• 0 Posts
  • 126 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 29th, 2023

help-circle


  • XFCE + Compiz

    The unholy combination of accelerated 3D graphics and performance, all without the stupid drawbacks of wayland.

    Runs much lighter than KDE even with all the 3D cube and windows stuff enabled.

    Extremely customizable as well. XFCE already does a great job of UI/UX, it just lacks a compositor to add flare (xfwm4 has no animations, only some blur effects).





  • I remember when Microsoft made a big deal about this on Windows and then their “implementation” was making the local signon a number PIN.

    And not a proper separate auth operation lol. You either set up almost everything with the PIN or use a regular password, not both. Makes it useless on enterprise.

    Realistically we should all be using a key/pass vault since that would make using passkeys much easier, but that’s too complicated for the internet in 2004 2024.

    If it were me, I’d just issue everyone a yubikey.


  • Explorer has had so many dependencies attached to it that if even one of them sneezes, the entire desktop environment crashes and has to restart.

    Actually insane when you think about it. Why the hell is a file explorer the root process of the desktop???

    I’ve only ever forced stopped thunar once and it was because I was messing with some thumbnail settings. Naturally the rest of my system worked as normal, as well as the other thunar windows open lol.


  • mlg@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhat the hell Proton!
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    edit-2
    30 days ago

    is this saying you can still be fucked on public WiFi even if you connect through a VPN?

    The quick and dirty answer is no, unless an attacker can figure out a way to get your VPN to strip it’s encryption (doubt you’ll ever see this outside something like defcon but you never know lol).

    The long answer is that not all VPNs are equal depending on what you are trying to accomplish.

    A VPN will simply tunnel your internet traffic over an encrypted channel to a server anywhere in the world.

    On a technical level, this means that it will guarantee your internet traffic is unreadable until it hits the destination, which does mean it can make it more secure to use a public wifi/hotspot.

    Of course privacy is actually a massive security iceberg, so some caveats in no particular order are:

    spoiler
    • Modern protocols like HTTPS are already encrypted, although someone can still mess with stripping and poisoning techniques, so having a VPN running would be peace of mind.

    • Your privacy from companies like Google, Facebook, etc won’t be enforced by a VPN if you don’t also use a new browser session (incognito) because they can easily track your identity via cookies and accounts.

    • Even if you use a fresh session and dedicated VPN accounts, aforementioned tech companies can still identify you via statistical modeling based on your activity. They don’t really care what your IP is unless they need to pay tax for a country or follow some random media block law.

    • Your privacy from the government is nonexistent because most VPN companies will share your info if the government requests it.

    • Lots of VPNs choose to block torrenting so they don’t have to deal with protecting their customers (although lots also don’t).

    • Even if you setup your own VPN via a VPS in anonymous way, the government can still watch your exit traffic and link the origin back to you by inspecting the VPN packets (which is why Tor exists, a much different solution to the privacy problem).

    You should use a VPN if:

    • You want to torrent copyrighted material (yar har piracy)
    • You want to spoof your location to get access to geolocked content
    • You want to negate an attackers ability to mess with your connections on public WiFi
    • You want a secure channel between two of your own locations (make two separate networks accessible to eachother, or VPN to home/work to access resources on that network).
    • ^ same thing but remote access etc.

    You should not use a VPN if:

    • You need to hide what you do on the internet from the government (See Tor, journalists stuck in shithole regimes).
    • You want privacy from internet megacorps (you’d have to keep fresh sessions or use them sparingly which you can 90% do without a VPN anyway)
    • You want to hide anything after it reaches the VPN server (public VPN services, doesn’t apply if you VPN to something you physically own and access only its local resources).

    After all that, the use case basically becomes:

    • VPN to within your own country to secure your connection on public WiFi
    • VPN to home or work to access network
    • VPN with a good public service to other countries to watch or torrent media


  • I don’t know why the guy just assumed every linux and BSD machine runs cups-browsed by default?

    It took me literally 5 seconds to check that it’s disabled on Fedora by default.

    Then he wrote a whole paragraph about how no one should use CUPS for printing because based off of his own analysis, it’s some insanely crappy and insecure system.

    Which is actually stupid because the only alternative is windows??? Which is universally known for printer driver and spooler vulnerabilities.

