Parienve @Parienve@qoto.org

I finally got around to explaining how I made this partial hash collision https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/colliding-secure-hashes.html

I'm getting Google, Facebook and Amazon out of my life.

Starting last year and continuing until it's done, in manageable increments, I've been gradually disentangling myself from three of the worst tech monsters. After 15 years of letting them embed their fangs deeper and deeper into my leg, it's daunting!

Finding an alternative for audio books and ebooks tonight was a nice step. I still have to un-DRM my books from them and find a non-proprietary e-reader, but I'll get to that.

Even seemingly little things like removing Google Analytics from my sites and installing the (paid) non-tracking app Plausible Analytics felt like a big thing at the time. I had to first look to see if there was such a thing as privacy-forward analytics — there is, with multiple options! Then pick one, then sign up, then install and configure...

So I'm taking this step by step. It'll take years. But each additional step feels liberating.

#goals #FuckAmazon #FuckGoogle #FuckFacebook

Back in Feb, when Grammarly said they were going to think about incorporating AI, I immediately canceled my account and uninstalled. And now they've actually done it.

I'm sharing because with everything going on, writers might not realize this is happening.

#AI #writing

I'd kinda like to get back into music composition, but… when I look at it I think Musescore is going down the "enshittification" process and I no longer have any desire to use it.

Are there any good FOSS alternatives?

@nextcloud ... and now I've looked into sharing as well. One person creates folders (Categories) with notes they want to share. Then share them from the File view. The person who gets them shared then used the Move functionality in their Shared files view to put them into their Notes folders.

This seems to work fine.

tl;dr: It seems Nextcloud has all the functionality, although with subpar UX, to offer shared Notes. Together with MIT licensed third party tools there's also a very easy to use Evernote-to-Nextcloud (Markdown) conversion available.

Let's go!

#Evernote #Nextcloud

Google Chrome will limit ad blockers starting June 2024 | Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/google-chrome-will-limit-ad-blockers-starting-june-2024/

#Enshittification #UseFirefox

well, no, but actually, yes

I'm so happy with this Gameboy Camera shot of my cat

#gameboycamera #photography #fedicats #catsofMastodon #CatsOfFediverse

Repl.it just killed Teams for Education, meaning any teacher that was planning on class management using that platform this year is now SOL.

I love that #Mastodon doesn’t auto-detect links: It only treats text as a link if it starts with a protocol—e.g. https:
That helps with posting source code snippets because Mastodon doesn’t see links where there aren’t any.

Fascinating both for what it says about dev & what it says about statistics:

A gamedev realized Linux users were just 5.8% of their sales, but represented 38% of bug reports.

Then they looked at those numbers closer, and realized. Linux users were not experiencing more bugs. Almost none of the Linux-user bugs were Linux-related. Linux users were simply *more likely to file bugs*.

Their conclusion: A linux port pays for itself bc it nerdsnipes ppl into giving u free QA

https://techhub.social/@ozone89/111337250473454154

EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram

https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-owner-faces-eu-ban-targeted-advertising-norway-says-2023-11-01/

Discussions: https://discu.eu/q/https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-owner-faces-eu-ban-targeted-advertising-norway-says-2023-11-01/

#europe #news #technology

After doing a best fit, we found #Rust projects were less likely to introduce vulnerabilities than their equivalent #C++ projects at all relevant experience levels, but more importantly, we found the effect was most significant for first-time contributors, who were almost two orders of magnitude less likely to contribute vulnerabilities. That is, even though Rust may have a reputation as a harder language to learn, there is a very measurable effect that makes it better for newbies. Reviewers should not have to put as much effort into reviewing code to be confident that someone making their first foray into their project is accidentally adding a vulnerability.

A new low, even for #Google. Giving Google permission to share information about you with third-party websites is being falsely advertised as an "ad privacy feature". This is privacy washing at its most extreme. But it gets even worse.

There is a dark pattern on the second screenshot. It isn't just informing you about the fake privacy features. Clicking on "Got it" actually turns on these features that allow Google to use your recent browsing history for ads on third-party websites:

Anyone familiar with #Apache #tomcat? Is there a way to make an application config persistent across server restarts? I have opengrok set up and I need to rerun the indexing every time I restart the server.. any ideas how to fix it?

Color cycling piece from a few years back

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Google's enshittification memos; and more!

Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/

#Pluralistic

1/

Discovered changes to #PHP's crypt() function that makes it impossible to reproduce hashes that used blowfish and a salt terminated by a $.

This method was (and still is) found in the blowfish example for crypt() on W3Schools.

Reproduced at: https://onlinephp.io/c/a7d05

"Automated translation of web content is now available to Firefox users! Unlike cloud-based alternatives, translation is done locally in Firefox, so that the text being translated does not leave your machine."

I got to see the early demos of this and it is jaws-on-the-floor bonkers wizard magic. Entirely local - and good - translation with no cloud service and like six megabytes of disk space.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/118.0/releasenotes/

Absolutely incredible investigation by Balkan Insight into the money trail from politicians, tech companies, and Ashton Kutcher behind the EU's push to break E2EE for everyone.

I am thoroughly unshocked by the fact that "Europol officials floated the idea of using the proposed EU Centre to scan for more than just CSAM, telling the Commission, “There are other crime areas that would benefit from detection” such as terrorism and drug trafficking.

Good heavens. Oh, my. Who could ever have known this would be a potential outcome. We've all been saying for decades: you cannot break end to end encryption for only one purpose and expect that exploit usage to be limited to that one purpose.

If this EU legislation passes in October, it will finally heat up the Cold Crypto Wars that have been ongoing since the San Bernardino terrorist iPhone case.

https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the-eus-fight-over-scanning-for-child-sex-content/