Skimmer

I just don't think Tor Browser is currently suited as a primary browser for most people. You lose things like staying logged into websites, you can't (or at least shouldn't) really add extensions like a good content blocker, you generally can't tweak or customize the browser to your liking, etc. Plus factor in things like the slow speeds, being blocked by websites, bombarded with captchas everywhere, etc, and it just becomes a harder and harder sell for a lot of average people.

Tor Browser's great and it absolutely has its need and purpose, I'm not trying to knock it for that at all because it works damn well for what it is and what it tries to do, but I just think its hard to be using as a primary browser and daily driver in its current form, at least for a lot of people.

Their extension isn't open source anymore, see here, so I don't recommend it personally, especially with how sensitive the data it collects is, its basically a keylogger, so trust is super important imo.

Basically, LMG were producing way too much content way too fast without proper testing of products and were making tons of mistakes, and wouldn't take the proper measures to take accountability for or fix the mistakes they were making. An egregious example was a mouse they reviewed where they literally didn't take the tape off the bottom of it. They also got a one of a kind prototype cooler from a very small start-up company, improperly tested it (used the wrong GPU that it wasn't even made for), blasted the product and called it horrible because of it, then refused to properly retest it because it'd at most cost $500 (despite them being a $100 million dollar company), and to put the cherry on top, auctioned off the product despite the company explicitly requesting it back and LMG even agreeing to send it back.

Now LMG is also being accused of sexual harassment and being an overall extremely toxic and horrible work place by a former employee.

I'd strongly recommend just watching the Gamers Nexus video and reading the thread from the former employee because this reply doesn't near do this shitshow justice and I'm sure I'm missing out on a lot details.

Not having root is done on Android for some very good security reasons to be fair, it opens up a giant attack surface and risk for all kinds of malware and nasty stuff to take advantage of. I don't think it's done completely in malice as you think. Its a very important part of the app sandbox and Android's security model at large.

With that said, I do think that people should have the option to root if they want to, I'm not a fan of OEMs like Samsung and whoever else purposely preventing people from rooting at all costs. I think people should be able to do whatever they want with their own device, root just certainly shouldn't be the default, and users should be aware of the risks if they choose to use it. But I do think it should be a possibility for those who really do wish to do so.

With Android, it all just comes down to the OEM and variant of it that you're stuck with. As a whole, I think its an amazing project and OS, though unfortunately Google, and especially OEMs, tend to make a lot of bad choices. It's similar to Linux as a whole in that aspect. You've got options like ChromeOS which are a nightmare for privacy and user freedom any way you look at them, but then you've got your traditional distros like Debian, Arch, Fedora, etc, which are the exact opposite. Its an important distinction.

Ah yes, Sony, the same company who distributed rootkits with their CDs, with the justification being "copyright protection".

I'm truly shocked this company would ever do anything malicious.

Fuck Sony, I hope Quad9 can win this.

Chinese Spyware go brrr

I understand how you feel, let me know if you find anything. I'm more left leaning myself, but I'm also not a fan of echo chambers and it gets pretty tiring and annoying seeing the same stuff over and over again. At the end of the day, I just wanna see an open, fair, and balanced discussion. The Fediverse is undeniably very left leaning currently, which is surprising to me since you'd think the anti-censorship design on paper would appeal more to people on the right who are against big tech and censorship, but I guess not? It's interesting.

Best way to fight against things like this is with your wallet. Stop buying and supporting games with Denuvo or any other similar DRM.

I usually use Signal.

There's so many I could list, I'll just mention 2 underrated ones I don't see mentioned as much:

• LibreTube - Best YouTube client imo, has a very nice and modern interface, proxies videos through Piped for maximum privacy (No direct connections to Google are made), No ads/tracking, SponsorBlock + Return YouTube Dislikes, support for downloading videos, etc. It's everything I'd want and more out of a YouTube client.

• URLCheck - Excellent app that allows you to preview what a URL is before you click it, includes tons of features such as scanning for malware, removing any tracking parameters, upgrading links from HTTP to HTTPS, etc. I can't recommend this app enough for the security, privacy, and general peace of mind it gives you.

