I've been frustrated by the ability to easily disable vehicle cellular systems. In older vehicles you could simply unplug the right cable and have it disabled. In newer vehicles I've found the cellular system to be integrated with other components -- making it impossible to disable without also getting a permanent check engine light.
Ideally I'd like some sort of CAM module that plugs in between the antenna system and the ECM that selectively drops telemetry packets.
I found the antenna, and replaced it with a 50 ohm resistor and wrapped the entire thing in foil, grounded to the chassis. No check engine light, no signal
I haven't bothered to get to it yet on my Bolt, but I've heard that pulling the fuse for this also disables the microphone for hands-free calling which is a bit more of a deal-breaker than a check engine light. Probably need to disconnect the antenna and put a dummy load on it or something. Really should get on it due to the LexisNexis shenanigans...
And what else does it break-break, even if you do kill the antenna, more that just the annoyance of a light? Integrated GPS, because it uses cellular to “enhance” that?
What other risks are there? Haven’t we seen CAN bus “hacked” over the air to shut down vehicles before? (Even ignoring the intentional ability to do so by the OEM, granted to law enforcement)
In my opinion who cares if it breaks the car gps. I have my phone that already does this function and never needed my car to do this. I would a thousand time over delete my car gps if it meant no tracking.
Meanwhile I'm actually the opposite. I'd prefer for my phone to pull from the car's GPS system instead of trying to figure out its own signaling. It would probably be a lot better since it's not locked in a steel cage and in suboptimal placement.
Yes. I can see turn my phone off or turn off location services or leave it at home since cell towers can track me should I really want to stay private. For example should I visit a brothel I might want that private. If I was going to a HIV clinic I might want that private. Should I be be cheating I might want that private. All made up examples but we should have the ability to remain anonymous and not have our car companies selling that information.
Please don’t log into your bank with Servo just yet!
So .. just their own test shell compiled about engine as yet. (AFAIK)
There a few longish tech talks on youtube, the initial focus was on bringing documentation up to date in order to draw third party dev's in. Now there's more focus on more coverage of test suite.
It's in a decent sweet spot for certain types to get on board; new funding, new energy, room to change the guide rails and a milestone to work towards.
Well as I understand it the goal now (or arguably 'still') outside Mozilla is just the engine, not the browser that uses it (which would have been Firefox)?
So there still needs to be some browser project like the Ladybird mentioned, or a Brave, or whatever that decides to use Servo instead of WebKit, is my understanding.
(A bit of a tangent since not a browser, but I assume Tauri will be keen to use it.)
Won't happen anytime soon :
"
Will Ladybird work on Windows?
We don't have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment.
We would like to do Windows eventually, but it's not a priority at the moment.
"
The Linux ecosystem is by far the largest market for enthusiasts volunteering their time to develop a new browser. It makes sense this community would only care about building a browser for their own needs (Linux support only).
Additionally and unlike Mozilla, this volunteer community is also very unlikely to care about non-enthusiasts who may complain the browser doesn't support Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), Web Environment Integrity (WEI) or whatever anti-features ad-tech companies are trying to force onto mainstream users. This volunteer community is also unlikely to care too much about whether web sites containing 10MB of obfuscated JavaScript that was developed and tested solely against Chromium-based browsers works well. I think you'd find that the community would rather spend time working on projects such as yt-dlp to just re-implement front-ends for horribly broken websites, or would simply prefer to use non-broken alternative websites.
Linux is also the easiest kernel to develop against too for reasons that include _much_ better sandboxing features being available, better debugging tools and availability of source code to learn from and debug with. Contrast to Windows with undocumented or poorly documented kernel and other system library APIs, lack of source code (particularly examples of APIs being used in other software), and having to do more work to opt-in to security features that are enabled by default on a Linux system.
"smallest market" is relative, the Linux market for suckless tools for example is likely 10x bigger than the Windows one. For privacy focused alternative browsers I'd say its somewhere close to 50/50.
