marcie (she/her)

  • 21 Posts
  • 254 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

help-circle









  • i actually work in software security.

    grapheneos has talked about integrating shields into vanadium (and by extension, trivalent) which i would love. shields imo is a very top notch implementation of an ad blocker and is better than ublock origin in every way due to how it blocks in ram with rust rather than in userspace like ublock. brave does pretty well at integrating many things into the browser so that the user isnt tempted to install extensions, which reduces attack surface. i consider email aliases, automatic darkmode (can be enabled via chrome flags) on sites, and a built in adblocker (not an extension, it must also work on videos) to be critical for user experience, and ideally via no extensions. currently only brave offers each of these stock, which is very unfortunate. plus it has better sandboxing, there are many exploits to harvest fingerprints on many corporate sites that circumvent sandboxing in firefox and read other tab data. basically, the only options are brave with minimal changes, mullvad browser with no changes, or tor browser with no changes, and you should not open more than one tab on any firefox browser. the last two are not great for usability every day due to no automatic darkmode, among other features.

    i think the best way for brave to improve would be maybe to include something like sponsorblock in the browser as well and then work hard to cut off providing extensions altogether, as extensions are a main source of fingerprints becoming unique and data leaks. and of course remove all the crypto garbage.





  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_lightweight_Linux_distributions

    heres a pretty good resource, bit of a tangent but i got a ton of shithouse computers with very low ram and i think alpine/postmarketos is the best choice. ive gotten kde, cosmic, and so on running on tons of terribly old computers with it, typically with no more than 1-2gb of ram. its also good for computers with only 256mb or so. after a certain point you need to just load your OS into ram entirely in order to have any ability to handle modern applications on very old hardware, in this case you should consider buying ram for your very old hardware (it comes cheap for the top compatible tech when its 90s hardware) if you like to use it as a sort of display piece for visitors to use. there are a couple of distros in that list that can handle being stored in ram. but obviously youre a bit different because you can just run it all on a vps. still probably best to go with alpine despite the operational differences

    of the mainline fully featured modern desktop environments i feel cosmic de works the smoothest on old hardware, strangely enough.