Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    1 day ago

    oh I meant the rant that started this thread, but fuck it, let’s go, welcome to the awful.systems privacy guide

    grapheneOS review!

    pros:

    • provably highly Cellebrite-resistant due to obsessive amounts of dev attention given to low-level security and practices enforced around phone login
    • almost barebones AOSP! for better or worse
    • sandboxed Google Play Services so you can use the damn phone practically without feeding all your data into Google’s maw
    • buggy but usable support for Android user profiles and private spaces so you can isolate spyware apps to a fairly high degree
    • there’s support coming for some very cool virtualization features for securely using your phone as one of them convertible desktops or for maybe virtualizing graphene under graphene
    • it’s probably the only relatively serious choice for a secure mobile OS? and that’s depressing as fuck actually, how did we get here

    cons:

    • the devs seem toxic
    • the community is toxic
    • almost barebones AOSP! so good fucking luck when the AOSP implementation of something is broken or buggy or missing cause the graphene devs will tell you to fuck off
    • the project has weird priorities and seems to just forget to do parts of their roadmap when their devs lose interest
    • their browser vanadium seems like a good chromium fork and a fine webview implementation but lacks an effective ad blocker, which makes it unsafe to use if your threat model includes, you know, the fucking obvious. the graphene devs will shame you for using anything but it or brave though, and officially recommend using either a VPN with ad blocking or a service like NextDNS since they don’t seem to acknowledge that network-level blocking isn’t sufficient
    • there’s just a lot of userland low hanging fruit it doesn’t have. like, you’re not supposed to root a grapheneOS phone cause that breaks Android’s security model wide open. cool! do they ship any apps to do even the basic shit you’d want root for? of course not.
    • you’ll have 4 different app stores (per profile) and not know which one to use for anything. if you choose wrong the project devs will shame you.
    • the docs are wildly out of date, of course, why wouldn’t they be. presumably I’m supposed to be on Matrix or Discord but I’m not going to do that

    and now the NextDNS rant:

    this is just spyware as a service. why in fuck do privacyguides and the graphene community both recommend a service that uniquely correlates your DNS traffic with your account (even the “try without an account” button on their site generates a 7 day trial account and a DNS instance so your usage can be tracked) and recommend configuring it in such a way that said traffic can be correlated with VPN traffic? this is incredibly valuable data especially when tagged with an individual’s identity, and the only guarantee you have that they don’t do this is a promise from a US-based corporation that will be broken the instant they receive a court order. privacyguides should be ashamed for recommending this unserious clown shit.

    • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      their browser vanadium seems like a good chromium fork and a fine webview implementation but lacks an effective ad blocker, which makes it unsafe to use if your threat model includes, you know, the fucking obvious. the graphene devs will shame you for using anything but it or brave though, and officially recommend using either a VPN with ad blocking or a service like NextDNS since they don’t seem to acknowledge that network-level blocking isn’t sufficient

      No firefox with ublock origin? Seems like that would be the obvious choice here (or maybe not due to Mozilla’s recent antics)

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        1 day ago

        the GrapheneOS developers would like you to know that switching to Ironfox, the only Android Firefox fork (to my knowledge) that implements process sandboxing (and also ships ublock origin for convenience) (also also, the Firefox situation on Android looks so much like intentional Mozilla sabotage, cause they have a perfectly good sandbox sitting there disabled) is utterly unsafe because it doesn’t work with a lesser Android sandbox named isolatedProcess or have the V8 sandbox (because it isn’t V8) and its usage will result in your immediate death

        so anyway I’m currently switching from vanadium to ironfox and it’s a lot better so far

        • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          23 hours ago

          and its usage will result in your immediate death

          This all-or-nothing approach, where compromises are never allowed, is my biggest annoyance with some privacy/security advocates, and also it unfortunately influences many software design choices. Since this is a nice thread for ranting, here’s a few examples:

