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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I have to use Windows 11 at work. Whenever I complain about it to any of my friends, they say, “it’s easy to work around that. You just have to…” and then they say to modify some registry key, or set up a group policy, or run a powershell command, or use some cleaning tool.

    But even if it’s easy to do that, it’s not easy.

    1. You have to know about the key or the cleaning tool, and there’s a different one for every problem.
    2. You have to keep up to date with the new user-hostile behavior introduced to Windows every month.
    3. You have to keep up to date because Microsoft removes those circumventions, because they don’t want you to be able to remove their trash.
    4. You have to vet the tools, make sure they’re not malware. And continuously make sure it’s not replaced by malware in the future. There’s no central repository of Windows programs like there is for Debian or Ubuntu, so if you just web search for the tool name every time, you might click on a malvertising link in the search results instead.












  • Web browsers have a huge attack surface, and are most people’s main exposure to potential exploits. Without javascript, 99% of the attack surface disappears, becuase the attacker no longer has a way to run arbitrary code.

    A lot of terminal-based browsers don’t do javascript.

    If I want to scrape a page, this makes it a pain for both parties. I’m not an AI company, so I can afford the hash tax, but it’s still a pain to spin up Firefox from a from cron job instead of wget. And I’m still doing it, Anubis doesn’t stop small time scrapers like me who aren’t running AI training, and only scrape like one page per day. So now the server has to serve the original page, plus all the Anubis stuff each time my crown job goes off.


  • It sucks that you can’t browse anywhere without javascript anymore. It used to be that all the open source sites, most news sites, forums running phpbb, even YouTube aside from the actual <video> element all worked without javascript, and as a bonus there would be no ads.

    Now, you can’t browse anywhere without these challenges. At least this one is noninvasive, but the Cloudflare one and the Google Recaptcha do a ton of fingerprinting to choose whether to let you in.

    USPS has a home-rolled one that requires web assembly enabled, or it silently fails with a blank page. There’s no non-malicious excuse for that.

    If this is the future of web browsing, hopefully more sites use systems like Anubis. But I also hope at least static pages can be viewable as plain html.