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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The manifest v3 changes primary give a lot of security and privacy changes that stop extensions from doing a lot of questionable things in the background on all your page you visit. But that does stop ad blockers from doing a lot of what they currently do - blocking in page elements and modifying the pages you visit.

    It also killed a lot of other genuinely useful extensions.

    And if security is their main concern they should have spent resources on making sure the extensions they themselves redistribute are safe, not on killing a huge chunk of extensions. Sorry but you’ll have a very hard time convincing anyone that getting rid of ad blockers wasn’t their primary motive.

    But it does not block them from blocking page requests so ad blockers like ublockorigin lite can still function in a more limited capacity to block ads.

    It completely changed how they do this, and made it way less effective and more limited. All completely unnecessary from a security standpoint.


  • Algorithmic patents amount to patenting maths which, by very longstanding precedence, is not a thing, for good reason.

    You absolutely can patent “math” (well, more like physics) IRL. What matters though is that the invention actually has to be novel and non-obvious, and IMO it should also be harder to patent if it’s in a segment like software where costs of development, iteration and “research” are generally extremely cheap. Like, it should have a way higher bar for the “novelness”.

    And I would not allow any kind of software design patent (use copyright or trademark to protect that).







  • Amju Wolf@pawb.socialtoLinux@lemmy.mlGNOME 47.beta Released
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    3 months ago

    I may understand “opinionated” differently from you, but the main issue is that when you do want to change something, you can’t. Or it’s some unsupported hack, or (best case) you flip some hidden configuration variable (that will probably break with the next release).

    KDE is well configured from the get go as well, you don’t have to change anything and it will work well. But if you do decide that you don’t like some of their defaults, you can tweak many aspects of it.


  • Amju Wolf@pawb.socialtoLinux@lemmy.mlGNOME 47.beta Released
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    3 months ago

    It wouldn’t really be an issue if you didn’t need an extension for every single basic functionality…

    Because of how stupidly opinionated Gnome is I switched to KDE a year or so ago and have been extremely happy with it. And what do you know I don’t even need any extensions, because sane stuff like tray icons are builtin.

    I do use an extension for distributing windows in custom areas though, and it didn’t even break throughout the (I believe) 2 large updates there were since I started using it.


  • That’s what PieFed changes though. You can still track how someone votes, but you can’t tie it to a specific profile (without doing some extra analysis and even then you can’t be completely sure).

    Or, with my suggestion, you could track how that specific account votes, but it would be easy to obfuscate who exactly it is and (hopefully) impossible to track to the user’s other identities.



  • Looks like it’s kinda hard to spin up a piefed bot. Not impossible, but it’s a bitch without an API.

    What you would actually want to do if you want to bot is take one of the existing apps and modify it to make spamming easy.

    Either way, I want to be able to point to their behavior - without the extra step of having to de-anonymize their activity - and tell them to chill the fuck out or get the fuck out. Out means out. Totally and forever.

    I can see why you would want that, but my question is is that such a big deal compared to people being harassed for their voting? I don’t think user privacy should be violated - especially en masse / by default just because of some (in my opinion fairly minor) moderation concerns.

    And if they are a dick overall, then you will figure it out anyway, ban their “main” account and that will prevent them from voting, too (unless the instance is malicious, but then a malicious instance can do much more harm in general).


  • That’s technically true, but the apps “everyone” has are the opposite to that, and people are used to it and don’t really seem to complain. So if Facebook, Tiktok, Twitter, Amazon, Spotify and Aliexpress each do their own (garbage) thing, it shows other brands they can do that too, and they kinda ruin it for everyone. Basically the apps you spend most time in are probably like that, and it’s a shitty experience.





  • This means that it is impossible for them to make a patch or PR because it would conflict with the projects licence and fact its open source.

    That’s not how it works. It just means the company owns the code for all intents and purposes, which also means that if they tell you that you can release it under a FOSS license / contribute to someone else’s project, you can absolutely do that (they effectively grant you the license to use “their” code that you wrote under a FOSS license somewhere else).