newscracker

Like it or not, e-mail is a document storage medium for most people.

I don’t recommend Signal to others because its priorities don’t match mine and that of others I know. I do use it, but I treat it more like a fragile platform where anything can disappear any moment. Don’t share or keep anything valuable on it.

The fact that Signal is another centralized platform that not only requires a phone number but also exposes your phone number to others (like in group chats) are larger issues for me.

I’ve been trying Element (from Matrix), but its UX is quite poor. I just wish chat apps would copy at least some of the UX of Telegram.

I have a few questions about that.

1. Would that link even work after 10 or 20 or 30 years? What’s the fallback if the link is broken?

2. Is the “latest version” always guaranteed to be compatible with the scheme used by the document in question (again consider that the document is created now but is being attempted to be recovered a few decades from now)?

3. Based on the above questions, what’s a reasonable expected age for this system to work (I’m referring to the software)?

It would be useful to have these questions and their answers added in an FAQ on the site and in the repo.

On iOS, Firefox Focus (a single tab browser) comes with a content blocker. Hush is another good content blocker. Of course, Magic Lasso (free or paid).

But later on in the same page, the following promise is made under the “Harm Reduction” section:

> Straight to Apple servers. Tact does not store your messages, files, photos, or any other data. They are stored only on Apple servers, and we as the makers of Tact have no access to them. We cannot provide your data to anybody even when requested or forced — we just don’t have it.

This part should have an asterisk and a link to the notifications section, since your systems will be able to see some metadata and data of the messages, and we don’t know how long that’s retained and what kind of backup systems those might end up in for a long duration.

This part isn’t entirely true. One large and influential reason why people switched to Chrome was because every Google search result page and many other pages on Google properties heavily and prominently advertised Chrome. Chrome was also bundled with some other third party software. Chrome may have been better in its initial years than Firefox, but that wasn’t the main trigger for people to switch.

For most people, the default browser installed with their OS is what they’d use unless they’re sold another browser or they know that another browser is what works for them.

> "Arunmozhi is a freelance programmer and an open-source enthusiast."

I'm surprised, shocked and dumfounded that Firefox is not even mentioned while Vivaldi and Chromium are being considered. For someone who put up with Brave for years and its other issues, it really seems strange that Firefox is not in consideration.

I also use Temporary Containers [2], Facebook Container by Mozilla [3], and Google Container [3]. There are also container extensions for Twitter, YouTube, etc.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...

[2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/temporary-container...

[3]: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/facebook-container/

[4]: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/google-container/

Here are some things that may help your quality of life several decades from now.

Financial health:

* Start saving a large chunk of your income and invest it wisely in assets that will provide value over the long term. Avoid get rich quick schemes.

Physical health:

* Exercise everyday, preferably for a minimum of 30 minutes (it doesn't have to be a single session).

* Eat well, meaning, you can eat in tasty and highly indulgent foods, but develop the habit to eat more of whole and unprocessed/minimally processed foods.

* Related to the previous point, cooking is a life skill that will help manage your budget and health better. Learn to cook and try to cook at least one meal a day, if not all meals for the day.

* Sleep well and rest well during your waking hours.

Mental health:

* Related to the point about sleep and rest, try to regularly review your interactions online and offline, and cut off those that are not productive or those that make you feel worse, increase stress, etc. Good relationships can uplift you a lot, and bad relationships can make every other achievement pointless.

* Try out meditation, and if you're sure about your mental health, try a meditation retreat (even once is enough for a different perspective).

* It's natural to get extremely angry and upset about many things in this world. Practice some detachment if possible (this depends on your background and situation).

Odds and ends:

* Measure and track what you value. Without measurement, you won't realize how far you've reached or how far you've deviated from your desired states.

* Enjoy life through whatever provides you joy. Don't get guilt tripped by others on this front.

* Though related to health, I'm keeping this for the last since it may be very controversial. Avoid or drastically minimize the consumption of alcohol, smoking, and also caffeine if you can. The accumulated damage from these over decades cannot be reversed (well, if you have good genes, then it's a different matter).

Though Brave has been involved in (controversial?) work that’s tangential or unrelated from the core web, such as a substitute for advertising based income for sites, a crypto wallet, etc., I do admire the relentless focus on creating features that help and protect users. It also seems to have a higher velocity of feature releases, perhaps because it can still rely a lot on the open source Chromium project (which it customizes) as opposed to the Firefox team that has to maintain and improve Gecko/Servo as well as handle end user facing features.

The premium paid subscription is said to be only available in specific countries, but the payment form seems to appear in other places too. So I’m not sure how the service allows or disallows subscriptions.

A quick thought also occurred to me comparing this with iCloud email aliases from Apple, which is available for all paid iCloud subscriptions starting at the same price as this one ($0.99 per month) and allows the user to use their custom domain (Firefox relay premium gives you one custom subdomain under mozmail.com). And for the same price, Apple also provides 50GB of storage and supports the iCloud Relay hop service for Safari (and apps, if supported).

I’d like to support Firefox monetarily, assuming the revenue from this service goes to Mozilla Corporation (not Mozilla Foundation) and to Firefox. But the attachment size limit is currently unacceptable for me.

a) on desktop computers (i.e., not smartphones that have better default security with sandboxing, permissions, Secure Enclave/equivalent hardware, etc.)

b) embedded in an application like a web browser that has a large attack surface

I think the mention of hardware wallets and the recovery phrase should be stronger recommendations on this page, and not left as an optional or “if you read till the end” thing.

I didn’t see a description of how this wallet could be moved around (from one computer to another) or any plans for making that easier (other than the use of the recovery phrase). The recovery phrase does need a lot more prominence.

