Crowd sourced, open access FLOS(Data) is almost always good. will check it out. thanks!

without addons to control internet crazy, that word “function” is doing some heavy lifting.

it be there! ;-)

awesome job!

peachy keen, friend. peachy keen.

GNUs Not Unix. I don’t recall him claiming it was. if he did, well… :-/

didnt finish the video but, seriously, one of the best laymans explainations I have seen of emulation and thin compatibility layers.

• plate number is tied to a VIN which describes the make/model. (sir, this is a wendys toyota. where is the honda?)

• replies not required from the plate - plate has a specialized qrcode printed across the entire plate (infrared reflector?) with an identifier (lic + other public info?) and signed with an RSA keypair - reader can authenticate the information and a qrcode read counts as a verifiably good read

• …or just ship RFID tags in the yearly inspection stickers - same cryptographic concept

none of this is hard or costly. only impediment is public rejection and we all know that can be managed.

very cool idea. they will counter with RFID or turn the plate into the equiv of a qrcode. store a cryptographically secure hash of the plate number and you pretty much put an end to that, no?. if I cant get a crypto signed version of your plate, flag the the car as a scofflaw (or worse) and track it as it travels in other ways. I think we are pretty much screwed without a change in laws.

with anti-women laws in some of these states, this is terrifying.

sadly, agreed. mindshare leads to adoption, tho - so putting Firefox in front of more faces is always a positive. after all, its how google dominates.

I’d wager that the cameras can’t read them either if you can’t at 10 yards

I might not take a bet on that. most license plates use reflective paint to aid in this. it would surprise me if paint and cameras are not tuned to at least one non human-visible wavelength.

polarized plate covers, specialized spray coatings, etc may work, but I am not betting my freedom on it. time to go bond style and get rotating plates.

a big thank you for your comment. comments like these really do help me to not skip worthwhile articles.

nah, lets get them switched away from chromium based spy machines.

seeing it now on fdroid.

they are. props, however, for system76 branching out into their in-house hardware.

this thread is it in a nut shell. the x11/wayland situation can trip things when it really should be super seamless. that will be fixed soon enough.

if you are ok with an Ubuntu base (which these days is drifting further from its Debian base) then regular mint is great.

if forced…

1. Debian stable (or sid if you loathe/love yourself)
2. lmde
3. mint
4. something other than ubuntu
5. …
6. ubuntu

not hating on ubuntu, its just been moving away from where I am at.

quassel and quasseldroid. its client-server, always on irc connectivity but does require a little setup.

you can access irc servers (if acceptable) and the quassel daemon via Tor. might just change the way you think about irc.

edit: word

You have a double standard.

well, don’t we all? but I think my argument is somewhat well founded. I have a reply in-composition, but just got project smacked. will reply as soon as I am able. didnt want you to think I had abandoned a conversation.

That’s security through obscurity. It’s not that Linux has better security, only that its already tiny desktop market share around 2003 was even smaller because of different variations.

no, its absolutely not. its choosing software components based on known security vulns or limiting exposure to a suite of suspected or established attack vectors. its absolutely not security through obscurity. these are fundamental choices made every day by engineers and sysadmins everywhere as part of the normal design, implementation and maintenance process. there is nothing “obscure” about selecting for certain attributes and against others. this is how its done.

perhaps you disagree with this.

That’s again blaming the Microsoft user for not understanding computers but not blaming the Linux user for running as root.

? its not the users job to understand OS security. to expect otherwise is unrealistic. also, virtually no “average” linux user, then or now, ran/runs as root. the “root X” issue related to related to requiring XWindows to run with and maintain root privs., not the user interacting with X running as root. it was much more common in the XP era to find XP users running as administrator than a “Linux user for running as root” because of deep, baked-in design choices made by microsoft for windows XP that were, at a fundamental level, incompatable with a secure system - microsofts poor response to their own tech debt broke everything “NT” about XP… which is exactly the point I am trying to make. I am not sure your statement has any actual relation to what I said.

So you blame Microsoft for allowing users to disable security features but don’t blame Linux for allowing it also?

I am saying that I have far fewer privilege escalation issues/requirements on a typical linux distro - almost as if a reasonable security framework was in place early on and mature enough to matter to applications and users.

we can get into the various unix-ish SNAFUs like root X, but running systems with non-monolithic desktops/interfaces (I had deep core software and version choices) helped to blunt exposures in ways that were just not possible on XP.

we are talking about XP here, a chimeric release that only a DOS/Win combo beats for hackery. XP was basically the worst possible expression of the NT ethos and none of NTs underlaying security features were of practical value when faced with production demands of the OS and the inability of MS to manage a technology transition more responsibly.

now, if you ask me what I think of current windows… well, I still dont persnally use it, but for a multitude of reasons that are not “security absolutely blows”.

apologies for the wall-o-text, apparently I have freshly unearthed XP trauma to unload. :-/

so, hows your day going? got some good family / self time lined up for the weekend?