viking
@viking@infosec.pub
- Comment on US Government Urges Total Ban of Our Most Popular Wi-Fi Router 1 week ago:
I used the volume controls for the website in my phone’s pulldown menu to stop it, then the music player resumed. Still very much unwanted behavior. Will dig into the page source and see if there’s anything hidden.
- Comment on US Government Urges Total Ban of Our Most Popular Wi-Fi Router 1 week ago:
I’ll do some digging in the code and see if I can come up with a custom filter for ublock.
- Comment on US Government Urges Total Ban of Our Most Popular Wi-Fi Router 1 week ago:
Nope there wasn’t anything visible, I’ve been scrolling up and down to verify. Unless the video was somehow truncated or scaled to 1x1 px or something.
- Comment on US Government Urges Total Ban of Our Most Popular Wi-Fi Router 1 week ago:
It’s a clone of the official Firefox repo stripped of all telemetry.
- Comment on US Government Urges Total Ban of Our Most Popular Wi-Fi Router 1 week ago:
Totally off topic, but I was reading the article on Fennec (mobile Firefox clone) while playing music over Bluetooth to my car. I was parked waiting for someone, not driving. No streaming service, playing honest to god mp3s from my device, when out of the blue I got VPN ads over the speaker.
Fennec indicated that cnet was playing them, but there as was no video box or other audio player widget active, so it looks like they are splicing invisible audio ads in somehow?
I’m also using ublock origin on mobile plus AdAway (rooted), so that’s not an easy feat.
Could anyone double check? That’s the most obnoxious behavior I’ve experienced in recent time.
- Comment on Top economist on the economy’s dirty truth: The only people who feel good are ‘making over $200,000’ and ‘have large stock portfolios’ 2 weeks ago:
Smart investors aren’t all in and use the drop to gobble up shares.
- Comment on What if reincarnation is real, but you were probably plankton in your last life, so you don’t remember anything anyway? 2 weeks ago:
Without a soul, the concept of reincarnation doesn’t exist. Else we are just talking about energy transfer, which absolutely happens after cellular death. Your physical matter is absorbed and becomes part of other organisms.
- Comment on Microsoft builds on Recall with Gaming Copilot — fails basic privacy tests 2 weeks ago:
I’ve just switched from Windows 10 to Windows 10 IoT LTSC (long term support channel), designed for IoT means there’s no AI garbage, game bar and any other crap installed, and I get updates until 2032.
Quite happy with it, after a disastrous experience with Windows 11 that essentially killed my system.
And no, I can’t switch to Linux due to company requirements. I work in finance and some of the banks we use operate by hardware tokens that only have Windows drivers.
- Comment on Another WSJ banger about why the poors aren't doing more 2 weeks ago:
That problem didn’t start by voting Trump, he should have been on track to retirement before his first term. You can blame the orange overlord for many things, but not for shit planning.
- Comment on Apparently Palantir can access the content of social media accounts that were deleted a decade ago. 2 weeks ago:
The requirement exists unless the company is under legal obligation to retain something. I had one case where I requested a GDPR data dump followed by a full deletion, and apparently whoever executed the request deleted first and then processed the dump, so I was able to see that what they did was change my email address from username@mail.tld to username#mail.tld@company.tld - meaning that login attempts, password resets etc. would clearly fail, and a further attempt to request my data revolving around my email address would be unsuccessful, but ultimately all my data was still accessible somewhere. Whether they’d then proceed to delete it after the retention period, who knows. I intended to follow up but forgot…
- Comment on Apparently Palantir can access the content of social media accounts that were deleted a decade ago. 2 weeks ago:
There’s a browser addon called Meta Random Search which sends your queries randomly through google, bing, ddg, yahoo and other search engines so that nobody has a full history. Paired with a user agent switcher (personally using Chameleon on Firefox) with a high frequency of change (1 min or so) and disabled browser telemetry it might throw them off already even without poisoning results. Especially since every query consumes natural resources I’m not really a fan of this approach.
- Comment on Which game would you erase from your memory, in order to experience it fresh once again? 2 weeks ago:
Thief: The Dark Project
I still keep playing it with all the gfx patches, it’s a masterpiece. 2 and 3 are not bad either, but the original is unmatched. Love the user generated mods as well.
- Comment on As Microsoft Forces Users to Ditch Windows 10, It Announces That It’s Also Turning Windows 11 into an AI-Controlled Monstrosity 2 weeks ago:
Nah their website got hijacked and instead of an ISO they spread malware. The system itself was never at risk, if you ran it.
- Comment on As Microsoft Forces Users to Ditch Windows 10, It Announces That It’s Also Turning Windows 11 into an AI-Controlled Monstrosity 2 weeks ago:
I upgraded to Windows 11 last week after my laptop initially came with it 2 years ago, but was so bloated and slow I installed Windows 10 from USB.
