• 36 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle

















  • I probably wouldn’t bother. I can think of two scenarios you might get spied on.

    1. Through your browser you’ve granted a website access to your webcam (Zoom etc.) and left a tab open. Maybe it could activate it when you weren’t expecting?
    2. Someone has used a vulnerability to take control of your computer to the degree it can access your webcam directly. Desktop linux software doesn’t usually have meaningful isolation between software running as the same user, so at this point they can grab all your data, passwords, take screenshots, etc. and the webcam is just the cherry on top.

    I expect most people don’t do (1) very often, let alone for sketchy websites, so IMO it doesn’t make much difference either way.




  • Smart fridges are one thing but there are many innocent folk relying on internet services to do normal and important things involving sensitive data - talk to family and friends, access healthcare, attend work, do their banking, school and childcare enrolments, even insurance. Should these things be replaced by rooms full of filing cabinets? Maybe, I dunno, that’s a big call. Short of substantial collapse that renders the internet unavailable, these sort of things will continue to be online and ordinary people deserve all the security they can get. If you’re working in cybersecurity to help people like this, then that is totally ethical in my view.

    If you’re lucky maybe you can land a role with some direct permacomputing aspects - reduce hardware requirements, simplification of systems, maintaining old hardware to maximise lifespan. But just avoiding roles where you or your organisation is encouraging people to view more ads or buy more stuff would be a good start.


  • The web can’t be discarded by individuals

    I agree, as a practical matter it’s another heavyweight tech system that we can’t opt out of. Striving to keep client requirements low so that we can get maximum use out of older hardware is great.

    Is your comment is driven by wasteful web design or are you saying that even a lean web service design is still inherently excessive?

    The latter. The web relies on a continuous path of connectivity between the client and the server to function at all. In practice it also requires cooperation on a global scale to make this useful to everybody, whether that’s DNS, CAs for TLS, BGP, undersea fibre optic cables or the big services that “everybody” relies on like AWS and GitHub.

    When somebody says a word like permanetworking, to me that’s an invitation to think small. If you want to create something local, networking offers a lot more possibilities for action than, say, semiconductor manufacturing. Bluetooth chat, neighbourhood WiFi with local servers, long distance email via sneakernet, distributing useful data packages like maps, books and encyclopedic data so that they’re stored close to the people who need them. There’s so much we can do without climate-controlled datacenters.


  • I’ll join the handful of commenters shilling for kagi which has domain blocking and ranking as a first-class feature. It really is wonderful if you have the cash, and hopefully it will put pressure on the advertising-funded search engines to add these kinds of features.

    I’m looking at the word “permanetworking” and my first thought is we could be a lot more ambitious. The web is such a complex and brittle way to access information it feels like a world away from perma-anything. Still, avoiding wasteful use of bandwidth is always a good thing so I won’t prattle any further.











  • Honestly I’m glad they highlighted the telemetry. I went through the local report about what’s included and while it’s not an upsetting level of detail, it’s more comprehensive than I would have opted in to if asked.

    Still, as sibling points out it’s in a completely different league from slurping up your IMAP creds, something which has always been local-only data. This is the second time I know of recently where MS has trampled on this kind of local-only expectation - the other was Edge defaulting to sending the contents of textboxes you’re filling out on webpages to the MS cloud for spelling and grammar checks. Thunderbird is still a sound recommendation, and unlike Microsoft, I trust that if I uncheck the telemetry box they’re not going to try to get me some other way.