          • LibreWolf enables by default “resist fingerprinting”. That’s nice. However, that setting also hard-enables “smooth scrolling”, because apparently having non-smooth scrolling can be fingerprinted (that being possible is IMO reason alone to burn down the modern web altogether). Too bad that smooth scrolling sometimes makes me feel dizzy, and then I have to disable it. So I don’t get to have “resist fingerprinting”. Cool.
          • Some of the modern Linux software distribution formats like Snap or Flatpak, which are so super secure that some things just don’t work. After all, the safest software is the one you can’t even run.
          • Locking down permissions on desktop operating systems, because I, the sole user and owner of the machine, should not simply be allowed to do things. Things like using a scanner or a serial port. Which is of course only for my own protection. Also, I should constantly have to prove my identity to the machine by entering credentials, because what if someone broke into my home and was able to type “dmesg” without sudo to view my machine’s kernel log without proving that they are me, that would be horrible. Every desktop machine must be locked down to the highest extent as if it was a high security server.
          • Enforcement of strong password complexity rules in local only devices or services which will never be exposed to potential attackers unless they gain physical access to my home
          • Possibly controversial, but I’ll say it: web browsers being so annoying about self-signed certificates. Please at least give me a checkbox to allow it for hosts with rfc1918 addresses. Doesn’t have to be on by default, but why can’t that be a setting.
          • The entire reality of secure boot on most platforms. The idea is of course great, I want it. But implementations are typically very user-hostile. If you want to have some fun, figure out how to set up a PC with a Linux where you use your own certificate for signing. (I haven’t done it yet, I looked at the documentation and decided there are nicer things in this world.)

          This has gotten pretty long already, I will stop now. To be clear, this is not a rant against security… I treat security of my devices seriously. But I’m annoyed that I am forced to have protections in place against threat models that are irrelevant, or at least sufficiently negligible, for my personal use cases. (IMO one root cause is that too much software these days is written for the needs of enterprise IT environments, because that’s where the real money is, but that’s a different rant altogether.)

          • self@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            19 hours ago

            also, I forgot to point this out earlier, but it’s worth saying: the only reason why I’m considering GrapheneOS as a viable path forward is because as an AOSP fork, it isn’t all-or-nothing. I can create a private space or profile for Google Play Services and all my spyware shit and keep it isolated, and ending the session kills all the processes those apps might have been running.

            that’s fantastic! I finally don’t have to switch fully to open source apps and do without working non-janky notifications to have a modicum of privacy on Android! the graphene devs assume I’m not gonna be perfect and they ruggedized their fork against that and put a ton of effort into making even stuff that’s deeply reliant on Google safer! why in fuck aren’t they like that for everything?

          • self@awful.systemsEnglish
            8·
            22 hours ago

            To be clear, this is not a rant against security… I treat security of my devices seriously.

            exactly! and taking this shit seriously is why this overbearing shit sucks, especially when it’s theater or enforced for threats that aren’t realistic for your threat model. unlike some of these fuckers, we both actually intend to daily the devices we’re locking down.

            because apparently having non-smooth scrolling can be fingerprinted (that being possible is IMO reason alone to burn down the modern web altogether)

            oh I fucking hate this. it’s the same shit as forcing dark mode off/on as part of fingerprinting protection. not only is this the absolute wrong way to fix that shit, it’s pretty monstrous for anyone who needs dark mode or light mode to use their device in anything resembling comfort — your user may have a visual impairment or severe light sensitivity, and now they’re fucked cause the developers couldn’t accept a minor fingerprinting risk (and light/dark mode and smooth scrolling are both utterly minor, to be real)

            Possibly controversial, but I’ll say it: web browsers being so annoying about self-signed certificates.

            motherfucker yes! the CA infrastructure is nowhere near usable for all cases and we all know it, but locking down the web and making development and self-hosting fucking annoying is the game for the browser vendors and Google in particular. to add to this: why the fuck is my browser acting like me not having a cert for localhost is a tragedy? why does the browser sandbox not allow certain shit unless I’m using https of all things to access localhost? where precisely is the fucking threat here? (I’m sure some well-paid security asshole at one of the browser vendors could snark a list of unlikely shit as reasons why local host needs to be treated as insecure with no toggle or dev tools option to treat it otherwise… and I just don’t give a fuck)

            The entire reality of secure boot on most platforms

            I’d love good secure boot! the one on PCs ain’t it at all, and unfortunately the secure ones tend to be used to lock out device owners from modifying what they own and implement shit like attestation that’s just there to violate your rights and make sure you’re not blocking ads, so unfortunately good secure boot might be incompatible with capitalism. for now though at least graphene seems to benefit from a secure secure boot chain that hasn’t been locked down yet?

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            7·
            23 hours ago

            hey those are my gripes with much of modern computing, give them back! I’m gonna tell mom

            so much more software needs a “I know what I’m doing, shut the fuck up” button

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        5·
        1 day ago

        No firefox with ublock origin? Seems like that would be the obvious choice here (or maybe not due to Mozilla’s recent antics)

        Librewolf with uBlock Origin’s probably the go-to right now.