Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 10

One of the problems with the modern corporate web is the constant surveillance tracking your activity from site to site to site (mostly used for targeted advertising). Even if you’re willing to see ads, you may not want to be tracked so thoroughly.

Originally, EFF’s extension for blocking trackers was useful mainly because it would automatically detect tracking activity and block it. Eventually someone figured out how to detect that and use it for fingerprinting, so now the extension uses a pre-trained list (updated periodically) instead. Though you can choose to turn auto-learning back on if you want to.

With most browsers offering to block third-party cookies these days, and some specifically including tracking protection and/or ad blocking, the obvious question is: what does Privacy Badger offer that just changing my settings on Firefox or Vivaldi – or installing an ad blocker – doesn’t?

1. It automatically configures settings like turning off Chrome’s misleadingly-named privacy sandbox and turning on Global Privacy Control, even in browsers that don’t have built-in support. (more about that below)

2. It replaces embedded social media widgets, including share buttons and embedded posts, with placeholders. So you can choose whether to enable a Facebook post or TikTok video on some random article or blog post, instead of letting Meta or ByteDance track you as soon as you open the page. (Brave picked up this idea too, but only does it for Facebook, LinkedIn and “X.”)

3. It can still protect browsers like Chromium that only let you block cookies and not other tracking methods like local storage.

The widget placeholders and GPC support are the main reasons I still use it with Firefox and Vivaldi.

Plus, it works on mobile Firefox too!

Wait, what’s GPC?

Global Privacy Control is an automated way to tell websites that you don’t want them to sell your data instead of writing to them one by one. It’s mainly useful in jurisdictions like California that require companies to honor this sort of opt-out.

Some sites will honor it silently. Some will tell you they got the message. I’ve noticed grocery stores including Vons/Safeway and Ralphs/Kroger showing a banner on the first visit in a browser session letting me know that they got the signal and will honor it.

On the flip side, Yahoo shows me a pop-up asking me to please turn it off, I’m missing out of so many things they could do for me if I just agreed to let them sell my data.

Firefox and Brave have settings to enable GPC. Privacy Badger is one of several extensions that can add support for Chromium, Vivaldi, Edge etc.

Sometimes you go back and watch something years later and it’s better than you remember.

Sometimes it’s not.

We’ve started re-watching Star Trek: The Next Generation from the beginning, and “Planet of the Jogging Bimbos” falls solidly into the latter category.

The arbitrariness of the law, the fact that no one on the planet thinks to tell anyone about capital punishment until the second visit, the fact that the crew thinks it’s a great idea to send 14-year-old Wesley down to a planet where casual sex among adults is like a handshake without checking how their kids interact first, the general vapid characterization of the Edo, the lack of urgency in the editing, the shallowness of the argument and “solution,” all add up to something that was trying to present a moral dilemma, but has all the depth of a word problem on an exam with a lingerie picture next to it to spice it up.

Tip of a Hat

That said, Picard’s attempts to find a diplomatic solution don’t bother me as much as they did back when I was (checks airdate) 11, and frankly if the episode had taken time to really dig into ways they might actually negotiate with the Edo and their “god” – instead of making sure there was enough skin visible in the background on the planet scenes, and then just beaming up while saying that justice can’t be absolute, it might yet have transcended the ridiculous premise. As it is, the starship side of the plot does give them a reason not to just beam Wesley out of there and sort things out afterward.

I did appreciate the sarcasm in the “oh, you must be more advanced than us, so tell us how advanced your justice is” remarks at one point, though it’s not clear in the delivery. And it is amusing to watch the interaction between Troi and Riker during this season, before they’ve decided they definitely aren’t getting back together…knowing that eventually they do.

Any Hat

Yes, “Planet of the Jogging Bimbos” was a contemporary nickname for the episode. Strangely, searching for that exact phrase online only turns up one result on Google or DuckDuckGo, a forum discussion from 2007…almost half as long ago now as the original airdate. (And about as old as “The Apple” was when this episode aired, give or take a bit) I don’t know if the nickname was just local to the fannish circles my family moved in and didn’t make the jump to online usage, or if it’s yet another example of search engines not finding things anymore.

Debian isn’t my first choice Linux distribution for either desktop or servers, but it’s my second choice for both.

