Yeah Librewolf is amazing. I dialed some if the ootb settings back for usability, but all the “new” stuff Mozilla adds is filtered right back out upstream, so I never even see it.

But… That would force them to provide a great user experience in order to retain users!! That’s an unacceptable burden on the largest companies in the world!!

Yeah. Honestly. For platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, mandate chronological feeds of only people you have followed, paginated at like 30.

They saved lifes.

Glad to have cleared that up for you 👍

It’s just a helper. It’s a way for your calendar to ask “uhhh… Should I already know of any calendars…?” and the service going “oh actually yeah, the user configured their email account, hold on, here’s the corresponding calendar”.

That’s just basic functionality. Maybe what’s tripping you up is that it’s a separate service? Because I assume you have nothing against inputting your email into a mail client and a calendar separately.

If so, then for one, it’s not really a difference if the mail app stores this into or the service does; and second, it’s a good thing to have this standardized into a single purpose built service, rather than having each app reimplement this stuff.

CPU and RAM usage is so negligible it’s laughable.

IDK.

It seems like you read something about personal data in the service description and just jumped to the conclusion that this is something nefarious.

How exactly is it bloatware though? Not a KDE user myself, just had a look at the wiki. Seems it’s just a convenience utility to allow you to not have to enter the same things into multiple applications?

This is VERY different from pre-installed apps in your start menu that collect and sell info about you…

Yeah, thinking more about it, I don’t think the term “bloatware” (as it is commonly used) applies here at all.

How do I completely disable it forever?

To answer your question: sudo systemctl mask <servicename>.service

The much more common disable just disables autostart; masking will point the service file at /dev/null, which makes it impossible to load or start the service, even when other services or apps (like the clock widget someone mentioned in the comments) request it.

Neovim, configured entirely through nixvim. I always liked neovim, but it’s never been as incredibly stable as now with nixvim.

Main/only IDE both in private and at work. Can’t ever go back, muscle memory has ensured that.

I think the text is somewhat dubious in its arguments, but this (and the arguments built on this assertion) is just plain wrong:

[Signals servers have] a few important pieces of data;

Message dates and times Message senders and recipients (via phone number identifiers)

Signal clients implement the Pond protocol. As a result, Signals servers know who a message is for (obviously, how else do you get the message) but cannot know who it is FROM.

I’ve been playing around with implementing a secure/private messenger demo for myself, and have been consistently impressed with how privacy preserving Signal is when reading their papers and code. I wish it was selfhostable, but apart from that, it’s great.

The server would be NICE to be OSS, but ultimately, privacy breaches are prevented client/protocol side.

That ks for sharing this, this is fascinating.

Maybe the underlying rule is: the more you know about something, the more you are aware of its flaws, making the alternatives you know less about more attractive?

This doesn’t make a call to government servers.

The app (or desktop application BTW, incl. Linux) reads your national ID’s NFC tag, once. When you need to prove your age, the app locally computes a zkp that only tells the site “at least 18yo yes/no”.

Note that every EU country has a form of national ID, and the digital capabilities of these IDs are already used for a bunch of stuff (e.g. taxes, bank account creation,…). This doesn’t worsen the privacy situation for EU citizens, but instead ensures that no privacy-unfriendly solutions emerge.

If you use nixos, you basically have to know/learn/use day-to-day the nix language.

nixpkgs are written using nix the language, using concepts mostly familiar from just using nixos.

Basically everyone using nixos is capable of contributing packages.

Ah, sorry. https://repology.org/repositories/graphs

Just gonna leave this here

Is this some sort of public tracker issue I’m too private trackers and Usenet only to understand?

Funny, I’ve also already read that 😄 Good blog and article.

What blog?

Ha, thanks, I’d already read that. And I do, mostly, agree; the OMEMO implementation is not great both from the security perspective discussed in the post, as well as the UX (not being able to decrypt old messages on new devices at all).

That being said, I primarily want a selfhosted, federated messenger which also takes privacy and security seriously, and at least for the former, XMPP is really refreshingly good.

Ugh. I’ve always liked Matrix (and was not bothered too much by the metadata leaks because my home server was not federated anyways), but after noticing some issues and finally reading up on the actual protocol spec a couple of weeks ago… oof. Yeah. No.

Set up XMPP for now. Works really well and the protocol seems so much saner. Unfortunately, it too has some annoyances that are unacceptable to me in the long term. I’m this close to saying “fuck it” and wasting the next couple of years of my life on a new protocol that no one is gonna use. (Cue the XKCD here.)

I mean, how can we feel superior if we are not wasting huge amounts of time setting things up!?

Why, by boasting that it’s so easy, just look at that, it is only two options you need to set thanks to the 80 custom modules I’ve written to abstract the abstractions from nixpkgs!

I WISH I could put an /s here, but I cannot.

Ehm… I’m also on Nixos and I’d say it’s super trivial.

services.openssh = {
  enable = true;
  settings = {
    PasswordAuthentication = false;
    PermitRootLogin = "no";
  };
};

users.users.<name>.openssh.authorizedKeys.keys = [ list of pubkeys ideally read from file in repo ];