All the talk about the xz affair seems incongruous with the focus on automated scanners. Correct me if I’m wrong here but I don’t think any of them are going to detect something like that.

It’s the culture of an instance that makes the difference, not which software it runs, but there is often a correlation. Misskey tends to get more people who appreciate cute emoji and comfy vibes.

Having apps that do what users want but try to hide it from reviewers really highlights the absurdity of letting Apple decide what software you’re allowed to run.

Hello Internet commenters. Please remember that there’s no rule that says you need to tell us all your gut reaction to this if you know absolutely nothing about the situation.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/Installation

Normally I try to use apt for everything, but yt-dlp is an exception since when you want it, you probably do actually want the latest version. I think the only thing it depends on is python, so simple enough to get it from git one way or another.

PS: Now that I actually look at that page I linked to, I see there’s a PPA repo you could use. I don’t know who runs it or how up-to-date it is, but it’s probably a better bet than what you were trying.

That depends on what’s making it take so long, among other things. But with sufficient effort I suppose the more sneaky fingerprinters (those which aren’t aren’t already blocked by other extensions) could probably be made difficult to notice for unprepared users. JShelter popping up a big warning about a “very high” level of fingerprinting activity is a pretty good hint though, and I take it as a suggestion to add some rules for ublock if I expect to visit that site again.

As it continues to get more common, maybe it’s time to go back to using noscript as well.

Yeah my main browser is easily fingerprinted due to the many ways it is non-standard. I’ll use torbrowser or something if it actually matters. But JShelter does not really make that problem worse for most people, and it probably frustrates some fraction of attempts — including those that rely on web workers apparently.

The page load time of creepjs would not be acceptable for use in real life. Anything with that much creepy js is going to get itself blocked by other means.

If I visit that page I get a “fingerprinting activity detected” warning from JShelter and then a mostly blank page with “FP ID: Computing…” at the top, and a bunch of javascript errors in the console.

Most sites are fine with the settings where I normally leave them, but it’s not much of a surprise for one that’s devoted entirely to browser fingerprinting to be broken by JShelter. Stopping or at least making more difficult most fingerprinting attempts is among the things it does. It can’t stop all of them of course, but it’s one component that helps to work against them.

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It appears that you’re trying to install a kernel for which dkms can’t build the version of the v4l2loopback kernel module that you have.

I don’t see why this would affect Gnome, but if it’s causing problems for the rest of the system maybe try uninstalling v4l2loopback-dkms until you can get a version that works, or else use an older kernel.

Alternately, if you’re feeling brave and this is the same version that’s in debian stable right now, you could edit /usr/src/v4l2loopback-0.12.7/v4l2loopback.c and replace strlcpy with strscpy in two places.

You can stop that (and many other things) with jshelter.

There goes brave Mozilla, sacrificing its reputation for the good of us all. Jumping into bed with the ad industry in the hopes that later on it might have the chance to whisper sweetly in their ear and ask them to stop molesting the Internet so much.

One Mozilla developer claimed that explaining PPA would be too challenging

It’s not that difficult to explain. “When you visit the website of a participating advertiser whose ads you’ve seen, do you want us to tell them that someone saw their ads and visited their site, without telling them it was you? Y/N”

But if they asked such a question almost all of the small fraction of users who bother to read the whole sentence would still see no good reason to want to participate. Coming up with one is that hard part. It requires some pretty fancy rationalizations. Firefox keeping track of which ads I’ve seen? No, thanks.

If there was an option to make sure that advertisers whose ads I’ve blocked know that they got blocked, I might go for that.

The writer apparently thinks that the previous Mozilla misstep into advertising land was the Mr. Robot thing six years ago, which seems to confirm my impression that this one is getting a bigger reaction than their other recent moves in this direction. We’ll see if the rest of the tech press picks it up. Maybe one day when the cumulative loss of users shows up more clearly in the telemetry they’ll reconsider.

Mozilla has been ad funded since 2005

It was funded through a deal with an ad company. It did not become an ad company itself until much more recently. jwz had a succinct and memorable response to the the absurd idea that really it’s been ad-funded all along and that this makes things okay:

You are just another of those so-predictable people saying, “The animal shelter has always had a kitten-meat deli, why are you surprised?”

Yes, Mozilla started making absolutely horrific funding and management decisions many years ago. Today, they have taken this subtext and turned it into the actual text.

I don’t mind the idea of them having a go at improving it. What I want (and I don’t think it’s too unusual) is for history and site settings to be remembered when I close the browser, and most cookies + data to be deleted with the exception of a few sites where they’re kept. Configuring this has been strangely complicated for a long time. To get it to work, I had to figure out this procedure:

1. Select “delete cookies and site data when firefox is closed”
2. Click on “manage exceptions” to add the exceptions. You’d think we’d be done, but…
3. Scroll down to the “history” section
4. Select both “clear history when firefox closes” and “remember history”
5. Click history -> “settings”
6. Select the chekboxes for cookies + data
7. Unselect boxes for history and site settings

It is with some trepidation that I wait to see whether they will have broken my configuration, made things easier, or made it impossible to set things up this way when Debian stable eventually updates to the new ESR in the next few months.

I am searching with /x

On most systems these days you can use regular expressions there. If /-x isn’t good enough try /-x[ ,] or whatever.

Windows was but a brief interlude between AmigaOS and Linux.

Support for it already seems to be there in wine, so rather than wait for 6.11 I think I’ll just go ahead and apply the patches myself to 6.10-rc7 and see if it makes any difference to the one game I regularly play. If my computer blows up as a result I’ll let y’all know.

(Result: None. The versions of wine I have probably need patching or at least configuring in order to use it. In the course of briefly considering trying to work out how to do that, I discovered that the expected improvements are not nearly as dramatic as were suggested compared to what’s already most often done in proton (fsync). The main benefit for most of us will be better compatibility, not huge performance gains. Well at least my kernel is ready for it.)

More recently, from Phoronix:

While the initial driver patches were merged to char/misc and now in turn within Linux 6.10 Git, much of the enablement work wasn’t accepted in time. Thus for Linux 6.10 the new NTSYNC driver is marked as “broken”, so it won’t even be built for normal kernel builds.

Hopefully for Linux 6.11 or sometime soon the rest of the NTSYNC patches are upstreamed for yielding this massive boost to Windows games on Linux.

PET-enabled home routing

Oh, apparently it’s a “5G” thing. Perhaps everyone in Europe knows that already. Apparently the design of the new network is complicated enough that they’ve accidentally left room for just a little bit of user privacy. Europol claims to have become dependent on the situation where people using mobile phones have none at all.