The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux

https://www.sambent.com/the-engineer-who-tried-to-put-age-verification-into-linux-5/

The lasting damage was knowing it could happen at all: that a single contributor with no stated organizational backing could submit compliance infrastructure for surveillance law directly into the software that boots your computer, get it merged by two Microsoft employees, and have the creator of systemd personally block the removal.

Two things that have vastly improved my online life lately:

1. Adding "||accounts.google.com/gsi/*$xhr,script,3p" to Ublock Origin, which comprehensively blocks every Google login popup on random websites;

2. Switching my paypal.com bookmark to "https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_account," which bypasses the "Download the app" nag-screen.

Reminder that Firefox has a pathway to specifying some settings, including ones not exposed to users any other way, with a config file stored on disk.

They call it enterprise policies but anyone can use it by just putting a file in the location indicated on that site.

You can disable entire features, opt out of Telemetry before your first launch of Firefox on a new install, declare you never want to be part of studies, turn off their ML integration and keep it off, force about:config preferences in a way that can't be "accidentally" reverted, etc.

Hello! It's another day of our supporter drive! https://spritely.institute/donate

And today is the last of the "Tech Values" threads: https://spritely.institute/about/

Today's tech value / design goal is "Fun as a Revolutionary Act"!

Hey! We mean it! Let's get into why!