Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
Spent the last week playing with some security shit (thinking about a career change, since it looks like I will be mastering out of my PhD program) and fuck me everything about hardening your personal devices is exhausting. We are nowhere close to accessible privacy and security in our computers. The best solution right now may be "buy a Macbook and learn MacOS", which is so depressing.
Still deciding on a web browser. Used to be I could recommend Firefox because Righteous-Opposition-to-Google, but that doesn't really track anymore with Mozilla's behavior. Now I guess I would recommend Chrome, but it feels so gross (and I am unsure about things like Ungoogled-Chromium, for security reasons).
the basic laptop hardening
As far as passwords, the only password I have to memorize is the one to my Bitwarden vault. Everything else is stored in Bitwarden. The passwords (except for my phone PIN) are 16 characters if I ever need to type them in manually (e.g. LUKS password), whereas passwords that will always be copy-pasted are 128 characters. I am looking into integrating a yubikey, but am leaning towards "fuck that shit, why would anyone actually want to use this?" If anyone here has comments on this (am I missing an obvious pitfall? do yubikeys suck as much as it looks like they suck?) I would be happy to hear them.
Anyway tl;dr is I spent the last week hardening all my devices and it sucks. In some cases it was a complete waste of time (my Steam Deck does not appear to have a way to set a password in the BIOS). In other cases (e.g. my Framework), it was probably worth it but a deeply terrible experience.
I don't think I could ever recommend chromium-based browsers due to the MV3 switch. Does ungoogled-chromium do any patching to get around this? If not I think FF is the only sane option still.
I believe ungoogled-chromium does have MV2 support. Unfortunately, there are still real security concerns with Firefox. The good news is that Trivalent (a hardened version of Chromium developed by the Secureblue folks) has ad/content blocking built in. I am still mostly using Firefox, but the small amount that I have used Trivalent has been good.