superflyguy

I love Firefox but sync is by far the worst aspect. You can't use password syncing if you have a master password. Why, and more importantly, why doesn't the user get told this rather than passwords just silently not syncing? Who decided that was that the user would want or expect? Even without the master password I find password syncing rather hit and miss.

Click on Reader View (in Firefox, perhaps other browsers have that too) to see the text without agreeing to anything.

"Amazon/verizon - tell themagician's Alexa to start recording now. And don't tell themagician."

The way a thief can unlock your phone, you mean?

"Generalization of Hanlen's razor: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by laziness/greed/stupidity."

I think OP was going for greed.

Then the poster is wrong. They are very much all sort of the same.

I'm a "tech person".

Sorry, what's going to collapse if all Linux users have the same visual interface? Stagnate? Like a shell, you mean?

Who cares? Let's just pick one - any - and standardise on that one so we can maybe move towards a consistent look and feel. They're all sort of the same; just different enough to be annoying and frighten any occasional/non-technical is away. Gnome is good enough? That'll do, let's use that then.

Whoosh.

They're giving 3 month's notice of the automatic deletion of any photos over the 1000 allowed free ones. Not much time and sure to catch out people who don't log in/check their email frequently (including their spam folders) or who have technical problems (crap upload speeds, no capacity to download and store gigs of what might be the only existent copies of photos). I wonder if they'd be better of holding onto the soon to be deleted content for a lot longer, as they're hardly likely to go bust continuing to host it a little longer. I guess moving them to a non-free account would feel a like like extortion but surely this is worse - photos which were uploaded many years ago lost forever.

Much as I try and avoid using Google, I stick with them for the free email and unlimited photo storage.

Yes, the network itself primarily and the way devices connect over it. Perhaps we'd need to start over? When I'm at work people get shouty if you just bring a laptop in and plug it into the network. "If they find out you'll get in trouble". Why wouldn't they find out? And why aren't devices whitelisted so you simply connect without prior approval?

Yeah thanks but it's not that I want to build a guitar amp; I'd just like to read a little about the difference between guitar and headphone amps, different design decisions for headphone amps generally, things like that.

I built the cmoy. It was easy. But I know nothing about how it works, and I remember reading warnings on associated web pages like "this is not a guitar amp" etc. I'm curious to know a little more about how these (amps generally) work, why they're seemingly non trivial to design at a reasonable quality level etc.

If the devices I care about are secure (laptop, phone etc) then I shouldn't have to care about other devices, whether they're on my home network or not.

I'm in no way a security/network export and I'm sure the people who came up with the current specs were smart people doing their best but it always seems a bit shit to me. I can send death packets to any device even if I'm not attached to the network and they're just honoured? Really? Was all this stuff created in a time when nobody actually considered bad people?

My solution to the atrophy thing is to keep my vim settings (and bash scripts aliases etc) on gitlab where they're always only one git clone away.

Exactly. The usage in question is completely at odds with the legal protection afforded software created in the last few years.

In theory perhaps, yes. In this case, however, just "I'm a kidult".

Probably you are using a non-standard definition of the word dubious.

Legally dubious? Not sure of the "website is old so pop along to a .ru site" exemption to copyright law. Did the author attempt to contact the copyright owners or discover an alternative?

YouTube and Netflix stream for me just fine. Are you on 4g/fibre?

Well this conversation was about spies and I doubt it is very important what percentage of trainee spies eventually pass.

I'm probably missing something here but how are you confident that you're not failing to identify the ones who are convincing?

Unless you're going to also stop using Tweedledum corp's browser and search, I'd not bother. And if you are then just use, say, Firefox and duckduckgo and ublock origin on your current os.

Amusing that the story about unwanted side effects of information unwittingly exfiltrated contains numerous identical requests for me to disable my "ad blocker".

I got bored of scrolling through it. I know it's just someone's blog but I'm always a little surprised when grown-ups use stupid little cartoons and memes.

Possibly just need to reduce every answer's score a little every month to favour answers which are actively being voted up more recently.

I use Firefox with ublock origin and didn't have any trouble with videos auto-playing.

How about Firefox Focus?

Settings/accessibility/always enable zoom.