the case.

All well and good, but sadly this relies on the hosts managing DNS to include specific entries in their DNS configuration for keys to use during the encryption process. Unfortunately the vast majority of hosts probably won’t be bothered to do this, similar to DNSSEC.

Turned out, this model was hard coded to only allow a boot entry named “Windows Boot Manager” to be loaded by default.

Holy moly that’s absolutely shocking. Yeah I didn’t quite realize how scuffed various UEFI implementations were until I encountered this issue and started looking around. Wild.

The lack of proper search has been a defining barrier between Mastodon and similar services. I’m glad it has finally been added. A great improvement alone.

In part because some of my education research led me into looking at how data was being used by social media and big tech and led me to a greater understanding of just how much was being collected and how it was being shared and used.

After learning about the landscape of data collection, I decided I wanted to minimize my part in it.

Unless you’re using the TOR Browser or Mullvad Browser, you’re already fingerprintable with a high degree of accuracy for those determined enough. If you’re that worried about fingerprinting, you should probably be using one of those.

There’s no magic number of extensions that would be considered “safest” from a fingerprinting perspective. Any you add will likely adjust your fingerprint in its own way. But as I said, since you’re probably uniquely identifiable anyway you can’t really get “more unique.”

With that said, it’s best to keep your extensions to a minimum for other reasons too. Each extension represents an increased attack surface and you have to trust more developers to not be implementing exploitable code directly into your browser. Generally, I find UBlock Origin to be enough and maybe an extension for your password manager or a few other things. I don’t generally run more than 5.

Supporting the Chromium monopoly is a valid point, but there’s also a reason why a lot of browser companies, even those who market their browser at more privacy-conscious individuals such as Vivaldi and Brave, choose to fork Chromium over Firefox/Gecko. A good portion of that reason is Chromium’s superior security architecture that is a lot more battle tested and mature; the rest of the reason often comes down to compatibility and mobile-readiness.

A lot of people are wary of any browser engine attaining a monopoly since IE achieved this back in the day. It’s not exactly a like-for-like comparison though, since Chromium is actually open source and IE/Trident was not. For that reason, anything problematic can be stripped out by those who fork it which is exactly why we have browsers like Brave, Vivaldi, Ungoogled Chromium, and others who remove anything that feeds data to Google from their releases. The option also theoretically exists to hard fork the project entirely and take it in a different direction which was never a possibility in the IE days, although that would be a monumental effort.

I get it if people want to support Firefox/Gecko for philosophical reasons. In an ideal world there would be several projects of equal maturity to the browser engines we have today. Realistically though, for all intents and purposes, the vast majority of the world is already using Chromium in some flavor or another and it’s a project that has a lot of the world’s best browser engine developers contributing to it. As a user, I care most about using a secure, privacy-respecting browser that I find innovative which caters to my needs through its features rather than fighting a philosophical battle that’s already been lost. Naturally if you find Firefox does cater to all your needs though, more power to you.

Brave and Vivaldi are very different companies. I don’t use Brave specifically because I’m not comfortable with the fact that, essentially, they’re an advertising company primarily looking to push their crypto.

It’s true that using a Chromium base poses some additional privacy challenges. Due to its customizability, it’s certainly possible to harden Firefox to a better level than any Chromium-based browser currently; projects like Arkenfox certainly help with this, as well as the tweaks ported to the browser by the TOR Uplift project. With that said, stock Firefox as shipped by Mozilla isn’t exactly privacy friendly without going to lengths to harden the browser. Mozilla collect an absolute ton of telemetry by default, complete with a unique identifier attached to each download. FF also comes with pre-installed addons with questionable privacy policies like Pocket.

I think concerns about fingerprinting are somewhat overstated, or at least over thought about. The reality is there’s an absolute ton of metrics that can be used to fingerprint a browser by advanced scripts and if a site wants to fingerprint you it will, and it doesn’t really matter if you’re using FF or Chromium. The only realistic way of avoiding this is by using browsers like TOR or Mullvad, which aim to all have the same fingerprint so you’ll be able to blend in with the crowd. Preventing naïve script fingerprinting is the best you can ever hope to do on any other daily driver browser, and addons like CanvasBlocker for Firefox or JShelter for Chromium are typically enough to prevent fingerprinting by opportunistic scripts.

