tuckerm

One popular way was that Internet Explorer 6 included something called ActiveX, which basically allowed any website to run code on your computer as though it was a locally-installed program. You could just click on some URL and next thing you know it’s writing files to your hard drive. This is one of the main reasons why the Internet Explorer 6 / Windows XP era was particularly virus-filled. A website could open your freaking CD tray.

From the ActiveX wikipedia page:

Developers had to register with Verisign (US$20 per year for individuals, $400 for corporations) and sign a contract, promising not to develop malware.

Promising not to. And they did it anyway. The bastards.

I remembered seeing a post on Mastodon a while ago about an AI-generated vulnerability report, and this article reminded me of that. Turns out, that old one was also about curl. He has been dealing with this bullshit for a while now. https://mastodon.social/@bagder/111245232072475867

On that old one, the indignant attitude of the guy who “reported” the vulnerability still irritates me. He admits that he used AI (this was when Google’s AI was called Bard, so that’s what he means by “I have searched in the Bard”), and still has this tone of “how dare you not have fixed this by now!”

What are you trying to host?

Probably would run into these things needed in this order:

• The text editor kakoune
• Add uBlock Origin to Firefox
• KeepassXC
• tmux

Then nodejs if it’s a laptop, or Steam if it’s a desktop.

Agreed, I wouldn’t recommend Librewolf for casual users. I understand why Librewolf makes those decisions, and I’m glad that it exists, but you definitely run into some quirks when using it. I’m thinking about switching from Librewolf to Waterfox myself.

The thing I dislike about Brave is that Brave intends to be an advertising company. Brave’s original idea for revenue was that the browser itself should be the ad platform. Brave doesn’t block ads because it has a pro-user manifesto; it blocks ads because it dislikes competition.

That’s why it makes no sense for people to abandon Firefox for Brave. I understand the backlash against Mozilla’s recent ad-focused shift, but Brave invented that idea. So leaving Firefox for Brave is not an improvement.

It’s the browser I’ve chosen to use after getting fed up w/ Gecko’s terrible web compatibility these days (coming from Librewolf).

I’m curious about what those compatibility issues are. It’s been years since I’ve noticed any problems – and back when I was seeing problems, it was mainly because Google could afford to implement new standards faster than Mozilla could, not because Mozilla was doing anything wrong. Could it have been because of Librewolf? Librewolf has a ton of privacy-focused settings that can sometimes make pages behave in strange ways. (It doesn’t use your real time zone, it ignores dark mode, it lies about which OS you’re on, and it constantly clears your cookies to name a few.)

And on a meta-note: I dislike Brave, but I don’t think the parent here is a comment that needs to be downvoted. We can just explain why Brave is a bad idea.

Looking forward to reading it! awk has been a huge blind spot for me for a long time now.