You might have been wondering what happened to diaspora*. Well, although we’ve been a bit quiet, we haven’t gone away! In fact, some big things have been happening in the background that we’re really excited about, and now it’s come to the time for us to tell you about them.

• What is Clear Linux? — Most Powerful Operating System in 2022

  The most powerful Operating and Best Kept Secret of 2021. There is a new kid on the block, Clear Linux by Intel.

• This Portal fan brought Wheatley to life as his own personal assistant [ed: This is a listening device of (or for) Amazon]

  The video game Portal 2 is widely regarded as a classic that introduced players to several memorable characters, including one of the main protagonists-turned-antagonists, Wheatley. This anthropomorphized personal assistance robot was able to move, speak, and listen/respond to speech from a user, which is exactly what Steve Turner was trying to recreate when he built his own version of Wheatley. His animatronic device starts by waking up, and from there it selects a folder of audio files to play at random. Additionally, its AI-powered interactivity is provided by an Amazon Echo Dot via Alexa and the Arduino Cloud.

• Dynatrace : Managed release notes version 1.230

• Digital world seen moving into 'authoritarian space' | Reuters

  From blocking websites to forcing companies to share user data, governments – including democracies – are increasingly resorting to "authoritarian" methods to control the internet, tech experts warned on Thursday.

  Governments like China and Russia are blocking social media content, requiring firms to submit to data surveillance, and silencing journalists and activists online, panelists told the Thomson Reuters Foundation's annual Trust Conference.

  "The digital world is increasingly moving into an authoritarian space," said Alina Polyakova, head of the Center for European Policy Analysis, a U.S.-based think-tank.

• Web trust dies in darkness: Hidden Certificate Authorities undermine public crypto infrastructure

  Security researchers have checked the web's public key infrastructure and have measured a long-known but little-analyzed security threat: hidden root Certificate Authorities.

  Certificate Authorities, or CAs, vouch for the digital certificates we use to establish trust online. You can be reasonably confident that your bank website is actually your bank website when it presents your browser with an end-user or leaf certificate that's linked through a chain of trust to an intermediate certificate and ultimately the X.509 root certificate of a trusted CA.

  Each browser relies on a trust store consisting of a hundred or so root certificates that belong to a smaller set of organizations. Mozilla's CA Certificate List for example currently has 151 certs representing 53 organizations.

  Some of the more well-known CAs in the US include IdenTrust, DigiCert, Sectigo, and Let's Encrypt.

• From Myanmar to Sudan, autocratic regimes have weaponised internet shutdowns. Time to fight back.

  Internet censorship is nearly as old as the internet itself. While much of the theorizing about the early internet viewed it as a free and open space for the exchange of new ideas, a number of governments had different ideas about its potential.

  While China is well-known for its sophisticated internet censorship apparatus, several governments across the Middle East and North Africa — including Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and Syria—were early adopters of certain censorship tactics such as keyword filtering and DNS tampering. Similar to China, these countries targeted a range of content, including sites that offered information about human rights violations, sex, and certain religions, as well as those that encouraged political opposition.

  But in recent years, governments have taken the more decidedly extreme tactic of cutting off internet access entirely, depriving their citizens of a lifeline to the world...and each other, a tactic that Human Rights Watch has rightly called "collective punishment."

• 50,000 rules is not enough for Safari Content Blockers and I’m not hopeful that the situation will improve for GNOME Web, despite “WebExtensions” coming.

  GNOME Web uses WebkitGTK, which is basically an improved version of the one that Safari has. (No DRM modules and support for open media codecs.)

  However, it has some of the same limitations. One of these is using Content Blockers for the ad blocking. GNOME Web previously had one that was much, much worse, and caused many bugs, and ate RAM like it was going out of style, and was only partially compatible with Adblock Plus.

  So deleting it out of the browser and moving to use Webkit Content Blockers was a win by that measure.

  However, Apple is such a piece of shit company that they designed the scheme so that you’re limited to 50,000 rules. To put that in perspective, in most of my browsers, I have twice that many, and no, they don’t slow the browser down at all, because uBlock-Origin is efficient.

