I’m really liking this, thank you for the suggestion.

@grue@lemmy.world has whored his karma already, he isn’t answering these additional questions which call into question his false assumptions.

Yes, we could have an internet without businesses. See here.

Funny, we get more complaints about DuckDuckGo browser than anything else, and that’s one of the few we don’t test on. I know this because I make it a point to have someone from CS tell me about consistent pain points users are having. I wonder how many complaints about Firefox not working your customer service team is getting daily and you just don’t hear about it because they’ve been told to tell users “just say Firefox isn’t a supported browser and to try installing Chrome.”

You should ask someone in CS. Whichever agent bullshits the least (not the manager) - you might learn something.

Almost 3/10 people accessing your sites are using Firefox. All those “images not loading right or whatever” are probably blatant to them, making them think “wow, what an absolute shit website.”

3 out of 10.

Those were your words – you said you would notice a shift like that and adapt, which to me is saying you think you could undo the harm once you noticed it. Maybe you worded it wrong.

This sounds like the kind of thing a Zoomer who has no memory of life before the Internet – or the Internet of the '90s before the advertisers got a hold of it, for that matter – would write.

To clear that up, I’m coming up on 40. We got our first family computer with a 56k modem in 1995. I’m not saying ads are a good thing, I’m telling you that 99% of websites are ad-powered.

Back then companies had websites as a novelty, or way to find information about their company. All the newspapers that had websites were simply putting their major articles on the internet as a bonus, and as a business strategy to push subscriptions for their physical paper. Most everyone still purchased a subscription to their physical newspapers and magazines. Now, basically nobody has a newspaper or magazine subscription unless it’s online, but most people still don’t… The tech savvy use archive.ph and similar, and the old and non tech-savvy use their 3-article limit and might buy a month subscription to read an article they really have to read, or maybe even a year like the old days, but most don’t pay for a subscription at all, and that’s where the ads come in.

However, since social media has become the dominant news-spreading mechanism, many or most don’t even read articles. They read headlines and talk shit or ask questions in the comments section, of things which were answered in the article. In the 90s those people would be reading the articles as something to do, and to stay somewhat informed. Today, their smartphone would ding or buzz before they finished the first article.

P.S. I’m Degoogled and use Graphene without GSF on my main profile so I use Aurora, Neo Store, and F-Droid. Currently using Boost installed with Aurora. What’s a good recommendation for a good, fast, FOSS Lemmy client that doesn’t show ads that I can get with F-Droid?

Yes, Edge has transitioned to using their own forked version of Chromium under the hood, but they make enough changes that it’s necessary to test for. It’s not like Cromite that takes Chromium and removes some things and change configs. They modify core components of the engine itself.

Those are not businesses. They are free projects which a dedicated person (or group of people) donate their time and energy to produce.

Wikipedia has their semi-annual donation drives and many (not most, but enough worth mentioning) FOSS devs are salaried by companies like Google and Microsoft and are allowed to work on patches to out-of-scope projects on company time provided they’re still fulfilling their main roles. There are also Liberapay, Open Collective, Ko-fi and such but for the majority of FOSS devs not funded by large corps, just developing a large and widely-used program because they want to, donations rarely ever cover as much as they would make at a 9-5. There are also nonprofits that distribute donations to FOSS devs. For most it is a money pit, but to them the passion is worth more. They do it for the love, not the money.

These are not businesses.

Sucks that I have to preface but people can be jumpy here. This is genuine curiosity, I’m actually asking, because it’s really probably something I should already know. Can you explain the nuance to me please?

My understanding, speaking mostly of apps/websites, I know jobs can be much different:

Most places have the first factor as a password.

First factor (or “login”) = username+password pair.

For the longest time that was all there was, “your login” was just a login, which meant a username and password combination. Then 2FA/MFA (“2 factor authentication / multi-factor authentication”) came along in the form of username+password combo plus SMS/email/Google Authenticator/Yubikey/etc to verify as the 2nd form of authentication. You can have 3FA 4FA 5FA whatever if you want and if it’s supported by the app/website. So 2FA is MFA, but MFA is not necessarily 2FA.

I know jobs can be set up a lot differently.

What are your suggestions besides ads and subscriptions, professor?

That’s a nice thought.

Then you suddenly realize no one knows up from down or down from up. Society would shift on such a massive scale people would probably just stick their smartphones in a drawer and only use them to message people they already know personally and check them a few times a day like an answering machine.

