Lol Monero

Potentially helpful extra context that makes me extra suspicious when somebody evangelizes it all the time

Monero users can and have been deanonymized by the police. Monero also acts as a de-facto tumbler, meaning by using it, you’re money laundering for criminals as a matter of course.

If you think this is worthy of sharing, please, feel free to share it! Just mention me so I can take a look :)

Frustratingly, doing a search on that Changelog page for sources is mostly full of stuff not relevant to my search.

I did find a different post on Lemmy that talks about it, though. This post is incredibly thorough, and does an excellent job of undoing Kagi’s attempt to memory-hole the information about which sources they use.

This makes it all the more frustrating that Vlad refuses to re-add them, instead asking to know why we would care. Here’s a link to that conversation, which is on a platform controlled by Vlad, which appears to be resistant to archiving services that attempt to fetch those particular comments. Also for posterity:

slamor
Oct 27, 2024
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html

There is really no proper information about search sources. We need to know what resources are used and at what rate.

Please make a more detailed and clear edit.

Vlad
Oct 29, 2024
[@]slamor Is there any particular reason you are asking for this? More context will help us better understand the need.

slamor
Nov 2, 2024
[@]Vlad why not?

Searching through kagi.com for “Yandex” yields a lot of dead links. The one living link is the Changelog, which says they added Yandex to their image search, back in December 2024… But that’s hardly a revelation. The changelog doesn’t go back very far either, AFAIK

As for the other links: Google says these links used to contain it the word, but I don’t know why. Maybe this one was for raised sites, maybe it was for lowered sites, which would at least give a little insight into whether users loved or hated the domain…

url: https://europe-west2.kagi.com/stats?sd=asc&st=percentage
text: yandex.com. zlibrary.to. androidcentral.com. answer-all.com. baijiahao.baidu.com. cbc.ca. developer.apple.com. eightify.app. github.getafreenode.com. gitmemory …

Another result seems to suggest Yandex Images served up a photo of Steve Jobs in a demo search, but that is no longer the case. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.

url: https://kagi.com/images?q=steve+jobs
text: 564 x 318 yandex.ru. 20 Steve Jobs Quotes: Wisdom from the Apple Co-Founder 20 Steve Jobs Quotes: Wisdom from the Apple Co-Founder. 696 x 418 cioviews.com. 75 …

Kagi has been criticized for removing their list of partners - originally, they admitted to partnering with Yandex, but they recently hid that partnership after receiving backlash. I’m not sure if the changelog will reflect that information, but I am curious to check now.

From a tech perspective, it looks promising. In theory, your privacy will be, at very worst, only as bad as the most private actor in a two-hop chain.

In practice, though, Mullvad seems relatively okay with offering a white label version of its services to anybody who asks. And there’s a plus side there, because it means anybody who subscribes to that other service will be part of a larger crowd of Mullvad users in general. And blending in with the crowd is a good way of staying obscured.

One potential workaround, if you’re okay with using extra software, is making a script with AutoHotKey to intercept Ctrl+Alt+X and fire a different key combo in its stead.

This doesn’t fix the issue with the Firefox but, you know, it’s something.

Firefox will upgrade page loads to HTTPS and gracefully fall back to HTTP if that does not succeed. This behavior is known as HTTPS-First.

Wasn’t this already the case? For a while?! I don’t know whether this means HTTPS sites will load more reliably, or HTTP sites will.

AI Chatbot access is now being gradually rolled out to all users.

Hooray

To use this optional feature, choose AI Chatbot from the sidebar

Oh it’s migrated to be even more prominent now

or from Firefox Labs

… Despite still being labeled experimental

Pro tip: Long-clicking the Back button gives you a mini history to choose from. It works on the desktop and on mobile Firefox too, in the overflow menu’s Back button.

Not quite the same as this fix, but this knowledge has saved me from hunting through browsing history a few times.

Seeing the perspective of somebody who’s not particularly well versed in Android forks is interesting, though.

I found the part around 2:45 to be interesting, where the YouTuber says the thought of the OS getting compromised was scary. This is a sort of privacy paradox where Calyx looks worse than other, less honest, alternatives.

Could a rouge employee compromise Calyx? I guess, but Calyx has the best possible setup to avoid it. And Android itself is basically compromised by default, which should be far more concerning. The biggest reason people aren’t concerned is because Google understands PR, and they know how to spin things in the most positive light possible.

Mozilla FakeSpot sells your private data (profile, location, browsing and search history) to advertising companies.

https://lemm.ee/comment/11216210

And when Mozilla released the Orbit AI assistant, they linked to FakeSpot for some reason…

Edit 2

The official Deepfake Detector privacy policy is missing from the FakeSpot website. This is the one Mozilla links from their extension policy.

Edit

Firefox may be bad in many ways, but the biggest alternatives are generally worse. There are some reasonably good forks like Zen and LibreWolf, but if you have the wherewithal to patch Firefox’s user.js on a desktop, you’ll probably be better off with a patched Firefox.

https://lemmy.world/post/4064988

https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-09-24-harden-firefox-with-arkenfox.html

The best service I’m aware of is archive.is, which has been around for at least a decade, and does a good job taking snapshots of pages the way they’ve rendered. Beggars can’t be choosers, though, and the alternatives are sparse. (Their site does recommend a couple others, though.)

Typically I would prefer The Web Archive, but currently their site is experiencing issues with Twitter URLs.

For clarification, is there a reason you would prefer xcancel links in particular over other frontends? I’m entirely uninformed on the matter, outside of seeing this service used relatively often and recently, compared to other Nitter instances.

I’m not the person you asked, but in my opinion, archiving services are more reliable than simple frontends, since they will continue to work even if the tweet in question is from an account that deletes or protects the tweets later, or if the account is suspended by Twitter. Considering the tumultuous relationship Twitter has with both reality and its users, this might be worth consideration too.

Your writing is better than serviceable, I just had a brain fart while reading it

I thought you said “What’s next, a few ads in the URL bar?” …because Mozilla has put a few ads in the URL bar.

This sounds like a good change! It’s bound to be frustrating to a lot of people, but it’s good to see protecting your passwords on their servers is the number one goal of this company.

I don’t see how enabling federation will fix the problem of not knowing what is running on their servers. You’ve just introduced a new problem: other servers, with their own rules, which may also be peppered with requests for data and gag orders.

This change will impact how you set up Signal on your desktop computer. Previously, after linking your desktop to your phone, you would be presented with basically an empty window.

This change will allow you to, optionally, synchronize your message history from your phone to your desktop, filling it with your previous messages, making it much easier to pick up where you left off with your conversations.

Pictures and videos that were sent will also synchronize, as long as they are from the past month and a half.

Kind of funny they list their built-in, paid VPN as a positive feature and not a negative. Maybe they were running out of good things to say about… Themselves.

Granted, Mozilla also shot themselves in the foot by saying Firefox was better for not blocking ads by default, but that’s a different story for a different day

Brave still does include ads enabled by default. You need to disable sponsored images in the New Tab page.