• 2 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • This is my biggest challenge with this extension. What’s clickbait to one person is not to another. Several times I’ve come across titles that get mangled when rewritten to lose key points. Or the image gets replaced with a random screen grab. There’s a difference between somebody doing the YouTube face and a title with “the craziest stunt you’ve ever seen” and an artist photo with a title saying the “a crazy stunt jump through a burning hoop”. I’m okay with the latter but dearrow will often remove crazy. The is just an contrived example

    One person could still say “crazy” makes it clickbait, but having some adjectives are fine




  • As a professional software dev, I worked with pretty much every OS daily. My personal computer was a Windows, my work laptop was a Mac, and I ran my code on Linux so I was familiar with the things I liked and disliked about each. I also ran my own set of server with my websites, mail servers, and various research projects to learn and grow.

    Then I decided it was time to order a new laptop and I didn’t want to go to Windows 11 because I felt Microsoft was going too much into features I didn’t want like Ads, more tracking, pushing AI. Don’t get me wrong, I like AI, but it was too much about forcing me to use it to justify their stock valuations.

    I also was working on reducing my usage of big tech, setting up self hosted services like pi-hole, Home Assistant, starting to work my own Mint alternative. It just felt natural to get a Framework laptop and try running Linux on it.

    I still have a Windows desktop for games and other things, I still use Mac at work. I still like the Mac for it’s power efficiency and it doesn’t get as hot. Linux has some annoyances here and there, like dbus locking up, or weird GNOME issues, or for a while my screen would artifact until set some kernel params, or the fact that my wifi card would crash and I had to replace it with an Intel card, but I’ll stick with it.





  • I think this a problem with applications with a privacy focused user basis. It becomes very black and white where any type of information being sent somewhere is bad. I respect that some people have that opinion and more power to them, but being pragmatic about this is important. I personally disabled this flag, and I recognize how this is edging into a risky area, but I also recognize that the Mozilla CTO is somewhat correct and if we have the option between a browser that blocks everything and one that is privacy-preserving (where users can still opt for the former), businesses are more likely to adopt the privacy-preserving standards and that benefits the vast majority of users.

    Privacy is a scale. I’m all onboard with Firefox, I block tons of trackers and ads, I’m even somebody who uses NoScript and suffers the ramifications to due to ideology reasons, but I also enable telemetry in Firefox because I trust that usage metrics will benefit the product.


  • Why is telemetry useful or why is it needed to use pi-hole to block telemetry?

    Telemetry is useful to know what features your customers use. While it’s great in theory to have product managers who dogfood and can act on everyone’s behalf, the reality is telemetry ensures your favorite feature keeps being maintained. It helps ensure the bugs you see get triaged and root caused.

    Unfortunately telemetry has grown to mean too many things for different people. Telemetry can refer to feature usage, bug tracking, advertising, behavior tracking.

    Is there evidence that even when you disable telemetry in Firefox it still reports telemetry? That seems like a strong claim for Firefox.








  • It’s true that Mozilla does collect telemetry and that Mozilla Corp is for profit, however Mozilla Corp is owned by Mozilla Foundation. That ownership structure is either a way to get around limitations on non profits, or its an opportunity for the Foundation to directly influence the Corp to be better.

    However, I’ll still use Firefox/Thunderbird because: Usage stats such as number of accounts or filters is in no way comparable to my username and password. One is basic metadata and stats, the other is a massive risk. You can opt out of the telemetry, the only way to opt out of sharing your password is to not use the new Outlook.

    I take a more pragmatic approach to privacy based on my trust. I understand the value of telemetry, but change it depending on the company. Big Tech I have less trust in, Mozilla, while they have issues, are on average far better for privacy vs big tech.

    As a developer, I understand the value of telemetry and the risks that come with collecting any data. I pick Firefox because it challenges the homogeney of Google’s influence and it looks like I’m going to pick Thunderbird because I’ haven’t seen a better option.



  • Amazon corporate employees get RSUs which are stocks, not options. After the new hire RSUs go away, you end up with two vest dates a year and new comp offerings start the following year (so in 2024 you’ll see new money in 2025 plus a small base salary bump that goes in effect that month).

    Tech salaries are frequently stock based, but Amazon’s is unusual in that it’s only twice a year, and bumps start the following year, and they recently made the change to do 2 year offers instead of 3 years.


  • Attestation depends on a few things:

    1. The website has to choose to trust a given attestation provider. If Open Source Browser Attestation Provider X is known for freely handing out attestations then websites will just ignore them
    2. The browser’s self-attestation. This is tricky part to implement. I haven’t looked at the WEI spec to see how this works, but ultimately it depends on code running on your machine identifying when it’s been modified. In theory, you can modify the browser however you want, but it’s likely that this code will be thoroughly obfuscated and regularly changing to make it hard to reverse engineer. In addition, there are CPU level systems like Intel SGX that provide secure enclaves to run code and a remote entity can verify that the code that ran in SGX was the same code that the remote entity intended to run.

    If you’re on iOS or Android, there’s already strong OS level protections that a browser attestation can plugin to (like SafetyNet.)