Upsides: More reliable than Ubuntu, easier to install than Arch, a more stable base than Fedora, more standard in its libraries than Alpine. Debian is one of the classic distros, and is the basis for multiple modern variations. And it runs on a wide range of hardware architectures, with first-tier support for ARM (both 32bit and aarch64), RISC-V, and more in addition to the more common x86_64.

Downsides: Slower to update software than Fedora or Arch, bigger than Alpine. Though the former can be mitigated using Flatpak or Snap (which have their own issues).

I still prefer Alpine for servers and highly-constrained virtual machines because it’s so tiny, but if I’m going to be running something that requires glibc, or I need the wider array of software available from a more “mainstream” distro, I prefer the stability of Debian rather than Ubuntu or Fedora, and I’d rather not set up Arch again if I can avoid it.

Probably worth noting that IT at my current job also switched from Debian to Ubuntu and back to Debian for our servers.

For desktop use, I still prefer Fedora, since the faster release cycle means that the included software and environment are kept more up to date. Ubuntu used to be my second choice on desktop, but lately I’ve been tinkering with several distros as desktop VMs, and it’s not Ubuntu I keep going back to: it’s Debian. Ubuntu feels half-baked these days. Debian stable feels solid, even if I’m running slightly older versions of software (usually with security fixes backported, at least).

I’m not sure what distribution I’d recommend to a novice these days, but I’d definitely be more inclined to recommend Debian than Arch or Alpine.

The comedy about a robot coming to life and the humans trying to catch him or help him escape holds up better than I expected! The human leads are as engaging as the robot, the jokes are (mostly) still funny, and the story holds up under internal logic (if not real-world logic). The villains are cardboard (the trigger-happy army division and the selfish jerk ex-boyfriend), but that’s just fine for this type of comedy.

The only real problem is Ben, the one-dimensional comic relief Indian programmer played by a white actor in brownface. At least he’s shown to be both intelligent and sympathetic (and in the sequel he’s actually written as a person).

For Chrome, Google takes the Chromium project as a base and adds more connections to Google services. Ungoogled Chromium goes the other direction: it removes everything that connects to Google services (including the “Ad Topics” that would track you in the browser). This is great for privacy! But it also removes things like Safe Browsing and syncing. (I have gotten bookmark sync working with Floccus.)

You also have to jump through hoops to install extensions, since it doesn’t trust the Chrome Web Store! You have to either install and update extensions manually, or manually install another extension that will connect to the web store. The bookmarklet on that page is a convenient way to download an extension from its store page, and I’m copying it here for easy reference:

javascript:location.href='https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx?response=redirect&acceptformat=crx2,crx3&prodversion='+(navigator.appVersion.match(/Chrome\/(\S+)/)[1])+'&x=id%'+'3D'+(document.querySelector('a[href^="./detail"][href$="/report"]').pathname.match(/([^\/]+)\/report$/)[1])+'%'+'26installsource%'+'3Dondemand%'+'26uc';

A few quirks: It’s crashed a couple of times even in the short time I’ve been using it, and it’s run out of memory on lower-spec virtual machines. And (this is weirdly specific) it doesn’t show lines while adding a new way to OpenStreetMap using the online editor.

Otherwise everything in my Chromium review applies here too.

Availability

Packages are available for various Linux distributions, usually in the user-maintained repositories like AUR for Arch or COPR for Fedora, plus a Flatpak, Guix and NixOS. Some, including the Flatpak, are available for both x86_64 and aarch64, while others are Intel/AMD only and lack ARM support (though you could compile it yourself if you really want to). Homebrew provides a package for macOS, and Windows installers are on GitHub. The GitHub page also lists an Android port, but it doesn’t seem to be maintained – the latest release is three years old.

In addition to the extra steps for installing and updating extensions in the first place, the Flatpak has the usual issues connecting to KeePassXC.

Bottom Line

Ungoogled Chromium is a good option to have. But it’s in a weird middle zone. It leaks less data than Chromium or Chrome, but so does, say, Vivaldi. It’s lighter weight too, but not as lightweight as Falkon. For me, the gains aren’t quite enough to make up for the rough edges and missing features. YMMV, of course.