Then suddenly you realize you haven’t heard about Ukraine, Russia, Israel or Palestine in months. It’s November 28th and you heard someone mention a ‘new president’ but you didn’t even vote. Shit, you forgot to vote. There were no social media or news websites reminding you about the election and you didn’t have it on your new wall calendar yet! Ah that’s what all those “Vote Now!!!” yard signs were about, fuck…

It’s a nice thought, but the internet is powered by ads. (Almost?) Every subscription-supported website is also ad-supported. The internet would basically go under. AFAIK all the Lemmy apps have ads too. It’d be a nice change to get back to get a force shove back to the early-mid 90’s. Maybe we’d do things differently. People would certainly be outside talking to each other a lot more.

MFA - 1 = SFA

aka password login

At that point its out of your hands. Once the users have fully decided only one browser is all they’re going to use, because most websites only develop for that browser (gee sound familiar?) then whoever owns that browser owns the web. That’s the point people are trying to get you to understand and you aren’t getting.

its not like we wont notice a shift like that. It would be very easy to adapt

This has has happened before. It took over a decade to get people to start using other browsers. Your little company can’t wave a magic wand and make the entire internet ecosystem shift, even though you were part of the cause.

Firefox market share is going up. But because small vendors not testing on it, it’s preventing its adoption. So you’re letting Google own the web.

The number of Edge users is only a few % more, do you skip that too? Just check Chrome and Safari and call it a day?

As someone that uses only Firefox and knows others who do, this really surprises me. If a website is broken on Firefox then it’s shitty webdev work and I’ll find another store.

Friendly reminder that Bluetooth has a larger network stack than Wi-Fi. Much more code, much larger available attack base. There have been many numerous Bluetooth vulnerabilities that allow remote code execution or theft of files.

This is truly becoming a surveillance state, in no way that can be debated. That want to be able to access everyone’s innermost thoughts (texts, notes, recordings, calendars, contacts, photos, you get it) without any chance of someone being able to protect against it.

Reminder that Google was the 2nd or 3rd company to commit to NSA’s PRISM program of feeding American’s data for future analysis.

What guarantees do you have that Malus doesn’t copy your key to their cloud?

I remember when I used a Samsung Galaxy as by daily driver a couple years back. I enabled full disk encryption and thought okay great, now that’s done. I noticed a very small, brief popup on my screen that lasted a few seconds, and it was a notice that my key had been sent to Samsung servers. Apparently you have to disable that option that’s hurried deep in the settings somewhere no one would think to look, and change your password again. If I hadn’t caught that brief notification at the bottom of the screen (not the normal location for notifications), I’d never have known.

The encryption password is also a max of 15 characters.

Thank you for doing the work. More of it needs to be done. I don’t know what your workflow is, but running Android-x86 and injecting into the virtualbox networking process to strip the SSL should still work, unless the app uses certificate pinning. I wish I remembered the name of the program, but it’s specifically for injecting into a running exe and hooking all network calls to pull ALL network data from that specific app. It’s not Fiddler or Wireshark or any of those. Fiddler and wireshark will work fine if you add your self-signed cert to the Android CA list, as long as certificate pinning isn’t used in the app. You can point wireshark to the virtualbox network adapter so it doesn’t listen on your other adapters. Also, most apps in the app store, play store, and F-Droid likely will not have much maliciousness. Play Store has the highest chance. But I think you’ll have better luck using all the major search engines and searching for “free VPN android” without any adblockers, using an android phone (Google & co easily detect user-agent manipulation) running chroming. Making note of all the paid ads, and then getting the first 10 pages of URLs, and then comb those links (all the ad links & result links) and download any .apk that shows up. Keep an eye out for more ads on those pages as well. Use a fresh android-x86 for each analyzed VPN apk.

There may be a better, easier way, but this was how I quickly analyzed the network data of android malware as of a few years ago.

Edit: other keywords to find shady vpns are ads for things like “watch porn in Utah” and “express VPN”, " nord VPN", etc. You’ll want to do the search within android as Google and Bing will allow the malvertisers to target specific operating systems, along with locations and other variables.

Also for checking into the servers that show up, and any interesting domains, you can use shodan and similar tools, and there is a great site (name escapes me now, similar to domaintools and urlscan.io though) that shows what domains run on certain IP addresses and also the owners and creation dates, although cloudflare and private whois entries make those less useful today. But that will potentially allow you to unmask ‘networks’ of shady free VPN providers.

