Porting this would make for a great starter project if you’re just getting into Firefox extension development!

Depending on your level of experience it would take a competent developer anywhere from 1 to 4 days to complete the port.

It’s no secret that GPG shows its age, but the part that the author has rewritten is still only a small fraction of gnupg’s features.

agreed. another reading - the part of gpg worth using is not worth using gpg for, given the bulk that comes with it.

That was also my number one takeaway from the article. I knew about compiling to WASM targets but had no idea the front end story included full frameworks like Yew.

Have you looked at ledger, hledger, and/or beancount?

Whereas I’m about to have to get back on Facebook after being off quite a long time. I’ve simply missed too many opportunities among local friends and family info since they just refuse to get off it. Once it has them in certain numbers, they find it most convenient to post on it. That’s on top of the psychological manipulations Facebook uses to keep them there. I’ll still use alternatives, stay signed out, block JS, etc for everything I can. I will have to use it for some things for best effect.

The most interesting thing about leaving, though, was their schemes get more obvious. They tried to get me back in with fake notifications that had nothing to do with me. They’d look like those that pop up when someone responds to you but you’re not in the thread at all. They started with an attractive, Hispanic woman I’ve never seen from across the country that some friend knew. Gradually expanded to more attractive women on my Facebook but who I haven’t talked to in years or rarely like (not in my feed much). The next wave involved more friends and family I do talk to a lot. Eventually, the notifications were a mix of the exact people I’d be looking at and folks I’ve at least Liked a lot. I originally got nearly 100 notifications in (a week?) or something. Memory straining. Last time I signed in, there was something like 200-300 of them that took forever to skim with only a handful even real messages given folks knew I was avoiding Facebook.

So, that whole process was creepy as hell. Especially watching it go from strangers I guess it thought I’d like to talk to or date to people I’m cool with to close friends. A lure much like the Sirens’ song. Fortunately, it didn’t work. Instead, the services’ grip on my family and social opportunities locally are what might make me get back on. The older forms of leverage just in new medium. (sighs)

It kind of depends on what you are trying to prevent. There are some easy wins through

1. As of March 2017 US ISPs automatically opt you in to Customer Proprietary Network Information. ISPs can sell this information to 3rd parties.. You can still opt out of these.
   Look for CPNI opt out with your ISP.
   https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cpni+opt+out&t=ffab&ia=web

2. uBlock Origin / uMatrix are great for blocking tracking systems.
   These do affect sites who make they’re money based on ads however.

3. Opt out of personalized adverting when possible
   Reddit, Twitter, even Google give you an option for this.

4. Revoke Unneeded Accesses
   https://myaccount.google.com/u/1/permissions https://myaccount.google.com/u/1/device-activity
   https://myaccount.google.com/u/1/privacycheckup
   https://twitter.com/settings/applications

5. Make your browser difficult to fingerprint.
   EFF has a tool called panopticlick that can show you how common your browser’s fingerprint is. I locked down what I could (there should be instructions on panopticlick’s site), and added an extension that cycles through various common user-agents. It might sound like overkill, its not onerous to do.

6. Don’t store longterm cookies.
   I actually disabled this mostly. I still blocked for 3rd parties, but first party cookies are allowed now. Using a hardware key or password vault makes signing easy, but ironically the part that killed this for me more sites supporting 2FA. I use Cookie AutoDelete for Firefox.

7. Change your DNS provider.
   I don’t have a good suggestion for this one. I use quad-9, but I don’t really know enough to say whether or not I trust them.

I pay $40/year for Protonmail. It is fantastic.

As for Facebook, why delete? It is actually a benefit to have an online presence for your identity, but you need to be careful with what about yourself you share. If you don’t take your online identity, someone else will. This is exactly why I’ve registered my name as a domain and kept it for years now. It is just another “string of evidence” that I am who I say I am on the internet.

My FB is just a profile picture now and nothing else. I have set my privacy settings to basically super locked down.

When it comes to socializing, there is little you can do to not be tracked. The only thing you can do is “poison the well” with fake information and keep important communication on secure channels (i.e. encrypted email, encrypted chat applications).

I removed Facebook about 6 years ago and recently switched to Firefox beta and DDG. Gmail has had serious sticking power for me, though. I’ve had several fits and starts of switching email over the years but my Gmail is so intertwined with my identity nothing else has ever stuck.

It is possible to switch, I’m sure, but in my case, I have never committed quite enough to pull it off.

I may write a follow-up with historical information included. Unfortunately, most of these guidelines could be turned into complex polemics on their own (and I have written some of them)!

The guidelines are heavily influenced by my work on Xanadu, and many are a distillation of ideas that are threaded through a lot of sort of unfocused rants by Ted, some of which are not even public. When I have a chance, I’ll do some archaeology and find proper references where possible. (Alternately, I may just write the polemics I am inclined to write on particular topics, with citations.) My “lessons” are pretty controversial (and some are controversial even within the ex-Xanadu crowd – such as the emphasis on peer-to-peer systems).

Items #2-6 and #9-13 are things that were part of the Xanadu design since at least the early 80s (and in some cases, going back to the 60s), and are well-documented either in Ted’s criticisms of the web or in available design documents from Xanadu projects.

Items #7 and #8 are controversial in Xanadu – they apply to Udanax Green (and probably Gold, though I’m not totally sure), but not to implementations done since 2006. My group maintained that forcing links to always apply to the original source text, as opposed to positions in the document, was a confusion of form and content of the same type as XML (which treats conceptual groupings that function mostly as formatting guidelines as part of content even as those groupings are mostly entangled with form) – particularly in the context of formatting links. (After all, a page break may be appropriate in the context of, say, a book, while a paper quoting that section of the book would not want to add a page break at that point.) Ted said that supporting the document-as-assembled as a first order object in transclusion and linking complicated the specification and complicated the implementation, and wasn’t strictly necessary anyhow (since you could just force that document to un-apply the offending formatting link).

