Just SSH. Every public facing piece of software (I.e. a web interface) adds more complexity for misconfiguration or security vulnerabilities.

You can mount you remote filesystem locally and use your local file manager and text editors to manage most tasks. If you use ansible you can make changes to a local configuration and deploy the state to the server without needing to run anything special on the server side. It is especially effective if you also run docker.

And for monitoring I usually just have a tmux with btop running. Which is fine if you don’t need long term time series data, then you might want to look at influxdb/grafana - but even those I would run locally behind a firewall, with the server reporting the data to the database.

When I saw that there was a pihole update to a new major version I got so excited hoping it would finally support DoH or DoT - nope. So disappointed.

Sticking with Adguard then.

One scar away from losing access to your ability to pay …

Biometrics can not really be changed. Except maybe through time or trauma (i.e. age or injury). They can be used to uniquely(?) identify a person - except maybe twins - at the expense of anonymity, which has it’s own set of problems.

But because they can not easily be changed they’re a terrible security feature. Once they leak, they’re unusable and you’re hosed. You can’t issue a new palm print for your bank account like you could a new chip card and password.

Also, just because you waved your hand over a scanner does not mean that you approve and consent of the transaction. With tap to pay there were ideas of mobile point of sales devices just tapping on peoples backpacks in a crowded area. You don’t even keep your biometrics markers in your pocket, they’re just out in the open for anyone with a camera. This may be bordering on paranoia, but a few years back (2014) German hackers from Chaos Computer Club took iris scans from Angela Merkel (then Chancellor of Germany) and finger prints of Ursula von der Leyen (then Minister of defense) using nothing but press fotos. Cameras have only gotten better.

TL;DR: Biometrics can be used for identification but should never be used for authorisation.

Why you should care?

Because the debate is not about whether or not you have something to hide.

It’s about your right to consent. You should have the right to say no. And you should have the right to change your mind for any reason. You should have the right to regain control of who can store, access or process your data.

Depending on where you live you may have such rights, or you may not. And the political debate is about granting, strengthening, weakening or revoking these rights. And you should care about having these rights, whether you use them or not.

Exactly, and when something crashes in the ocean it might be full off sea weed errr, I mean non-human biologics. And if equipment from foreign nations were recovered of course they’d get reverse engineered.

Knowing how secretive militaries tend to be about their missions … of course the whistleblower gets stonewalled when trying to inquire about it.

I haven’t seen a single claim that couldn’t be explained with something mundane.

My interpretation is that it’s mostly half-truths.

Do I think governments and militaries around the world have plans for such scenarios? Like retrieving UFOs? Yes, this seems reasonable. Do I think they have run exercises and tested those scenarios for real? Probably, yes. Most likely successfully so. Do I believe that someone with a lot of hearsay could interpret those things as “holy shit, they actually found something”? Yes, yes I do.

Is any of this proof? Nope. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I don’t mean some obscure about:config setting. I want it to show me some indication (doesn’t have to be a popup, those have their own set of issues) that tells me “Firefox blocked x extension on this site [enable it]” - like they do for popup windows that have been blocked.

They have a knowledgebase article explaining why …

… that doesn’t explain why. Yes it explains the technical mechanism by which extensions can be blocked, but no explanation why this feature is even there. There’s just a sentence about “various reasons, including security considerations.”

I think it would help if they explained some of those “various reasons”, maybe with an example. Then I might even agree that those are situations where that might improve the user experience. Or the security.

But I would absolutely demand a transparent process for how, why and by who these decisions get made. And possibly a way to enable the extension regardless - you open a page, an extension is blocked, you get a notification explaining why and giving you an override option.

Part of me wants to believe that this is just very poorly communicated. Mozilla has been doing this for a while, for example extensions don’t work on addons.mozilla.org or any of the about: pages. And that seems reasonable to me. But I also don’t like the thought of mozilla policing what a user is or isn’t allowed to do.

Probably also advertisement revenue. Why would people go on twitter if they can’t see anything? Why would advertisers pay money to show ads to no-one?

I think Elon got quite a talking to.

Sure did. Kinda?

Moved the panel to the top, added a dock (rip latte, it’s now just a panel) and set a hot corner for the overview effect. I like it to move windows between desktops.

Everything else is default though. Maybe I changed the application launcher widget, I don’t remember.

A few things come to mind:

The “Mr. Robot” promotion was pretty bad - they force installed an extension without user interaction. This is IMHO still the worst thing they’ve done.

Their finances could be seen as a little sketchy, at times, like executive pay vs. layoffs at the start of COVID. The fact that they’re hanging off the teat of Google (or maybe Microsoft, which ever search engine has the higher bid at the moment) could also be seen as a conflict of interest.

Some might criticise Mozilla for a lack of focus. While Firefox was getting stale they invested in Pocket, and VPNs and stuff.

It’s a thing of the past, but there was this whole thing about Brendan Eich …

Honestly most of these things seem pretty par for the course under capitalism.

I’ve come around to liking Flatpak.

• I don’t have to deal with dependency hell I sometimes get with third party packages (AUR/PPA)
• I don’t have to worry about make dependencies
• I don’t have to deal with clutter in my home directory, they are mostly encapsulated in ~/.var and easy to clean, discover even asks me. Especially if I try the app for 10 minutes and device it wasn’t for me. Espexially for apps that don’t follow XDG base directory specifications (which is too many, but that’s another post)
• I get some (imperfect) sandboxing and control over what an app can access, especially with proprietary things like Discord …

Anything I need to get into a desktop environment should come from the distribution’s repositories and package manager. For user applications, Flatpak is great.

We have made mistakes.

We wanted it all to be free. It was free. I remember the early days of the internet, the webforums, the IRC, it was mostly sites run by enthusiasts. A few companies showing their products to would-be customers. It was awesome and it was all free.

And then it got popular, it got mainstream. Running servers got expensive and the webmasters were looking for funding. And we resisted paywalls. The internet is free, that’s how it’s supposed to work!

They turned to advertising. That’s fair, a few banners, no big deal, we can live with that. It worked for television! And for a while that was OK.

Where did it all go sideways? Well, it was much too much effort to negotiate advertisement deals between websites and advertisers one website at a time, so the advertisement networks were born. Sign up for funding, embed a small script and you’re done. Advertisers can book ad space with the network and their banner appears on thousands of websites. Then they figured out they can monitor individual user’s interests, and show them more “relevant” ads, and make more money for more effective ad campaigns.

And now we have no privacy online. Which caused regulators like the EU to step in and try to limit user data harvesting. With mixed results as we all know. For one it doesn’t seem to get enforced enough so a lot of companies just get away with. But also the consent banners are just clumsy and annoying.

And now we’re swamped with ads, and sponsored content written by AI, because capitalism’s gonna capitalism and squeeze as much profit as they can, until an equilibrium is reached between maximum revenue and user tolerance for BS. Look up “enshittification”

I wonder how the web would look like if we had not resisted paid content back then. There were attempts to do things differently. flattr was one thing for a while. Patreon, ko-fi and others are awesome for small creators. Gives them independence and freedom to do their thing and not depend on big platforms or corporations. The fediverse and open source are awesome.

There’s still a lot of great stuff out there for those of us who know where to look. But large parts of the internet are atrocious.