Arthur Besse
cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
- 626 Posts
- 1.33K Comments
Mailbox.org lets you keep your own private key.
Every email provider lets you keep your own private key if you do encryption using the interoperable OpenPGP standard using software running on your own computer. Many email providers will recommend that you do exactly that, and will helpfully instruct you about how to do so (eg, the more reputable options in this thread such as migadu.com, mailbox.org, posteo.de, and even fastmail.com all have instructions for how to use some implementation of pgp to encrypt your email).
Meanwhile any company selling non-standard “email encryption” (eg, proton and tuta) which is not compatible with pgp (or, in the corporate world, s/mime, which is also a standard…) is firmly in the snake oil business and should be distrusted and boycotted regardless of which shitty youtubers they’re sponsoring this week.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name@lemmy.world•All I'm offering is the truthEnglish
11·6 days agoFendit, refusing this meme:
who's Fendit?
Maybe some Tamarian from a novel, or maybe made up for an academic paper? The only search engine result i see for “Fendit, refusing the flame” is the paper Picard understanding Darmok: A Dataset and Model for Metaphor-Rich Translation in a Constructed Language which “assembles a Tamarian-English dictionary of utterances from the original episode and several follow-on novels”.
(it seemed appropriate to respond to this meme with some apocryphal Tamarian.)
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name@lemmy.world•It's not a big ship. It's a series of tubes.English
4·7 days agoHe even managed to pull off cardassian with sideburns
Combs did not ever play a Cardassian.
Are you referring to his appearance on Voyager, where he played the vaguely-cardassian-resembling Penk?
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPto
Not the Onion@lemmy.ml•Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage by residents of US-sanctioned countries [pdf]English
9·8 days agoI don’t follow how a useful thing becomes “useless” or “no point” just because millions of people are unjustly denied access to it.
Fwiw Let’s Encrypt was just the first but isn’t actually the only free ACME provider anymore; acme.sh has a list of other providers in its readme and there is another list here. Actalis is Italian apparently; unfortunately I think the rest might be ultimately US-based (ZeroSSL says it’s Austrian but it’s owned by a US company).
It would be nice if some more independent country (eg, China) who already has one or more CAs trusted by all major browsers would step up and start offering free certs to the world.
It’s worth noting that HTTPS is needed not only for its confidentiality and authenticity properties, but also is required by browsers for pages to be allowed to use modern features like WebRTC (needed to have a voice or video call from a web page).
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPto
Not the Onion@lemmy.ml•Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage by residents of US-sanctioned countries [pdf]English
10·8 days agoIt’s much easier said than done. Anyone can start a new Certificate Authority but for it to be useful internationally it (its public key) needs to be built-in to (trusted by) all of the popular web browsers, the largest of which are all controlled by US companies.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPto
Not the Onion@lemmy.ml•Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage by residents of US-sanctioned countries [pdf]English
63·8 days agoeffectively making it useless
do you know what Let’s Encrypt is? it is very far from useless; the system it is a part of is very flawed but it’s how the web works currently and US sanctions restricting access to it is absurd.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Privacy@lemmy.ml•Companies now block older browser versions from accessing their websites!English
1·8 days agoCompanies now block older browser versions
Now? This has been happening since the dawn of the web. At least the screenshot you pasted represents all of the big three rendering engines - it used to be common to see “Internet Explorer version XYZ required”, sometimes with javascript to prevent you from using the site with any other browser (even if in some cases it would actually work fine if you simply spoofed your user agent string).
I have used kinda retro devices to surf the web at times
Most websites became HTTPS-only sometime after the snowden disclosures in 2013.
Over time old versions of TLS have been deprecated and eventually support for them is dropped from browsers and web servers alike. So, a browser from even 15 years ago literally cannot connect to most webservers today.
Planned obsolescence is terrible but it’s a minor factor here: it’s actually dangerous to use even (especially?) a slightly-out-of-date web browser because every new release fixes vulnerabilities which can be exploited to run malicious code on your computer. The planned obsolescence which prevents people from being able to have an up-to-date browser comes mostly from proprietary operating system vendors; to have up-to-date software while continuing to use somewhat older computers you need to use free/libre software.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Solarpunk@slrpnk.net•Foxes moved into a solar farm, and they ended up turning the panels into part of their habitatEnglish
22·10 days agoAI;DR - i literally could not bear to finish reading this slop, and went to find something human-written to confirm if any of it is based in reality. It is, but I wouldn’t assume any details in the slop summary are accurate.
From what i skimmed I think the sole real-world source on the topic which this “article” (if you can call it that) cites is this abstract for a seminar that happened in 2022. An 88-page report from 2019 (San Joaquin Kit Fox Response to the Topaz Solar Farms) has far more information as well as pictures of the foxes and one of the dens the researchers built for them:
sydney morning herald my head
i concur, but a lot of people do start out with Arch afaict
Wait but that means your computer will stay on if the update fails, right?
If it was
&&then the second command would only run if the first command was successful.But @vodka@feddit.org wrote only one
&which instead means the first command will run in the background and the second will execute at the same time… which does not seem like a good idea in this case 😅
Many people do seem to like Arch fwiw
i don’t recommend Arch smh
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Open Source@lemmy.ml•Why are there no hard forks of Firefox, Chromium, WebKit, or other browsers?English
32·10 days agoAs others have said it is a huge amount of work to maintain a fork of such a complicated piece of software.
Especially around security: web browsers constantly process potentially-malicious data, which gives them a large attack surface. Every browser regularly has new vulnerabilities discovered which must be fixed. Hard forking a browser means that, even ignoring any bugs in the new code the fork has added, every time a bug is discovered and fixed in the code they forked from someone needs to analyze the upstream’s fix and port it to the fork. The more they diverge, the more work this is. Failing to do this work lets any malicious website exploit the bugs and install malware on users’ computers.
'Suspicious given the elections going on'

😭
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•How do I re-establish peaceful relations with a family of crows?English
2·14 days agoThey absolutely eat bread
By “they don’t” the person you’re replying to means “they shouldn’t”.
Search for “bread” and “birds” to find thousands of web pages explaining why bread is bad for birds and you should not feed it to them.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto
Programming@programming.dev•Rsync author responds to online outrage about his usage of LLMsEnglish
8·14 days agoOne shot rewriting the whole test suite
tridge’s blog post makes it clear that this was not “one-shotted” at all.
You should read the whole thread
I regret reading it; I’ll assume in good faith that it wasn’t LLM generated but it is ironically as confidently wrong as if it were.
It almost (and should have) lost me when it started by quote-agreeing with someone else saying “rsync was basically done until the maintainer discovered vibecoding” - no, pay attention, it was not “basically done”, there were/are a mountain of CVEs!
But then this got my interest:
This does not “translate tests into pytest” or a unit testing framework, it writes its own testing framework where tests are whole python scripts that redefine basic test functions in every script. Surely there would be a single way to “run rsync and get the results” - nope, well, there is, but then every test file will randomly redefine its own _run_and_capture function.
tridge says he has used pytest on other projects and had good reasons not to use it here; I’m inclined to believe him.
But the notion of every test defining its own way to invoke rsync sounded like a valid criticism, and an easy one to verify, so I checked: It turns out that there is in fact a common
run_rsyncfunction which is used by the majority of the tests. One test defines its own_run_and_capturefunction (which differs in that it writes the output to a file, for reasons I didn’t investigate), and it looks like a few others invoke rsync other ways, but the majority of them use the common function.So, that rambling thread’s sole concrete criticism of rsync’s new python tests turns out to be false.
































Did you not read the post? OP clearly says:
😂