Whatsapp and FB Messenger killed it. You can scream about XMPP and secure apps like this or Signal all you want, they are utterly useless unless the people you communicate with also switch to them. Network effect's a party pooper. Unless you exclusively hang out with security researchers, no one's going to bother.
WebRTC. Apart from opening up a whole can of worms security/privacy-wise, "Web Real Time Chat" (comparable with Skype video calls and the likes) is not considered useful or desired functionality for Pale Moon (both according to the developers and the users of the browser at large). This is best left to dedicated programs or at most a browser plug-in.
This is on par with the general move of the internet towards walled gardens. From independent websites and blogs with RSS feeds for updates to Facebook/Twitter to abandoning the web itself in favor of apps. Also, every once in a while you'll see an article in the business/tech press bemoaning the existence of email when there are so many wonderful proprietary alternatives. If XMPP had become as widespread as POP/SMTP/IMAP, we would've been able to chat as easily we can send an email, using any combination of client and provider.
The good news is that the blocking ‘feature’ isn’t mandatory. Subscribers can enable and disable it whenever they please, by changing their network settings
From the link to Xfinity support (emphasis added) -
Protected Browsing is an opt-in service that Xfinity xFi customers can use to help safeguard their home networks against malicious content. In order to use the feature - which we offer at no additional cost - you must enable it using the Xfinity xFi app. You can also turn it off at any time with a single swipe.
The recent followup movies simply reset everything - episode 7 was a remake of episode 4, and 30 years after defeating the Empire, the good guys are again stuck as the underdog against a 'new order' (of what, takeout?) pulled out of the director's ass. The Last Jedi took the already bad story and distortions in continuity and made it worse with a dose of pandering to the SJW crowd.
That's the only relevant question here. Until drive-by downloads are a thing on Android, the only victims will be the common sense impaired. - Stick to Play Store if you don't know what you're doing, and check the developer name, reviews and number of downloads of whatever app you plan to download for any red flags. Better still, stick to well known, popular apps. - Keep the 'install apps from unknown sources' setting at its default state of unchecked if you're not smart enough to differentiate between malicious and benign 3rd party APKs. - You don't need any sort of antivirus app on Android. This isn't Windows XP circa early 2000s where using IE6 would get you infected with silently installing malware.
Get rid of Firefox, install Palemoon and import your Firefox profile into it. It comes with the standard desktop UI that was there before Australis, continued full support for XUL extensions and no telemetry or bundled bullshit. Basically everything that was good about Firefox until version 4. And no, it's not abandoned or obsolete or anything, it gets regular updates and fixes. And it's had a 64-bit version on Windows for long before Firefox finally offered one.
I've been blocking ads for 20 years now, ever since I noticed that the banner ad would load first before the rest of the page had even started loading on a 28.8k dialup connection. It's multi-level for me now -
Hosts file - used this initially, now it's just AdAway on my rooted Android
AdMuncher, a commercial adblocker for Windows that blocks ads at the socket level, so even ads inside programs get filtered
After Firefox appeared, started using Adblock Plus, and now Ublock Origin. On Android I still use ABP.
Browser set to reject all cookies by default, except for sites that require you to login.
However, because software is an intangible and you can't see it taking shape in the same way as a house it is much more difficult (for someone who is not a software developer)
Iterative software development helps, where you deliver a prototype every few weeks and everyone can see tangible progress. Of course you still need to manage expectations as to what gets into each subsequent release.
Without that personal context its hard for a lot of people to imagine any other possibilities.
Maybe on earlier platforms where you didn't know anything about the person beyond an anonymous nick, but most people put their lives out on Facebook without caring to use the privacy features, so you can still (most of the time) see their profile and the kind of posts they share or pages they like to give you a general idea of their politics.
Waterfox is a 64-bit port, not a fork. Palemoon is a fork, with all the telemetry and dumbed down interface removed, so it looks like how Firefox 4 used to look before they turned into a Chrome wannabe - but is a modern fully supported browser under the hood.
I've always pirated movies and TV shows since they're not available in India, but recently Amazon Prime Video launched here - for the equivalent of $7 per year, you get access to their library, plus they've added a whole lot of Bollywood and Indian TV shows to gain popularity, so trying it out was a no brainer.
