nyankas

I disagree with that assertion.

While not in power, the conservatives have shifted their position to what was considered to be the far right only a few years ago. For example, one of their main messages during their campaign was to close Germany‘s borders for refugees, a position that was only supported by the far-right AfD beforehand (and which is violating EU law).

Their main target during the lead-up to this election wasn‘t the far-right, it was the green and left-wing parties. They ranted against renewable energy, taxes on gas, the legalization of Cannabis and such, instead of fighting against the rising far-right extremists.

Friedrich Merz, the conservative’s candidate and likely future chancellor, is an opportunist. If he expects to win something from the talking points of the right-wing extremists, he has absolutely no issues embracing them. He’s very, very different from Angela Merkel.

He already voted with the AfD against the other democratic parties a few weeks ago, which he explicitly ruled out only two months earlier. I have no reason to believe him, if he says he won‘t cooperate with them again.

My educated guess would be that it would require a lot more work for very little benefit.

Officially supporting another platform is just more work for the developers, QA and the support team. Their games do run very well on Linux using Proton. Diablo 4 has even been marked as Steam Deck Verified before its launch on Steam.

And they work without them having to implement things like a Vulkan renderer, having to test on even more system configurations and having to teach the support team how to handle issue reports on Linux.

So I think they‘re okay with how things are right now. Everyone can play their games on Linux, but if something breaks, it‘s not their problem.

And, having played their games on Linux for many years now, I‘m personally okay with that. Proton, DXVK and all the other tools are so advanced by now, that I don‘t think there would be much of a difference if they offered native game builds for Linux.

That's unfortunately not how fingerprinting works. There isn't one fingerprint defined for every browser. The methods of generating such fingerprints are ever evolving and although the Tor Browser does obfuscate more data points than regular browsers, it is not able to guarantee identical fingerprints for all users.

For example, this demonstration of a WebGL fingerprinting method produces different WebGL Report Hashes on two of my systems using the Tor Browser. The hash even stays the same on each machine between browser sessions, so it's indeed very useful for fingerprinting.

Don't get me wrong, your chances of avoiding fingerprinting are probably much better when using the Tor Browser. But it's only mitigating the problem, not solving it.

Good idea, but unfortunately even the Tor Browser doesn't seem to reliably protect against fingerprinting.

I've just tested fresh installs on Manjaro and Windows 11, both with Standard and Safest security levels. I haven't resized the window or done anything else. According to the website, I still always had a unique fingerprint.

Ich weiß nicht, ob es schon wieder hängt, aber das Plakat sollte wieder im Besitz des ZPS sein, weil es für das Abnehmen gar keine Rechtsgrundlage gab. Der Adenauer lässt grüßen.

Laut netzpolitik.org wurde die Polizei von der Staatsanwaltschaft zurückgepfiffen, nachdem sie das Plakat abgenommen und dann vergeblich versucht hatte, Weidel und Merz zu erreichen, um nachzufragen, ob sich einer von beiden beleidigt fühlt. Kannste dir nicht ausdenken.

I unfortunately can't really see how a browser could still be nice to use and properly resist fingerprinting.

The site https://amiunique.org/fingerprint tries to fingerprint your browser and lists the used attributes along with their uniqueness within their dataset. And while a browser could pretty reliably lie about its User Agent or Platform, it's often just necessary for a modern website to know, for example, what your view-port's resolution is or what kind of audio/video codecs your device supports. Going through my own results, I'd say combining these necessary data points is probably enough to identify me, even though I'm pretty privacy-conscious.

Maybe I'm overly pessimistic, but I think preventing fingerprinting would need a regulatory instead of a technical solution. Unfortunately that doesn't seem very likely anytime soon.

I find it difficult to wrap my head around how Privacy Pass actually works. It seems pretty involved. Kagi‘s implementor actually explained it over on hackernews, but that‘s only a summary.

Since it‘s an RFC standard, I don’t doubt that it works, but I hope someone smarter than me actually checks Kagi‘s open-sourced client code, which should be enough to ensure anonymity, according to the standard.

Der aktuelle Stand ist übrigens, dass die Polizei gestern von einem wohl sehr irritierten Richter aufgefordert wurde, endlich Unterlagen zu der Sache rauszurücken. Hat sie nicht gemacht. (Quelle)

Ich wünschte wirklich, solche eindeutigen Rechtsbrüche durch die Polizei hätten mal Konsequenzen.

Update 13.02.: Es gibt inzwischen weitere Neuigkeiten. So hat die Polizei wohl nicht einmal versucht, eine, für eine Beschlagnahme erforderliche, richterliche Genehmigung zu bekommen. Sie haben einfach wild drauflos beschlagnahmt. Außerdem rücken sie weiterhin keinerlei Akten an Richter und Anwälte raus. Dafür bietet die Polizei jetzt an, den Adenauer zurückzugeben, wenn das ZPS ihn zum drölfzigsten Mal beim TÜV untersuchen und die Klage gegen die Polizei fallen lässt. Was das ZPS selbstverständlich nicht akzeptiert.

So langsam beschleicht mich das Gefühl, dass die Berliner Polizei 1 Pimmelbande sondergleichen ist.

