WordPress makes useless updates that just break the site in SeaMonkey for no reason.
This has prevented me from logging in with SeaMonkey because instead of the log in page, you’ll just see the WordPress logo.
Thankfully, PaleFills 1.27 is out now and it rolls some fixes for WordPress.com needlessly breaking things.
It’s ridiculous when I have to stop using in SeaMonkey because they make a pointless change that brings more GoogleShit in when standard Web functionality (which works in Chrome too!) could have been left alone.
Roy Schestowitz recently posted about Google’s new initiative to finish destroying the open Web.
It mentions that most of the growth in Web pages today are computer-generated spew designed to SEO-bomb Google and they really are pretty useless.
In the late 90s and early 2000s we had things like dmoz which was basically a human-curated index of things that real people wrote.
I was going to write an entire article about how Fedora bombed me with 10 updates to Firefox in a month where Mozilla only made three releases, and one of those releases was for Windows because malware that’s been spying on Windows Firefox users since 2016 finally crashed it, and then another update for Windows because Chinese “anti-virus” was crashing it.
So I had to get 10 whole RPMs downloaded and unpacked because Mozilla is bumping the version number uselessly and Fedora keeps shitting out one patch releases where the patch itself is quite broken and then they go back and patch it three more times.
So I finally yanked it out with dnf remove firefox and installed Firefox 115 ESR from the Mozilla tarball and set it up with their instructions for a systemwide install and then unpacked a firefox.desktop from a Fedora RPM that sits in my taskbar with extras like “New Private Window”.
Then I sat down and turned off and hid the DRM and spyware (like “Firefox Suggest”) all over again, and installed my add-ons. Hopefully, I get less update churn this way.
ESR is like the “slow ring” that people who don’t want to go crazy use that Mozilla doesn’t want to admit is an option. To even find it on their site requires real work because Mozilla only blares loudly that there’s a Windows and Mac, and then in itty bitty font there’s a link called “Other Systems and Languages”.
It’s like the slow ring build of Windows that Microsoft doesn’t just randomly chuck untested broken updates into your system with a manure spreader to see if they’re legit for the corporate users that pay them more.
(Microsoft apparently used to have like 10,000 paid testers to figure out what was wrong with Windows before it shipped and now they just use Joe Sixpack’s computer he got at Walmart and if they break it every month somehow, it’s his problem. Anyway, this is certainly one reason I use Linux.)
Modern software and the modern Web just do things you already did 20 years ago, only 1,000 times bigger and with more ads and spyware.
For the most part, I think Fedora 38 works quite well. It’s been stable to the point of boring for a while everywhere but Firefox. Firefox is a very big wart these days. It’s getting harder to set up than an entire operating system and half of that is turning off visual eyesores and spyware and adware.
Jamie “Linux is terrible because I tried audio 20 years ago.” Zawinski recently published yet another article that should be instructive for anyone thinking they’ll use a Mac as more than a gussied up Chromebook in which sshd randomly disconnects for reasons unknown. Maybe he can report it to Apple and they’ll help him. That was a joke, haha, fat chance.
Apple has Telemetry that bypasses your VPN to spy on you and phone home to Apple literally every time you click an icon. Ahhh, privacy by Apple, I’d recognize it anywhere.
At this point, the Mac is definitely just Windows 11 with less software.
The Google plan for “Web Environment Integrity” is Orwellian as hell, and proves that we need to focus on alternatives to the Web. They use the terms “integrity” and “security” to mean that the user has no meaningful control over the program and what it does.
I myself rarely use anything that can’t be loaded in SeaMonkey, and usually SeaMonkey with JavaScript off. I even read my news in it using text with a Gemini proxy and I read my email with SeaMonkey Mail. It’s had roughly the same interface since the late 90s. It’s got a better calendar now.
JavaScript is already too much of a security vulnerability and there’s too much on most Web sites.
SeaMonkey is inherently faster and more efficient than Firefox and Chrome, among the reasons being that it doesn’t use “multi-vector assault mode” to deal with Web crap, but it will try to load JavaScript if you don’t use NoScript and then it can turn into a disaster because you’ll see what Web “developers” are cramming onto your computer, stealing your CPU time, to run.
The upfront cost of dealing with multi-process is too high if all you want to use the browser for is to “read documents”. Not for binary-shit and “Virtual Machine”-type Web “apps”. I have applications on my computer, Free Software applications.
It would be a huge step backwards to rely on someone running a program on their server so that I can edit documents or sit down and “paint” something or do audio work. In the time it takes to communicate with the server, my computer can be done with the work already.
It doesn’t appear to slow down a modern browser because they just take all eight of your cores to run ads, NSA scripts to install UEFI malware implants, and fingerprinters. Om nom nom thank you hoooman….. *Burp!*
People think I’m some sort of aging hipster or something but I just don’t like my email program changing buttons around pointlessly like Thunderbird did again.
When I have things to do, I don’t want to stop and figure out how to use the email program again.
I learned an email program 25 years ago and why should I change because they suck? (“Michael Bolton? Like the singer!? For my money it just does not get any better than when he sings When a Man Loves a Woman!”)