NN is about treating all traffic within a category the same way. So you can prioritize video streaming over others, so long as you don't further discriminate between Vimeo and Netflix and Youtube.
Plus there's no such thing as 'an Android phone'. There are tons of them at various price points, and usually those say they tried 'an Android phone' and it was crap somehow never can remember the manufacturer and model.
That's interesting, because India's oldest and largest theatre chain, PVR, began about 20 years ago as a joint venture between the Australian production company Village Roadshow and a single theater in Delhi called Priya (hence the acronym).
Here's a rebuttal to a rebuttal by Indian VC Mahesh Murthy when Facebook tried to introduce its Free Basics here last year. This attempt came just after a backlash against local mobile operator Airtel, who wanted to charge extra for using Whatsapp and Viber since they claimed to be losing money on SMS revenue as a result.
Read this piece to see the FUD that FB has been spreading and how it was countered.
In India we've had chipped credit/debit cards for at least 3-4 years now. Every shop and restaurant has a card reader that works with both chip and magstripe, and they give you the machine to enter your pin. Some of them are attached to the cashiers' desk on account of a landline, but many of them use mobile SIM cards, so they just bring the reader over to your table or hand it to you to enter the pin.. On some of them there's a shield over the keypad to conceal your fingers when typing the pin. And for online transactions, Mastercard & VISA both enforce an extra layer of security, either by an OTP sent to your phone (which you presumably have with you while making the online purchase) or by another password known only to you.
Facebook suspends your account because some asshole from Brazil has complained about one of your holiday snaps.
Why is some asshole from Brazil able to view your holiday snaps in the first place? It's amazing how many people continue to blithely post everything on Facebook publicly.
I'm gonna have my brain cryogenically frozen, and be scanned into a brain emulator 200 or so years from now when tech advances.
There is a comic in the Transmetropolitan series by Warren Ellis (#8, I think) titled 'Another cold morning'. It is about exactly this, how the cryo-frozen people from the past wind up as the unwanted homeless of the future society where they're thawed out.
If the group of people you communicate with are privacy conscious enough to use Signal and Telegram, I envy you. Nobody I know uses or cares about Signal, they're all happy sitting with Whatsapp so I'm stuck using that as well.
Good luck getting all the people you currently communicate with to switch over, unless they're all security experts or whistleblowers. Network effect's a real party pooper. If only XMPP had taken off the way email did.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatsapp and FB Messenger killed it. You can scream about XMPP and secure apps like this or Signal all you want, they are utterly useless unless the people you communicate with also switch to them. Network effect's a party pooper. Unless you exclusively hang out with security researchers, no one's going to bother.
Pale Moon intentionally does not support WebRTC:
You mean like the Indian subsidiaries of Ford, GM, Hyundai, Suzuki, Volkswagen, BMW, Audi, Daimler-Benz..?
Probably means calories.
This is on par with the general move of the internet towards walled gardens. From independent websites and blogs with RSS feeds for updates to Facebook/Twitter to abandoning the web itself in favor of apps. Also, every once in a while you'll see an article in the business/tech press bemoaning the existence of email when there are so many wonderful proprietary alternatives.
If XMPP had become as widespread as POP/SMTP/IMAP, we would've been able to chat as easily we can send an email, using any combination of client and provider.
From the TorrentFreak article -
From the link to Xfinity support (emphasis added) -
The recent followup movies simply reset everything - episode 7 was a remake of episode 4, and 30 years after defeating the Empire, the good guys are again stuck as the underdog against a 'new order' (of what, takeout?) pulled out of the director's ass. The Last Jedi took the already bad story and distortions in continuity and made it worse with a dose of pandering to the SJW crowd.
Plenty of Nokias had that feature, including the iconic N73, N82 and N95.
That's the only relevant question here. Until drive-by downloads are a thing on Android, the only victims will be the common sense impaired.
- Stick to Play Store if you don't know what you're doing, and check the developer name, reviews and number of downloads of whatever app you plan to download for any red flags. Better still, stick to well known, popular apps.
