• 1 Post
  • 102 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Buddy, given your relatively basic questions and how you’re posting to every single fucking vaguely relared community, I would highly suggest you do some studying on just… basic computer concepts and how to use them. Not sure what resources are out there anymore, but maybe some basic “these are the parts of a computer, these are programs and how they work” stuff from the 90s. They used to do middle school classes on how to properly use google and other seaech engines to find trustworthy information for citing in research papers. I seriously suggest you start there.

    Then, after you understand the basics maybe you start trying to understand how all of that works in regards to security and the concept of trust in the software you install and run.

    Spoiler alert: Computers are not designed with any sort of “zero trust” architecture like you seem to be shocked that they don’t have. Things are not sandboxed, segmented, or otherwise prevented from accessing other stuff as a general rule.

    This is why one of the bare minimum basics is “don’t run anything you don’t trust”.


  • Harsh question: Do you have a real need to prevent this data from being collected, or are you investigating just for funsies best practice advice? There are a lot of posts like this where people overestimate the threat model they have and insist on needing to block things that are nearly impossible to, or at least have significant tradeoffs like you are dealing with now.

    Javascript is also not the only source that sites can use for these pieces of info from your machine. Local time in particular can be estimated by looking up the rough location of your IP address then matching to a time zone.


    Anyway.

    I would assume you could technically fork localCDN (replaces remote javascript libraries with local copies) and then manually edit the local javascript library copies to remove the calls you are concerned about.

    There’s also options like uBlock Origin’s methods of only whitelisting specific scripts. Much more flexible than NoScript. You can block scripts that are third party and only allow site specific ones fairly easily, without digging deep into the settings.

    Bear in mind that your specific combination of installed extensions can also be a unique identifier though.


  • So this is your project? Judging from your username here and the test messages shown in your screenshot here and on the Github. Nemesis.

    Brand new lemmy account with only this post on it.

    And the entire Github codebase is made up of a single commit of all the files 2 hours ago as of the time I’m commenting.

    As I’ve said before with similar posts from (I believe) other users/coders: just be up front about if something you’re posting was your weekend project or just something to fill out a portfolio.



  • Yes, but it still deserves the question to be asked explicitly. I don’t think most iPhone users looking for a music reccomendation app would assume they’d need to selfhost in order to use an app.

    And again, if as the dev he’s not prepared to set up his own server for use to pass basic testing, it begs the question of what exactly he’s expecting out of his end users and if it’s truly a reasonable ask even if they’re prepared to self host



  • I’ve been running the same heavily customized Windows box for half a decade now. Like “tore critical system components I don’t need out from the install media” level of customized. A good chunk of the “modify windows for privacy” tools shit the bed because parts of what they want to flip switches on for better privacy simply aren’t there on my install.

    No issues with updates, nothing bricked or fucked up even with me definitively using it not as intended.

    The more I progress in my tech career (roughly a decade in now) the more blatant it becomes that the overwhelming majority of issues people have with computers (especially in the modern era) are self inflicted. This is common across all OSes and Distros.



  • Yes, the price is the point. Excel (Office) is that dirt fucking cheap, industry standard, and comes with a bunch of other shit included that can be legitimate value add for a small business.

    If you’re at a firm that has legitimate need for specialized accounting software, you’ll have enough money to get those. But even those generally export to Excel format. Without outing myself too much, I’ve had comsiderable exposure to financial tech over the last decade and less than 10 specialized accounting softwares I’ve seen couldn’t export to Excel. All of those still exported to csv, or “software agnostic excel” if we want to bend things a bit.

    The power of being industry standard for going on 30 years now cannot be overstated.