Despite having support for extensions,
#Fennec (and I guess
#Firefox for Android in general) don't deal with them as nicely as desktop Firefox/Firefox forks.
This notification popped up yesterday, asking for new (quite dubious) permissions on behalf of "extension"... Problem is, there's more than one extension! Which extension is Fennec referring to?!
There's nothing about this update in Fennec extensions screen, there's no about:extensions in Firefox mobile, there's nothing about this in
about:support, I can only do a whack-a-mole game of disabling/uninstalling a random extension until the notification stops appearing.
I initially thought it was a paywall remover I had, and I proceeded to uninstall it, only for the same notification message to appear again today (therefore, it wasn't the extension I suspected).
The new permissions being asked, no matter which extension, feels quite creepy, especially in times of supply chain attacks (when once trustworthy and popular code repositories get hijacked and modified to inject malicious code into potentially millions of user devices; maybe uBO or Ghostery, very popular extensions, got hijacked?). Why would an adblocker, an anti-telemetry or an image extractor (the only extensions I currently have installed in Fennec) require reading my clipboard? I'm not gonna update it, until I find out which extension is requesting this and I proceed to actually read its source code and see with my own eyes what's going on, where exactly within the code the systemwide clipboard API is being used and for what purpose.
you'll see Ishtar And I literally mean it (spoiler):
As a reference and comparison, this is the source picture I used as a projected image in the Blender scene. Credits:
Animalia.bio#ArsRitualisTemplii #3dmodeling I went from a floorplan blueprint I made in
#CAD to a whole scene in
#Blender, with an additional experimentation on Blender light.
In a nutshell, I managed to make a functional projector whose working principle is the same as real-world projectors, in which intense light passes through a triple-color filter (often a spinning wheel made of glass with red, green and blue strips uniformly distributed), then through a LCD (which is displaying a single RGB channel corresponding to the current color filter wheel position) and then by lenses that focus the beam at a specific point at distance. In my case, I built three copies of a crude projector object (basically a thick-walled box with a small, square pinhole which is filled with an alpha hashed face using a second material whose alpha is defined by the inverse of one of the RGB channels of an image; I used an object attribute and a chained math compare + multiply logic so I didn't need three separate materials) and an area light inside whose color is manually set to either red, green or blue (according to the object's attribute, set manually so not to involve animation drivers), then they're all pointed at distance, at the theater wall.
The owl you see in the rendering isn't part of the wall texture, it's light-and-shadow cast from actual area light passing through a conditionally-transparent material. Because it's reliant on the shadow cube size and my laptop can't handle 4096px shadow cubes (I tried, and Blender immediately crashed out of segmentation fault), the projection ends up low-res.
Oh, and I'm now using Blender 3.6 instead of the old Blender 2.9x I was using earlier. I miss some browser extension that would be capable of detecting if a website uses cryptomining-based gatekeeping (namely, Cloudflare and Anubis) before I accessed said website, warning me so I can decide not to access it/boycott it before it overwhelmed my CPU with cryptomining instructions.
Just like a website doesn't owe me access to their content, I don't owe websites my CPU lifespan (especially in times where there's a fricking shortage of chips caused by the "profit maximization" hubris of Western AI corps and a new PC would cost me my literal kidney especially given I'm unemployed without the faintest glimmer of hope and will to come back to DevOps where I used to have 10 years worth of a career).
Much despite to the excelent exchanges I used to have there, I stopped accessing lemmy.eco.br for this very reason, after they offered their own instance in a silver plate to Cloudflare's whims so Cloudflare Inc., not Ademir nor Lemmy Brasil as a whole, has the ultimate power to decide who enters Lemmy Brasil and who don't... which is undeniably a "great power comes with great responsibility" issue. And a "consent" issue as well, considering how it's something put in place particularly because of non-consented scrapping from AI crawlers (which is definitely a problem) whiel taking away the consent from the user (the human user) to choose whether to proceed with the required cryptomining shenanigans or, as a decision-capable person who's given the daily ability to choose the fricking president for an entire country and control a half-tonne metallic apparatus at 120km/h, refraining from access altogether.
Then Lemmy.world did the same. And then Lemmy.ml went the "open-source Cloudflare-wannabe" road with Anubis, which is, yeah, better than Cloudflare, but still does something akin to non-consented cryptomining, i.e. Anubis doesn't ask for user consent; as soon as the user tries to access an Anubis-enabled website, she simply starts eating the CPU like it had infinite lifespan and/or another fresh CPU could be grown in trees.
But this is far from just a Fediverse thing. Lots of websites I used to access became CPU eaters, such as Stack Exchange, Shader Toy, iNaturalist, among countless others.
Non-consented cryptomining is becoming a cancerous thing. I mean, I propose you an experiment you can do by yourself: search for "Just a moment" in your own browser history and do a napkin math multiplying 5 seconds by the amount of "Just a moment..." entries you're seeing buried in your browser history, then multiply this by 50W (which is the average TDP for consumer-grade CPUs) and convert it to kWh before multiplying it by your regional electrical bill rates in your local currency (yeah, this is how much you lost by simply "proving being a human" regardless of your consent), then tell me, looking in my eyes (or pretending you can look at my eyes through this text), how the thing you're seeing with your own eyes is acceptable as a condition to live in society!
