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XFCE: we added some format options for the clock

I'm sure there's probably more than one and I don't even remember which it was that I saw, but a quick search turns up GNO which is said to be privacy-focused although it isn't immediately clear how exactly it works.

Personally I'm rooting for something non-blockchain for the electronic payments system of the near-ish future: GNU Taler. It solves enough privacy problems to be useful, making it much better than what most of the world uses now, without immediately becoming the basis for a pyramid scheme, an instrument for pump-and-dump scams, a means of receiving big ransom payments, or a big flashing target for banking regulators.

Monero is better than most in some ways, but it's proof-of-work so not really any better in that way. Ether is the one that doesn't waste energy, Monero is the one that offers privacy. There's at least one that tries to do both but even fewer people have heard of it.

There isn't one simple reason for it. There's a fairly large set of complicated interrelated reasons some of which require going back over 40 years of history to explain. If things had gone differently we'd have had a different result. For instance, just off the top of my head here, if free software had arrived earlier the network effect where everyone wanted one particular operating system because it's what everyone else was using and therefore all the software was written for it might not have happened. People would've been free to build and distribute things for whichever OS they preferred. If Bill Gates hadn't been such a sharp business dealer, maybe his company wouldn't have amassed the vast wealth and influence required to dominate things so thoroughly back in the 1980s. If American antitrust law hadn't been defanged maybe it would've stopped him, because many of Microsoft's business practices that allowed them to get the monopoly we're still recovering from were quite despicable. If DRM (digital restrictions management) hadn't caused problems for Linux such as preventing it playing DVDs for the first few years they were popular, maybe it would've got further by now. If education systems around the world did a better job encouraging more people to be curious about how the things they rely on actually work, maybe the switch to free software would be going faster.

Anyway, it's one thing that is slowly going in the right direction for the most part.

There's some good stuff in there and it's easy to cheer for some big new regulatory burdens being put on Google and Facebook, but it's slightly chilling to think what it'd be like if they eventually try to apply it to the fediverse. It sets up teams of what it calls "trusted flaggers" for example, whose job it will be to scour the net for anything they believe to be "illegal content" and order it removed. I imagine they'd start with places like c/piracy, but once such a vast apparatus for net censorship is set up who knows where else it might start looking. They'll use it to go after sellers of "counterfeit" goods as well. Imagine your instance admins being forced to go through some kind of appeals process to take down posts they don't like, but being required to instantly take down posts the government doesn't like.

I don't know, it's pretty complicated but there are some reasons to be slightly worried about it I guess.

The one Ukrainian Linux user without an adblocker started visiting a website that still has a statcounter widget on it, but he got tired of it after a while and stopped?

It seems like nothing much has changed since this was written: https://webdevlaw.uk/2022/07/21/fixing-uks-online-safety-bill-part-0-not-fixable/

When does this moment of bliss happen? I must've missed it. All I noticed when I lost my firefox profile for some reason and had to make a new one was about an hour of fiddling with the settings, installing extensions, and messing with userChrome.css to make it look reasonable.

Don't ever trust a "smart" TV until you've installed Linux on it. All of the ones I've bought so far (the cheapest available at Wal-Mart, usually) are willing to display things without ever having been allowed a network connection. If you manage to buy one that isn't, return it and complain vigorously.

It's not particularly easy to find a trustworthy VPN, but it's not particularly hard to find one you'd trust more than whatever random public wi-fi you've found while on the road. Your stock reminder that we can never trust anyone is not really useful here.

Using a good VPN is one way to sanitize the whole network environment when you have no reason to trust even the router you're connecting to, avoiding quite a few risks besides that of someone passively analyzing your traffic.

So they've decided that this part of the bill will be unenforceable and useless, but they plan to go ahead and pass it anyway. I suppose they'll soon need to do the same for the age verification nonsense as well.

They still want to impose these ill-conceived laws on us so as to appear to have done something, but the people who had somehow been convinced that this would do some good will be disappointed. If they stick with this course, they will soon have managed the impressive political feat of pleasing exactly nobody with the results of this excruciating years-long process of counterproductive legislating.