Yes, absolutely! I’m in a renter’s mindset so I didn’t even think of that.

In theory, the only difference between an electric heater and your computer, as far as actual heat goes, is the dispersal pattern. They will generate exactly the same heat: 1W of heat per 1W of electricity used. That’s thermodynamics for you!

You said:

The flat was kept not quite as warm as previous years

So I don’t think it makes sense to assign any of the savings to using your PC vs your usual electric heaters. It’s because you kept your place a little cooler, which makes an absolutely huge difference. When heating in winter, every additional degree of air temperature is more costly than the last, since heat loss is relative to the temperature differential between indoors and outdoors (i.e. a warmer room will lose more heat to the outdoors than a cooler room, so you need to generate more heat to maintain it).

This sounds to me a lot like dieting. Most of the time, the success of a diet has less to do with the actual diet and more to do with the fact that dieting has made you more mindful and changed your behavior in other ways.

The two biggest things you can do to save money on heating in winter are:

1. Keep your place cooler. Wear warm socks, long sleeves, etc. instead.
2. Improve insulation. Plastic window insulation kits are cheap and easy to install/remove. For doorways, you can get adhesive insulating foam to fill side gaps and a slide-on door sweep to cover any bottom gaps.

I agree. Of all the UI crimes committed by Microsoft, this one wouldn’t crack the top 100. But I sure wouldn’t call it great.

I can’t remember the last time I used the start menu to put my laptop to sleep. However, Windows Vista was released 20 years ago. At that time, most Windows users were not on laptops. Windows laptops were pretty much garbage until the Intel Core series, which launched a year later. In my offices, laptops were still the exception until the 2010s.

Google as an organization is simply dysfunctional. Everything they make is either some cowboy bullshit with no direction, or else it’s death by committee à la Microsoft.

Google has always had a problem with incentives internally, where the only way to get promoted or get any recognition was to make something new. So their most talented devs would make some cool new thing, and then it would immediately stagnate and eventually die of neglect as they either got their promotion or moved on to another flashy new thing. If you’ve ever wondered why Google kills so many products (even well-loved ones), this is why. There’s no glory in maintaining someone else’s work.

But now I think Google has entered a new phase, and they are simply the new Microsoft – too successful for their own good, and bloated as a result, with too many levels of management trying to justify their existence. I keep thinking of this article by a Microsoft engineer around the time Vista came out, about how something like 40 people were involved in redesigning the power options in the start menu, how it took over a year, and how it was an absolute shitshow. It’s an eye-opening read: https://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html

This is really cool! I like the idea of pen and paper as a supported UI. I’ve never found handwriting on a touchscreen to be an effective or enjoyable experience, across the myriad devices I’ve tried it on (including an iPad with an Apple Pencil). And app-based form entry is often a drag. By the time I’ve even opened the app and clicked the “new entry” button, I often could’ve been done already with a simple pen and paper.

IPFS content IDs (CID) are a hash of the tree of chunks. Changes to chunk size can also change the hash!

I don’t understand why this is a deal-breaker. It seems like you could accomplish what you describe within IPFS simply by committing to a fixed chunk size. That’s valid within IPFS, right?

Is it important to use any specific hashing algorithm(s)? If not, then isn’t an IPFS CID (with a fixed, predetermined chunk size) a stable hash algorithm in and of itself?

Disgusting and unsurprising.

Most web admins do not care. I’ve lost count of how many sites make me jump through CAPTCHAS or outright block me in private browsing or on VPN. Most of these sites have no sensitive information, or already know exactly who I am because I am already authenticating with my username and password. It’s not something the actual site admins even think about. They click the button, say “it works on my machine!” and will happily blame any user whose client is not dead-center average.

Enter username, but first pass this CAPTCHA.

Enter password, but first pass this second CAPTCHA.

Here’s another CAPTCHA because lol why not?

Some sites even have their RSS feed behind Cloudflare. And guess what that means? It means you can’t fucking load it in a typical RSS reader. Good job!

The web is broken. JavaScript was a mistake. Return to monke gopher.

Fuck Cloudflare.

Defaults matter. Every time you open a private browsing window, that’s what you’re going to get. Every time you use LibreWolf or Firefox Focus or any other browser that disables/clears cookies by default (which is a good practice), that’s what you’re going to get.

I don’t want anything I search for going into OpenAI. Ever. I’d feel fine about this if they hosted their own models.

