jish @jish@mastodon.technology

Don't 👏🏻 connect 👏🏻 your 👏🏻 TV 👏🏻 to 👏🏻 the 👏🏻 Internet!

Ever! Buy something - a Roku, an Apple TV, a PS4, an Xbox, a Raspberry Pi running Plex, *anything* - and use that as your video source. Don't ever use the TV's own Internet-connect apps. First, they're guaranteed to spy on you. All sly TV brands do this as far as I can tell. Second, they *suck* in comparison with what you get from a set top box.

Just don't do it!

https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1583755244

Today I interviewed the inventor of Pinafore, @nolan. We had a blast. Pinafore is a web client for mastodon (our favorite website platform).

These days everyone seems to be rather busy being anti-this and anti-that and anti-everything-in-between.

You know what? I'd rather people tell me what they actually stand *for*, not everything they are *against*.

I don't think it can have been more than about a year since I discovered Firefox's "Reader" mode, and in that relatively short time I have gotten to the point that, when I'm on my phone at least, I instinctively check for whether the icon is available on every single site and hit it the moment I see it, even if the page in question hasn't yet loaded/rendered to the point where I can even assess it's readability. I just do it, because I have literally never once seen a single case where switching to Reader mode made the site *less* usable on a mobile. Not even once. I guess this shouldn't surprise me - nobody would have gone through the trouble of writing the feature if it didn't work well. But what does it say that we have gotten to the point where its of real practical value to automate the process of routinely throwing away the entire product of the web design industry?

I made a thing! 🎉
https://github.com/nileshtrivedi/better

It's a browser extension that recommends "better" alternative products and services via in-page popups, based on community-curated lists. Available for all Chromium and Firefox-based browsers.

We live in times where the distributions costs are hampering the adoption of higher-quality (which could mean security, privacy, ethics, local etc) products. I am hoping that this extension can eventually be managed by orgs like IFF, EFF or FSF.

Web design is a lot more easy when you're not trying to sell people crap they don't need.

So many people saying they're switching from Firefox. Won't this only make the problem worse?

If you're switching to Brave or qutebrowser or UnGoogled Chromium or something, you're only strengthening Google's monopoly. If you're switching to a Webkit-based browser like Epiphany, you're shifting the monopoly towards Safari, whose parent company doesn't consider the Web a priority.

That Mozilla has bad management doesn't change the fact that Firefox is the most viable option for the open web.

Apple doubles down on iOS 14 tracking privacy as Facebook panics

https://9to5mac.com/2020/08/11/apple-ios-14-privacy-tracking-facebook/

Here's a link to the talk!

https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200729_1300_Saving_Hacking_From_the_Zaibatsus.mp4

UX vs. Human nature