riQQ's recent activity

  1. Comment on Communist and far-right candidates head to Chile presidential run-off in ~society

    riQQ
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    Chile's presidential election will go to a run-off vote in December between a Communist Party and a far-right candidate, after the first round on Sunday produced no outright winner.

    The election campaign was dominated by crime and immigration, as migration to the country has grown in recent years and candidates pledged to fight foreign gangs like Venezuela's Tren de Aragua.

    The Communist Party's Jeannette Jara, from the governing coalition, narrowly won the first round followed closely by far-right candidate José Antonio Kast.

    The result is expected to give a boost to Kast, as Jara was the only left-wing candidate running against several right-wing candidates, which split the right-wing vote.

    3 votes

  3. Comment on Mullvad - Shutting down our search proxy Leta in ~tech

  4. Comment on Mozilla Firefox gets new anti-fingerprinting defenses in ~tech

  5. Comment on Mozilla Firefox gets new anti-fingerprinting defenses in ~tech

    riQQ
    Link

    Mozilla announced a major privacy upgrade in Firefox 145 that reduces even more the number of users vulnerable to digital fingerprinting.

    The new protections will initially be available only in Private Browsing Mode and Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) Strict mode. After testing and optimization, they will be enabled by default in the Firefox web browser.

    Now, ‘Phase 2’ protections are being rolled out, which block requests to discover installed fonts, hardware details, number of processor cores, multi-touch support, and dock/taskbar dimensions.

    Specifically, the new protections constitute the following:

    • Random noise is added to background images only when a site reads them back, not when they are just displayed.
    • Only standard OS fonts are used; local fonts are blocked, except for key language fonts like Japanese, Thai, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Hebrew.
    • Touch support is reported as 0, 1, or 5.
    • The available screen resolution is the screen height minus 48 pixels.
    • Processor cores are always reported as 2.
    26 votes

  7. Comment on The day my smart vacuum turned against me in ~tech

    riQQ
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    It all started innocently enough. I had recently bought an iLife A11 smart vacuum—a sleek, affordable, and technologically advanced robot promising effortless cleaning and intelligent navigation. As a curious engineer, I was fascinated by its workings. After leaving it to operate for the entire year, my curiosity got the better of me.

    I’m a bit paranoid—the good kind of paranoid. So, I decided to monitor its network traffic, as I would with any so-called smart device.

    All I did was block its data logging IP address—just the logs, not firmware updates or OTA channels. Simple enough, I thought.

    For a few days, everything seemed fine. It continued to clean, map, and obediently avoid the furniture. However, one morning, it failed to power on.

    8 votes

  9. Comment on Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking in ~tech

    riQQ
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    Cellebrite can apparently extract data from most Pixel phones, unless they’re running GrapheneOS.

    Despite being a vast repository of personal information, smartphones used to have little by way of security. That has thankfully changed, but companies like Cellebrite offer law enforcement tools that can bypass security on some devices. The company keeps the specifics quiet, but an anonymous individual recently logged in to a Cellebrite briefing and came away with a list of which of Google’s Pixel phones are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking.

    21 votes

  11. Comment on EU country grouping cleared to build sovereign digital infrastructure in ~tech

    riQQ
    Link

    The European Commission on Wednesday gave the go-ahead for a group of four countries to establish a common organisation for building open source alternatives to much-used (non-European) software.

    France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands will work to develop open, European alternatives in “key areas” such as AI, cloud, cybersecurity, and – curiously – social networks.

    20 votes

  13. Comment on Aggressive bots ruined my weekend in ~tech

    riQQ
    Link
    Interesting bit about smartphones possibly being abused for scraping

    Interesting bit about smartphones possibly being abused for scraping

    What's wild is that these scrapers rotate through thousands of IP addresses during their scrapes, which leads me to suspect that the requests are being tunnelled through apps on mobile devices, since the ASNs tend to be cellular networks. I'm still speculating here, but I think app developers have found another way to monetise their apps by offering them for free, and selling tunnel access to scrapers.

    17 votes

  14. Comment on Pete Hegseth announces Qatar will build air force facility at US base in Idaho in ~society

  15. Comment on Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without an online account in ~tech

    riQQ
    Link Parent
    In Windows Enterprise, so called domains are used. Historically, these are networks where the accounts are managed centrally by servers in the local corporate network. Microsoft doesn't know...

    In Windows Enterprise, so called domains are used. Historically, these are networks where the accounts are managed centrally by servers in the local corporate network. Microsoft doesn't know anything about these, as all the information stays in the local network.

    But Microsoft also offers several cloud-based solutions for account and identity services.

    3 votes

  16. Comment on US Supreme Court allows order forcing Google to make app store reforms in ~tech

    riQQ
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    The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to halt key parts of a judge's order requiring Alphabet's Google to make major changes to its app store Play, as the company prepares to appeal a decision in a lawsuit brought by "Fortnite" maker Epic Games.

    The injunction issued last year by U.S. District Judge James Donato requires Google to allow users to download rival app stores within its Play store and make Play's app catalog available to competitors. Those provisions do not take effect until July 2026.
    The judge also said Google must allow developers to include external links in apps, enabling users to bypass Google's billing system. That part of the injunction is due to take effect later this month.

    7 votes

  19. Comment on Greg Kroah-Hartman explains the Cyber Resilience Act for open source developers in ~comp

    riQQ
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    There has been considerable worry about the impact of the European Union's Cyber Resilience Act on open source programmers. Linux stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman says, however, that there won't be much of an impact at all.

    2 votes