> iMovie and Final Cut support capturing from MiniDV and write the data straight to disk without any modification, but they didn't work out for me for two reasons:

> There was no way to turn down the audio while a tape was being imported

When I did a similar exercise (on an older Mac that had a FireWire port), iMovie worked quite well. Since the import happens in real time (a 60-minute recording will take 60 minutes to import), the audio and video are played on the camcorder. All I had to do was reduce the volume on the camcorder to prevent it from being too loud. There was no audio output from iMovie on the Mac during the import.

Tip: If you can get a Mac with iMovie '06 (as opposed to iMovie '08), use that. The older version of iMovie is better (not as much dumbed down) than the newer version.

Choose your own filter lists (that are constantly updated), create multiple profiles to use according to the target device/location and enjoy as blocking at the DNS level. It’s not a complete match for something like uBlock Origin, but a lot of stuff still gets blocked with DNS filters.

While Cloudflare has introduced many industry disrupting features, the pace of innovation isn’t that fast if you look a bit deeper. For example, it only took like three years or longer for domain registration to be available for new domains (it was only transfers until then). The reason given for this on a HN comment was a non-answer. If you visit the forums on Cloudflare, you’ll also see different kinds of billing related issues that, while they may be a bit complex, are not responded to as well as one might expect.

Nevertheless, Cloudflare is doing a lot of stuff that will prod the competition to wake up (or just let them die).

These devices will also become the ones responsible for setting up the same login on other devices. These would work in a way similar to, for example, how Apple or Okta handle two factor authentication by sending a push notification to existing devices registered to the account.

Since most people wouldn’t have a Yubikey (or multiple Yubikeys for backups) and since most people own one smartphone, the fallback for account recovery — when their smartphone breaks or is lost — would be the weakest link.

1. “Facebook takes the protection of the user experience very seriously, and it is committed to keeping its products safe for users to interact and share information.”

Only some lawyers (not accusing the entire profession) could write this with a straight face after all the revelations about Facebook and Instagram over the years. You just be eternally high on something to use these words in this context.

2. I wish I could see an alternate reality where The Pirate Bay people respond to this notice (like how they did to various RIAA and MPAA notices). That’s the kind of response this one deserves.

[1]: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden

[2]: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/wiki

Mozilla Corporation, please figure out a way for users to directly donate to support Firefox. Not everybody realizes or knows that the donations on mozilla.org go to Mozilla Foundation and not to Mozilla Corporation. Not everybody knows that Firefox is primarily funded by a search partnership agreement with Google. The direct donations to Firefox may not be a lot, but I’m sure it could pay for at least one programmer a month, if not more.

Mozilla Corporation, expand the availability of Mozilla VPN to all the countries that Mullvad offers its services in. Keeping it restricted isn’t helping anyone much.

There’s an app called Micro Snitch [1] that will alert the user when any application activates the microphone or the webcam and tell the user which application is doing it (including Apple’s apps like FaceTime). You could try it to confirm that it is indeed Signal that’s activating the microphone at all times and file a bug report with Signal. Listening in the background is a very serious issue because we don’t expect Signal to do that.

Edit: FWIW, I just remembered that I have Signal and Micro Snitch on an old MBP (running the latest macOS). I have never seen alerts for microphone activation when Signal is running (I don’t use it for calls from the computer). Nevertheless, if the coreaudiod issue is with an app using the mic, Micro Snitch may help.

[1]: https://obdev.at/products/microsnitch/index.html

Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla Foundation (would donate to Firefox directly if there were a way to do that)

Some Firefox extensions

VLC Player

The Document Foundation (LibreOffice)

Free Software Foundation

Wikipedia (stopped after sometime due to the heavy annoyances)

and some others I may be forgetting right now.

Links (dated January 2021):

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/01/07/encrypted-clien...

https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypted-client-hello/

I see people talking online about switching to Android or “going back to Android” just because of this. That sounds weird to me from the privacy perspective. Some are taking an approach with better control by switching to GrapheneOS or CalyxOS, which is probably great (for those who can manage these).

I’ve also seen some people talking about staying on iOS 14.x, which, for the first time in iOS history, will continue getting security updates even after iOS 15 is released (current users of iOS 14 will have a choice of which version they’d want to use). But since there were already leaks of a version of the CSAM scanning on iOS 14, I don’t think staying on it will help avoid this whenever Apple flips the switch on. It will be turned on in the current OSes supported by Apple.

Overall, Apple has a lot of thinking to do. One can only dream that its usual adamant and arrogant self doesn’t make the decisions later.

One thing I miss with 1.1.1.1 and WARP is DNS based ad blocking and filtering. NextDNS has handled that part quite well, allowing multiple profiles (so you can have different rules for different devices) to be setup in a single account. One can choose different filter lists and manage custom allow/deny lists too. The simpler filter lists are what one would choose with something like uBlock Origin. The NextDNS app on iOS is also just a DoH DNS provider and not a “VPN” app. This allows using another VPN app (or VPN service) while simultaneously relying on NextDNS for DNS.

I understand that Cloudflare wants users to use WARP+ for routing traffic too, but it would be useful to add more flexible DNS filtering capabilities (similar to NextDNS) and also provide for a non-VPN setup on iOS. As I understand it, the Cloudflare DNS service has a malware blocking/family mode and another (default) one that’s not.

If this were a personal Gmail account, it wasn’t “your own account” in the first place. It was a place Google allowed you to play in so long as you didn’t anger one of its bots.

Here’s a recent report on one of the companies that counts Apple as its customer monitoring employees by video. [1] Apple in this instance responded that it prohibits such monitoring.

[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/09/workers-complain-about-...

The nested menus to access it aren’t very convenient.

I do use CookieAutoDelete to handle this for closed tabs.