• Brave embeds a cryptocurrency wallet right in the browser

  Brave version 1.32 includes a dedicated wallet built right into the browser, in which users can store their private keys for various cryptocurrency holdings. (Read our review of Brave 1.0.) The company claims that the direct integration is more secure than a third-party browser plugin, but also allows users to connect with hardware wallet devices like Trezor and Ledger. Brave’s wallet also provides real-time market information as well as the ability to buy and pay via various cryptocurrencies.

• Bypass some paywalls and in-page pop-ups by forcing GNOME Web into Reader Mode.

  Some sites claim they aren’t compatible with a browser’s reader mode to prevent users from clicking on it and bypassing Admiral, paywalls, and other junk.

  Tip: putting ephy-reader: in the front of the URL in GNOME Web and hitting enter forces it into Reader Mode anyway, regardless of what the site wants.

• EasyOS version 3.1.10 released

  As 3.1.10 has Firefox builtin, if you are going to do an update of an existing installation, get rid of any existing Firefox beforehand. It should be enough just to delete /mnt/wkg/sfs/esyos/oe/dunfell/firefox-*.sfs. At bootup of 3.1.10, the initrd will see that the SFS is no longer there, and will do a "cleanup" -- so there shouldn't be any "firefox" on the desktop after bootup.

  Firefox updating and hardware acceleration both caused trouble, so they have been permanently disabled in file /usr/lib/firefox/distribution/policies.json. To re-enable those features, delete the appropriate lines in that file.
  I was disappointed how slow FF was to startup on the Compaq Presario. SeaMonkey starts much faster. It was also a concern to see the Internet data activity lights continually green in the systray -- FF was only looking at a static page, so why is it transferring so much?
  Muted sound is easy to fix. Right-click on the audio systray icon, choose "Preferences" will run pavucontrol (Pulseaudio Volume Control) which has a mute/unmute button.

  MSCW, I need to work on that. It is functional, but the code is still very ALSA-oriented.

• Vivaldi messes up their Debian repo and causes Apt sources errors. Mozilla Firefox continues falling apart. Moving my daily browsing to GNOME Web.

  This morning I got an error from Apt in Debian.

  It turned out that Vivaldi had misconfigured their Debian repo, and it was stopping the i386 multiarch repository from updating.

  So I got punchy and removed Vivaldi, its .config and .cache subfolders, their repos, and their two GPG keys.

  Is that an extreme reaction? No. If you can’t manage your Apt configuration responsibly, I remove you. You can mess up and create a hassle for a lot of people, so you should watch what you are doing.

  Mozilla’s subreddit shows the general state of the Firefox world.

  I got this error. “PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR” instead of loading sites. It happened on Amazon and a few other sites. First, I thought it was something wrong with my connection, or the site. Nope. Another Firefox bug.

  GNOME Web has a few bugs, but nothing nearly so annoying as the degenerate state Firefox is in. So I’m just going to go full time GNOME Web 41 Flatpak…. and maybe keep Ungoogled Chromium or something around in case I have to log in to T-Mobile, in which case “We have our wires crossed. Ooops.” no matter how your Firefox is configured, when you try to log in. LibreWolf too, why not?

  Since Flatpak apps are self-contained, this will also hopefully prevent disaster from spilling over into my system all for want of a web browser.

  LibreWolf doesn’t just compile and patch out obnoxious junk that Firefox adds. It also removes minimally useful web platform crap that is a major attack surface through hardening of the user.js and prefs.js.

• Mozilla Plays Matchmaker: Microsoft Store Now Offers Firefox for Windows 10 and 11 - FOSS Force

  The open source community hardly noticed this week when Microsoft opened its arms to its once arch rival in browser space, Firefox, the open source daughter of Netscape and for many years the only serious competition Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser faced, by making the open source browser available in the Microsoft Store.

  A dozen or so years ago Microsoft would never consider putting open source software of any kind in an online store it managed, even if it had had one back then, which it didn’t. This would’ve been doubly true of a browser, because of its fear that losing the browser market meant losing its lucrative operating system market, which was largely bankrolling its operations. Remember, this was at the height of Ballmer administration, which proclaimed Linux and open source to be a communist cancer, or something like that.

  It’s just as unlikely that Firefox would have accepted any offer from Microsoft to make it easy for Windows users to find and install Firefox through a Microsoft platform. At that time, a decade or more of dirty tricks and FUD originating from Redmond had made the open source community wary and openly belligerent when it came to Microsoft, and Mozilla was dependent on the open source community.