Which is not the point. If you want to have success you need to copy the Blender/Godot model. Year by year they make great versions for all platforms, and they do well. A new browser should support both and rally the people to work on it, again like the Blender Foundation has done.
Of course thats a great metric, but to better exemplify, taking Blender again, with their pool of money (mostly donated by enthusiasts) they could really accelerate the development, hiring the best contributors on a case by case basis, which solidified the code base and continuity. What I am saying is there is a great middle ground, with a good team, where money and enthusiasm go hand in hand.
Yes, it's called WSLg. Uses Wayland, so many apps are a bit messed up. I think there's a way to install X11. Last time I tried it over a year ago it was a bit rough.
I think they were listing the lineage of browsers they used, starting from the earliest one to current one. Not that they were using Firefox 30 years ago.
Draw a trend line through Windows releases and it doesn't look good. I can't see myself upgrading to 11 any time soon and I'm seriously considering just switching to Linux. It's all I've used on work laptops since 2013 and it's just fine.
I still despise Gtk 3 or whatever it is that is killing menus and sticking controls into the title bar etc. but it's fine. You don't need to use Gtk apps much these days anyway.
I'm afraid it'll take very, very much time and effort for Ladybird to be as fast as Firefox. Web pages are terrible resource hogs. An inefficient browser will not be popular.
> One of the long term goals is to match the performance of other production JavaScript engines like JavaScriptCore and V8 when they run without a JIT compiler.
Only for a few years until they come up with same shit but with a different name. Take a look at the presumably "dead" Palladium initiative and consider how much of it we're actually been subjected to now in our computing.
You don't need to rely on alpha vaporware. You can use a Firefox or chromium fork that patches out the changes and still have a quality battle tested browser.
Using "he" as default is just as much of a political stance as using "they" as default. The fact that whoever rejected this PR thinks that pronouns are "political" gives me a pretty good guess as to their overall political leanings.
To me that depends on the context it's used in - if it's like:
> When a user visits a web page, he expects [...]
then yes, I'd even just say that's wrong, no opinion or politics about it.
However if it's:
> So once Alice has published the website, and Bob visits it in his browser, he expects [...]
and the PR is suggesting that actually we don't know how fictional Bob identifies... Then personally I just think that's tedious, the pronouns are helpful to disambiguate Alice & Bob in shorthand anyway, and that is bringing 'political' (ish? Societal?) views into it.
Yeah that's clearly the first case I gave then, it's just wrong, it's not even about not liking 'woke' or 'PC gone mad' or whatever.
At least, that's what I was taught at a private school, in a Conservative-voting area, ~25 years ago.
(I've always disliked the 'unknown-she/her' for 'important' roles too, for the same reason: it's fighting wrong with opposite wrong. Matt Levine for example will write 'if you ask someone on the front desk I feel like she will tell you' - it's an abstract person, they will tell you. Grr. Anyway.)
In this particular case I might actually say 'it' anyway. But in general I think to native English speakers (because we don't gender most things) it's pretty clear it should be 'they' if the sentence is more mundane and bias-free, like 'find someone to ask for directions, and if they don't know [...]' - it's just weird if you substitute '(s)he doesn't' isn't it?
It's hard to put faith in a project that's partially AI-generated and doesn't disclose it.
That picture of the laptop is the most blatant part. Is that just one contributor phoning it in for the landing page, or does that culture run deeper through the Ladybird project?
I've followed Kling's videos for years, both the ones working on serenity OS and the ones working on Ladybird, and followed the general arc of those projects and even contributed once a few year' back, and they actually seem to take the quality of their work very seriously and enjoy producing good high-quality code. I think it's just that none of them had experience with website design and the one guy who stepped up to do it happens to be one of those people that thinks AI generated stuff is fine.
