Recently I used Google maps to search for the nearest DHL near me so I could return a package. DHL is not that popular near me and when I specifically typed for DHL, I would get only their competitors in the search results.

There was a DHL service center near me and I had to scroll a bunch to find it. Oh, and apparently big box stores (or anyone) can pay Google to come up in the search on maps, even if unrelated.

I don’t think they have skin the in shipping game but their algorithms are over optimized that they don’t even show what your searching for, but trying to infer why you’re searching for it. That or whoever pays them more. Certainly a search risk

was it ever? I participate in interview rounds at my company (several tech screens a month) and I must say a candidate’s email was not something that drew attention

you’re able to unsubscribe from all those protomtions . . . that is in settings. Personally, a once-a-month newsletter of everything that is new is helpful bc I don’t need to put in the effort tlinto keeping up

For backup and sync I use Syncthing. I can specify which folder on which devices I want to sync to which folder on the server.

I use a folder based gallery on my phone so when I move stuff around on my phone (or on my server) it gets replicated on all my devices.

I also have a policy to sync specified folders (and subfolder) with my family’s devices. No more " hey can you send me all the pics from the XYZ trip"

We take a trip. Make a subolder for that trip in a shared folder dump all our pictures there, get home and open the folder on the computer and prune together.

Debian has the advantage of not using snapd like Ubuntu does. You have to not only remove snaps but also instruct the package manager not you pull in snaps as dependencies and not to favor snap packages.

I have fond memories of Ubuntu being my first distro many years ago but pushing snaps onto users to compete with flatpak is a nuisance.

newsblur

People like having choice, it was never about saving space in phones.

If you look at which company (apple) and the time of removal of headphone jack (around the time their wireless buds were announced), you’ll notice they removed choice so the consumer can only buy more expensive wireless buds, or many many dongles.

The “save space” is an absolute lie. The international (EU, Asia, etc) version of the iPhone has a dedicated SIM card tray. The US model? No tray, just a freakin placeholder where the international version has the SIM tray. Yes, there is a volume of space that can fit 2 headphone jacks on the US iPhone that is just empty.

Look at this iFixit video where they call apple out on it. The placeholder is huge. at ~1:17+

I’d really want to know what’s driving them

likely ego

The letter is a post on his own blog . Hard to distill into a summary so I recommend reading it get more context. But it seems to have boiled down to:

• How It Was:

  • Strong adherence to the “don’t be evil” ethos, focusing on societal good over profits.
  • Open, transparent communication and decision-making processes.
  • High morale, with a culture of learning from successes and failures.
  • Work focused on benefitting the web and users, rather than Google’s immediate interests.
  • Collaboration and lack of internal silos, encouraging innovation and autonomy.

• How It Is Now:

  • Shift from user-centric to Google-centric, and then to individual-centric decision making.
  • Eroded transparency and increase in organizational silos.
  • Decline in morale and a culture of distrust between employees and management.
  • Focus on short-term financial gains leading to layoffs and defensive employee behavior.
  • Lack of clear vision and leadership, resulting in confused and ineffective management.
  • Overall deterioration of Google’s unique, innovative culture and values.

Brave has superior fingerprint protection, they achieve this by randomizing the browsers fingerprint. Visit EFF’s cover your tracks to test your browser.

To achieve the same functionality that brave achieves out of the box with Firefox I need many extensions and then when I profile both browsers, Firefox is more resource intensive. Brave’s blocking is native to the browser. I will give Firefox the W because I’ve read that uBlock is technically more capable. But as a long time Firefox/uBlock user who switched to brave - this has not been noticable.

As for accessibility, I can configure brave to be really aggressive at ad blocking, tracking blocking, fingerprint blocking, and restricting JS even, and all those options I can set from one place instead of in different settings/extensions. When a website breaks, I click on the button next to the URL and immediately have options to granularly dial down the “protection” or add a website to my trusted list. In Firefox I was annoyed to having go through settings for the extension.

Brave plans to continue supporting Manifest V2 after Google kills it. For Ungoogled Chromium, however, it’s still undecided, likely depending on whether UG contributors are willing to maintain it.

Brave has superior fingerprint protection, they achieve this by randomizing the browsers fingerprint. Visit EFF’s cover your tracks to test your browser.

