Howdy fellow humans. So I need help finding ways to teach my technophobe mother how to not get caught out by scam websites and how to just generally navigate the internet like a tech savvy person.

Recently, she got caught out when applying for the Thai Digital Arrival Card. She paid $80 for the "service". She only realised afterwards that this should not be the case. This angered her and reinforced her thinking that she can't do these things online and will always say she doesn't know what she is doing etc etc. When I googled the thai DAC the first hit on google was the official site and I had to go out of my way to find the one that she got. As I mentioned before she is a technophobe but then won't take the time to learn how to properly navigate the internet or improve her media literacy skills at all. I am also sure that there may be some other more personal issues around her refusal to learn how to use tech but thats a problem for another day.

Anyway so far Iv found 2 crash course series that would most likely help but if anyone else here has other resources for me to suggest to her id really appreciate it.

Back in high school when I was writing essays, my teacher always demanded to use justified text, because simple left aligned or right aligned text looked ugly. Even back then as a totally rebellious teenager, I agreed with her. Print has used it for hundreds of years, why shouldn't we?

The web has always resisted this development because it was difficult. Yes, the css property text-align: justify exists, but browser were always missing the crucial functionality of hyphenating words. That led to very ugly justified texts and so called "rivers" of whitespace because the spaces got so large. Begrudingly, I got used to it.

I was surprised to learn that all major browsers support the new hyphens css property since late 2023. This one adds exactly that crucial functionality. I was stunned and immediately tried it out and oh look, the web is so much more beautiful now.

You can try out yourself here on Tildes! Just right click a comment, click "Inspect" and then when the dev console pops up, add

text-align: justify;
hyphens: auto:

to p, which stands for the paragraph html tag and in which all text posts are rendered on Tildes.

It looks so much better! But I do wonder why it hasn't spread around more in the web. Am I the only one? Am I nitpicky? I feel like the improvement is stark and very good for functionally no extra work. I even installed a browser extension which augments a website's css so I could automatically do it on most websites.

I think most people would agree that the internet and technology in general have absolutely gone to shit over the past decade or so. There is no corner of the internet nor of the software world that hasn't been affected by enshittification. Everything exists to serve you ads. Everyone wants to extract as much money from you as possible. Every website is in a race for the bottom as they try to find the lowest effort content that makes them the most money. Every piece of software is pushed out half-baked and/or stripped down to the bare minimum with the rest paywalled or with the devs pinky promising to fix it 5 updates down the road.

Every social medium is just bots. The front page of Reddit is easily 35% easily detectable bots at least and who knows what the rest is comprised of. And it's probably the one that's doing the best at the moment, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, all of them are just bots and propaganda and engagement farming the whole way down. And the worst thing is, they're complicit. Hell, they're actively encouraging it and trying to find ways to make it worse. And I have no doubt Reddit will bend the knee soon enough too (they just banned /r/whitepeopletwitter because Musk made a tweet critical of the sub).

There's probably some element of rose-tinted glasses here, but the old internet was just so much better looking back. Like, early 2000's to maybe 2012, 2013 or so, that was the peak. No colossal data harvesting schemes feeding into algorithms designed to keep you engaged on their site 24/7 for the purpose of shilling you advertisements and selling your data, no mass propaganda, no Dead Internet Theory (which can hardly be considered a theory anymore). Yeah there was shit content, there was tons of it, but I can deal with shit content and petty forum drama and whatnot; what I can't deal with is all the multi-billion dollar corporations trying to shape the entire landscape of the Web into the perfectly minmaxxed cash-generating machine that does as little as possible for as much data and advertising as possible.

Modern software isn't much better. Windows and MacOS are filled with anti-user features, telemetry you just can't turn off, Windows will often just install shit on your computer without telling you. They turn your computer into a walled garden, where you can do what you want as long as you play by their rules, but without giving you any real control over what your computer does. Yeah you can delete system files and brick your laptop if you feel like it, but anyone who's ever tried to permanently disable Windows updates will know that in the end you're not the one calling the shots: Microsoft are. And... Like, that's insane, right? It's running on my fucking computer, it's my CPU doing the work, I want to know what the hell it's doing and not just the parts it lets me see, and if I want it to do something different then I should be able to make it so.

I hate it all. I'm tired. I want out.

These are my problems. Here's what I've done about it so far.

• Obsessive privacy on the web. No Google services. Firefox with as much telemetry turned off as possible. Protonmail and ProtonVPN for everything (and I'm considering getting out of those too with the pro-Trump stances they've been taking recently). As minimal an online footprint as I can get, I make as few accounts as possible and I don't use shared or even slightly related usernames (my username here is an exception as it's my Reddit username, and no, it's not my real name), I delete accounts whenever I can and I GDPR request the services afterward. Virtual cards for online payments as much as possible. Will probably make a Javascript whitelist at some point too. Is all of this overkill? Yes. Why do I bother? Because fuck them.

