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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: September 25th, 2023

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  • it’s better to avoid using it and report web compatibility problems

    It would be if sites were truly incompatible, but developers know Chrome/Chromium dominates the market and instead of bothering checking compatibility with firefox, they just preemptively block Firefox since that’s an easier “fix”.

    That’s assuming the vendor isn’t Google and doesn’t have a vested interest in Chrome hegemony.

    Still. Finding a site that doesn’t work and reporting it absolutely is the way to go.


  • You can bet 300 new uBlock replacements to spring up practically overnight, some of them scams, reducing trust in the Google ecostystem.

    Unfortunately it’s a bigger problem.

    Google doesn’t plan to block uBlock Origin itself, but the APIs it uses to integrate into Chrome in order to function. This will effectively disable all adblockers on Chrome. uBlock won’t be removed from the Chrome extension store, it will just have 90% of its functionality removed.

    Additionally, this isn’t a Chrome-only change, but a change in the open source Chromium, an upstream browser of Chrome all other Chrome-based browsers use (essentially everything aside from Firefox and Safari themselves).

    The change itself is involved in changing the browser’s “Manifest”, a list of allowed API calls for extensions. The current one is called Manifest v2 and the new one was dubbed Manifest v3.

    Theorethically Chromium-based browsers could “backport” Manifest v2 due to the open source nature of Chromium. However that is unlikely as it’s projected to take a lot of resources to change, due mostly to security implications of the change.

    Vendors of other Chromium-based browsers themselves have little to gain from making the change aside from name recognition for “allowing uBlock”, which most users either wouldn’t care for or already use Firefox, so the loss for Google isn’t projected to be large, just as the gains for other vendors.

    TLDR: uBlock won’t be removed from the Chrome extension store, but the mechanisms through which it blocks ads will be blocked. The block isn’t a change in Chrome but in Chromium and affects all Chromium-based brosers (all except Firefox and Safari). Other vendors could change that to allow adblockers but it’s projected to take a lot of time and resources.









  • Both are, or at least should be, ridiculous.

    Yes, an app costs money. Yes, servers do cost money. But do they need to use servers? No. For example, self-hosting. Or just connecting the car to the cellular network (which they already do, mind you) and just let the phone talk to it directly, no manufacturer server required. Just pay an ISP for cell service and you’re set. Are there problems with such a solution security-wise? Yes. And while I’m not an expert in cybersecurity I think the risks are about the same for this and a server model.

    Hell, they might not even use servers for anything other than checking if you’ve paid your subscription in order to lower costs already (as if a few thousand unlock requests a minute couldn’t be managed without a problem on a Raspberry Pi). They don’t need some huge, expensive and power-hungr supercomputer for that, so I don’t see a need for such a steep price.

    Are the features useful? Absolutely. Would someone be willing to pay this price? Also absolutely. But the festures objectively don’t cost that much to maintain and competition should and could put an end to it.

    It’s just corporate greed, and it feels to me as if we’re getting closer and closer to the fabled oxygen subscription, and we have to call manufacturers out on their bullshit while we still have air to breathe.

    Just don’t buy their cars or at least their subscriptions. Get your car ‘jailbreaked’. What will they do, remote disable it? I think we’re still not that far down the dystopia plotline that a boycott couldn’t work.