So are we. Just get back to your browser as you knew it, with a script called “Just the browser”. Or read more about it from Liam on TheRegister first. You’re welcome.
The internet is sooo kaput
After a bit of reading, yesterday I decided to have another fresh look at a browser called Brave. And yes, I knew about the controversies regarding its crypto- and “AI”-integration, and also the ones about its owner. But it’s still one of the better browsers around, so I tried it on Arch and Debian Linux, on Windows 11, and even on my phone (which runs GrapheneOS and which does have a pretty secure Chromium-based browser called “Vanadium” already).
I’m not the typical internet user who is using a browser for pretty much everything, and no “doom scrolling” for me, thanks. But what hit me is that after less than 24 hours, Brave’s built-in tracker stats showed me this:
Almost 3,500 trackers in less than 24 hours? Wow – see the headline of this post… time to regulate the internet, and to “take it back”. A website needs just two things from us as end users: the URL you want to see, and the IP address where it should be sent. No scripts, no cookies, and most definitely no ads and trackers.
Anyway, thanks like always for reading. Oh, and the background photo within the Brave browser is by Anna Wangler, on Unsplash.
Tried secureblue
Last week I had a brief look at secureblue, a hardened Linux distribution based on a so-called “atomic” Fedora distribution (called “silverblue” in case you’re interested). I was interested because I’ve read about it on several security-related websites like for instance here or here.
And I liked it a lot, becauise it takes many very good ideas from GrapheneOS, like their hardened Chromium-based browser Vanadium which here is called Trivalent. Even their webpages kind of look alike.
And since I haven’t had a look at a tiling window manager yet, I first tried the “Sway” version. With the <super> and <Enter> keys, you open a terminal window, here called “foot”. Looks like this:
You’ll notice the “us” keyboard, which I couldn’t switch to a German one, except in the login manager which looks like this:
This isn’t a problem of Sway; I later tried that with another distribution where it worked. Maybe some overlay “header” on Fedora’s version was responsible for this, I didn’t find out during my test.
I stopped testing it because neither this Sway nor the KDE Plasma or Gnome based versions of secureblue ran on Mitchie’s old Lenovo laptop which still has a Celeron-class dual core CPU, and only 2GB of RAM. Too heavy for old metal like that. I also can’t do all of my stuff (like music making which requires real time) on such an atomic version of Linux, and with flatpaks.
But in case you want a nice and reasonable secure machine, and have the hardware for it – I recommend a quad core with at least 4GB of RAM – then go for it, and have a look. Could be well worth trying it.
And like always, thanks for reading.
Bravo, Jan!
This. No other comment needed, except that you need to understand German, or that you’ll have to use your favourite translation engine for it.
Memory loss, indeed
Oh wow – this means the end of an era, at least for me. We have Crucial memory in all of our desktop computers, and in each one I’ve built over the years. And now it will be gone, at least for us “consumers”. Why? The AI craze. And look at this:
That’s what AI – and as such, all of us – are doing to our planet. A lot less trees, a lot more datacenters. This has to stop if we really want to save the planet…
Like always, thanks for reading.
Where the mice live…
We live in a housing area which is rather nice – it has a kindergarten nearby, several playgrounds for kids small and big, and lots of green areas, with bushes and trees. In between, there are some pathways for us humans to walk (and some like to cycle there, too, or ride their – now electric – scooters, or even drive in with cars).
I got up early this morning, before dawn, and let the cat out soon after sunrise. She disappeared on one of those pathways which we can see from our dining area window – and like last time, she was back after less than two minutes, carrying a mouse. I let her in, expecting to find a dead mouse which I could take away from her – but this time, the poor thing was still alive, so there was an inhouse chasing and hunting time for the cat, which she surely enjoyed.
I tried to catch the mouse as well to set it out again, but it ran under my computer desk to hide from that deadly predator. I was thinking about how to save the poor thing – doing nothing meant that it would starve if not moving, or being killed if it dared to come out again. Locking away the cat in another room and then moving my computer desk would mean that I would have to chase it through all of the flat. I also didn’t know how bad it was hurt already, so I thought about the mouse’s status as maybe in-between, like Schrödinger’s cat, of which you couldn’t really tell if it’s dead or alive, so in my thoughts I named that mouse “Schrödinger” already.
As it turned out, my wife was far more clever than me – when she returned home from work, she brought a shoe carton in which we could trap the mouse (after locking away the cat), so I could bring it out again and release it beside some big rock and bush. The mouse looked up at me, and I left it there…
It was the second time that our cat came back from that pathway carrying a mouse in under two minutes, so by now we know where the mice live – but so does the cat…
Google is evil, and it’s getting worse…
Some Arch sites are down again
Arch Linux lately reported about DDOS attacks to their sites (read about it on their homepage in case you can reach it), and it seems that of now, their user repository (known as the AUR) is affected:
That means no yay -Syu (or other AUR helper) updates at the moment. I wonder which weirdos gain anything from attacking sites like Arch? The world is definitely a strange place by now…
Anyway, and as always, thanks for reading.
No Pixel 10 for me; thanks…
… way too early for it is the first reason.
Other than that, it’s too big, too expensive, and the headphone jack is missing. In the US, even the SIM tray is missing. I want a phone the size of a Pixel 4a, with headphone jacks please, and best with a user-replaceable battery. Oh, and Google show reopen its device tress of course, to make their hardware the premium development platform again.
That would sell phones, I think… oh, and btw – if phones were a reasonable size (maximum around 5.8 inches or so) again, then that would also sell 8″ tablets. Who wants a phablet if they don’t fit into pockets? Such nonsense…
Never use a browser without a built-in adblocker
Oh my… being curious, I tried the built-in webbrowser of the Gnome desktop, which used to be called “Epiphany”, and which is now simply called “Web”. And with that browser, I started viewing a well-known site full of trackers, which is spiegel.de
This got me more or less immediately:
Really? Selling a free product for 0 (zero) Euro? On which you can install Windows in parallel? (Hint: you can’t – Windows always has to be installed first in case you want that)
Oh my oh my – I really hope that no one ever falls for things like these. And most importantly: do never, I repeat *never* ever click on one of those links, in no browser – that these people are up to no good is obvious.
That was a short experiment – and now I’m back to Librewolf, which is a correctly configured Firefox with uBlock Origin already installed. There are others, like Mullvad, Zen, and the likes, or you could even use Firefox itself in case you want to configure it for security and privacy yourself, and don’t forget to install uBlock Origin in that case – you won’t even see that crap like above.
Never again… isn’t it time to overcome capitalism, and to stop all that ad crap once and for all?
And like always, thanks for reading.