wiki-user: unruffled

  • When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called “the People’s Stick.”
  • If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

- Mikhail Bakunin

  • 11 Posts
  • 104 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • From the article:

    Mr. Wardle’s curiosity was piqued by recent news that Russian spies had used Kaspersky antivirus products to siphon classified documents off the home computer of an N.S.A. developer, and may have played a critical role in broader Russian intelligence gathering.

    From the “recent news” article mentioned above:

    Government officials, who would speak of the classified details of the case only on condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Pho took the classified documents home to help him rewrite his resume. But he had installed on his home computer antivirus software made by Kaspersky Lab, a top Russian software company, and Russian hackers are believed to have exploited the software to steal the documents, the officials said.

    Honestly, I agree, it’s a serious accusation against Kaspersky with very scant details and allegations made by off-the-record “officials”. Having said that, just because they didn’t present any compelling evidence doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. In the words of Carl Sagan, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” I’m not sure where that leaves us though lol. Honestly, I don’t trust Kaspersky with my data any less that with any of the other big antivirus companies. I guess it makes sense they would want antivirus software with CIA/NSA backdoors over alternatives though :p















  • I agree with you that Mozilla is spreading itself too thin. And don’t get me wrong, I love Firefox and am a long time user. But they do need to understand their user base better.

    They aren’t going to become a sustainable business by copying more popular browsers. It’s their differences from the mainstream that make them appealing as an alternative in the first place. I already don’t like them foisting Pocket on me, which 100% should have remained an extension. I don’t like the fact that Google is their default search engine, which goes against all their privacy messaging. I understand the reason is money, but that’s kind of the definition of being a sellout isn’t it? Their core values should always come first.

    Fact is, those employees weren’t fired for any good reason other than to hop on the latest tech trend. It’s this sort of corporate “profit before people” bullshit that will erode any goodwill that people still have towards Mozilla. I couldn’t give a fuck about adding a stupid AI driven chatbot to Mozilla, and neither, I imagine, do many of their current users. Honestly, I think “AI” has ruined the internet in a lot of ways already. It’s already had a massive negative impact on the quality of search results, across all major search engines, because of all the low quality llm content that has been produced already, and it’s only going to get worse. And you can’t trust a single thing that comes out of those models, so what is even the point of them?

    Sorry in advance for the old man rant lol.




  • Another good option is to use something similar to Smart DNS Proxy to bypass geo-blocking by UK (and other) TV channels. I’ve been using it for years with no issues. There is some configuration involved, but it’s not too complicated. You may also have to change you system clock to a UK timezone for the BBC, since they sometimes check for that. I wouldn’t recommend using their DNS service for any other purpose though, since there are no privacy guarantees.

    IMO most VPNs simply can’t keep up with their IP addresses being quickly blocked by UK TV websites, so they are very hit and miss for that particular use case. Plus it’s not their necessarily their core business, so they don’t put so much effort into circumventing geoblocking. You might find one that will work, but it will often be blocked in a few days or weeks. But your mileage may vary & you may get lucky.