Vivaldi is an awesome browser and the people and company behind it continue to inspire me with confidence that they’re truly committed to providing a Chromium-based browser that is as privacy conscious as it can be.

Swing and a miss, bud.

I’ve tried all three and I currently use the free ControlD Ads & Tracking DNS resolver and I’ve been very happy with it. It filters a fair amount of garbage domains in my experience and I don’t want to spend time finely tuning the blocklists a DNS resolver uses. I use it over Adguard DNS because I noticed it blocks a few more domains in my observation.

I think most people talk about NextDNS because of the level of customizability it offers, if you want to finely tweak the blocklists and whatnot your resolver uses. It also has a pretty good web interface showing you all kinds of stats and whatnot.

You also have to keep in mind that ControlD is newer in comparison to either NextDNS or Adguard DNS by a few years, so there’s likely less people discussing it as it’s a little less known.

Coincidentally, the last time I opened WordPad was probably 28 years ago.

And FF containers are still no match for advanced fingerprinting.

The only way to protect against advanced fingerprinting is to use the TOR Browser or Mullvad Browser, to blend in with everyone else who shares the exact same fingerprint using those tools. The best you can do outside of those is to protect against less advanced scripts.

I am absolutely not, but this may have changed as I don’t have access to real-time information as my knowledge was last updated in September 2021.

Eh, I used to think this way until I actually tried GNOME for a bit. I’ve grown quite fond of its workflow. There’s definitely extensions that I feel I need for it to be fully usable from my perspective, but in some ways I see it as a positive to start out with a good foundation and then allow users to extend the functionality they feel they need onto that base. Not every user is going to want the same thing, so keeping the core minimalist makes sense.

If I wanted something like Windows, I’d use KDE. If I really wanted a GNOME Windows-like experience similar to the old GNOME2 behavior I’d use something like MATE or Cinnamon. I guess my point is that there’s plenty of DEs out there that are essentially copies of the same workflow. I respect the desire to innovate in GNOME3.

Coconut water. So refreshing.

I still use Slackware and it’s a great distro. I very much enjoy its batteries-included approach (a full install comes with pretty much everything pre-installed) and I enjoy its simplicity and ease of configuration and use. There’s a learning curve to get there, but once you understand how everything works it’s a distro that gets completely out of your way. The bonus is that if you understand Slackware, generally, your knowledge of GNU/Linux broadly will mean you’re never lost on any other distro either. Most of my frustrations with other distros actually stem from them patching something/doing something weird with config defaults, whereas Slackware ships stuff as it is from vendors with vendor defaults which I find a lot more palatable and predictable.

Philosophically, I like how Slackware is independent and beholden to no corporate entity. Controversies that have hit other distros in the past as a result of that just aren’t a thing with Slackware.

Slackware is a very rewarding distro to use even in 2023. It’s not for everyone, but I imagine there’s a fair amount of people like me who’ve probably been using it for ages and have had absolutely no reason to ever consider using anything else. Once you’ve got everything you want and configured stuff to your liking, it’ll just work forever fantastically.

The Lemmy experience has improved immeasurably since the pre-population-boom days, where I saw Kbin as a slightly more attractive option as the UI was more polished at the time. After Lemmy 0.18.2 hit and fixed the issues with the annoying auto-updating timelines, improved the sorting algorithms, and improved database performance I’ve used it exclusively.

The Lemmy software seems to have more people working on the code and things are being addressed and improved rapidly. This extends to more 3rd party app support too. It feels like the better supported platform and that seems like it’ll be the case moving into the future as well.

As a personal note I also don’t like some of the terminology used on the Kbin platform. “Magazine” is a confusing term that seems to have been chosen purely to be different. Sometimes it’s just best to stick to common terms to reduce the complexity and learning curve of a platform.

It’s very trivial to sideload EPUBs on a Kobo using Calibre. I think it is similarly easy on a Kindle. You’re not really locked into any ecosystem you don’t want to be with either, tbh.

I used to use Moon+ Reader on Android before I switched to a dedicated e-ink book reader in the Kobo Clara HD.

If you’re going to be doing anything more than very casual reading, do yourself a favor and get an e-ink reader like a Kobo or a Kindle or something. You really won’t regret it; they’re amazing.