First of all, Lunduke… has very funny opinions on things, as his politics massively shifted in the past 4-5 years, as someone who used to follow his rants before he became a rightwinger. His interview at Chris Titus channel was also a bit unhinged, and Titus protected him by hushing him a fair bit.
Secondly, unique IDs are only a thing when you download the Firefox online installer stub from their website. If you download the offline installer from their website or from any decent Windows software site (Majorgeeks, Filehorse et al), this is not a problem. Also, this is not at all a problem on Linux, since the software installation method is fully centralised.
What I will criticise is CEOs have been leeches at Mozilla. Emily Baker has been an absolute leech, and there is no denying about it. The new CEO is also a leech. But that has not affected Firefox. It may, however, affect Firefox as the developer money is snatched by CEOs. What has affected Firefox is how the world has shaped up, and people are okay with having less privacy because western elites have helped create that ecosystem for masses to cuck themselves. I am not going to honk trumpets for their inclusive politics like a liberal, but it has allowed to distance them from clowns like Brendan Eich, which has been fairly helpful.
Also your point about UGC using uBO is nonsense. Manifest V3 simply disallows the full capabilities of uBO on Chromium browsers due to its hard cap on memory limits. Raymond Hill has a lot of words to say about it. uBO Lite is about as good as uBO easy mode but even lighter, and you cannot block selective domains or scripts at all. Not to mention, uBO on Firefox allows importing extra filter text files, which is not an option on Chromium browsers.
Firefox has customisable user.js and userchrome.css, so the former allows implementing Arkenfox’s configuration and such things.
I’m NOT sorry for the trouble and mental break down I may have caused by the sudden realization that Firefox is as good and private after all, if you can put in a little work. You may cry, whine and bang your head about it. Your disinformation cope attempt has failed.
Lunduke has a problem with Mozilla’s “politics” as a white Christian rightwinger, as do people like Luke Smith, for reasons that should not need much explanation. He fell into that rabbit hole few years ago, and wishes to remain there.
Signal and Telegram are not rivals, though? Signal aims to be a E2EE chat platform, while Telegram works like a public forum in realtime chat format. Signal/WhatsApp are different from Telegram/Discord. They are not the same type of platforms.
Durov is comparing apples and oranges, and anyone falling for this whining, calling Telegram bad is an idiot.
I absolutely aim to challenge this kind of crap. If I leave, I doubt there will be people who will do it consistently. People want to follow X, Y and Z cults but not A, B and C cults, and think they are rational. Rationalists can come up with the most irrational nonsense, which is why they are not rational.
Because the world is not utopia, and individualism combined with a unipolar hegemon (UK before, USA now) made the division of society a feature and not a problem. Also, capitalism forces us to fake productivity and not have free time for ourselves to indulge in useless things like… learning more languages and cultures to become harmonious with more people. Wars and genocides are useful, you know… to fill the pockets of some white swines.
While colonialism created conditions that made it favourable to benefit from the coloniser’s language, the capitalist structure ensured a proxy form of colonialism never seen before in human history, where all forms of media and pop culture were hijacked. It is unique, and it is a perspective that only I have held and seen nobody talk about it, but Britain has utilised cricket as a tool of colonialism on Hindustan (post partition, India and Pakistan). It is part of reason why even after independence we continued to be silent, unlike China, who faced half as worse the fate as India, bounced back through Mao’s revolution.
Now, back to this proxy colonialism that never left most countries even after Britain left them, post WW2 the baton seemed to have been passed onto USA. The iron grip of capitalism and a unique cocktail (western pop culture infused with the invention of modern advertisement by Edward Bernays that abused psychoanalysis theories) and the vacuum of money and opportunities created by western imperialism ensured no matter how hard colonised countries were crippled, they would have only few choices left - starve and shrivel (DPRK post 1980s USA bombing), become proxy subservient to west (IMF/WEF initiative) or become subservient to west in the form of brain drain and human resource drain. This is purely my theory and how I think about things without ever having read a word of socialist literature.
The adoption of their language was just one step among many steps they probably worked long ago, or worked as time went on. I do think it was thought of long ago, similar to what Zionist Project is.
I am not sure, I may be just rambling here, but whatever I guess.
I will throw shade at this liberal article writer by saying Elon Musk also promoted Signal. Does this make Signal actively compromised? Absolutely as much as Telegram.
This way of judgement of things is pure mental illness. I refuse to sugarcoat this, because now suddenly this Telegram vs Signal shitshow will become a trend if it is not nipped in the bud.
Signal/WhatsApp are different from Telegram/Discord. Former aim to be E2EE messengers while latter aim to be realtime public forums. Comparing apples to oranges is dumb, and falling for this Durov whining and counter-whining of Signal sheeps is even worse.
Let me ask Signal stans, since they are so proud of it, why is it that they kept delaying the username feature, and still require phone number to this day? Signal is not anonymous or private. Their servers are all Amazon and Google. What is private is the message contents, and even WhatsApp has that. Most people never even install Signal from their website’s APK, instead Play Store or Aurora frontend (same thing) or some APK website. So how is Signal this messiah? Matrix is a whole lot better, XMPP and SimpleX are even better. Briar is an extreme step further.
Is Meta ownership the singular thing that needs focus? Google, Facebook and Amazon are nearly equally evil, considering all of them are US military contractors. Other Big Tech companies are too, but Signal uses them as server hosts.
