The EFF and I agree on the importance of privacy, but I don't know that I agree with its call to ban online behavioral advertising. Unless I am missing something, the argument rests on alot of "cans," "coulds," and "mights." Where this article does mention one specific, real-world abuse, behavioral advertising is being used as a tool to bilk seniors out of money. The same can be said of the telephone. No one is suggesting telephones be banned.

The tools to block behavioral advertising are out there, freely available to all. I know because I use them. So why should the responsibility of protecting one's self be taken from the end user? And especially on the Internet where boarders and jurisdictions are so nebulous to begin with. It seems to me that leaning on legislation is a weak solution in this case.

Am I missing something?

#eff #privacy

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/ban-online-behavioral-advertising

The weather was too nice to spend in the office today, so I took the day off. And what did I do with that day off? I pressure washed the deck and deck furniture, then put up the awning, mowed the yard, and capped it off by plugging a hole I found in my house's foundation. Now I'm going to get a shower, then watch a NASCAR truck race.

18-year-old me would be so mortified to see what I have become.

After yesterday, I can see the allure of Flatpaks and Snap packages and such. I avoid them because I like the Unix philosophy that my tools should be simple and easy to chain together. But yesterday, I needed to edit an epub file and found I couldn't launch Sigil on antiX 21. Turns out that version 1.5 of Sigil relies on CSS, which my 18 year old Presario will not deal with. I tried to install version 0.9.3 from a deb package, but was met with an invitation to dependencies hell. At that moment, I saw the brilliance of self-contained packages.

Not that any of them would run on my Presario. I only need to use Sigil a handful of times a year, but when I need it, it's essential to my job, so I had to roll back antiX to 19.5, which relies on Debian Buster, which also offers Sigil 0.9. So now my 18 year old desktop appears to be stuck on Buster unless I find an alternative to Sigil.

#oldbytes #antiX #Debian #Buster #Sigil

"I could really use some tenderness right now. And bacon."

#shitTheSpouseSays

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