When companies tell you they respect your privacy and you should give them your data, you tell them it doesn’t matter. Because policies can change, and at the end of the day, your privacy isn’t always up to an single company.

Wait. This was last year, so not the capitol riot. What happened in January last year? I’m in a decent mood today. Just going to skip looking deeper into this one. I have Factorio to play!

Oh! I think I see what you mean now. I think I get it.

I hope so. It’s more likely something infected Firefox itself, and didn’t get into the OS. But when I checked the modem logs, it happened up to a couple of months after the fact. That’s worrying.

What’s even more worrying is that a couple of websites told me I had an IP address that didn’t match my home IP, but would provide the correct one if I refreshed the page a couple of times. So some kind of covert proxy or VPN type of thing was happening.

I ended up just wiping everything, to be safe. Still a bit paranoid though.

You’re not wrong. But also keep in mind that headlines prime readers to think in a certain way before they even get a chance to read the context. No one will admit it, because headlines make money, but all it takes is one carefully worded headline to change how people interpret, feel about, and react to a story. Even when you’re aware of this trick, it’s impossible to avoid all the time. That’s just how our brains work.

I know this story is more-so about a trojan in a trusted place, and not general security, but I have an anecdote to share.

So, time to fess up here. I previously complained about Google trapping me in captcha-hell for enabling Ublock Origin.

I was wrong.

Turns out that I had visited a movie streaming site a while before to watch a season of some show, I forget which. Without any downloads or noticeable input on my part. My Linux box apparently got hacked/malware. All I did was click the occasional “I am a human” box on the website, and sit back with popcorn.

I found out when my ISP starting blocking IP addresses some time later. I checked my modem’s logs, and they showed some unexplained traffic to impossible “unassigned” IP addresses afterward. I didn’t notice for a while.

I was stupid. Even worse, my phone also started behaving badly after that. I think I watched the last few episodes in bed, so must have infected that too.

Don’t assume any system is automatically safe.

Context. People seemed to be complaining about Mozilla’s CEO. That’s why I wanted to clarify for anyone reading the comments first.

People. This is talking about the CEO for Onerep, not the CEO for Mozilla.

The headline is ambiguous here. The CEO in question is from Onerep, not Mozilla.

Pretty sure the thought process goes something like this:

Since Trump is being charged under RICO, we’ll point at Biden and say “Him too!”.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/12/10/elon-musks-grok-twitter-ai-is-actually-woke-hilarity-ensues/

“I would advise against playing any games protected by EAC or any EA titles”, they went on to say.

Easy. I specifically blocked all titles with the tags “EA” and “EA Play” on Steam. Never have to worry about it.

Pretty simple, actually. Content farms push as much media out as possible to get as much attention and views as they can. This generates ad revenue. Advertisers pay Google for the ads, Google pays content creators.

Nice!

Needs the unified menu for the active/maximized window at the top. Else, it’s perfect.

😍

Well fuck.

Legitimately the only reason I still have a Windows 10 ISO and key sitting on my long term storage drive is because I fear that I may have to install it to use VR whenever I get a new kit.

Please Valve. Pretty please…

Actually, didn’t Facebook buy the lens company Valve was donating to and working with to develop their new VR lens tech? I forgot about that. Another reason to hate Facebook. (I refuse to call it the M word.)

Linux already won years ago. Linux won so thoroughly that Windows 10 includes a Linux subsystem, almost every supercomputer runs Linux or BSD, and the majority of all mobile devices use the Linux kernel.

Not too bad for a bunch of nerds sharing code. :)

God, I want a THC vape. Had one once when I lost my job, apartment, roommate, etc, all at the same time.

I couldn’t afford my overpriced-yet-shitty $2,000 apartment, plus utilities, by myself on any of the jobs I found. There was nothing to do but wait for a couple of weeks for family to come pick me up, so I said screw it and got a THC vape pen. It was the most relaxing two weeks I’ve ever had.

The pen had a nice big cartridge of Charlotte’s Web. I used it A LOT. Woke up in the middle of the night at one point, still buzzed, and decided I should take a break from THC. I needed to sober up to handle adult crap, so I threw the thing away.

Proud of myself for not letting myself become and addict, even though I was high at the time. But still miss it.

Automated content farms to sell ads. So basically, instead of teams of people in Russian content farms like 5 Minute Crafts siphoning money from Google, the AI does it instead.

Another reason why advertising-based economies are stupid. It’s a race to the bottom, and every single content creator has to make their content worse and worse, with more and more ads, just to break even. Fucking podcasts have automatically inserted crap now, just shoved in randomly, based on your IP when you download them.

Instead of each frame of animation being a grid of pixels, each frame is a small collection of math describing the visuals.

But we’d still have frames to use for animation, if we want.

Instead of replacing one PNG for another PNG to make the illusion of movement, we replace one SVG with one SVG instead.