Item #14 is half-controversial. Because I support assembled documents as first-order object for the sake of transclusion, I also think that it’s justified to cache assembled documents in some cases. Very often, a derivative work becomes more popular than the origins of its component parts – and such a work might become very fragmented, if it is itself composed from similarly fragmented sources. The important thing is that an assembled document, when cached, can nevertheless be everted into the cached parts of its source documents, so that we still gain the benefits of caching when we go to load the source. (This is particularly useful when a single source has many popular derivatives with minimal overlap – say, Poor Richard’s Almanac, whose epigrams are quoted all over the place in extremely various forms, or in Marx’s work, different and mostly-non-overlapping pieces of which are very important to economists, sociologists, and bolsheviks.)

#16 is true of both Xanadu and IPFS, probably independently. (It’s controversial elsewhere. Access control is a hard problem, particularly when you’re trying to get a variety of implementations in a peer to peer system with potentially-untrusted peers, and so I would rather depend upon crypto, which will break eventually in individual cases and expose stale data, than access control, which will be attacked directly and probably break even easier. However, I don’t plan to optimize this for secret data. I’d like to use it to encourage openness, and discourage people from hiding things on it at all.)

#17 is from IPFS. Xanadu implementations have not largely been peer to peer – the business model has always been to charge for storage (though sometimes as a flagship node in a federated system). I feel like making these facilities available to people is more important than making a buck off them, so I prefer peer to peer (which after all requires less money up-front to set up).

#18 is my own formulation of a rule that theoretically underlies both Xanadu and the w3m’s URL rules (and seems to also be an assumption underlying the design of HTTP, particularly with regard to the design of response codes). I’ve written about it in various places, as well. TL;DR version: server-side content variability breaks all of the important parts of hypertext, while client-side content generation is a poor and wasteful simulation of regular native app development. A hypertext system should not double as an application sandbox or code delivery system.

#19 is part of post-2006 Xanadu design, which uses a single append-only file and calls it the “permascroll”. I feel like it should be integrated into the cache system (which is absolutely necessary but, when I took over the 2006 project in 2011, was not implemented or really planned for).

#20 is a side effect of #17, and is derived from Usenet, although similar ideas exist in popular forum software, as browser extensions, and in Mastodon.

If it’s local, you get authenticated encryption. No other choices.

If it’s public (i.e. the token is signed by one party and verified by another), you get digital signatures.

That’s the only choice that needs to be made.

I think the idea is that if it doesn’t fit an existing tag the post is off-topic. Tag creation references posts that I guess we’re agreeing as a community were on-topic but had to be shoehorned in to existing tags.

I’ve at least on one or two occasions ran in to a story that I couldn’t really fit in a tag so skipped submitting. Overall I like the approach.

You are not alone :)

Epochs are a way for the Rust team to make breaking changes to the syntax of Rust. For example, reserving new keywords, turning warn-by-default checks into error-by-default, that kind of thing.

Importantly, crates designed for different epochs can be used together, so a Rust epoch won’t fracture the ecosystem like the infamous Python 2/3 split. Even if you want to call a function in an old library whose name is a reserved word in the new epoch, Rust provides a “raw identifier” syntax so you can use anything (within reason) as an identifier.

More pragmatically, epochs are an excuse for more publicity. With a release every six weeks, you rarely get more than one or two new features at a time, which isn’t worth making a fuss about, so people outside the Rust community rarely hear about all the stuff that’s going on. An epoch is an excuse to list all the features of the past year or two and show people just how much progress has been made.

The canonical text is https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/2052-epochs.md . It should explain it reasonably well, if you’re the kind of person who follows Rust development.

That said, we haven’t actually done one yet, so it’s kinda hard to point to an example, it’s all theory at the moment. They also may not even be called “epochs” when we actually ship one. The name is… okay. I like it for its bad qualities, which probably means we should change it :p

Find a friendly gym. I use the one at my local tech uni. It’s boring, annoying, painful at first, and takes time. But your body will tell you that it is worth it. You don’t need to grow mucles there, just go regularly to move and get some blood flowing in parts of your body which are usually neglected. Especially when I start feeling pain in wrists and fingers, I can go there and the pain gets fixed. Sometimes I use the time there to reflect on things I’m working on, and already even found bugs in my code that way. You should get an intro from either staff or someone experienced. If you they ask you what you want, and you don’t really know, just ask for a set of exercises that will keep your back in good shape. Worked well for me.

Switching to a split keyboard (kinesis freestyle 2) and 70-degree-rotated mouse (like the Microsoft sidewinder) helped a fair bit, as did getting a good chair. All told I’ve spent about $1200 on ergonomic equipment and it all feels well spent.

I’ve been wearing wrist braces for about a month now. They’ve helped immensely. Also I’ve been trying to understand posture and ergonomics, like you… it’s hard; I never really paid much attention before.

I feel the same way - which is probably why I also found this interesting.

Another resource I really liked is Practical Signal Processing. It is also a practitioner focused treatment of the material, with enough theory to make you dangerous. It’s been a big help for me in understanding the DSP components of GNU Radio flow-graphs. It doesn’t necessarily cover details on the internal implementations of different processing stages but is great to come up to speed on discrete steps in a processing pipeline.

Seems to exist some such initiatives: http://opensourceecology.org/