Consider the fact that a lot of probabilities that surface as criticism are valid, because Signal prioritised things like stickers, statuses and fucking MobileCoin crypto over username pseudonymity functionality, and even then you need the phone number. Do you know who did this since day one? TELEGRAM. Telegram has pseudonym username option to hide phone number from people from the very start. Signal did not have it for 9 years until recently.
Joke aside, Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool is the tool you need. Download a fresh copy and put it on a USB stick. Whatever Windows computer you need to disinfect, restart in safe mode and copy KVRT. It is standalone and runs offline and can be removed after use. It will scan the whole system. Its malware removal rate is approximately the same as Kaspersky suite, so you know it will do the job.
Edit: turns out there are brainwormed redditors out here. Ignore their downvotes and you will be fine following advice.
Windows defender is almost useless. It heavily relies on cloud for scanning. This is not a problem with special offline tools that some AV companies provide to disinfect systems that may not be able to connect to a network.
I recommend you check PC Security Channel to see how Defender works against ransomware when internet is turned off, versus on. You can also check performance of other AVs. He is the most reputed resource on benchmarking AVs if you want to see frequent updates, and a rare one that is not biased or rooted in nationalistic or weird biases, since he has his Patreon, Discord and a lack of dependence on lackeys.
I have been pro privacy and anti data harvesting for many years now, however it is becoming increasingly more difficult staying off some platforms. Mostly Meta....
The cost of extreme privacy is your mental health and human relations. As rough as it sounds, you have to make a compromise, because you will not be an Edward Snowden in your life. What you can be, however, is an individual with a private life that beats out 95% people at having better privacy.
While I do not want to recommend it for privacy reasons, having just WhatsApp is good enough to strike that balance, to keep that one outlet open to society. I ended up doing that, since I realised barely a few people came to install Signal for me, even though I have a lot of leverage. They would instantly prefer normal calls and SMS over the usual WhatsApp, which is way worse for message content privacy and security. I did that experiment announcing reducing and even stopping WhatsApp usage, firewalling it and opening it weekly to check messages, and did gain a lot of leverage, but life became harder and stressed.
If you feel like you want to talk more, you can, whenever I will get time online. I can help you with threat modelling.
you will notice a WhatsApp section where it says “Messages: Limited*”, referring to unencrypted iCloud backups giving away messages which is no mystery. This is not an Android problem, and even better if chats are locally backed up on Android.
WhatsApp message content for one-to-one chats has not been compromised to date as far as E2EE goes, whereas metadata is unencrypted. WhatsApp messages atleast on Android can only be accessed in two ways — either user reports the other user to end up sharing the last few contextual messages between both parties, or by (forcefully) opening the phone. There is a third way, Israel/USA tools like Pegasus malware and Cellebrite toolkits, but those are reserved for high profile targets like activists and politicians.
Brainrot conspiracy theories are baseless when we have examples of court subpoenas and sophisticated malware like Pegasus needed to open phone and get to WhatsApp messages. Metadata is far more valuable compared to message content for feds, which is what stupid people are yet to realise. The same people that believe in this conspiracy theory and then go on to use Chromium based browsers leaking every bit of metadata possible, and using PWA apps without a firewall and good HOSTS ruleset are laughable.
Jerboa allows me to moderate the giant Lemmy communities, and has been quite reliable, so it is what I am sticking to. The lack of autosave drafts upon going back or every 20-30 seconds is a major issue I certainly do not like.
Minor bugs like the comment nav strip collapsing some comments instead of navigating is annoying.
Also, since phones are big nowadays, I would seriously like if there is an option for a translucent up/down comment navigation squares on the left or right side middle portion of screen, offset by probably 50 pixels. Many people will appreciate this and other apps might copy it too and improve things for everyone.
Also, tap to load images might be a handy feature for some people and those moments when data speeds are atrocious.
No, I shit on their delusion when they claim KDE is the best and most stable DE. It is like saying the second to finish the race has finished first, which is illogical.
What if I started allowing idiots claiming Apple is privacy friendly and people should absolutely trust Google Nest speakers because Google is a big company?
Disagreements are not small, when someone attempts to establish alternative reality as facts. This is why the bold stance is necessary.
Let me ask, how many years have you been deeply into the privacy endeavours? And I mean deeply. 2? 3? 5 years? I was using Tor before I hit teenagehood. You need a certain level of authority to keep such problems at bay, when one is unwilling to listen, act proud of not researching and double down on their nonsense takes. Maybe you like the shitty advice given on Reddit or other garbage privacy communities where Brave, Pixel and iPhone are recommended, but this is not going to be one. Privacy communities are full of half knowledge loonies and grifters, and there is almost no defense against it.
President Biden announces a series of tariffs on green energy products from China. (lemmy.ml)
Firefox to collect your (anonymized) search data (blog.mozilla.org)
Telegram CEO calls out rival Signal, claiming it has ties to US government (www.theregister.com)
Why is there no global language that at least nearly half the world speaks (3.5 billion, I'm talkin', including non-native speakers)
Is the Tower of Babel still affecting us or something?...
Are right wingers creating FUD around Signal? (hachyderm.io)
I found a worm on my USB
This is probably not the right community but I haven’t found a better one....
Chat Apps, Government Ties, and Transparency – Threema (threema.ch)
What is the cost of privacy?
I have been pro privacy and anti data harvesting for many years now, however it is becoming increasingly more difficult staying off some platforms. Mostly Meta....
Best Lemmy App in 2024
Now that the Reddit exodus is about a year old and the client apps have matured, what’s the latest state of the above question?...
What open-source software would you like more people to know about?
Proton Mail Discloses User Data Leading to Arrest in Spain (restoreprivacy.com)