I have the same concern about Apple and Google. I’ve diversified my usage of their services to have alternatives and regular backups that don’t use either so I can recover.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pLEjqt2760k

How come these “quiet academics” don’t have fatal booby traps that kills the SWAT team and blow up the house when invading the home when they’ve bugged out?

You’d think with so many movies having this scenario that it would be more common.

Shortly after I moved from x/shitter to Mastodon and migrated as many followers that said they were moving as well, I subscribed to an art-focused mastondon instance. It was absolutely lovely to see impressionist paintings and other great art from museums in my daily feed. Then the site closed down. The admin running it decided he’d had enough.

I still found art, but now it’s local artists posting their work. It’s lovely, but in a different way. AND I can buy copies of the art if I want. So, I guess change is inevitable. In the real world, I’m sorta glad the Cheesecake Factory and Roundtable Pizza places closed leaving places for local restaurants to take their place.

Why do I hate Cheesecake Factory so much?

Their food is terrible. And the portions are so small.

[yes, that’s a Woody Allen joke]

For this same reason (free to use but not free to run), I contribute to Jerry’s efforts AND to my local mastodon instance. Thanks for all you do Jerry. And your security podcast. And your pics of your orchids.

ntpd. The internet wouldn’t run without it.

I had Reader Mode installed but by the time I saw this posting, Chrome and Brave had already disabled it.

The old AT&T router I had came with a pretty obscure SSID password on a label printed on the side of it. The admin password was also a mix of punctuation and mixed case alphanumerics. I saw a neighbor’s router and it’s SSID password was different. So if these were being machine generated and set, that means there’s some sort of service access and port into the router from AT&T’s side.

Comcast Business Router, however came with a fixed username and password which I had to change when I set it up. I can’t imagine a non-techie person going through this step.

I stopped checking out LWN because they’re paywalled. There are many other sites that fill in what they offer, so why bother?

As you can tell by my wild supposition about doxing cops, I also read and write fanfiction.

Just think how great it would be to be wearing these glasses when a bad cop does an illegal stop on you. Theoretically, you’d know the size of their socks and underwear by the time you signed the ticket. It would make it so much easier to fight it in court.

If I worked for Starlink in Brazil, I’d be on a plane visiting friends outside the country right now. I’m sure an order to arrest EVERYONE who works for Starlink is being drafted right now.

If Starlink is connected to any infrastructure inside Brazil, I suspect that’s about to go dark. What the Brazilian authorities need is access to Starlink’s internal admin network that controls EVERYTHING. Because Melon Husk is to stupid to pipeline infrastructure for each country. I’ll bet it’s all shared at some level. I doubt local IT person would risk jail for them and their families or “extended renditioning” to extract access to those networks to shut them down.

As a sysadmin who has to support said developers, all I have to say is “Duh. No I won’t install your app with root privileges. And clean up all the files you write to /tmp.”

Since I can’t get the Fairphone in the US, I got a Pixel 7a for $350. It’s not as repairable as my ancient 3a, but if it lasts 7 years like the 3a, I’ll have gotten my money’s worth.

Actually, outside the US, the DO training is 7 years, same as a medical doctor. I chose a DO for my primary care doctor because they have papatory skills (i.e. they actually touch someone) that regular doctors refer out.

Actually, a DC goes to school for 4 years to learn what they do. A PT used to go for 4 years undergrad, then 2 years for the MS. Now you really can’t practice without a PhD. When a DC says they can do everything a PT can do plus Rx certain things, it really pisses PTs off. They work within the scope of a MD’s direction. DC don’t. Both use Phillip Greenman’s Principles of Manual Medicine in their training (an Osteopathic text).

I’m waiting for Apple and Google to pull the X client from their app stores.

Then the fun really begins.

Tubo

Chrome 117.0.5938.149 and Brave 117.1.58.137 with Adblock, uBlock+uBlock Origin, Disconnect, Privacy Badger, YouTubeEnhancer and other stuff.

Disabled YouTubeEnhancer and Adblock, which triggered the screen.

Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don’t get much from my choices. It still did a pretty good job of showing me stuff I was interested in watching.

Then on Oct 1, they threw up a “You’re using an Ad Blocker” overlay on videos. I’d use my trusty Overlay Remover plugin to remove the annoying javascript graphic and watch what I wanted. I didn’t have to click the X to dismiss the obnoxious page.

Last week, they started placing a timer with the X so you had to wait 5 seconds for the X to appear so you could dismiss blocking graphic.

Today, there was a new graphic. It allowed you to view three videos before you had to turn off your Ad Blocker. I viewed a video 3 times just to see what happens.

Now all I see is this: “Ad Blockers violate Youtube’s Terms of Service”

Google has out and out made it a violation of their ToS to have an ad blocker to view Youtube. Or you can pay them $$$.

I ban such sites from my systems by replacing their DNS name in my hosts file routed to 127.0.0.1 which means I can’t view the site. I have quite a few banned sites now.

It’s been well documented that Amazon does this with eBooks all the time. A publisher pulled a copy of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE from Amazon over a contract dispute in the earlier days of the Kindle. So Amazon reached out and delete that copy from all Amazon customers who bought it through the Amazon Store.

Students who were annotating it for class lost all their notes. Amazon refunded the cost of the eBook. But those notes are toast.

It’s what prompts me to copy non-DRM’ed files to my Kindle and read them without Amazon having a record of purchase. It won’t stop them from logging in remotely and wiping the device, but I have backups and programs to convert them to non-Kindle format for another eReader.