copygirl

That probably counts as a privileged page, as in something uBlock Origin can’t access or modify.

Mozilla has probably been running another “experiment”, meaning not every user is affected. In the past they claimed it’s not advertisements because they are “continually looking for more ways to say thanks for using Firefox”. (Bullshit.) If you go to Settings > Home, you disable anything you don’t want to see, or just set your home page to a blank page, period.

JavaScript is already sandboxed. You can only execute functions where there is an actual API defined by the browser to do so, for example Date.getTime(). There is / should be no way to get, say, your device ID. (With the exception of unpatched exploits that allow executing arbitrary code. But keep in mind browsers are likely one of the if not the most security tested software.)

What you linked to here appears to specific to Google Tag Manager in a way that I don’t fully understand, but is not related to how websites usually execute JavaScript code.

Can you link to a source that confirms this information can be collected with JavaScript (with browser comparison, ideally)? That seems outrageous if it was actually possible.

What is meant by “sensitive information” here? Browsers can’t just willy-nilly access your local files or something like that. The one thing I can think of is using JavaScript to collect information that can be used to identify you. (Is that “sensitive”? I’d put that in “identifying information”.) My honest suggestion is to keep using NoScript and just allow as few domains as possible. The next best option is to stop using websites that break without JavaScript when there’s no reason why they’d need it.

I can imagine there being a plugin that spoofs some common ways that allow sites to identify you cross-sessions / browser / websites without your consent, but blocking JavaScript (by default) is likely one of the best ways to reduce the amount of information collected about you. When you do find such a plugin, check out one of the “browser fingerprint” testing sites to see how unique your fingerprint is.

(That is, if I even understood the request properly in regards to the “sensitive information” bit.)

There is something called “local storage” that allows applications to store more information than just a cookie. Cookies are sent to the server, while local storage, as the name implies, stays local. (That doesn’t mean that this data can’t be sent to the server via JavaScript.) But local storage makes it possible to make 100% offline applications if the whole webpage is cached / downloaded (assuming no online functionality is required).

edit: As for deleting this, if I click on the lock icon in the address bar in Firefox, I have an option to clear cookies and site data for the current site. I assume the “site data” is the local storage I mentioned. If you’re using a Chrome based browser, you can probably google how to do the same thing.

From what I read online, Matrix is not very good with its federated moderation tools. Apparently, a quirk of it can cause the state of a federated channel to reset in time, thus also undoing removing of messages. Here is a blog post criticizing Matrix.

I can also recommend the NoScript extension.

It breaks a lot of websites – which you then have to unbreak by re-allowing scripts for certain domains, temporarily if desired – but you end up getting a better feeling of how bad the web has become when you come across places that want to load scripts from dozens or more of different domains. Like, you’re intending to tell how many other parties that I’ve visited this website?

I was editing my comment as you were responding. Check the issue on GitHub I linked in the edit, and maybe thumbs it up for visibility. One of the commenters mentions using a third-party tool but I’m not sure the one they linked to can grab posts. In theory another one might exist to dump your post data.

Which service? Mastodon has a built-in export functionality in preferences.

I can’t find such an option on Lemmy, but you should be able to do a GDPR request for your information as a last resort.

edit: Non-post data / user settings can be exported (and imported!) but posts are a separate issue. See this open issue.

A lot of contributors of FOSS projects make small changes that aren’t copyrightable.

The real question is not what the algorithm pushes to you, but whether their moderation actually bans bigots and removes their posts. Any other instance would lose their “right” to federate with a queer-friendly instance if they didn’t do that, so why would Threads get an exception?

Isn’t “queer friendly” and “federates with Threads” an oxymoron?

I don’t think that’s how it works and it would likely not be legal. By explicitly blocking Threads, you make a big statement about not wanting your instance’s posts to show up there. Also from a technical standpoint, I don’t think a “middle-man” instance will push posts from another instance to a third one. You’d have to explicitly scrape data that’s not available via the API. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Could you please provide some sources for that? I’d like to know more.

First of all though, there is no such thing as a “hostile fork”. Being able to fork a project, for any reason, is the entire point of open source. And to be fair, not wanting to continue working for a for-profit company for free is a very good reason.

And yeah, when you suddenly turn a FOSS project that’s been developed with the help of a bunch of contributors, into a for-profit company, without making a big fuss about it beforehand and allow the contributors and community to weigh in, then yeah, that’s a hostile takeover of sorts, at least in my opinion. Developers gotta make money, but they could’ve done that by creating a new brand instead of taking over that of a previously completely FOSS project. Forgejo is preventing that exact thing from happening by joining Codeberg (a non-profit).

There’s been a hostile takeover at Gitea and it’s now run / owned by a for-profit company. The developers forked the project under the name Forgejo and are continuing the work under a non-profit. See also: Their introduction post and a page comparing the two projects. Feel free to look up more, since I haven’t familiarized myself with the incident all that much myself. Either way though, maybe consider using Forgejo instead of Gitea.

I did decide to delete all my comments and posts on Reddit. Sure, maybe I’ve posted some helpful comments, but why support Reddit with their continued existence? Remove content, and people might move to other sites to get their information.

I also decided to keep my account. Turns out some content stayed around, because I could not see and therefore delete it in locked subreddits. So when they came back, the comments came back too, and I was able to delete them, still.

What I’m saying is that Microsoft is, in fact, being hostile by limiting OSS builds such as Codium in the ways I’ve mentioned above. I guess that’s how they try to get people to keep using their proprietary build instead.

except for visual studio code

But also:

• Telemetry everywhere
• Not permitted to use the official marketplace with OSS builds
• Not able to use certain extensions (like C# debugger) with OSS builds

Though I’ve been very happy about the direction .NET and C# have been going, especially the licensing.

1. There is the --download-sections option. Looking at it, you might want to use --download-sections "*0:00-1:00".
2. I briefly checked with --list-thumbnails and it doesn’t look like YouTube offers any square ones, so I would look into using ImageMagick to edit the image with a command. I doubt yt-dlp allows you to do any sort of image manipulation out of the box.

Not to be pedantic but I think the headline is fine.

If you simulated a fire in a building for training purposes and upon activating the fire alarm, it got broadcast to emergency services when it shouldn’t, you did accidentally broadcast the fire alarm, simulated or not.

The “accidentally” already implies it was done in error, suggesting it was not an emergency. On the other hand, if it was a real emergency, and just wasn’t meant to be publicly broadcasted, I feel like the headline would’ve looked different.