But, seriously... 3 (known) years later and Apple doesn't have a fix for this?

Almost as if it's intentionally unpatched

Pegasus constantly adapts, evolves, and changes overtime with how it works. Pegasus 3 years ago isn't the same as Pegasus today. Once a vulnerability is discovered and fixed, they find a new one to exploit and take advantage of. Its a constant battle.

I'm not a big fan of Apple at all, but credit where its due, they have made a pretty good effort to patch Pegasus vulnerabilities whenever they come about, plus have added features like Lockdown Mode to help protect against it even further, etc. This article is literally about Apple even warning journalists to be cautious of it.

Saying Apple is intentionally allowing Pegasus to happen, like you're claiming, is honestly laughable with all things considered.

Is this the part where I act surprised?

Its great and has a lot of potential, I like a lot of what it does. I just wish they had packaging easily available for Fedora/RHEL through a COPR or the like. Also would've preferred if they used a stable release vs. the ESR of Firefox as the base, but I can understand why.

with hardening out of the box

Floorp definitely isn't hardened out of the box in my testing. Only thing it does is seems to disable Firefox's telemetry, which is nice, but more hardening is certainly needed through other projects like Arkenfox (which work here on Floorp too). Also looks like Floorp makes it easier to toggle some privacy settings that you'd usually have to tweak the about:config for, and comes pre-installed with uBlock Origin, which is great.

I think overall my only concern with Floorp will be how well and quickly the developer can keep up with updates. The track record for now looks good, but only time will tell. Besides that, this is a good and very promising project, will definitely keep an eye on it.

Well said. May be worth reading through this GitHub issue and this Bugzilla issue as well. Its worth noting its also directly integrated into the browser as well in about:addons.

I'm personally not a fan of Firefox/Mozilla integrating and using Google Analytics, even under these circumstances, and think it does deserve criticism, but it is what it is I guess. I do hope they switch to a better alternative in the future.

In the meantime, setting the following about:config options should take care of and fully strip out Google Analytics and extension recommendations from about:addons:

"extensions.getAddons.showPane" to false

"extensions.htmlaboutaddons.recommendations.enabled" to false

"browser.discovery.enabled" to false

"browser.discovery.sites" to be empty

This list has so many weird and obsolete recommendations, looks like its being refined and improved according to this, so until that's finished, I'd take it with a heavy grain of salt.

Are they begging for another antitrust?

Not sure I follow, there are plenty of Firefox-based browsers:

Tor, Mullvad, LibreWolf, Floorp, Pulse, Mull, Waterfox, Mercury, Ghostery, IceCat, Iceraven, etc.

Its just a huge shame too because Brendan Eich is such a smart guy (creating JavaScript, co-founding Mozilla and Firefox, etc), so sad to see how distorted and awful his views on basic human rights and the world are.

Just looking at this gives me anxiety 😟

What do you expect Quad9 to do here? Their hand is being forced, they don't have any options besides continuing to fight it in court unfortunately, which is what they're doing.

I think this goes for open source in general. I guess its just because of Apple and how locked down and restricted they make things. AOSP is open source and as a whole is pretty open with allowing things like sideloading and more freedom and control to developers and users in general, so I guess that encourages more FOSS developers to support it and the platform, over something like iOS for instance with its locked down ecosystem.

"default-release" is your default profile for the Stable release of Firefox.

"dev-edition-default" is the default profile for Firefox Developer Edition, so I'm assuming you had that installed at some point.

"default" to my understanding is only there for legacy reasons. It used to be the default Firefox profile way back in the day, but now that there's so many different Firefox versions (Stable, Beta, Nightly, & Developer Edition), using the same default profile for all of them across editions would cause corruption and a lot of issues. So that's why Mozilla moved to "default-release" for the default profile on Stable Firefox, similarly Developer Edition makes its own profile, "dev-edition-default", as would Nightly, Beta, and so on. I'm not really sure why "default" is still included, its probably safe to delete, at the very least it can be safely ignored.

