You can’t really and make a profit. You pay more in electricity than you get in crypto.

…unless someone else is (unknowingly) paying for the electricity.

(Of course, when the price of crypto takes an upturn, sometimes it might get profitable again. And I’d imagine there are people mining it even when the price is low banking on the idea that it’ll spike again and they can sell it.)

No joke. I’m ashamed to say I have had to endure Weblogic in the past. God was that time a massive clusterfuck.

The company I worked for decided to use two particular separate products (frameworks, specifically; ATG and Endeca, even more specifically) to use in tandem in a rewrite of the company’s main e-commerce application. Between when we signed on the dotted line and when we actually started implementing things, Oracle acquired the companies behind both products in question.

The company should have cut their losses, run away screaming, and started evaluating other options. That’s not what happened. Instead, they doubed-down and also adopted several other Oracle products (Weblogic and Oracle Linux on (shudder) Exalogic servers) because that’s, of course, what Oracle recommended to use with the two products in question. The company also contracted with Oracle-licensed “service integration” companies that made everything somehow even worse.

And the e-commerce site rewrite absolutely crashed and burned in the most gloriously painful way possible. They ended up throwing away tens of millions of dollars and multiple years on it.

When the e-commerce site rewrite did happen, it was many years later and used basically only FOSS technologies. I guess at least they learned their lesson. Until the upper management turns over again.

The sooner the crypto bubble bursts, the fewer victims there will be of fraud like this.

So Wario, then? Maybe that makes Android Waluigi.

Yeah, I do know about that. (You’re referring to the PPA repo thing, yeah?) But there are a couple of reasons why that isn’t a workable solution specifically for me specifically.

• The major reason is that I only use Ubuntu on my work machine and my employer’s compliance department won’t really answer questions about whether it’s allowed to add extra repositories or install things not from the official Ubuntu repositories on company-owned hardware. (And they’re always really threatening and assholeish about breaking the rules they won’t elaborate on, so my best option is kindof just to interpret the rules as strictly as I can and follow that. Or else flout the rules and dare them to fire me. Heh…) Raising questions like that is always a whole thing.
• “firefox” from the PPA repo and “firefox” from Snap have the same package name which makes things awkward dealing with Apt. (Unless you use “firefox-esr” from the PPA repo, which would otherwise be an acceptable workaround if that was the only issue.)

So I just use Chrome on my work machine. I dislike Chrome more than Firefox for many reasons, but I at least mitigate some of the issues with Chrome by specifically not doing anything personal on my work machine. I don’t really care if Chrome invades my employer’s privacy. Especially when my employer doesn’t give me a choice in browsers. If anything comes of it, it’s their own damned fault.

Yeah, why does Ubuntu keep snap?

Like, WTF is the deal with not having any official way to install Firefox other than snap? Firefox.

Delete System32.

Zathura’s awesome. I’ve used it for a good long time now. I love that it’s about as minimal as the use case can possibly get away with.

What do you want an IDE to do (that a straight-up text editor wouldn’t?)

My experience is similar. I don’t play YouTube videos on my 4B with 8GB of RAM very often. When I do, I make sure it’s well less than a quarter of my 1920x1080 screen. (I use a tiling window manager, so I usually just make my browser window the top-left quadrant of my screen and don’t theater-mode or anything.) And I often reduce the quality to 480p or whatever.

If I’m going to watch something longer than a few minutes and want to be doing other things on my Raspberry Pi while the video is running, I’ll just pull it up on my phone propped next to my monitor.

Relevant blog post.

Remember when if your aunt wanted you to build her a computer that she’d only use for “web browsing”, that meant you could opt for the cheap components?

Oh Jesus. Really?

Holy crap. That explains nearly everything. The only things that still seem weird are:

• I’m 99% certain 273s is exactly where I left off watching yesterday, which seems like a weird coincidence.
• I don’t remember it starting anywhere but the beginning when I first started it yesterday, but it’s possible I just immediately scrolled it back to the beginning without thinking about.
• It doesn’t start there by default on my phone. Maybe YouTube doesn’t do that for mobile devices for some reason?
• It doesn’t start at 273s if you use (at least certain) other search terms. Maybe YouTube decided that the bit that was relevant to my search term was at the 273s mark.
• Someone else in this thread said they couldn’t reproduce the behavior I’m seeing by performing the same steps. It’s possible YouTube is A/B testing, though… though you’d think I wouldn’t consistently fall into the same “testing out the automatically starting you in the middle of the video feature” group and sometimes I’d get the control group where it didn’t give me that feature. Maybe they decide which group your in on the basis of “are you on mobile or not-mobile.” And maybe bamboo is on mobile or otherwise is on a machine that will consistently be picked for control group.

