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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • If you’re just interested in connections (and don’t care about packet inspection) you can use Little Snitch (paid) or LuLu (FOSS).

    Actually, all the Objective-See Foundation security tools are great and target specific classes of vulnerabilities, like LuLu for outgoing network connections, RansomWhere for detecting ransomwear by looking for encryption events, Oversight that monitors you cameras and microphones and a bunch of other really small, but really useful security utilities. Better than running a shady antivirus that’s going to suck up loads of resources and rely on signatures.











  • I’ve literally never even seen, or even heard of, a gas mower. Almost all of them are electric (and our electricity mix isn’t perfect, but is better than a lot of places) with the odd one being petrol for especially large gardens, but that’s increasingly rare.

    Why the fuck would anyone use gas? That would be awful. Do you mean natural gas from the mains? Hydrogen? Bottled Calor gas? I’ve absolutely no idea what a gas mower could even be and searching is giving zero results that make sense.







  • The biggest red flag is when they try and stop you from pasting your password (or anything else for that matter) breaking password managers.

    There are years-long arguments on social media with companies who do this with actual security experts telling them they’re hurting security (including referencing organisations like the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre) and their only response is “we don’t allow pasting for security reasons” but they can never explain how it helps security - because it doesn’t. It drives me mad.


  • and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

    Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).

    They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.

    Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.


  • That’s what’s great about all these companies. They take credit for, and try to derive value from, things they didn’t actually create. Reddit keeps on talking about “their” data that was created by users, for free, and moderated by other users, also for free. Yet it’s somehow theirs and they can sell it?

    Twitter didn’t invent hashtags. They were user created annd eventually incorporated in to the service.

    These services add very little value, but they believe they add it all.