- Keep the 'install apps from unknown sources' setting at its default state of unchecked if you're not smart enough to differentiate between malicious and benign 3rd party APKs.
- You don't need any sort of antivirus app on Android. This isn't Windows XP circa early 2000s where using IE6 would get you infected with silently installing malware.
..."It would be good to have that kind of job security."
Get rid of Firefox, install Palemoon and import your Firefox profile into it. It comes with the standard desktop UI that was there before Australis, continued full support for XUL extensions and no telemetry or bundled bullshit.
Basically everything that was good about Firefox until version 4. And no, it's not abandoned or obsolete or anything, it gets regular updates and fixes.
And it's had a 64-bit version on Windows for long before Firefox finally offered one.
I've been blocking ads for 20 years now, ever since I noticed that the banner ad would load first before the rest of the page had even started loading on a 28.8k dialup connection. It's multi-level for me now -
Iterative software development helps, where you deliver a prototype every few weeks and everyone can see tangible progress. Of course you still need to manage expectations as to what gets into each subsequent release.
Maybe on earlier platforms where you didn't know anything about the person beyond an anonymous nick, but most people put their lives out on Facebook without caring to use the privacy features, so you can still (most of the time) see their profile and the kind of posts they share or pages they like to give you a general idea of their politics.
Waterfox is a 64-bit port, not a fork. Palemoon is a fork, with all the telemetry and dumbed down interface removed, so it looks like how Firefox 4 used to look before they turned into a Chrome wannabe - but is a modern fully supported browser under the hood.
I've always pirated movies and TV shows since they're not available in India, but recently Amazon Prime Video launched here - for the equivalent of $7 per year, you get access to their library, plus they've added a whole lot of Bollywood and Indian TV shows to gain popularity, so trying it out was a no brainer.
NN is about treating all traffic within a category the same way. So you can prioritize video streaming over others, so long as you don't further discriminate between Vimeo and Netflix and Youtube.
Plus there's no such thing as 'an Android phone'. There are tons of them at various price points, and usually those say they tried 'an Android phone' and it was crap somehow never can remember the manufacturer and model.
That's interesting, because India's oldest and largest theatre chain, PVR, began about 20 years ago as a joint venture between the Australian production company Village Roadshow and a single theater in Delhi called Priya (hence the acronym).
Here's a rebuttal to a rebuttal by Indian VC Mahesh Murthy when Facebook tried to introduce its Free Basics here last year. This attempt came just after a backlash against local mobile operator Airtel, who wanted to charge extra for using Whatsapp and Viber since they claimed to be losing money on SMS revenue as a result.
Read this piece to see the FUD that FB has been spreading and how it was countered.
In India we've had chipped credit/debit cards for at least 3-4 years now. Every shop and restaurant has a card reader that works with both chip and magstripe, and they give you the machine to enter your pin. Some of them are attached to the cashiers' desk on account of a landline, but many of them use mobile SIM cards, so they just bring the reader over to your table or hand it to you to enter the pin.. On some of them there's a shield over the keypad to conceal your fingers when typing the pin. And for online transactions, Mastercard & VISA both enforce an extra layer of security, either by an OTP sent to your phone (which you presumably have with you while making the online purchase) or by another password known only to you.
Facebook suspends your account because some asshole from Brazil has complained about one of your holiday snaps.
Why is some asshole from Brazil able to view your holiday snaps in the first place? It's amazing how many people continue to blithely post everything on Facebook publicly.
I'm gonna have my brain cryogenically frozen, and be scanned into a brain emulator 200 or so years from now when tech advances.
There is a comic in the Transmetropolitan series by Warren Ellis (#8, I think) titled 'Another cold morning'. It is about exactly this, how the cryo-frozen people from the past wind up as the unwanted homeless of the future society where they're thawed out.
If the group of people you communicate with are privacy conscious enough to use Signal and Telegram, I envy you. Nobody I know uses or cares about Signal, they're all happy sitting with Whatsapp so I'm stuck using that as well.
Good luck getting all the people you currently communicate with to switch over, unless they're all security experts or whistleblowers. Network effect's a real party pooper. If only XMPP had taken off the way email did.