ThetaDev
@ThetaDev@lemm.ee
- Comment on The three million toothbrush botnet story isn’t true. 4 months ago:
First thing I was asking is the model of toothbrush that supposedly got hacked. AFAIK there are no mainstream electric toothbrushes with onboard WiFi. Both OralB and Philips use Bluetooth for their smart functionalities.
If the story was about smart ovens or washing machines I would have believed it.
- Comment on How does RSS work under the hood? 6 months ago:
RSS feeds are XML files which contain a list of documents hosted on the internet (articles, audio/video). The feed entries contain basic metadata (title, date, author, summary) and a link to the original website (or audio/video file in the case of a podcast).
Feed readers send a simple web request to the website hosting the feed, downloading it if it has changed since the last update. The content is then combined with other feeds and displayed. This way you can have a personalized news reading experience without needing to create an account at a a central provider or open every individual site.
Alternative YouTube clients use RSS feeds provided by YouTube (example: www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2Dj…), but they are only used to update subscriptions. All other requests (search, watching videos) are handled by the same web interface as the YouTube desktop application. Fetching the RSS feeds is a lot faster than opening the channel page, so the RSS featuee allows you update 100 or more channels in a few seconds.
The way podcast ads work is either just like YouTube sponsorships (the podcaster gets paid by a company to speak an advertisement themselves) or they are dynamically inserted by the podcast provider (these are the interrupting ads). Since most podcast apps dont store cookies, there is no way to track users and personalization is done only via the IP-based location and topic of the podcast. RSS-based podcast players have no way of directly reporting back playback telemetry. The server hosting the podcasts can only count the number of downloads/playbacks. So there is no way to count the amount of watched ads when using a RSS-based podcast player like AntennaPod or Kasts. Note: this does not apply to podcasts on Spotify, Apple Music or similar platforms. These platforms absolutely track your listening activity. I have no idea whether this affects ad/sponsorship earnings.
- Comment on How does RSS work under the hood? 6 months ago:
One important thing if you are building a RSS application is that the server should support conditional requests (the
If-Modified-Sinceheader). This way, a client does not have to download the entire feed on every update. It simply sends the last update date with its request and the server returns an empty response if the feed is up to date.There are some applications (for example YouTube) which dont support this, resulting in higher-than-necessery data usage, especially on mobile.
- Comment on Review of LessPass 7 months ago:
You also cannot use it to store secret information like bank account/credit card details, API keys, etc.
- Comment on Crypto Bros Report Burning Eyes and Skin at Bored Ape Bacchanal 7 months ago:
Did they accidentally buy UVC sterilization tubes instead of the relatively harmless UVA party lights?
- Comment on Has HP printers always been this bad? 8 months ago:
They look like good machines if you are printing a lot and need an inkjet (like for photo printing)
If you are only using a printer occasionally for letters or shipping labels, laser printers are probably a better option. Sure, they need more space, but they cant dry out and dont require cleaning programs.
- Comment on Why do all these companies developing privatised software use the word "Open"? Real question. 8 months ago:
They do publish some open source software like Whisper TTS. Their core products are all proprietary though.
- Comment on Review: Framework Laptop finally gets an AMD Ryzen config—and it’s pretty good 8 months ago:
Do they now have additional USB ports on the back side? Or do you refer to having USB modules plugged in?
- Comment on More than $35 million has been stolen from over 150 victims since December — ‘nearly every victim’ was a LastPass user 9 months ago:
Yes, if you write the decrypted file to disk, it could be recovered. Deleting files only removes the file system entries - it does not wipe the content.
Use a local password manager. KeePass is the most popular choice. If you prefer a command line tool, pass (passwordstore.org) is an option.