I’m just a spectre out of the nothingness, surviving inside a biological system.
Just a tip: always strip the si=... parameter from URLs. The si parameter is a form of tracking from platforms (particularly Youtube and Soundcloud, although other platforms use it as well), so the platforms can know who shared things and who opened the things that the former shared. When you send a clean link, without the si parameter, it’s more difficult (if not impossible) for platforms to determine who shared the link being opened/downloaded.
I wonder why disinformation and misinformation is such a problem nowadays… Maybe the access to scientific papers should be opened and democratized so everyone, regardless of social and economic classes, could read and lookup reliable knowledge? Nah, just paywall 'em all and blame those silly conspiracy theorists for online misinformation, it’ll certainly work. /s
Despite the lack of apps, Windows Phone was very good for me at that time, as I had two Lumias. They were quite cheap but rather powerful (again, despite the lack of apps like internet banking, but they did have Whatsapp and Telegram). I left WP and Lumia when Whatsapp ended its support for WP in December 2019 (if I remember correctly), and Nokia’s Android phones were expensive at the time, so I tried the Asus Zenfone (because I see Asus as a good PC hardware manufacturer). Two years later, my Zenfone started to drain faster because the battery started to swell, so I bought a Nokia with Android, which I still use nowadays. This latest acquisition made me realize that, indeed, Nokia is no longer the same: although it has the Nokia’s bold design (“almost indestructible”), it is a slow smartphone. I fixed my Zenfone battery and used both phones simultaneously for another two years, when the Zenfone battery stopped holding a charge again (although, this time, it didn’t swell). Since I couldn’t find a replacement battery for the Zenfone, I stuck with the Nokia, but soon I’ll try another brand like Xiaomi, or maybe Asus again since my previous experience with a Zenfone was really good.
Some examples that I remember are:
As a developer, I can foresee websites using features other than navigator.userAgent to detect Chrome, because it’s easy to change its value. For example: for now, navigator.getBattery is available only in Chromium, and it doesn’t need permissions to be checked for its existence through typeof navigator.getBattery === 'function' (also, the function seems to be perfectly callable without user intervention, enabling additional means of fingerprinting). While it’s easy to spoof userAgent, it’s not as easy to “mock” unsupported APIs such as navigator.getBattery through Firefox.
Problem is that newer systems aren’t compatible with “old” hardware. So to you know, these computers being disregarded are still functional machines, if it weren’t for Microsoft and other big techs bringing new requirements. What to do with lots of machines that doesn’t have TPM 2.0? Ditch em all, contributing to more e-waste? This thought almost rendered an paralyzed man unable to walk again, as an “old” $100k exoskeleton was deemed “out-of-warranty”.
Ubuntu isn’t as paid as Windows. Also, newer Ubuntu versions don’t need the user to throw their machine away because TPM 2.0 or NPUs are missing. Maybe these are two of the main reasons why nobody is complaining about its EOL.
Actually, it’s training a self-driving humanoid robot that’s supposed to climb stairs in order to terminate any potential John Connor that’s inside a house upstairs.
Dead Internet Theory all over again.
For now, Brave. As for search engines, most of the time I’ve been using DDG (IIRC it’s the default search engine on Brave) but sometimes I prepend “:g” to use Google for searching things that DDG cannot (yet). As a plus, sometimes I also use Marginalia (I set Brave to use Marginalia when I prepend a “:mgn”) in order to search for (g)old content (such as blogosphere content, BBS List archives and so on). If I need to search something deeply, I use Ahmia.
Media doesn’t load here (both through my instance’s web front, as well as through discuss.tchncs.de’s web front)
Edit: never mind, I got it to load now, maybe it was a temporary lag. It remembers me these Ethernet testers (in such a way that it’s capable of testing individual pins for electrical continuity), but digital and with more features:
The problem here is not just Chrome (as in Google Chrome) but Chromium, the web engine behind many browsers out there (such as Opera, Vivaldi, Edge, among many many others). For now there are two main web engines available, those being Chromium and Gecko (Firefox, Palemoon and many other Firefox forks). The deprecation of Manifest v2 is a Chromium change that includes (and focuses on) Chrome.
Somehow it reminded me of The Angel Problem:
The Angel-Devil game is played on an infinite chess board. In each turn the Angel jumps from his current position to a square at distance at most k. He tries to escape his opponent, the Devil, who blocks one square in each move. It is an open question whether an Angel of some power k can escape forever.
The mechanics are obviously different from it, but the theory kinda of still applies: if we limit the pieces to the maximum of K squares, could it lead to a checkmate?
Uninstalled (it was bloat).
There’s a third one, too, it’s a funny one: you stare at countless (mostly fake) job vacancies expecting to be hired so to “deserve to survive”, while bills can’t stop arriving. You resign from your 10-yr IT career and try to apply for a simpler, factory vacancy, just to hear from HRs that your CV is “too good to be applied for our simpler jobs”. In the meantime, you catch yourself selling your soul and autonomy (constantly forced to accept the circumstances) to these people that share the same blood lineage as yours (some call them “familiars”) because you can’t see another option, except for going homeless, where you’ll be constantly assaulted by cops and people saying “go get a job” to you because you got nothing. By the way, you also inhale toxic fumes from air pollution from cities. And you stare at a Word document, your own CV, thinking “what did I do wrong?”.
Exactly! Thanks! I couldn’t point the exact label, I’ve been using Linux for years in a daily basis so I forgot most of the Windows shortcuts/options.
When I read the title, I was thinking of something sophisticated such as hidden executable streams inside the MKV container (IIRC, it’s possible to append binary data other than audio, video or subtitles specifically inside a MKV). The “.lnk” trick only works in Windows and, even there, it’s easy to prevent: Windows Explorer > Options > Advanced > find and check “Always show extensions for files” (i can’t really remember the exact label for this option as I’m not a Windows user, but something like this will be there).
Many of these have public, archived repositories, differently from hundreds of dead Google projects.
It’s one of the few (only?) elements that will just disappear if you don’t do anything with it.
** Lavoisier crying noises **
Have you ever heard of the Riemann hypothesis? Since 1859 it’s yet to be solved. The generalization of prime numbers (i.e. a function f(n) that yields the nth prime) would impact fields such as Navigation Systems and Traffic Management, Communication Systems and Satellite Communication (i.e. your Internet connection could become more efficient and faster), Astrophysics and Cosmology, Quantum Mechanics, AI and Machine Learning, E-commerce, Finances and Algorithmic Trading, among many other fields. (Yeah, it seems like nothing. /s)