*Matthew Garrett triggered*
I do most of my browsing in a VPN that uses a server in Sweden or the Netherlands. Sometimes I use Tor (without JavaScript and with ublock origin) on top of that.
Proton VPN mentioned an “observatory” project to demonstrate who was signing up due to government censorship of the local Internet access. In the US you mainly have to worry about surveillance.
The US does indeed have a “Deep State”. It’s called the federal bench, and primarily the Supreme Court.
What Donald Trump left behind is a Frankenstein’s Monster with bits and pieces of the Third Reich and the Taliban.
Even if we assumed that President Biden was a thoroughly good man that wanted us to live in a Free country (he’s not), Trump left behind these assholes on the courts as sort of a “Revolutionary Guard” to prevent any sort of personal liberty or Freedom, and to keep the place turning into as much of a hellhole as possible until the Republicans gain control of the elected government again.
The coup succeeded, as people who lose their reproductive freedom, for example, now find out at some great cost. They catch people whose crime was bodily autonomy and wanting to finish high school and throw them in jail in places like Nebraska, because they use Windows, Facebook, iPhones, and Google.
Thinking that you can have privacy and liberty without Free Software is a “fuck around and find out” situation now, in America.
Future historians will likely look back at images like this young girl being taken to jail and see the police enforcing laws targeting vulnerable women as something comparable to the beginning of guards at Auschwitz or Treblinka working for the Nazi regime and cashing the paychecks.
All the while, the “left coast” tech companies being an indispensable part of hunting them down like dogs using the paper trails they leave while they use proprietary operating systems, and apps such as Facebook and Google.
“Villains who twirl their mustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged.”
-Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation
People like Matthew Garrett helped to trap victims of the Police State in Microsoft Windows, where they are being persistently spied upon by a multitude of malicious Windows functions that cannot all be terminated.
Right now, there are actually some computers that are trapping the user on Windows with “secure boot” and other maliciousness, sometimes pretending to be bugs, and when you call them out then Mr. Garrett will defend the bad guys and attack you, defame you, like he has done to me multiple times when I have successfully pushed back on them (Lenovo, Samsung, Foxconn…Microsoft uses companies like this as a liability condom so they have this sort of plausible deniability), although for the time being many just make it damned hard to kill.
The situation is rapidly moving in the wrong direction, and Matthew Garrett actually tricked the Free Software Foundation into giving him an award for helping the enemies of Freedom and Free Society.
Matthew Garrett may not be the State hauling a scared young girl to prison for an abortion, but Matthew Garrett helped design the “digital concentration camp” (“Secure Boot”), which helps enforce Windows usage that the State uses to prove its case in court.
The State does not want one system to spy on you, it wants dozens so that you won’t slip them all. Matthew Garrett is a collaborator in this sense of the word.
Matthew Garrett is a rather awful person, you know. When he’s not busy as a henchman for the Republic(ans) of Gilead, he’s busy harassing the TechRights IRC channel.
He goes there digging for dirt and calling people “transphobe” or something even though he “definitely said some transphobic shit, like 20 years ago” as a grown adult.
His latest antics are to set up sockpuppet accounts and repeatedly post about being a “dope dealing n******” (direct quote…I think this behavior is appalling) or as his other sock, he keeps disrupting the room and saying things like he wants to do lines of cocaine off of Roy’s wife’s boobs. (And also, butt, apparently.)
He can’t say this stuff as Matthew Garrett, because he has to publicly say things like he was shocked about the “Big Boobies” scandal where his friends at Microsoft put boob references in their code and shoved it into Linux. So he uses a sock-puppet.
When the sock-puppet deviates from things like cocaine off of boobies, it speaks using the same sentence structures, typing style, arguments, calling everyone a transphobe, etc. that Matthew Garrett (mjg59_) does. So it’s not even like he’s trying to make a huge secret out of it being him.
We usually just refer to him as a Conference Pervert because he told Roy that if you don’t go to open source conferences for the sex with strangers then “Oh, man, you’re missing out!”.
I was recently at a convention in Indianapolis, and several hundred people showed up and had fun and respected boundaries, and then we had one Conference Pervert (not Garrett) that had to grope an underage girl by the boobs near the swimming pool.
When people like this show up, the hotel may throw the entire convention and everyone who showed up there to have fun and behave themselves, out. And everyone who behaved just loses the money they spent.
Not Garrett himself, but some other Microsoft trolls, accused Roy’s wife of being a “mail order bride”.
It’s what they have to go to when someone isn’t openly flaunting their corruption, like Garrett does. Garrett actually seems to enjoy flaunting disgusting and anti-social behaviors, especially about sex.
Shifting gears again, today my mother’s Facebook account got “hacked” (I guess someone guessed the password in their very Apple-like void of security.)
They started posting all sorts of smut and obscenity for her very conservative church friends to see.
Had she done what I told her to do, what I did, and deleted her account, she wouldn’t have had hijackers spamming her church friends with hardcore porn.
The media likes to use the term “user” strangely. You don’t use these things. They are being used against you. ⬆