To achieve the same functionality that brave achieves out of the box with Firefox I need many extensions and then when I profile both browsers, Firefox is more resource intensive. Brave’s blocking is native to the browser. I will give Firefox the W because I’ve read that uBlock is technically more capable. But as a long time Firefox/uBlock user who switched to brave - this has not been noticable.

As for accessibility, I can configure brave to be really aggressive at ad blocking, tracking blocking, fingerprint blocking, and restricting JS even, and all those options I can set from one place instead of in different settings/extensions. When a website breaks, I click on the button next to the URL and immediately have options to granularly dial down the “protection” or add a website to my trusted list. In Firefox I was annoyed to having go through settings for the extension.

Brave plans to continue supporting Manifest V2 after Google kills it. For Ungoogled Chromium, however, it’s still undecided, likely depending on whether UG contributors are willing to maintain it.

hmm, I’m not sure I agree - or perhaps I didn’t explain myself well previously and caused confusion between us.

Yes I agree with you in your description of how cloudflare encrypts -> decrypts -> encrypts; they are allowing you to ride over their network. If you remove cloudflare from the picture entirely, then you just have the internet facing server.

What I’m saying is, if the client and endpoint (server) talk in an encrypted protocol, then cloudflare cannot MiTM the data, only the IP headers. This is similar if you were to connect to any ol’ website over an ISP’s network. If your session is not HTTPS, then your application data can be read. You can have encrypted sessions inside of CF tunnel-network-tunnel.

If your services support encryption, great. But you can also expose a wireguard endpoint so you have the following

wg client --(tunnel to CF)–> CF network --(tunnel to your server)–> wireguard server

the real advantage to CF tunnel is hiding your IP from the public internet, not poking any holes in your firewall for ingress traffic, and cloudflare can apply firewall rules to those clients trying to reach your server by DNS hostname.

interesting, I’ll have to read about this some more then. thanks for pointing me in the right direction

I apologize, I misread the chain of comments. Your explanation is perfectly adequate for someone who has a basic grasp on networking and VPN and tunnels and encryption.

I would just like to add that if your endpoints communicate via an encrypted transport (HTTPS, SSH, etc) then doesn’t matter if cloudflare tries to inspect your packets. There would be 2 layers of encryption while traversing the public web, then 1 layer when traversing CF’s network.

And to some, packet inspection is not a downside since they can offer more protection - but that is totally up to your attack vector tollerence

WARP (a client) just connects you to CF’s network.

If your server is running cloudflared (an outbound-only tunnel) then you can enroll your WARP client to reach your server, while your server is never accessible on the public web. That’s the principal behind Zero Trust.

While techinically yes, WARP can be considered as a VPN, it is just a secure tunnel to an endpoint. In which case you can argue any point-to-point tunnel is a VPN.

discovered tailscale from this post and after reading their “how tailscale works” I was hoping to get some clarification from an activer user (you).

CF tunnels setup an outbound-only tunnel from my private network via cloudflared, I have no ingress holes in my firewall to access my services. cloudflared does all the proxying. Plus my IP changes monthly as I don’t pay for a static one from my ISP. This “outbound-only” connection is resilient to that.

Tailscale is point-to-point (for data plane) connection and only the control plane is “hub and spoke”. This sounds like I need to allow ingress rules on my private network so my server can be connected to? Is this true or where did I misunderstand?

got a link?

to preface what might sound like slander, I really would love to get my hands on apple hardware. It is engineered rather well and the geek in me can appreciate that. However, getting access to your own hardware is an issue.

While I have some concerns about their objective features, to my shame, the greatest problem is with the brand and their practices.

I think the root cause of all my issues stems from their morals and aggressive/elitist business practice - specifically their quest to squeeze money out of users and hide behind the lie of “we are doing this for the user’s benefit”.

I have no issue paying money for features I want or entities I’d like to support. In fact, I’m more inclined to financially support those who I believe in.

And apple loves to gatekeep features and keep them exclusive to apple. They effectively benefit from hard work of others who contribute to open standards and services, but at the same time do not share their own. Greedy.

if I could pin this comment I would

I see what you mean now, that makes sense.

being on equal footing

agreed. Now how can we level the playing field with a multi billion dollar corp lol