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I had a Samsung phone and did the same with mine. Wrote a small tutorial here(https://harigovind.org/notes/removing-samsung-android-bloatw...). But even then, these apps will pop right back after system updates and those were becoming more frequent. I got rid of it shortly after, nowadays I use Moto where bloatwares are comparatively minimal.

In Firefox, it used to show the punycode when clicked on the lock icon. Now I just checked one such domain(https://www.xn--80ak6aa92e.com/) and it didn't show the punycode until I clicked the lock icon > Connection Secure > More Information > View certificate button. I didn't know that the behavior was changed... I would have clicked the lock icon, saw `www.аррӏе.com` and would have believed I was visiting apple.com. I think it should not take more than one click to see the punycode, let alone a couple of clicks and opening a new dialog box.

It is possible to opt-out of Google's Wi-Fi network location mapping by appending "_nomap" to SSID[1], I'm not sure if it works with other providers. Although I think this should have been opt-in instead of opt-out, the least we deserve is a standard, guaranteed way to universally opt-out.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Google-Maps-Wi-Fi-Location...

For browserless.io, the developer behind it talks about the tech stack in this podcast: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/62-browserless-gives...

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801693

Even if that's the case, it made the website unavailable for future victims who got the same text messages.

Do they loss access to their domain name as well if their TOS is violated? From their website it seems like they offer first year domain registration for free, tied to their account. It seems to fragile if the domain name goes with the suspended account.

Reminds me of my all-in-one "Ink Advantage" HP printer. The cost of ink cartridge had gone so high that it was reasonable to just not use it anymore. The cartridges can be reliably refilled 3-4 times but they put an artificial #X papers print limit on each of those cartridges and show cartridge needs to be replaced message once those limits are reached. Once there was a firmware update for some vulnerability, and the update somehow erased the previous cartridges used and I was able to refill and reuse all of my previous cartridges twice again so I know cartridges were in perfect condition despite the printer saying otherwise. It remains one of my most regretted purchases till date. Only if someone had the time and motive to jailbreak it :(

Coursera has a financial aid program for this, and it is easy to avail if one is a student from developing countries or low income households. edX has a similar program as well, where the price will get reduced to around 1/10th of original cost. In Coursera, the price is completely discounted and you can do the course for free. See: https://learner.coursera.help/hc/en-us/articles/209819033-Ap...

With WireGuard, it is easy these days to setup a VPN on our own server(https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-set-up-a-vpn-server...). Obviously it won't give us anonymity, but it is a good choice for security when browsing from public wifi.

I just hope firefox doesn't follow this trend. It was too difficult for me to adjust to their "one click select all" address bar that I now use ctrl + L for address bar interactions.

If you're using DuckDuckGo, we can use the !w bang to search directly on Wikipedia. Bangs are really handy, when you know where you'll find the answers, and can fallback to !s (startpage) if you feel google will have better answers for current query. This feature has been very useful for me, especially !mdn, !cpp etc. when coding.

Firefox even shows a link to "Common Myths about Private Browsing"(https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/common-myths-about-priv...) whenever private browsing windows are opened.

That used to be straight forward, but now most of the apps come with certificate pinning and for seeing through network request, toying with tools Frida are now needed.

I rarely use Facebook, but when I do I use https://m.facebook.com instead of the main site. Similarly i.reddit.com and the HTML version of Gmail. Which aren't great looking, but pretty usable. I hope these versions will be maintained for a long time.

Somewhat unrelated but, there are some WordPress themes that are trying to keep the bytes sent minimum. One such example is: https://sustywp.com/ and there's an excellent article by its author: https://blog.jacklenox.com/2018/06/04/delivering-wordpress-i...

You could add !s before your search query to get Startpage results(google results without tracking) for that query. See the complete list of bangs here: https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html

I don't use twitter android application and the browser version on mobile is extremely slow. This made twitter usable on my browser again. Thanks! PS: It would be even more useful if someone hosts it in a domain like <someshortcode>twitter.com, then I can just add shortcode to the url and escape from the slow, official one.

Thanks!:) What was even more confusing, but I didn't mention in the article, was that visiting domain.name in my browser did take me to a similar website. That was because firefox will try www.<doman.tld> when <domain.tld> fails, so it was actually www.domain.name I was getting instead of domain.name. This behavior can be turned off by setting `browser.fixup.alternate.enabled` to false.

My D-Link router had domain.name as the default dhcp domain name, which caused some of my devices connected to it to resolve <whatever.tld>.domain.name when <whatever.tld> fails to resolve and someone have set up ad pages in many .domain.name pages to take advantage of the flaw. I've recently blogged about it(https://harigovind.org/articles/who-is-hijacking-my-nxdomain...). Need to be always careful when configuring things like this especially since we now have hundreds of tlds like .email, .work etc.

> This site is not sponsored by or supported in any way by Google. It is a parody site protected as "fair use" under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. If you work for the legal department of Google, and you believe your brand is being negatively affected by an announcement that you would want to halt the climate emergency, please email nyc@extinctionrebellion.us.

And I just finished setting up gitea(https://gitea.io/en-us/) on my server and mirrored all my repos. An elegant piece of software, setup was straightforward and took less than an hour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h1ooyyFkF0 This episode on John Oliver's Last Week Tonight might help.

From the console:

> Media resource https://blog.jonlu.ca/assets/eightkhz_resampled.wav could not be decoded, error: Error Code: NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_METADATA_ERR (0x806e0006)

You can download and play those audios directly: https://blog.jonlu.ca/assets/eightkhz_resampled_unfrequencie... and https://blog.jonlu.ca/assets/eightkhz_resampled_unfrequencie...

Even Wikipedia would be a good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

> they built it

What exactly did they built? AFAIK, even search engines already existed when they entered the game(they just did it better). The fundamental protocols that makes the web work weren't invented by them. What made you think "they built the web"?

Docker to the rescue! For development, docker is godsend. It is a developer must have just like git, I regret I didn't learn it sooner.

Registrars like Namecheap now offer free WHOIS guard and I see why it is essential.