yeroc @yeroc@qoto.org

#Chromium (and #Chrome) begins phasing-out Manifest v2.

https://blog.chromium.org/2024/05/manifest-v2-phase-out-begins.html

This means, among other things, that uBlock Origin is about to be disabled in Chrome. Google will choose a different extension to recommend but it can not be as effective as #uBlock Origin.

Following #Google's example, may I instead recommend you switch to #Firefox.

Firefox will continue to support Manifest v2, and consequently uBlock Origin and other extensions that can not be implemented with Manifest v3.

Happy browsing.

The future of support: "I wasn't able to convince the support AI this was urgent enough to grant me access."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40529033

If mosquitoes sucked fat instead of blood, they'd be more popular.

Today's data: inflation rate falls to 2.7% in April. Would have fallen more, but gasoline pushed the rate up. Shelter remains largest contributor, but pace of increase is falling.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/240521/dq240521a-eng.htm #cdnecon #cdnpoli

just backed @mwl's “Run Your Own Mail Server" kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mwlucas/run-your-own-mail-server

I'm way too lazy to run my own email infrastructure (I don't even run my own webservers!) but I'm looking forward to learning about what's involved in running an email server anyway

I say it over and over. Read absolutely every word @Doubleemmartin writes. Every single thing she writes. https://open.substack.com/pub/melissamartin/p/green-line?r=4iztn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

If you own a Tesla, your car is covered in cameras that take images reviewed by Tesla employees, who share them with each other, joke about them, and make them into memes.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sensitive-images-recorded-by-customer-cars-2023-04-06/

Several of the major social media platforms - Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter - have effectively declared war on linking to things and I absolutely hate it

"Link in my bio" / "Link in thread" / "Link in first comment"... or increasingly no link at all, just an unsourced screenshot of a page

"If there was any doubt remaining that Alberta's nearly seven-month moratorium on renewable-energy projects was a political decision — made in the halls of power rather than in the offices of expertise — it was erased by internal documents released to the public last week."

My latest analysis for CBC, based on original reporting by @drewanderson for @thenarwhal

🔗 : https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-renewables-pause-moratorium-aeso-foip-1.7196943

#alberta #ableg #cdnpoli #canada #renewables #renewableenergy #energystorage

Here's a brilliant neologism: "slop", for text generated entirely by LLMs and published, unwanted, on the Internet

> Watching in real time as "slop" becomes a term of art. the way that "spam" became the term for unwanted emails, "slop" is going in the dictionary as the term for unwanted AI generated content

Source: https://twitter.com/deepfates/status/1787472784106639418

In 2016, Arlene Westervelt’s body was recovered from Okanagan Lake after a canoe trip with her husband, Bert.

Her family believes she was murdered. But missteps by the coroners service and police have left the case unresolved. @jenstden reports.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2024/05/07/Flawed-Autopsy-Dropped-Murder-Charge/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial

Two years later, this story remains as wild as ever:

'Fixer says former Alberta justice minister hired him to get reporter's phone logs'

🔗 : https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/denis-alberta-justice-minister-former-fixer-phone-logs-reporter-1.6415532

#alberta #ableg #cdnpoli #canada #journalism #journalists #law

Did you know there are 7 main types of plastic? Some (1,2,4) are recyclable ♻️ None of biodegradable :(

Part of a larger infographic looking at the plastic crisis https://geni.us/IIBplastics

The diagram attached to this post about CORS https://jub0bs.com/posts/2023-02-08-fearless-cors/ just helped something click for me that I'd previously missed

The OPTIONS request for CORS has request headers Origin, Access-Control-Request-Method, Access-Control-Request-Headers - which directly correspond to the returned response header names Access-Control-Allow-Origin, Access-Control-Allow-Methods and Access-Control-Allow-Headers!

Somehow I'd never made that connection between those header names before

The details behind the PuTTY private key disclosure vulnerability are super interesting.

Because Windows didn't have a secure number generation API in 1999, they used a "clever trick" that incorporates the hash of your private key as a random number during some parts of the authentication flow.

In one SSH algorithm, that "clever trick" has a bug that can be abused by the server to recover your private key.

Windows has had a secure random number generator since Windows XP (2001). Rather than move to that, however, they decided to use a more advanced version of their "clever trick". Not the choice I would have made.

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/vuln-p521-bias.html

Now this is #datascience. Which is the best Mario Kart Deluxe kart combo out of 703,560 possible customisations?

https://www.mayerowitz.io/blog/mario-meets-pareto

offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).

Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.

I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.

And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.

That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.

🆕 blog! “Software I Miss from Earlier Versions of Android”

My love of Android waxes and wanes according to how much the software feels like it is fighting me. On a good day, I can flash the OS and install whatever apps I want. On a bad day, I can't remove bloatware and I'm forbidden from changing the internals. I started using the latest Google […]

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/04/software-i-miss-from-earlier-versions-of-android/
⸻
#android

Browsers should refuse to respect paste-disabling. This is not something that any user wants.

"Documents released under Alberta Freedom of Information laws confirm the United Conservative government was talking with the coal industry for years about relaxing a policy that protected the Rocky Mountains from open-pit mines.

The documents also show the province was talking about opening those landscapes to more development generally for at least seven months before letting the public in on its plans."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/judge-alberta-coal-documents-1.7175487

#alberta #ableg #canada #cdnpoli #coal #foi