Notices by Bálint 🎭 (szbalint@x0r.be)

Capitalism is a leaky abstraction

The Fedilab developer just admitted to acting in bad faith by removing the user agent identification from their client.

I can understand a browser changing the user agent to something else for compatibility reasons, but for a client to deliberately remove identification to evade the wishes of the servers they connect to?

That’s not something well-behaved clients usually do...

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/68.0/releasenotes/

The new Firefox 68 release notes are quite educational:

- They added a bunch of extension quality features: clearer permissions, recommended extensions program, reporting. THIS IS WHAT CHROME SHOULD HAVE DONE!
- cryptomining and fingerprint protections
- WebRender rolling out to more users by default
- camera and microphone access requiring HTTPS

Firefox is really making the case for being the browser that has its users best interest at heart.

Normally I'm extremely interested in cryptography details, but I started reading a thread about how gnupg is connected to the SKS keyserver attack and....I gave up partway through because it's exactly the same story over and over again. We could have a drinking game on this, it's so consistent that everything PGP is:

- 90s crypto
- the internals are a badly evolved mess
- noone gives a crap about the end2end big picture, instead it's pass-the-blame hot potato

The botanical gardens is one of my favourite places in Vienna.

To get away from that badly chosen name (who would use something called GIMP) and to create a new image manipulation tool, I started the Pixel Hoarding Layer Editor & Generic Manipulation library.

Forget the official name, I heard a better one:

Panopticoin.

It's so apt and succint.

@wxcafe what you’re describing is basically Lenin’s contribution/invention: The Party. Anne Applebaum from a historian’s perspective wrote a couple of books showing how it’s an inherently authoritarian construct on the theory level (as opposed to turning into dictatorships in practice).

Mathematicians would probably say that elections are a required but not a sufficient (in themselves) component of a healthy democracy 😉

I swear people act like a fucking 1970s tap: there is one extremely narrow range where it’s not too cold or not too hot and outside that it’s hell or Hoth.

A lot of people like that regarding politics today when to actually get shit done we need to think strategically, build coalitions around issues and strike compromises to avoid bad outcomes.

https://secarch.dev/posts/2fa-is-still-too-complicated-for-most-people/

"2FA is Still Too Complicated for Most People"

I wrote something that might be unexpected.

tl;dr: use and recommend password managers first, then 2FA

#infosec

If you're interested in more about sleep, read Matthew Walker's book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep

It's really readable, is fascinating, scary, interesting and I think the only book on the planet that considers it a success if it puts you to sleep.

If you'd like to ask something that I might know the answer to, feel free - I'd be happy to try and reply. Perhaps the next day, as I'll soon head to get my own 8 hours of sleep.

14/FIN

Research shows that people shift their baselines and when exposed to long-term lack of sufficient sleep, they have no idea how badly they perform compared to their healthy baseline.

"I feel fine on 6h of sleep" is a myth. There are no humans who need less sleep than others and can still function as well as when having adequate sleep.

People just get used to their decreased state of functioning.

4/14

Generally speaking: regular, good quality sleep of sufficient length (8h) is the single biggest improvement you can do for your health

Sleeping 6-7h or less demolishes your immune system, doubles the risk of cancer, contributes to an increased risk of developing Alzheimer's later in life, increases your chance of developing cardiovascular diseases, contributes to most major psychiatric conditions, greatly reduces your ability to learn to percieve emotions and make logical decisions

First of all, when did sleep appear? It seems that sleep appeared shortly after life itself on the planet. Every organism sleeps, certainly every animal does and did so for a very long time even evolutionarily speaking

Nature does not spend huge amounts of effort on pointless things. Sleep serves absolutely vital functions, and if sleep is disrupted we suffer serious physiological problems

Sleep isn't a single thing. It is a combination of a multitude of different processes 2/14

I'm not a sleep scientist, but I've recently read a book by Matthew Walker who runs Harvard's sleep research laboratory and I wanted to share a whole bunch of important, useful and interesting details about sleep.

What is it, what it isn't, why is it important and how it affects us.

1/14

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-messenger.html

Facebook is rolling messaging between WhatsApp Instagram and Facebook messenger into one.

While they claim to add end-to-end encryption (let's see about that), the silent part is about profiles, contact lists and access.

Internally, the founders of WhatsApp left over this and employees are rebelling. That tells you a lot about how user-hostile these changes will be.

Zuck wants more data. #DeleteWhatsApp.

@jjg @nolan I wanted to make the exact same comment, twitter rage mobs are a thing but this thing went a lot wider than twitter with good reason and this whole article is doing some “both sides” reasoning, in which two sides only exist if you buy in to the racist logic of these hitler youth kids. A native american person isn’t a liberal and by definition the anti-thesis of an immigrant.

https://myaccount.google.com/purchases

If you didn't yet know, Google is datamining GMail etc for purchase confirmation emails amongst other things and aggregating it for their own purposes in an extremely detailed way.

(Everything you purchased with order ids, detailed billing details, VAT, including subscriptions etc)

Do not believe a single word about how this information is kept private. There is zero reason to build a system to aggregate this and then not use it to make money out of.

@mwlucas @SoloBSD

I’m almost a year in. Got a second model for home in June. Took me a month or two to get used to it (keybr.com recommended for training)

Would never go back to non-ortholinear keyboards, the stand is really good for my wrists too. Best kickstarter I ever backed.

I had no idea coffee with milk has such a high climate impact, compared to other foods and drinks.

If you drink 200ml of milk and a cup of coffee like with a mug per day, that's around 1kg of GHG emissions.

Do it every day for a year and it's the equivalent of 1500km driven by the average ICE car.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46459714