For me it’s the paranoia surrounding webcams. People outright refuse to own one and I understand, until they go on and on about how they’re being spied. Here’s the secret - unplug the damn thing when you think you won’t use it or haven’t used it in a while.
They, whoever it is, can’t really spy on you on something that’s already off and unplugged!
Majority of “webcam” use is in laptops, tablets and phones, grandpa… No “unplug the damn thing” to be found?
They often come equipped with a privacy slider to cover the lens. Or you can just put a sticker on them.
They don’t “often come with” I’d say it’s fairly rare, and especially in the last generation of computers that most have now.
Also, what you mention are all steps above and beyond OP’s direction to “just unplug it” and they come with compromises - I.e. A shutter cover isn’t a HW disconnect, two very different things. And, a sticker isn’t really removable temporarily when you actually do need the camera deliberately. Certain high end laptops have a purported physical HW disconnect toggle or even some “flip around” cameras that are only deployed when needed, but again, few and far between.
Sorry if I was wrong about the prevalence of such protections. My perception may be biased because the notebooks used by our company are all equipped with a switch or shutter of some sort. (HP brand, IIRC) Regarding your second point, however: surely a shutter physically obscuring the camera lens is just as effective as disconnecting the camera when it comes to protecting the user’s privacy?
Yes, common that folks in more privileged positions can have these skewed views on products, like, “Uber is a pretty good service and a good value…” but you only pay on your corporate expense account… When normal people need a ride now, it’s $80 for a 14 minute ride that used to cost 25-30 bucks. Someone’s we can just live fully different realities from most people.
You often forget to close camera shutters (they are often tone on tone and designed to be more invisible, or they can fall open/off. The microphones are also often located near/in camera modules, so a slide shutter can give a false sense of security, but you can still be heard even if not seen sometimes. I do hope it gets to a point where HW disconnect is the norm
Honestly, just Googling (or DuckDuckGo-ing) things. I tend to be the “tech person” that people ask about their computer problems quite often, and 9/10 times I just copy-paste the error code into the search bar and it tells me what to do. I’m not secret about it either, I’m like you can literally just Google it and it’ll usually work. But people still seem to think it’s magic lol.
I had a chat with someone that is a Senior Staff Engineer at a huge company a while ago, on what I’d say is a pretty big service that millions use.
They don’t write much code any more, but they debug a lot of issues. The way they described the workflow to mastery is:
- If you know nothing, ask someone that knows something
- If you know something, Google, and there will be answer from an expert
- If you’re an expert and Google doesn’t work, read the docs and specs from the masters
- If you’re a master, start writing the specs, and offer addendums for when the spec needs to change.
IMO, Googling gets you 99% of the way there in many situations, but if you know nothing the answer might be in front of you and you wouldn’t know it.
There’s a hidden skill in there that allows you to filter out the bullshit/scam/unhelpful solutions and zero in on the helpful, legitimate stuff.
You also need crazy fast reflexes for all the popups.
Ah yes, “two idiots one keyboard”.
There’s a rumour that it was part of a bet about which producer could make the dumbest hacking scene.
My colleague (we work in web dev) will literally sit there staring at an error message but apparently not reading it, and then he’ll open ChatGPT and start asking it what to do. The fucker never even Googles error messages, it’s an absolute nightmare.
ChatGPT can be super useful, but I’m kind of worried about people learning to use it exclusively.
I tried helping a PhD student assemble a set up for measuring transistors. He used ChatGPT to do all the code for the software control (python), which is fine, even if he relied on it to fix every single part of his code when a quick trip to the reference manuals of the equipments would solve the problem instantly.
At a certain point I realized I maybe had misunderstood his set up design and asked him “wait, which device do you want to connect to your gate? Which terminal even is the gate?”
And I kid you not, the dude asked ChatGPT which terminal in his device was the gate
(he also reeked of weed so there’s that)
Unless it’s Windows giving you some long hexadecimal number. Those never return any results.