Thank you for the correction.

Sender and recipient can’t be encrypted e2e. How would the server know to whom deliver the email if those are encrypted and not visible to it?

“End-to-end” is a bit of a misnomer in this case. Both Proton and Tuta apply encryption after receiving email in the general case, since email is not sent with E2EE across different providers (in general). Both Proton and Tuta can see your incoming email (body and all) from external servers in the general case — they just don’t store it that way. (This is different when sending email between two Proton users or two Tuta users.)

Proton does not use end-to-end encryption for email headers. That includes the subject lines, senders/recipients, and other potentially sensitive information.

Tuta uses E2EE for email contents AND headers.

Consider for a moment what someone with access to your contacts and subject lines would know about you. For me personally, they would know which political campaigns and causes I donate to, and when. They would know when I see various doctors, and who they are. They would know my travel dates and destinations. They would know what newsletters I read (many of which are also political). Etc.

“One mistake” would be if he didn’t double-down on it, and if Proton addressed their customers’ concerns in any meaningful way. Instead, they deleted posts and are now withdrawing from the community entirely, and directing users to three of the worst corporate hell-holes on the internet.

Almost certainly, yes.

People on Mastodon are not happy about those statements, and called Proton out on it relentlessly with every post Proton made. This is Proton running away with their tail between their legs, back to platforms where they have more control and/or are already full of right-wing nutjobs.

If anyone’s looking for secure email, look at tuta.com instead. The email service is very similar in terms of UX and offers better encryption. They don’t offer the rest of Proton’s suite, but…maybe that’s a good thing? I mean, do you want to get locked into an ecosystem?

Generally true. You would want to use DNS-over-TLS (DoT) or DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) to be sure your DNS queries are encrypted in transit.

Apple has three realistic options:

1. Submit to the UK’s demands and grant them a backdoor to encrypted backups.
2. Disable encrypted backups in the UK.
3. Leave the UK market entirely.

They went with #2, which is probably the least user-hostile option available.

From 1500GMT on Friday, any Apple user in the UK attempting to turn it on has been met with an error message.

Existing users’ access will be disabled at a later date.

I am very interested in seeing what the UX around this will be. Ideally, they should give users direct notice well in advance, so they have time to plan a migration or mitigation. Of course, Apple makes it basically impossible to perform a full backup through any mechanism except iCloud, so…one more example of how vendor lock-in is inherently a security and privacy risk.

Neat, I didn’t know that. I currently use Joplin this way, synced across my devices with Syncthing. Joplin also supports directly syncing to Google Drive or Dropbox (with optional encryption).

I’m sure there will be workarounds.

I think there are plenty of people who would be pirates if it were more convenient, but I suspect the point of diminishing returns for legislation has already been passed. If you’re savvy and dedicated enough to use a VPN in the first place, then this probably won’t stop you. Non-tech-savvy people are already turned off of torrents for half a dozen different reasons.

DNS, though? That will block a lot of people from accessing things like Z-library, which is currently easy enough to access for anyone who knows how to use Google.

China’s measures have been largely successful, unfortunately. It’s still possible to VPN out, but it’s a risk a lot of people are unwilling to take since it could realistically get them in trouble. I’ve lost contact with some friends in China because we have no shared platforms and the increasing blocking measures over the past 10 years finally passed their tolerance threshold.

I guess I could figure out how to use iMessage, which AFAIK is the only end-to-end encrypted messaging service that still works (or at least the only moderately popular one). Makes me wonder how secure it really is if China hasn’t banned it…

I’m not (currently) in a position where others would find it desirable to do so. Potentially in the future?

It’s hard to imagine a scenario where this would happen and your voice would not otherwise be available. For example, if you went into politics, then you’d be a target, but you’d already be speaking in public all the time. It only takes a few seconds of a voice sample to do this nowadays and it’ll only get easier from here.

Maybe just make a point to educate your family and friends on the risk of voice cloning so they don’t fall for phone scams.

The article keeps referring to “the sport”, but never mentions any particular sport. I don’t think I’ve ever seen “the sport” used to refer to sports in general before. Is this a regional language difference, like how Americans would say “go to the hospital” while Brits would say “go to hospital”?

“Let”

As if anyone asked for this.

Oh nice! I did a quick search for forks but didn’t find that, so thanks for linking. I’ll check it out!