    Then he got mad the the maintainer for patching before his disclosure…


  • After 15 years of wayland development hell, I’m honestly open to anything. Problem is I can definitely see an experimental branch being just as scrutinized. One of the core issues highlighted was that features and requests were rejected because of hypotheticals and the maintainers trying to avoid fragmentation like early Xorg.

    Basic features from X11 are still missing. Everyone ended up somewhat fragmenting anyway via compositors because weston wasn’t really useful for developers beyond a demo. Wayfire started out as a Compiz redux and now its being considered by several DEs like XFCE to be the default compositor which they should standardize around.

    Regardless, I really hope they nail it down in the next year because the halfway migration to wayland is seriously harming Linux desktop, especially when lots of frontend UI has been done perfectly decades ago on X11, and wayland still not properly supporting new features like HDR.



  • People fear the same thing about Valve.

    One wrong person and we could all end up in the same money milk machine as EA.

    I know people complain about Linus hurling insults at merge requests, but his rigidness is what keeps the kernel viable. If it weren’t for him, google would have already shit all over it with a mega fork and essentially cornered the market like they did with Android and HTTP3.

    Both are technically “open source”, yet Google essentially dictates what they want or need for their economic purpose, like ignoring JPEGXL, forcing AVIF, making browsers bloaty, using manifestv3, etc. Android is even worse and may as well be considered separate from Linux because it’s just google’s walled garden running on the linux kernel.

    He is open to new technology, but he understands the fundamental effects of design choices and will fight people over it to prevent the project from fracturing due to feature breaking changes, especially involving userspace.


  • I’d support anything to see NIntendo get kicked in the nuts for shutting down yuzu, which could have easily continued legally by removing like 2 paragraphs and probably a few lines of code.

    Also Citra which was 100% legal.

    EDIT:

    I also wanna mention that current Pokemon gameplay sucks, and would also kill to see GameFreak’s billion dollar franchising burn. Maybe 15 20 years ago when hardware was “limited”, a low asset turn based RPG focused around pocket monsters was a fun game. Ain’t no way a PS1 graphics looking game with practically zero changes to the formula can be considered AAA title in 2024. And even then they’ve somehow made it into an A button press simulator by nuking the difficulty.

    Being completely honest, the DS hardware was not that limited (had 2 generations on it with significant upgrades despite being the same console). BW2 was probably the golden era with very well done animated sprites, overworld, features, etc. The moment it hit the 3DS, it started showing its cracks with GF continuing to develop the game without expanding the team to meet development demand.

    Palworld isn’t even the first challenger. TemTem gained some popularity purely for showing how much of an upgrade it was from Pokemon only a few years ago.


  • I’d say about 99% is the same.

    Two notable things that were different were:

    • Podman config file is different which I needed to edit where containers are stored since I have a dedicated location I want to use
    • The preferred method for running Nvidia GPUs in containers is CDI, which imo is much more concise than Docker’s Nvidia GPU device setup.

    The second one is also documented on the CUDA Container Toolkit site, and very easy to edit a compose file to use CDI instead.

    There’s also some small differences here and there like podman asking for a preferred remote source instead of defaulting to dockerhub.


  • Yeah I should have mentioned the context is FBLA, and Google partially fixed the prompt.

    Original from a few weeks ago:

    BPA is another student org called Business Professionals of America

    The AI ignores the subject context and just compares whatever is the most common acronym.

    They lazy patched it by making the model do a subject check on the result, but not on the prompt so it still comes back with the chemical lol.




  • iirc due to some anti trust lawsuits, they cannot do that anymore.

    But it’s still easy to coerce OEMs to run Windows because they offer stuff like quick support and standardized IT support.

    If an OEM ships Linux, they don’t want to have to make an entire department to help troubleshoot the OS for users who will inevitably call for help. Ignoring them would only result in returns and loss of sales.

    I think some thinkpads actually do ship with some distro like redhat or opensuse as an option, but that’s because thinkpads are very popular in the business space which means lots of CS people use them, so it helps save some cost from a windows license that won’t get used.

    Like I said though, if windows really dives into the deep end, I think a potential market would open and some OEM will take a chance on it.