Update 13.02. (2): Inzwischen hat sich die Berliner Innensenatorin Iris Spranger im Abgeordnetenhaus zu dem Vorgang geäußert. Die Ausschnitte des ZPS enthalten viele Schnitte, die komplette Sitzung gibt es hier (ist momentan noch live, deshalb leider ohne Zeitmarke. Das Thema beginnt etwa 2 Stunden nach Start der Aufzeichnung).

Sinnvoller erscheint mir die Maßnahme nach Fr. Sprangers Ausführungen jedenfalls immer noch nicht:

Als Begründung für die Beschlagnahme führt Fr. Spranger an, dass ein Polizist Mängel festgestellt haben will (zur Erinnerung: Der Bus war zuvor drei Mal bei einer HU und zusätzlich bei weiteren Sachverständigen, die keine Mängel feststellen konnten). Auf Nachfrage führt Fr. Spranger aus, dass da beispielsweise die Dachaufbauten, wie Sirenen mit gefährlich hoher Lautstärke, Fahrtenschreiber (?), Drucker (??), Beleuchtungseinrichtungen und ein Absenken des Fahrwerks (???) zu überprüfen wären.

Fr. Spranger hat des Weiteren korrekt wiedergegeben, dass innerhalb von drei Tagen ein richterlicher Beschluss vorliegen muss. Auf Nachfrage, warum heute, am vierten Tag nach der Beschlagnahme, noch keiner vorliegt, weicht sie aus und faselt von Lösungen, die gemeinsam mit dem ZPS, der Polizei und dem TÜV gesucht werden. Das ZPS weiß von diesen gemeinsamen Lösungen offenbar nichts (wenn nicht der oben erwähnte Erpressungsversuch der Polizei gemeint ist...).

I think Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais explained their plans for a Steam Deck 2 pretty well in this interview (starting at 8:36).

Paraphrasing: They are happy to work with other companies, but the people at Valve also have their own ideas and goals for hardware. And they want to be able to set the bar for these ideas themselves. That‘s why they‘re working on a Steam Deck 2.

And when you look at how well that setting the bar worked with the Deck, I‘m really glad that they want to follow up on that.

I own a GPD Win 2, a handheld PC from a few years before the Deck was a thing. That device couldn‘t be charged while using it, it had its speakers wired the wrong way, it constantly overheated and was a pain to use because of that. Ever since the Deck came out, the whole handheld PC market, including GPD, improved their device quality by a country mile.

And that‘s one of the best things about the Deck, in my opinion, and will hopefully also be one of the best things about the Deck 2.

I think Valve should really make the current „Betas“-Feature more prominent, and rename it to „Versions“ or something. It should* be pretty easy for Firaxis to just offer an old, cross-play enabled version there, while updating the regular version more frequently on PC. That would make disabling such features unnecessary.

I’ve seen only a few developers actually making use of „Beta“s in that way, but I think it would be very useful in cases like this.

* there could, of course, be other technical issues preventing them from doing that, which only their developers know of

Edit: They've actually added a console-compatible "Beta" yesterday.

I‘ve been using Kagi since September 2023.

The biggest difference to other search engines is really the quality of the results. Before Kagi, I‘ve used DuckDuckGo for a few years, but had to switch to Google more often than not, as I just didn‘t find what I was looking for. Most alternative search engines only use Bing‘s index, which just isn‘t any good in my experience. Kagi‘s results are built from quite a few different sources as well as their own index. Seeing how crappy Google‘s results are at this point, I don‘t think you can get better search results right now.

Also, the ability to rank and block specific domains in my results is something I really like and wouldn‘t want to miss anymore.

Lastly, I really enjoy using a search engine that isn‘t being optimized for advertisers, but for the user. Kagi‘s team is very receptive for feedback. For example, they’ve implemented an icon for search results with paywalls, because users asked for it. There are many small, nice details like that, which can save you a few clicks or just improve your general experience.

It's nice that they fear it, but it would be better if they learned to recognize it and act accordingly.

Musk was given his own opinion piece in a big Sunday newspaper recently (Welt am Sonntag, published by Axel Springer), praising the right-wing extremist party AfD and telling people to vote for them. Then, he was part of a (hilariously bad) live stream with AfD's leader Alice Weidel. And then he appeared on their party congress. And just today, Bild, which is Germany's most popular trash-newspaper and made by, drum-roll please, Axel Springer, published an article (archive link, German), implying that the current wave of protests against fascism and right-wing-extremists is just state-controlled propaganda. And this covered only [the most obvious part of] the US-side of things.

But don't worry, Russia has been caught recently as well: It came to light, that a series of vandalized cars, where the exhausts were stuffed with building foam and stickers of the Green's leader were put on the cars, were most likely ordered by Russia and not done by some green extremists.

And how is that knowledge reflected in the polls? Right-wing-extremists up, Greens and moderate parties down. Greeeeeat!

I'm so sick of reading stuff about people being afraid of being manipulated by someone. Yes! People are trying to manipulate you, you blithering dingus, maybe you should try not being so easily manipulable instead of sitting there acting like you can't do anything about it! Stop getting your news exclusively from social media and other sources which have been manipulative in the past. And use a bit of common sense when you're being told that the evil Greens want to take away your pet, turn off your heating and ruin each and every farmer in Germany. Sure, there might be more subtle manipulation going on, but not falling for the really obvious stuff would at least be a great start.

TL;DR: Angry rant about people being afraid of manipulation while just letting it happen.