I can't help but see these "let's create a Web browser from scratch" projects as massive wastes of time. You can't build a sane implementation of an insane standard.
Modern websites and the standards they rely on are overcomplicated. The problem lies with the standards, and the way they are used. The browser can't control that. I could never work on such a project without quickly losing motivation.
Also, that link says "The main community hub is our Discord server." That doesn't inspire confidence in anything.
It's the PayPal method of conflict resolution. Freeze everything immediately, and maybe a few months down the line you'll get to talk to a human who might allow you to process transactions again after you provide a menagerie of documents.
It's curious how corporations try to litigate business models that struggle to survive the Internet age, enabling places like Anna's Archive to pop-up and do more damage than simply leaving the IA alone.
This doesn't make much sense. The reach of Anna's Archive is much narrower than archive.org, and Anna's Archive is clearly an outlaw site that sets no precedent. It's not curious at all. They'd prefer to eliminate both, but they should be very happy if they can cripple or eliminate the IA.
Hell, they'd prefer to eliminate the books on people's bookshelves and replace them with instantly revocable and totally non-transferable licenses to ecopies of them on devices that were well-secured against user access, but they'll take what they can get. Tomorrow is another day.
The existence of the Internet does make existing copyright law much more destructive and limiting than ever intended.
The creators of copyright law never imagined a world where everyone could have a free library of a lifetime of books in their pocket, and where copyright would eventually be extended to make this impossible.
This creates urgency to change the law (e.g. back to the original 12 year copyright terms), challenge the law in the courts as archive.org has been doing, or disobey it on principle, as the operators of Anna's archive, Z-library, and Scihub are doing, heroically and at great personal risk.
>This creates urgency to change the law (e.g. back to the original 12 year copyright terms)
What was the reasoning for lengthening the terms in the first place? It's not clear to me why works from 1780 would be relatively trivial to modern and thus only merit potentially up to 20-something years of protection while they now may need ... 80ish? I'd assume production of essentially any work would be more of a PITA and riskier in 1780.
The law is a mutable, ever changing thing. New technology invariably leads to updates to the legal framework of society. Legal is not the same thing as ethical, moral, or right.
Of course it is. The work should therefore be on changing the law, not rug-pulling authors who are the real people who get hurt by this. They don't like the big publishers either.
Unfortunately, the reality is our legal system is largely subject to regulatory capture at this point. Moneyed interests(corporations and oligarchs) have much louder voices(deeper pockets) than the body politic as a whole, and thus the People are subject to rules made for the benefit of those interests.
I don't think most authors are upset with IA or libraries, but rather a vocal minority of the same. Most authors know that things like this help their reach and ultimately make people more likely to buy their books in the long run.
It was a publisher who filed this lawsuit, not an author.
"Most authors know that things like this help their reach and ultimately make people more likely to buy their books in the long run."
This is a huge, HUGE false belief amongst the technocrats who think they are on the side of the creators. I put this in the same bucket as the 'it democratizes creativity' fallacy.
It might have been true right up until every techbro decided it was totally fine to scrape every bit of creativity off the web – legally and illegally – and repackage it into an AI model.
The publishers are bad, agreed, but at least there's a framework for artists to make a penny for every buck. Today it's open season on every author, illustrator, photographer, and writer.
Yes, exactly. Imagine spending your life developing something so brilliant and wonderful, so well-loved that even your descendants can benefit, and then have some technocrat decide he was going to destroy that with a single keystroke.
A tangential topic studies how you can actually trust the hardware. Andrew "Bunnie" Huang has done a lot of great work in the area, first with Precursor, and lately with Infra-Red, in situ (IRIS) inspection of silicone.
Yes. Absolutely. In many ways, I think Car Thing did the inverse of what I expected it to do. It was mounted on my dash for a total of about 5 minutes.
How old are we talking? I've never owned a car that had an aux input unless I replaced the head unit - and if I replaced the head unit, then I would have Bluetooth too.