Yep, they're horrible. I always disable internet on them, uninstall any apps I can, and generally do what I can to avoid using the built-in smart TV, but I shouldn't have to do this, its unfortunate and sucks to deal with. They just take advantage of consumers who don't know better, wish the TV market wasn't like this. :/

100%, I've lived both in the US and Europe, and Androids are definitely more prevalent in Europe than in the US.

Firefox with uBlock Origin is by far the best option, the only other browser that comes close is Brave, their content blocking and such is pretty good, so I'd recommend trying them if you're hellbent on not using FF. I'd also recommend looking into NextDNS for system-wide ad/tracker blocking in conjuction with the browser.

Hard for me to understand how blocking valid email providers like Proton, Tutanota, and Skiff, would actually mitigate any abuse. All it's going to do is hurt the websites with this filter and prevent privacy-minded folks from signing up. Unfortunate to see, hopefully they get some common sense and don't block these for no reason.

Welcome!

How hard was it to set up? I've been considering making my own personal instance for a while now but haven't fully properly looked into it

Side tangent but god, just unbelievable how an app like YouTube would ever be a system app on Stock that you can't just uninstall without needing to go through hoops like ADB. Samsung includes so much fuckery on their variants of Android, but to be fair, I believe even on stock Pixels, YouTube is a system app as well, so can't even entirely blame them for this case. Still unacceptable and insane to me.

Stock Android just sucks, can't see myself ever going back to it unless I absolutely had to. Props to you for making it work.

For microG (what I would recommend, since its much more private than regular GAPPS/full Play Services), you can just flash a LineageOS for microG build for your device instead of the official LineageOS. You can get them here. It covers the same devices that Lineage itself does. Same installation process, just using their files instead of Lineage's.

They both should work, you won't get notifications for Teams though unless you flash microG or GAPPS.

Have you tried Cromite? Its forked from Bromite by one of the original developers, except kept up to date and actively maintained, plus improved constantly, etc.

My Grandfather in his 70s who isn't tech savvy in the slighest has been able to use Jellyfin without any issues, just an FYI.

It's an entirely new standard, so no, it won't just be a firmware patch.

Yeah, Pixels are great, basically reference Android. Developers even usually use them for testing and making apps, so you know you're getting the best compatibility. Overall can't recommend them enough.

Hopefully it comes back, it was my personal favorite instance out of the options available and the one I mainly used.

Gonna quote myself from an earlier comment I made:

On Windows, just use the built-in Windows Defender. On Linux, I recommend ClamAV + ClamTK. On Android, Hypatia.

If you think you have malware, this is a pretty good guide to remove it.

I'd also strongly recommend using and configuring a content blocker like uBlock Origin in your browser, as well as using a DNS level blocker like NextDNS.

If you have a multilayered setup like this, then I think you're pretty good and it'll be not impossible, but much harder to get malware or be infected. Just use common sense as always.

I would say to just keep your OS and software and such up to date, enable features like Lockdown Mode on iOS if available to you, and just generally have good security practices. Really not much else you can do.

different distros

Isn't that a benefit of Linux, having all kinds of different distros and different options available? There isn't a "one size fits all". Just find the one you like and go from there.

broken repositories

How often does this actually happen? I can't think of a time I encountered broken repositories within the last few years of using Linux as a daily driver, I feel like you're exaggerating this. I think the repository system in general is amazing and installing software on Linux is so much better than Windows in about every way really.

software that doesn't work on Linux

This is a fair point, it depends on your use case. If anything you need is only tied to Windows, then yeah you don't have many options unfortunately. But I think for average people its probably fine since basically everything is on Linux nowadays, I guess biggest exceptions are like Microsoft Office and Adobe's suite.

proprietary drivers

I assume you mean NVIDIA? You can just get a distro that includes them already installed and ready to go like Nobara, or just use one that makes them easier to set-up like Pop OS, if you're uncomfortable installing them on a regular distro. (Though it really isn't that difficult).

Overall Linux isn't for everyone, but I do think it's improving more and more and about at a point now where average users could probably get away with using it instead of Windows in a lot of cases. But it does depend on your use case for sure at the end of the day. Hopefully I'm not out of touch here though lol.

I'd say as long as it isn't harming a small independent artist, then its generally ethical.

Last good version of Windows, RIP 🙏