Posts by jpennycook 60 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jul 2009
Back in the days when last.fm was still a streaming audio service + social networking + audioscrobbler, Songbird and Nightingale were great - I've not found a music player that met my needs so well since. I liked last.fm so much I paid them money for years. Now Songbird/Nightingale are dead, and post-takeover last.fm is really just audioscrobbler + shoutbox with some YouTube/Spotify integration thrown in.
I like the idea of Firefox - in theory it's easier than Chrome to stop it broadcasting all your data to all and sundry, but since Mozilla merged with an AI/advertising company they now hate their users and try to grab as much as they can. I'm now using Firefox forks with some extensions on my computers and phones, but I'm worried that the maintainers might get bored/too busy/run out of money/might go on holiday when there's an important security update.
If the bad guys have got enough storage, and the information is still going to be valuable in decades to come, they just need to record the encrypted data and then decrypt it in the future. However, the same people wanting companies to improve their encryption also want the same companies to not use encryption, so it doesn't make sense.
LibreWolf also has the ability to counteract more tracking than basic Firefox does.
https://lucb1e.com/randomprojects/cookielesscookies/
https://arkenfox.github.io/TZP/tzp.html
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org
https://privacy.net/analyzer/ (the "Fingerprint analysis" page in particular)
I usually try the above with NoScript, Privacy Badger, UBlock Orign, etc. all disabled just to see how awful my browsers are without protection.
> web/browser world where network-level m-i-t-m snooping of https is normal business.
Why would a web browser need to do anything like MITM snooping? It is literally the endpoint, it can do what it wants without before even creating the tunnel. You're confusing web proxies with web browsers.
The certs in question are related to code signing, so it's a good thing they expire.
Does this include Edge Secure Network? I'm surprised that neither the Edge Secure Network menu nor the Defender for Android app actually mention that this is being discontinued. In theory they're supposed to be able to block dodgy websites and trackers (but I've not tested it). I'm of the opinion that if you use Edge or Windows you're already being tracked by Microsoft (did Chromium ever fix the problem that different Chromium browsers running on the same computer could harvest what the other Chromiums were doing?), so using another Microsoft app isn't going to significantly increase the amount of info they get about you.
Personally, I trust Microsoft more than I trust the operators of the free WiFis in shopping centres, and if the Chinese hackers are in the UK telecoms networks as well as the American ones then MS is probably safer than them.
I don't understand how my local council can say that giving up the central catering body and transferring responsibility to each school can save money. Even if the plan is to outsource, surely the Council could negotiate a better outsourcing contract than all the schools in the County could individually.
Of course, the irony is that activating DNT makes you stand out from the crowd, making it easier to track you.
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
> How is this used in your fingerprint?
> Browsers which set the DNT header to ‘1’ are fairly rare, and this can be an identifying metric. However, this should be left as the default for your browser.
> not least adding a social media UI to an e-mail client - E2E encrypted social media operating user to user, without a central hub.
You'll likely get some Government interest in that, given that it would be of interest to organised crime etc. It was done ages ago anyway - encrypted P2P platforms don't seem fashionable any more (or at least I don't hear about them, but maybe that's because I'm getting old).
An awful lot of Fediverse servers are blocking @threads.net - some probably temporarily, most permanently, so I am not worried about Threads making unilateral changes.
In theory, truth.social could probably federate (it's based on the same software) but they would be blocked by almost every server.
> PDAs were an early form of tablet and I was designing one in 1987-1989, with aspects inspired by Dynabook, Project Xanadu, Apple Hypercard, the digital cordless system that later became DECT, and DOS based FutureNet CAD/CAE (which used hyperlinks).
Was the PSION Organiser not a PDA? The Series 3 definitely was, and I wouldn't call either a tablet.
> MS was shipping Xenix in 1982. All internal Microsoft email transport was done on Xenix-based 68000 systems until 1995–1996, when the company moved to its own Exchange Server product.
Back in the time of Exchange 2007, I found some Xenix mail documentation, and it looked like Microsoft had changed Exchange to make it more like Xenix mail.
> The iPhone a success due to the data contracts. It was 9 years after smart phones came out and 2 after Nokia politics killed their better than S60 GUI on Symbian.
I imagined that the curated app store and a proper touch screen were big advantages of the iPhone over Nokia, plus Apple had a footprint in America where Nokia did not.
AMSTrad were nearly sold to PSION, until someone thought they were over-valued
https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/23/symbian_history_part_one_dark_star/
“We are not buying Amstrad as perceived by its brand and name. Amstrad is in ashes. We are buying the phoenix in those ashes.”
When you call the emergency number, your phone transmits your location at the same time, and it's free, and the mobile network provides a location too (presumably based on cell tower triangulation)
https://eena.org/our-work/eena-special-focus/advanced-mobile-location/
> AML stands for Advanced Mobile Location. In the event of an emergency call, an AML-enabled smartphone (all Android and iOS devices worldwide) automatically sends accurate location information of the caller to the emergency services. This information is derived from the location data of the phone (GNSS, Wifi).
> AML is not an app; it does not require any action from the caller. AML is simply a protocol to transport the data (using SMS and/or HTTPS) from the smartphone to the emergency call centre. AML is – of course – free of charge. Emergency services are then able to receive this information in all the countries that have deployed AML.
https://eena.org/knowledge-hub/documents/aml-in-the-united-kingdom/
> Handset locations obtained through the AML functionality are be compared to the location provided by mobile networks (using cell coverage information), using an algorithm that analyses factors such as time of positioning and the separation of the two locations.
> Once the mobile handset knows its location it is sent to BT using a simple, already available, Short Message Service (SMS) based protocol (which gives 160 characters of data).
If you don't know where you are and your phone isn't able to use GPS to locate you, W3W is going to be just as bad as AML.
Microsoft were already involved back in 2010/2011 - they formed a consortium called CPTN to acquire Novell's (who owned SUSE at the time) patents.
> As of December 2010, CPTN's members are believed to be Microsoft, Apple Inc., Oracle and EMC Corporation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPTN_Holdings
From the Manchester Evening News article, writing about a Council motion:-
'It said: “When a group of residents recently met Chris Green MP about the problems, he claimed to have no knowledge of the company until they pointed out to him that he had recently received a political donation of £5,000 from IX Wireless.
'“He has failed to answer any questions as to what his relationship is with the company or why he received and accepted the donation. It is noted that similar donations have been made to a number of other Conservative MPs in the North West of England.”'
Those poles do look ugly - I wonder why they can't at least disguise them as trees.
When Microsoft were first making operating systems for phones, Apple wasn't in the market, and I'm not sure that Android had caught on. I think there was a court case against Microsoft that they had allegedly blocked the ability for EPOC and Symbian-based devices from syncing with Windows PCs which should give you an idea of who Microsoft were competing with.
OpenStreetMap.org refers to these (non-existent roads or deliberate spelling errors) as Copyright Easter Eggs: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Copyright_Easter_Eggs
For ages, Bing had a town near me named "Empshott", presumably a deliberate misspelling of Kempshott which isn't a town and wasn't quite where they said it was.
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