Sarcastic Penguin @extrn@qoto.org

The Ukrainian army took part in 73 combat skirmishes with russian forces near Petropavlovka and Tabaivka of the Kharkiv region, Terna, Yampolyvka of the Donetsk region and Biłohorivka of the Luhansk region, Ivanovskke and Klyshchyivka of the Donetsk region, Berdychiv, Orlovka, Tonenka, Pervomaysky, Nevelsky of the Donetsk region, Krasnohorivka, Heorhiivka , Pobeda, Novomykhaylivka of the Donetsk region, Robotyne the Zaporizhia region -General Staff of the Armed Forces of #Ukraine evening report

1-bit CPU Board sells out promptly

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/1-bit-cpu-for-super-low-performance-computer-launched-sells-out-promptly

🎵 Always look on the bright side of DEATH 🎵

To protect your privacy and shield yourself against 0-days and malicious advertisers, an adblocker is an important part of your security stance.

The FBI, NSA, CISA, and UK National Cyber Security Centre all recommend adblocking as a protective measure.

You'd never disable your firewall or antivirus because a site asked you to. NEVER DO THIS WITH YOUR ADBLOCKER.

That's the only pertinent point here. Everything else is noise.

#adblock

Bread week in The Great British Bake Off? Time to share a refresh of this baking chemistry graphic, then! https://wp.me/s4aPLT-bread

22-year-old Firefox tooltip bug fixed in a few lines, offering hope to us all

Tiny text boxes, lingering on screens like ghosts, exorcised after 2 decades.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/22-year-old-firefox-tooltip-bug-fixed-in-a-few-lines-offering-hope-to-us-all/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

В госдуме, к примеру, воруют и берут взятки в долларах, так что им вообще норм. А остальным расеянцам выделят вкусный и питательный валежник, им вообще не до доллара. Особенно наплевать Владимиру Рудольфычу. Он в эфире обплевал весь микрофон. 😁

Have you ever made a profit from selling a domain name?

(Please boost for sample size.)

Вот и новая цель «спецоперации» подъехала — оказывается, парашка напала на Украину, чтобы страны Африки были свободными! Африканцы слушают и охуевают. По-моему, она бухая и никогда трезвой не бывает.

If your computer can’t lie to other computers, then it’s not yours.

This is a fundamental principle of free and open source software. The World Wide Web abides by this principle, although we don’t often think of it that way. The Web is just an agreed-on set of programmatic interfaces: if you send me this, I’ll send you that. Your computer can construct the “this” by whatever means it wants; it’s none of the other side’s business, because your computer is not their computer.

Google’s so-called “Web Environment Integrity” plan would destroy this independence. “Integrity” is exactly the wrong word for it — a better name would be the “Browser Environment Control” plan.

In the normal world, you show up at the store with a five dollar bill, pick up a newspaper, and the store sells you the newspaper (and maybe some change) in exchange for the bill. In Google’s proposed world, five dollar bills aren’t fungible anymore: the store can ask you about the provenance of that bill, and if they don’t like the answer, they don’t sell you the newspaper. No, they’re not worried about the bill being fake or counterfeit or anything like that. It’s a real five dollar bill, they agree, but you can’t prove that you got it from the right bank. Please feel free to come back with the right sort of five dollar bill.

This is not the Open Web that made what’s best about the Internet accessible to the whole world. On that Web, if you send a valid request with the right data, you get a valid response. How you produced the request is your business and your business alone. That’s what software freedom is all about: you decide how your machinery works, just as other people decide how their machinery works. If your machine and their machine want to talk to each other, they just need an agreed-on language (in the case of the Web, that’s HTTP) in which to do so.

Google’s plan, though, steps behind this standard language to demand something no free and open source software can ever deliver: a magical guarantee that the user has not privately configured their own computer in any way that Google disapproves of.

The effrontery is shocking, to those with enough technical background to understand what is being proposed. It’s as though Google were demanding that when you’re talking to them you must somehow guarantee, in a provable way, that you’re not also thinking impure thoughts.

How could anyone ever agree to this nonsense? Must all our computers become North Korea?

The details of your own system’s configuration are irrelevant to — and unnecessary to accurately represent in — your communications with a server, just as your private thoughts are not required to be included, in some side-band channel, along with everything you say in regular language.

If a web site wants to require that you have a username and password, that’s fine. Those are just a standard part of the HTTP request your browser sends. But if a web site wants your browser to promise that it stores that username and password locally in a file named “google-seekritz.txt”, that’s not only weird and creepy, it’s also something that a free software (as in libre) browser can never reliably attest to. Any browser maintenance team worth its salt will just ship the browser with a default configuration in which the software reports that to Google when asked while, behind the scenes, storing usernames and passwords however it damn well pleases.

Indeed, the fundamental issue here is the freedom to have a “behind the scenes” at all. Environments in which people aren’t allowed to have a “behind the scenes” are totalitarian environments. That’s not an exaggeration; it’s simply the definition of the term. Whatever bad connotations the concept of totalitarianism may have for you, they come not from the fancy-sounding multi-syllabic word but from the actual, human-level badness of the scenario itself. That scenario is what Google is asking for.

My web browser (currently Mozilla Firefox running on Debian GNU/Linux, thank you very much) will never cooperate with this bizarre and misguided proposal. And along with the rest of the free software community, I will continue working to ensure we all live in a world where your web browser doesn’t have to either.

(Cross-posted at https://rants.org/2023/07/the-right-to-lie-and-google-wei/ .)

This story is outrageous.

Tesla falsified vehicle range estimates which made owners think their cars were broken when they didn’t experience anything close to that range.

Tesla then canceled their service appointments because they knew there was nothing wrong their cars. They had just been lied to.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/tesla-exaggerated-ev-range-so-much-that-drivers-thought-cars-were-broken/

I miss written tutorials. I hate how every tutorial is a YouTube now. I don’t want to watch 15 minutes and forget to pay attention for the second that has the detail that I am missing or it just doesn’t show. Even short tutorials are 3 minutes when it could have been a ten second read. I want to skim a page and go directly to the point. Has writing really become that hard to do?