Still, though, the idea that it’s not “remembering me” and probably is just giving people that timestamp when they search that term by default even if they’ve never run across that video before seems like the most likely explanation.

Oh, and I did take a minute to go try this on (a fairly outdated version of) Firefox on another Arch Linux laptop on which I wasn’t logged in and all my cookies/history/form data/etc had all been deleted immediately before. I did get the indicator on that video when searching “gnu taler”. Which definitely seems like more validation of this theory.

Thank you for your input!

While logged out, https://www.youtube.com/feed/history gives me the following:

And it’s still showing the indicator on the “gnu taler” search results page.

I suppose it might be worth closing my browser, opening my browser, going to YouTube, logging in, and checking that page, though. It might at least give some information or something. I’ll try that here and see if it lists the video in question. I’ll update when I’m done.

Edit: That video about GNU Taler does not show up in my viewing history while logged in. I tried viewing a random video while logged in and checking my viewing history and that random video shows up. But not the GNU Taler one that still has the indicator. I’m starting to think I’m losing my mind. Lol.

Right, the link has a timestamp in it. But I don’t know how the search results page knew what timestamp to put in the link to the video even after switching to TBB.

Yeah, forgot to mention I hadn’t logged in or anything. But that’s right. I didn’t log in during any of that testing. I’ve edited that detail in.

Still weird that it could possibly fingerprint even while using TBB, though.

Not sure I understand what you’re getting at here.

Yes, I linked to the video and didn’t think to remove the t=273s bit when I included the link in the OP. And, yes, I understand that having a &t=273s in the url makes it start not right at the beginning. My question is how did it know where to start (and how much red bar to show on the video thumbnail in the search results) given that my cookies had been deleted and, on subsequent tests, I even switched browsers.

I was purposefully telling my browsers to forget all the information YouTube could use to remember that and it still remembered somehow.

Now, I am concerned regarding the privacy aspect of how on earth it still persisted in TBB. But even when sites fingerprint you, if you delete your cookies they almost always at least pretend not to know you when you visit. I’d expect YouTube/Google to use fingerprinting to sell my information and do targeted advertising or whatever. But it’s weird that they’d even let on to me that they had figured out who I was even though I wasn’t sending them any cookies.

Also, did you return to that video with the same IP address as when you first watched it?

That’s (part of) why I tried Tor Browser Bundle, though. Because it would give me a different IP address. (And when I visited YouTube via TBB, it gave me the little superscript after the YouTube logo indicating a different country than I was in.)

I’ll just assume you didn’t log in to youtube when watching. :)

Ha! Should have thought to mention that. But yes, you’re right. I didn’t log in or anything. (And for that matter, in every test I did, when I first got to the home page, I got the “search to get started” prompt that YouTube gives as of pretty recently when you don’t have any cookies on visiting the index page.)

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as WSL, is in fact, GNU/WSL, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus WSL. WSL is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU/Windows system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

The repair cafe has a hackerspace/makerspace in back. The local LUG meets there on Thursdays. And they help maintain the 3d printers and library software at the library two doors down. As well as providing them lendable hardware put together from donated parts. And there are no due dates or late fees.

A lot of user fingerprinting techniques rely on JS. Plus, by shutting off JS, you reduce the attack surface of your browser. If, let’s say, there was a zero-day vulnerability in Firefox that required JS to exploit, you’d be shutting off that whole means of attack if you blocked all/most JS out there on the internet. Mining cryptocurrencies on your computer via your browser can only be accomplished with the help of Javascript. A lot of forever cookie techniques require Javascript.

uBlock origin is for kindof a different use case. It’s for if you’re on one website that you don’t necessarily suspect of evil dealings that might include buttons (like social media sharing buttons, for instance) or other scripts (like ad displaying scripts or analytics scripts) from third parties that might include evil tracking stuff. If I started a blog on https://theawesomeestblog.com/ and included script from Facebook that puts a share button on my page, and if you then visited my blog, Facebook would know because your browser would make requests from your IP with cookies they’d placed on your brower previously and JS included with the button could very well be used to do additional fingerprinting.

NoScript is for (among other things) when you don’t even necessarily trust the website you’re purposefully visiting. Like, I don’t know if cnn.com mines Bitcoin via JS on users’ browsers (and, honestly, it seems a little unlikely to me, I think), but if I disallow JS on cnn.com, then when I click a link in Lemmy to a cnn.com article (and maybe I don’t even really know I’m going to cnn.com when I click the link – it might use a link shortener or something – or maybe it’s not cnn.com, but some reasonably-trustworthy-sounding news-y-sounding domain that I haven’t heard of before), I know it’s not mining Bitcoin on my machine.

Oh, and as others have said, NoScript is Open Source. Says so right near the top of the home page.