Complaints on An Untitled Blog

Browsers: Plummeting Off the Brink

Wed, 03 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is sort of a successor to Firefox: A Brink of Their Own Making that I published ~6 months ago, followed by me rambling on about different browsers that I’ve used or decided to check out for this post. This follow-up was largely spurred on by two different things: Manifest v2’s phasing out in standard Chromium and Firefox getting worse. Further, after writing a whole lot and then reflecting on it, I’ve gotten a few more thoughts on the topics on hand - but unfortunately like the two external motivations, my thoughts have also led me to think about the ecosystem more negatively.

Firefox: a brink of their own making?

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Update August 5th 2024

I have been made aware that Firefox for Android no longer includes Google Analytics as part of their app telemetry. It appears it was removed in v80.1.13. At the time I posted this the Exodus page I linked to did list Google Analytics, but according to the page now they updated the page on July 15th and likely removed the tracker information on that date.

Further, on July 3rd I made another post about browsers. As the title contains ‘plummeting off the brink’ you can correctly assume things are only getting worse.

MITM Risks in Signal? Mitigation + Monologue

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Update 11/25: I was made aware that Signal has some proprietary anti-spam code and added the TLDR.

A More Technical TLDR

I never know how much jargon I should include or how much I should explain, and as long as I’m writing I’m enjoying myself meaning I’ve been all over the place. But here’s a shortened version for those familiar with encryption.

A vanilla implementation of the Signal protocol relies on public key infrastructure to perform a handshake between devices. As you may know, a public key server can certify that any device/key belongs to an account if you have nothing more to go on than a phone number. Furthermore, at any point the server may say keys have changed and direct you to start communicating with a device other than the one you expect.

Microsoft's All-Cloud Windows is what I dislike about Modern Computing

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I never have had a good track record with massive changes to Windows, starting with Windows 8 which was entirely unusable in my case. It wasn’t just the mobile-style graphics and the bloat, but also the fact I couldn’t get more than a couple of days before the installation would break. This went on for a while as I tried to figure out why it was breaking, and I probably went through dozens of installs that themselves took nearly as long as the time I could actually use the device before it broke again. After determining it was an update to blame, I deferred updates and set my connection to a metered connection, either of which on their own should have solved the issue. Yet soon after I was greeted by another update screen, followed by yet another bricked install.