lurch (he/him)

he/him

  • 14 Posts
  • 3.95K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • First of all, fingerprinting isn’t that precise. It’s extremely overrated, because instilling fear gets clicks and views. You can’t use the browser fingerprint for authentication, for example, because even though there are enough bits in theory, they are not random and not unique and a lot of people end up having the same exact fingerprint, for example, if they use company PCs where everyone gets the exact same PC and plugins/extensions are enforced with group policy.

    However, the JS running in the browser is limited and sandboxed. It cannot do everything and can’t access everything. But among the few things it can actually do is prompting for the timezone offset and transferring it to a permitted site, like the one the JS app is running on. If you feel stalked by ad companies fingerprinting you and you have JS enabled, that’s unfortunately something you have to accept, unless you run your browser in an environment with a different timezone, but then all times on sites you visit and in its history, will appear off. For example, in Linux, you could achieve that by setting the TZ environment variable in the environment you start the browser in. If that environment is a shell script, it can be temporary and just for the browser while it’s running. A script could even be made to pick a random TZ on every browser start, to confuse fingerprinters.



  • I found my Creative Nomad MuVo MP3-Player in a drawer recently. I haven’t used it in many years. I popped a rechargeable AAA battery in and it still worked like new. It’s basically a USB drive, but if you insert it into its battery compartment, it can play back music files stored on it.

    Since I use smartphones, I use them now and don’t need an extra gadged for that. Still cool it lived way past its era and even retained its data, even though people told me mass storage wouldn’t be good for backups because it’s supposed to lose data after a some years. Didn’t happen here 👍











  • Yeah, I think greatness is not just a binary thing, it’s a wide spectrum. I’m from EU and from my outside look at the US in all those decades, it seemed to become greater all the time. Even if you look at earlier US history. There were always problems, but they got solved. It seemed to have peaked with Obama.

    The slogan “Make America Great Again” implies all this progress wasn’t great and I think that’s just wrong. It’s a big blatant lie.

    Human brains often romanticise the past. We forget the intensity of hardships and suffering quicker than the nice and fun moments.

    I think they are trying to take advantage of that, as well as create a romantic fantasy past for people who weren’t around back then.

    The reality is Americas past had been worse. It was evolving. Now they’re trampling that progress with backwards ideologies.