With the EoL I reluctantly upgraded due to company policy, and it was running surprisingly smooth. Really thought they’d fixed it. Only that two days later when I booted the system, I had a blue screen - the first one I have seen since Windows XP.
Page fault in non-page area 0x50 - google suggests reboots, or if they don’t bring any progress, boot into safe mode and update all drivers. Only that I couldn’t boot into safe mode, the BSOD locked me out.
Second suggestion was faulty RAM. Did a memtest from boot stick, no fault.
Third suggestion was to run checkdisk and scm or whatever it was called (some system file integrity check). All good.
Fourth suggestion was to boot into recovery mode, roll back into the system image the Windows 11 installer created, and redo the upgrade. Only to find out that the system restore point had not been created, despite the info box during the installation that this was happening.
Last suggestion was to reinstall Windows 11 from the repair mode, and select the “keep files” option. The offline installer crashed at 25% repeatedly, the online installer moved to 92% and stopped there. Repeatedly, again (tried 3x, and it takes about 1h to get there).
After all that frustration I had enough of that shit and installed Windows 10 IoT LTSC with updates until 2032. When the time comes I’ll either have a new job where I can use Xubuntu, or Microsoft installed on a chip in my brain. Let’s see.
- Comment on The Discord Breach Might Be Worse Than We Thought, As The Hacker Is Said To Have Two Million Age Verification Photos 4 weeks ago:
They enforced the verification, but discord was supposed to delete the images right after.
- Comment on Why doesn't anybody get notified about warrants for their arrest? 4 weeks ago:
if anyone got that notification, there could be chances that they’d run
That right there. People who forgot to update their address and got unpaid traffic fines and stuff will settle them when they are eventually found, but the flight risk for serious criminals weighs much more.
- Comment on Open Printer is a fully open-source inkjet with DRM-free ink and no subscriptions 5 weeks ago:
Yup. I’m on my second now because of an international relocation, but the first one is still going strong at my dad’s. Bought that thing 14 years ago, was the first series that came with network enabled printing instead of USB (though it has a port).
- Comment on Portal and Portal 2 are 80% off 5 weeks ago:
They were both good, but not really looking. I got portal one and two as a bundle and completed them in a single Saturday.
- Comment on Google is blocking AI searches for Trump and dementia 5 weeks ago:
Thanks, maybe time to try again. I used it years ago but the results were not great.
- Comment on Google is blocking AI searches for Trump and dementia 5 weeks ago:
What are you using now? I’ve been toying with kagi for a while, but the idea of having to use an account that ties all my searches to me doesn’t sit well with my sense of privacy, and none of the others get results remotely close to google.
- Comment on Former BioWare lead writer reads the runes on EA-Saudi deal and speculates that 'guns and football' are in, 'gay stuff' is out, and the venerable RPG studio may be for the chop 5 weeks ago:
You think? That generation will have kids who buy the same crap and won’t listen to their parents, just like the kids now don’t listen.
- Comment on Watch first, then wipe: Some China’s restrooms put toilet paper behind paywall 1 month ago:
China is prosperous, don’t let anybody fool you. But people are deeply, inherently selfish and love money more than everything (yay, communism!), so if they can save 30 cents by taking a roll of toilet paper home, they will.
- Comment on Watch first, then wipe: Some China’s restrooms put toilet paper behind paywall 1 month ago:
As someone who lived in China for 7 years, the alternative is that the next best person who enters the bathroom takes all available paper home.
In my entire time there, I can count the number of times where paper was available on a single hand, with spare fingers.
Naturally, everybody carries a box of tissues at all times.
- Comment on Google just broke *all* third-party web clients, including yt-dlp; a full JS implementation is now required. 1 month ago:
NewPipe as well, without any update either.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
What’s that supposed to be? Never seen those before, and I’m in my 40s.
- Comment on do you use non violent communication at the workplace? 1 month ago:
It’s a nice concept for interpersonal relationships regardless of the setting, but it’s got limited applicability in a results driven setting.
- Comment on TikTok To Be Sold To Trump’s Right Wing Billionaire Buddies And Converted Into A Propaganda Mill 1 month ago:
Nice, another of those shit platforms nobody needs is dead.
- Comment on Why is the human body so incredibly bad at responding to colds? 1 month ago:
You’re only seeing the colds that made it through the defenses, without having any means of measuring the ones your immune system successfully blocked or kicked out before they could take hold.
So your statistics are flawed.
- Comment on Samsung brings ads to US fridges 1 month ago:
Patience, young Padawan. Patience.
- Comment on Things are going so well.... 2 months ago:
It’s a raffle for gift cards of their member organisations. Also called an advertising deal. If said member is a food chain, what else are they going to advertise with? Kittens?