Web developer, gamer, reader, and a true ligma male

  • 4 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • My IT teacher from high school put a major emphasis on online privacy.

    He thinks the internet is a major threat to individual freedom and while it brings benefits, the negative effects are too big for him.

    While I don’t agree with the last statement, I do think privacy is very much under attack nowadays and while I am not very concerned what other people and corporations know about me, I still care about privacy simply because I have the right to do so and because if I don’t pay attention, a dozen different trackers will know what I have done without me granting permission.

    Corporations basically take advantage of people and give nothing in return and that is bad imo.










  • My ELI5 version:

    Basically, the ‘Web Environment Integrity’ proposal is a new technique that verifies whether a visitor of a website is actually a human or a bot.

    Currently, there are captchas where you need to select all the crosswalks, cars, bicycles, etc. which checks whether you’re a bot, but this can sometimes be bypassed by the bots themselves.

    This new ‘Web Environment Integrity’ thing goes as follows:

    1. You visit a website
    2. Website wants to know whether you’re a human or a bot.
    3. Your browser (or the ‘client’) will send request an ‘environment attestation’ from an ‘attester’. This means that your browser (such as Firefox or Chrome) will request approval from some third-party (like Google or something) and the third-party (which is referred to as ‘attester’) will send your browser a message, which basically says ‘This user is a bot’ or ‘This user is a human being’.
    4. Your browser receives this message and will then send it to the website, together with the ‘attester public key’. The ‘attester public key’ can be used by the website to verify whether the attester (a.k.a. the third-party checking whether you’re a human or not) is trustworthy and will then check whether the attester says that you’re a human or not.

    I hope this clears things up and if I misinterpreted the GitHub explainer, please correct me.

    The reason people (rightfully) worry about this, is because it gives attesters A LOT of power. If Google decides they don’t like you, they won’t tell the website that you’re a human. Or maybe, if Google doesn’t like the website you’re trying to visit, they won’t even cooperate with attesting. Lots of things can go wrong here.




  • No, I disagree. When you ask the average person to show you their private chats, emails and passwords, they will refuse because of privacy.

    Instead of not caring about privacy, people prioritize convenience over privacy. Big tech companies such as Google, Meta, Microsoft offer really good, stable products which are mainstream and generally don’t cause problems. At least, Windows 10 is way less troublesome than Linux and it’s easier to use the stock Android with Google instead of installing a custom ROM such as GrapheneOS.

    To really push the privacy friendly alternatives towards the mainstream, the alternatives should become more user-friendly, less tech-savvy, and preinstalled.








  • De grote aantrekkingskracht van de fediverse voor mij is dat ik gevarieerdere meningen tegen kom en uit mijn filterbubbel kan stappen. Dat er mensen zijn die allerlei dingen vinden waar je het niet mee eens bent is naar mijn mening een feit waar we allemaal mee om moeten leren gaan en ik vind het eerlijk gezegd ook interessant (en amusant) om te lezen waar al deze mensen over praten.

    Om te beginnen, ik ben het hier helemaal mee eens. Maar er moet tegelijkertijd ook een lijn worden getrokken tussen dingen waar we het niet mee eens zijn en letterlijk haat en laster. Iets zoals “Ik vind het raar om nieuwe voornaamwoorden / pronouns te gebruiken” is nog wel OK (vind ik), maar iets zoals “non-binaire / transgenders moeten allemaal dood!!11!” is weer een stapje te ver en mag wat mij betreft geblokkeerd worden.


  • Fortunately, I don’t have the same experiences as you. I mean, sure, I’ve encountered bugs in the Android app, but I’ve never lost any files with my selfhosted Nextcloud server.

    Setting up the Nextcloud server and optimizing it was quite a big hassle for me (took an entire afternoon), but after it was all done, I was pretty happy with it.

    No, the web UI is quite slow and that probably won’t change, but the caldav server and the Windows Desktop app work perfect. The automatic upload of media on my (Android) phone has no issues at all.

    In my experience, the most issues are with the web UI due to its bad performance, but besides that, it works perfectly.