That seems to be the case, probably a killswitch-type feature, ensuring the VPN is working. Additionally, addr[.]cx is a free GeoIP lookup service, and I assume bigbrolook (OP - Big Brother is a term for a surveillance state, the porn definition is only used for 5-10 years) is/was another one. You can confirm with waybackmachine.

Seems to be an amateur free VPN using free infrastructure. Most of the time the free VPNs that turn their users machines into a proxy or do other dirty things will be obfuscated and require at least a bit of reverse engineering, not just opening a debugger and peeking.

Not trying to cast shade here, but isn’t a master’s thesis after you know a subject incredibly well, and aren’t you supposed to look at things no one has looked at before? In case you’re not in tech and this is a master’s for another subject, this has been done.

Yeah but this is Texas. One of the largest consumers of porn by state. Pornhub is the 6th most visited site in the US, just one spot behind Amazon. I’m sure at least some Texas politicians have decades old accounts accounts with all their favorites videos and probably paid access to creators, etc. Sure they won’t be giving up their account username and telling everyone why they’re doing it, but this gives them an excuse to call out the bullshit overreach and taking of frozen peaches. They can lie and say their constituents are the ones calling and demanding action. Actually a pretty smart move by Pornhub.

Antihystamine is very specific. Antihistamine is quite generic and it depends on whether you want to treat allergies or schizophrenia. Here is a list from Wikipedia of the most common type of antihistamines (targeting the H¹ receptor)

List of H1 antagonists/inverse agonists

Acrivastine
Alimemazine (a phenothiazine used as antipruritic, antiemetic and sedative)
Amitriptyline (tricyclic antidepressant)
Amoxapine (tricyclic antidepressant)
Aripiprazole (atypical antipsychotic, trade name: Abilify)
Azelastine
Bilastine
Bromodiphenhydramine (Bromazine)
Brompheniramine
Buclizine
Carbinoxamine
Cetirizine (Zyrtec)
Chlophedianol (Clofedanol)
Chlorodiphenhydramine[12]
Chlorpheniramine
Chlorpromazine (low-potency typical antipsychotic, also used as an antiemetic)
Chlorprothixene (low-potency typical antipsychotic, trade name: Truxal)
Chloropyramine (first generation antihistamine marketed in Eastern Europe)
Cinnarizine (also used for motion sickness and vertigo)
Clemastine
Clomipramine (tricyclic antidepressant)
Clozapine (atypical antipsychotic; trade name: Clozaril)
Cyclizine
Cyproheptadine
Desloratadine
Dexbrompheniramine
Dexchlorpheniramine
Dimenhydrinate (used as an antiemetic and for motion sickness)
Dimetindene
Diphenhydramine (Benadryl)
Dosulepin (tricyclic antidepressant)
Doxepin (tricyclic antidepressant)
Doxylamine (most commonly used as an over-the-counter sedative)
Ebastine
Embramine
Fexofenadine (Allegra/Telfast)
Fluoxetine
Hydroxyzine (also used as an anxiolytic and for motion sickness; trade names: Atarax, Vistaril)
Imipramine (tricyclic antidepressant)
Ketotifen
Levocabastine (Livostin/Livocab)
Levocetirizine (Xyzal)
Levomepromazine (low-potency typical antipsychotic)
Loratadine (Claritin)
Maprotiline (tetracyclic antidepressant)
Meclizine (most commonly used as an antiemetic)
Mianserin (tetracyclic antidepressant)
Mirtazapine (tetracyclic antidepressant, also has antiemetic and appetite-stimulating effects; trade name: Remeron)
Olanzapine (atypical antipsychotic; trade name: Zyprexa)
Olopatadine (used locally)
Orphenadrine (a close relative of diphenhydramine used mainly as a skeletal muscle relaxant and anti-Parkinsons agent)
Periciazine (low-potency typical antipsychotic)
Phenindamine
Pheniramine
Phenyltoloxamine
Promethazine (Phenergan)
Pyrilamine (crosses the blood–brain barrier; produces drowsiness)
Quetiapine (atypical antipsychotic; trade name: Seroquel)
Rupatadine (Alergoliber)
Setastine (Loderix)
Setiptiline (or teciptiline, a tetracyclic antidepressant, trade name: Tecipul)
Trazodone (SARI antidepressant/anxiolytic/hypnotic with mild H1 blockade action)
Tripelennamine
Triprolidine