Do they “give high rankings” to CloudFlare sites because they just boost up whoever is behind CloudFlare, or because the sites happen to be good search hits, maybe that load quickly, and they don’t go in and penalize them for… telling CloudFlare that you would like them to send you the page when you go to the site?

Counting the number of times results for different links are clicked is expected search engine behavior. Recording what search strings are sent from results pages for what other search strings is also probably fine, and because of the way forms and referrers work (the URL of the page you searched from has the old query in it) the page’s query will be sent in the referrer by all browsers by default even if the site neither wanted it nor intends to record it. Recording what text is highlighted is weird, but probably not a genuine threat.

The remote favicon fetch design in their browser app was fixed like 4 years ago.

The “accusation” of “fingerprinting” was along the lines of “their site called a canvas function oh no”. It’s not “fingerprinting” every time someone tries to use a canvas tag.

What exactly is “all data available in my session” when I click on an ad? Is it basically the stuff a site I go to can see anyway? Sounds like it’s nothing exciting or some exciting pieces of data would be listed.

This analysis misses the important point that none of this stuff is getting cross-linked to user identities or profiles. The problem with Google isn’t that they examine how their search results pages are interacted with in general or that they count Linux users, it’s that they keep a log of what everyone individually is searching, specifically. Not doing that sounds “anonymous” to me, even if it isn’t Tor-strength anonymity that’s resistant to wiretaps.

There’s an important difference between “we’re trying to not do surveillance capitalism but as a centralized service data still comes to our servers to actually do the service, and we don’t boycott all of CloudFlare, AWS, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo”, as opposed to “we’re building shadow profiles of everyone for us and our 1,437 partners”. And I feel like you shouldn’t take privacy advice from someone who hosts it unencrypted.

It sounds like nobody actually understood what you want.

You have a non-ZFS boot drive, and a big ZFS pool, and you want to save an image of the boot drive to the pool, as a backup for the boot drive.

I guess you don’t want to image the drive while booted off it, because that could produce an image that isn’t fully self-consistent. So then the problem is getting at the pool from something other than the system you have.

I think what you need to do is find something else you can boot that supports ZFS. I think the Ubuntu live images will do it. If not, you can try something like re-installing the setup you have, but onto a USB drive.

Then you have to boot to that and zfs import your pool. ZFS is pretty smart so it should just auto-detect the pool structure and where it wants to be mounted, and you can mount it. Don’t do a ZFS feature upgrade on the pool though, or the other system might not understand it. It’s also possible your live kernel might not have a new enough ZFS to understand the features your pool uses, and you might need to find a newer one.

Then once the pool is mounted you should be able to dd your boot drive block device to a file on the pool.

If you can’t get this to work, you can try using a non-ZFS-speaking live Linux and dding your image to somewhere on the network big enough to hold it, which you may or may not have, and then booting the system and copying back from there to the pool.

That should just be the title bar now

I think we can trust that most phone camera apps do in fact obey the toggle they provide for whether or not to embed the GPS location data in the image.

They also have Paul Frazee, who is the Beaker Browser dude and one of the Secure Scuttlebutt dudes. And also whyrusleeping, one of the IPFS dudes. So if they manage to enshittify it won’t be because they forgot to hire enough “Wizard Utopians” with decentralization experience.

On phones Android is pretty typical, and on desktop Unix is also pretty typical because MacOS is it. But non-Mac Unix on the desktop is pretty unusual, and stuff built for Mac specifically often won’t work on other Unixes.

I’m going to go with “be normal”.

Linux is unusual in a way that Windows is not. In a lot of areas (games, interfacing with weird hardware), Linux uses up one of your three innovation tokens in a way that Windows doesn’t. You are likely to be the only person or one of a very few people trying to do what you are doing or encountering the problem you are having on Linux, whereas there is often a much larger community of like-minded people to work with who are using Windows.

Sometimes the reverse is true: have fun being the only person trying to use a new CS algorithm released as a .c and a Makefile on Windows proper without WSL.

But that’s kind of why we have Wine and WSL: it’s often easier to pretend to be normal than to convince people to accommodate you.

I have had pretty good luck with this actually. You can get e.g. Matlab for Linux no problem, and even weird company-specific tools I want I usually find to be available. But then I guess most of the commercial software I want to use is software for people like me. I don’t bother trying to use e.g. MS Office even on platforms it runs on, I don’t do professional CAD, I don’t do professional graphic design.

I think you can keep doing the SMB shares and use an overlay filesystem on top of those to basically stack them on top of each other, so that server1/dir1/file1.txt and server2/dir1/file2.txt and server3/dir1/file3.txt all show up in the same folder. I’m not sure how happy that is when one of the servers just isn’t there though.

Other than that you probably need some kind of fancy FUSE application to fake a filesystem that works the way you want. Maybe some kind of FUES-over-Git-Annex system exists that could do it already?

I wouldn’t really recommend IPFS for this. It’s tough to get it to actually fetch the blocks promptly for files unless you manually convince it to connect to the machine that has them. It doesn’t really solve the shared-drive problem as far as I know (you’d have like several IPNS paths to juggle for the different libraries, and you’d have to have a way to update them when new files were added). Also it won’t do any encryption or privacy: anyone who has seen the same file that you have, and has the IPFS hash of it, will be able to convince you to distribute the file to them (whether you have a license to do so or not).

Maybe that’s when I mostly stopped getting the wrong page of stuff.

I took one passing look at how the thing is built, found out it’s “basically all websockets for some reason”, and stopped expecting it to work properly. Whenever it breaks I think “this is why you don’t use websockets when you can just send a goddamn server side rendered web page or make an AJAX POST request” and I feel vindicated instead of annoyed.

Well how do you think it should work then?

So that’s why everything is enormous now!

On desktop: animations tied to scrolling.

Hello and welcome to our scroll wheel powered video presentation.

What’s an illegitimate interest?

If you don’t have your code report in at all, then you have no idea how many people are using it or what features they use the most. So when someone says “how many people use the thing? We need to prove it is useful so people will pay us to make it” then you can’t answer. Or if someone says “that feature is hard to maintain, can we just ditch it?” you either have to leave it in or risk ditching a very popular feature.

I think the key is for it to be a provisional guess and not a will-be-shocked-if-it’s-wrong assumption. You need to be prepared to have been wrong.

People will sometimes introduce themselves with pronouns, or sometimes wear little badges with them.

There are definitely people IRL who don’t use the pronouns one might guess by looking at them. I haven’t met many (any?) people who go by neopronouns, but they are around the Internet.

You can often just guess pronouns for people, but if you can’t read the gender someone is presenting (is your new friend rocking a kilt, sports bra, and enormous beard?) it might be polite to ask, and/or to use “they” until you get the right one.

You don’t have to want people to call you he/him just because you are a man. But he/him is overwhelmingly popular with men, so it’s a fine choice.

If there is a field for pronouns, and you want people to know yours instead of them having to guess, you should put yours in there. The other reason to put pronouns in, even if people are likely to guess right, is to exercise the field for the people who often get guessed wrong.

You might want to try Openstack. It is set up for running a multi-tenant cloud.

TIL China is a one-party system with English subs