Posts by Ethan Strongtower

Microsoft has reached $1M giveaway levels of desperation to attract users to Bing

No Reddit indexing

One significant disadvantage of Bing relative to Google is that Bing no longer indexes new posts on Reddit. See https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/25/microsoft_generative_search_bing/

How Apple Wi-Fi Positioning System can be abused to track people around the globe

Randomization of mobile phone hotspot BSSIDs

According to this article by Brian Krebs (https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/05/why-your-wi-fi-router-doubles-as-an-apple-airtag/):

'The researchers said Wi-Fi access points that can be created using a mobile device’s built-in cellular modem do not create a location privacy risk for their users because mobile phone hotspots will choose a random BSSID when activated.

“Modern Android and iOS devices will choose a random BSSID when you go into hotspot mode,” he said. “Hotspots are already implementing the strongest recommendations for privacy protections. It’s other types of devices that don’t do that.”'

German state ditches Windows, Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice

Re: Baby steps

As an Acrobat replacement on Linux (for manipulating not just viewing PDFs), I have been using Qoppa PDF Studio Pro. It's not quite as capable as Acrobat Pro, and it's not FOSS. However, it's much cheaper, and it works pretty well.

KDE Plasma 6.0 brings the same old charm and confusion

Re: 3D Effects FTW!

I just assumed that a substantial motive behind Microsoft’s embrace of a flat GUI without 3D effects was to mimic browser content. Thus the distinction between desktop and cloud is blurred in furtherance of Microsoft’s software as service/cloud ambitions.

That's not the web you're browsing, Microsoft. That's our data

Re: Keeps one on Edge.

Unfortunately, I use Edge on Ubuntu due to the intersection of text to speech and shared history, favorites, etc. across devices. As far as I know, the text to speech capability of Edge is unsurpassed on mobile. On desktop, there are text to speech options in other browsers, but I would lose the shared history, favorites, etc. with my iPhone. Moreover, even though Microsoft removed Edge’s integrated TTS on its Linux version some time ago, the API is still present and accessible via extensions that produce more realistic speech than in Chrome or Firefox.

If there is a better approach, I would be grateful to learn it because I would love to escape the thrall of Microsoft.