• As little social media presence as possible. Real life necessitates some amount of social media interaction of course, I have Facebook and Instagram but use them exclusively for messaging. I often see people excluding Reddit from social media but I don't fully agree, even if it's not exactly in the category it still targets a lot of the same psychological weak points in us, encouraging doom scrolling and shaping our opinions through echo chambers and propaganda (it's always important to remember that echo chambers and propaganda you agree with are still echo chambers and propaganda). I still use Reddit admittedly, but I've tried to minimise my usage as much as possible and I'm shopping for alternatives.

• Free and Open Source software as much as possible. I'm all in on GNU these days. Yes, it's a massive pain in the ass. My job unfortunately requires some Windows-only software so I'm running a dual partition but I'm trying to get as much of my computer usage onto Linux as possible (I use Arch btw). Like I said above, it's my computer, if I can't control what it's computing then it stops being my computer, it's at best shared between me and all the developers of the proprietary software I have installed on it.

That's my rant. It's been a long time coming.

There are still things I'm looking to change, especially with how I use the internet. Getting rid of Reddit is the next big step for me, I think. I just can't be bothered with it anymore, but there is still something about it that I love, every time I look through a small niche topic community, or an interesting new hobby sub I've never seen before with years of cool posts for me to go through. And yeah, I do still enjoy browsing through /r/all even when it's 80% shit and objectively bad for my mental health. But at this point the overwhelming mass of utter shit is just not worth digging through anymore. I'm tired.

Tildes is really cool. It reminds me of the old internet, the ideal usage of the Web. I open the site, I see a link to an interesting article, I read it, I give it a like, I read and/or contribute to the discussion in a comments section. I want more of this.

If anyone has any links to cool sites that I should check out I'd greatly appreciate it.

Presumably, my understanding of Cloudflare is too simple, too rudimentary, or even entirely lacking in some aspects.

As far as I understand it, the main feature is just faster and more reliable access to sites, right?

If I host a website on a server in New York, and someone tries to look at it in Tokyo ... that's a long distance and a lot of potential hops to retrieve the file(s) directly from the NY machine. Cloudflare provides closer-location mirrors of websites so there is less lag time, plus having multiple copies makes my website more readily/reliably available.

That's good, I get that, especially for big, professional business-critical-type sites/services.

But it's not actually essential, is it? Anyone, anywhere on Earth could still visit my NY website w/o the existence of Cloudflare.

Is there more to Cloudflare than this? I realize they are getting into a variety of 2ndary "value-added"-type features, like their own "are you a robot" tests and probably a bunch of other stuff I don't know about ... but fundamentally, are they actually necessary for the Internet?

Why is Cloudflare such a big deal?

They aren't a startup anymore, but it seems the current CEO, Tony Stubblebine, got it right, according to his latest (long) blogpost.

Although Medium is in a healthy path now, they burnt goodwill so many times in the past that my trust on the business is absent. I wonder how other people perceive them…

I went down the path of thinking about switching to Passkeys but it seems like more hassle than it is worth, so I hoped this community could tell me if I am crazy.

I use Bitwarden to generate and save passwords for anything important and always use an authentication app when the option is present. I never use the same password. Sadly, most Canadian banks are awful and only allow SMS 2FA if anything at all. That said, of the two banks I primarily use, one does allow an authentication app and the other uses its own app to send authentication codes.

I always read that Passkeys are better for people who are lazy/bad with their passwords. For someone like me, is the security practically the same or is there still some benefit to switching everything I can to Passkeys?

I'm a web designer and web host. I've basically been doing this for almost 30 years - I registered my first domain back in 1996, and I've had my own dedicated server(s) since 2002.

I've gone back to starting up a business to do design and hosting, and so I'd like to get my business out there a bit, so that is a motivation for this; but also, I have long supported hosting projects that I believed in. The longest project I've hosted has been the Simutrans community - since 2002, I have hosted most of the resources used by the community, including being the primary source for most downloads of the game for a number of years.

One thing that makes me different from most webhosts? I believe in quality, speedy, secure hosting. You can get budget hosting on overloaded servers with support that doesn't care about you. That's not what I do. For my paid customers, I charge a bit more, but that's because I make sure that the sites run as quickly as possible.

I primarily host WordPress-based sites, and I use Divi on most of those because while it's pretty easy for non-techie people to understand how to make minor changes for those that want/need to do that, it's powerful and allows me to design websites for businesses.

I'm writing this post to offer hosting and help for up to six projects that people want to work on.

What I will provide:

• Website running WordPress+Divi
• Help using Divi
• Some design help, possibly a complete design, but at least some help with design ideas
• If your project doesn't use WordPress+Divi, I'd still consider hosting you. The server is a shared server environment, meaning PHP apps - a LAMP environment, essentially

What I will not provide:

• A domain name. But they are cheap through https://Namecheap.com/. And you wouldn't need one initially as I can set you up with a development subdomain on na1.site. (And if you were happy with a subdomain, I'd certainly allow that to be permanent)

For how long? Indefinitely. I'd say permanently, but you can't predict the future. That said, as long as I'm around and you still want the hosting service. Again, I've hosted the Simutrans project for more than twenty years. So I've been around and will be.

Questions? Lemme know. Interested? Lemme know.

I'm trying to keep this relatively short, so please, if you do have questions, please do ask.

Haven't seen anyone mention that project in a few years, but now I'm in the unique position to talk about it. I live somewhere where I can't get any proper internet service - mobile broadband is slow, DSL or fibre lines are not brought out to where I live, and the only other option is cable internet access, which I've 1. had bad experiences with in the past and 2. where I live is operated by a company with laughably bad reviews at exorbitant prices for what they offer. We are talking about 60 USD (eq) a month for 100 megabit service.

So I shopped around to see what other options there are, and Starlink made me an offer. Free equipment, which is usually 400 bucks, delivered to my house, and then an unlimited data plan at whatever speeds I can get where I live for 50 a month, with a one month free trial. I said yes, paid with Apple Pay (seriously, did not have to fill out a single form or sign anything) and the dish arrived the next day.

Now, I know, Starlink is run by Musk, who is somewhere around the top 10 of my nightmare blunt rotation and also pretty likely to be an actual neo-Nazi, but I say whatever. It's not like the alternatives are much better, and at least SpaceX has some actual value for humanity, if you ask me. I might put a "I bought this before Elon went crazy" on my router, though.

I got the dish delivered and set it up on my roof. The app - which is excellent - tells you to orient it north if you're on the northern hemisphere, and to roughly point it up. I built my own mounting solution - a wooden board with mounting holes that snaps in place on my roof - and set everything up, not expecting much.

I was absolutely blown away. The app, once more, is stellar and incredibly easy to use, and a joy to play around with. I got a satellite connection in minutes, and did a speed test. I got 200 down and 50 up in the Starlink app, but independent speed tests as well as my own experience routinely hit 400 down and around 80 up. Genuinely impressive. Ping around 30, by the way. Consistent as well.

The next few days were a similar experience, although I did notice a drop in speeds if there was heavy rain. The speeds dropped however to around 150 over 30, which is still more than usable, and latency was not impacted at all as far as I can tell.

Honestly, it's a super compelling package. Setup was so simple my grandma could have done it, the hardware is beautifully made and very robust, and the designers really did think of a lot here. The cables are just weatherproofed Ethernet and you can bring your own (although they don't recommend it), the router is Wifi 6 and looks damn snazzy, the dish can even heat itself up to melt snow in winter.

If you're looking for reliable internet service, I really can't recommend Starlink enough. If where you're planning on running it is within the service area and you're fine with the 50 dollar a month price point (no speed or data caps, by the way) I'd say go for it.

Now, there are people who will say that it's a good option for remote places, but not that great for densely populated areas in buildings that could get for example cable service, and you shouldn't rely on it. But, well, I haven't been completely honest here:

The real sting in the tale is that I live in one a large European city with plenty of access to other internet methods (just unlucky in terms of my specific building, which is getting fibre next year), and mounted the dish on top of my townhouse in one of the most dense districts in town. It works flawlessly, and it's been the fastest internet service I've ever had, period.

Course, it can't compete with a fibre line, sure, but many people don't have those - and then, service or hardware might still add large costs on top of that. And with Starlink, I can just take it with me whenever I move, and don't need to ever worry about ISPs again.

I don't have many sufficiently nerdy friends to talk about this with, so if you're curious or have any questions, I'll do my best to answer them. If you have Starlink too and feel like I missed something, feel free to contribute to the conversation.

Hello, I would like people to try and find the following:

• An image of someone using a bag phone that is not a stock photo, or an advertisement photo, or a photo from reference websites (such as Wikipedia).

• A recipe that is being presented as an original, or family secret, that is actually the recipe on the back of a box or otherwise publicly known (cannot be a reference to the Friends episode). I will allow personal anecdotes (no points will be awarded, this would just be for my amusement).

• An idea that is published for something that was later patented or otherwise protected under IP, that was published BEFORE the patented time, and the person is not the patent/IP holder. This is a two part find, because you must present the IP as well as the previously published idea.

Those are the only ones I have on the top of my head, I'm open to other people adding "find me" type things, in the same spirit, which is fun.

Please spoiler your results so that others can try it out, before seeing yours.

gl;hf

I've been wanting to tell the Tildes community about a favorite podcast of mine, The Film Reroll, an improv. comedy show which plays through your favorite movies as TTRPGs and totally ruins them (their words, I love the show and think the cast is amazing), and would love to hear about any podcasts y'all listen to that you might want to recommend to others!