And the solutions to Windows problems are almost always ludicrously esoteric and stupid anyway lol. It always turns out to be something like “the CPU usage went up because the clock in the taskbar on this specific version of Windows syncs to a different server that closed down so it tries to ping it 400 times a second for some unknown reason and that’s why you get a 78-character hexadecimal error code and all your USB devices disconnect whenever you render a video.”
Overheats when you hold down the space bar.
Don’t change that! I need that feature for my workflow
If it’s not a crash it’s probably an ntstatus and if it shows during a bsod then it’s a bughcheck code. That said the most common ntstatus I see is the very unhelpful 0xC0000001 - status unsuccessful.
The one I came across had something to do with…you remember Intel Optane? How there was a brief window there where they’d sell you a PC with a spinning rust hard disk and like a 16GB special NVMe drive that acted as a kind of cache for the hard disk? I was replacing that with just a normal NVMe drive, and there’s some settings in the BIOS you have to tinker with. And BIOS settings are bullshit. TMP. XMPP. FLP. TLQ. DKR or LXD. Which combination of these settings means “no more optane, just normal bulk storage on the NVMe socket?” There’s nothing that says anything like that.
I apparently didn’t get this quite right and Windows would get a ways through the install process before failing with an 0x2ac4d7f9f2 code or something. Windows’ installer doesn’t give you a functioning desktop, it’s in its own useless environment, so you have to manually type this into your phone to look it up, which returns no results. Like it doesn’t link to a page on Microsoft’s website because of course it doesn’t.
I then tried to install Linux Mint. Boots to the live environment, I get a full desktop. I run the installer, which fails partway through. The error message spells out the issue in plain English, contains a clickable hyperlink to a relevant wiki page which launches in Firefox because we’re in a live environment, and it has a QR code you can scan with your phone to go to the same page on a smart phone. Armed with this knowledge I got the setting right in the BIOS and successfully installed Linux.
But Windows is just so much more user friendly you guys.
Nah. People are using you and too lazy to care. They pretend it’s magic cause it’ll get you to continue being their gateway to laziness.
I think you’re underestimating peoples’ ability to filter out the massive amount of garbage results/astroturfed reviews/posts/websites out there.
As a similar “tech person,” me googling tech problems is exactly as lazy as the person asking me.
Their solution is “ask someone” and our solution is also “ask someone.”
It’s not a question of googling, it’s about recognising bullshit answers and skipping them
People who complain about ads on YouTube. I tell them about ads blockers and they always go “Huh, you sure it works? Sounds good, I might try that” and then proceed to forget about it and complain about ads in a few months time…
I’m pretty positive by this point that people love to bitch about ads for the sake of bitching about ads. They bring this onto themselves.
Same goes for them going onto sites without ad blockers. Then when you tell them, it’s either “OHHH THANKS!” or “Uhhhh, I cAn’t” for no reason.
Or people, like my mom, who
arewere relatively educated about technology and don’t want to learn new technologies/tools under the pretense of security (even if the software is foss, like again most adblockers.Edit: Whenever I use a browser without an adblocker, I remember how shitty the web is without them.
People have a fantastically high resistance to change
I think this happens because people believe that ad blockers are “too good to be true”. That was what I first thought when first getting an ad blocker, that there was going to be some kind of “catch” like slowing down websites, making them less functional or being malicious. But it turns out they actually improve performance, rarely affect functionality and are even recommended by the FBI because they protect against malicious advertising.
I hate the ad blocker argument for youtube. How am i supposed to do that on my tv or my phone?
I literally just use normal Firefox with normal ublock origin on my phone
- invidious
- piped
- some TVs have 3rd party specialized versions of the official webapp
The first two have web pages and phone apps. You can find the phone apps on F-droid.
Fun fact: did you know that the youtube app on your TV is just a no-effort web browser with a URL fixed to a web page, which you could even use on your PC?
Can I do any of these on FireTV?
I expect that all smart TVs have a web browser, so the first two should always work. Be aware though that while piped is more usable (imho), it currently does not work anywhere, because it did not yet implement a fix for google’s blocking that invidious did a week or so ago.
If FireTVs are android TVs, you should be able to install the android apps too, in a way or another.
Use smart tube on fire tv and other android tv devices: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube
Rebooting your PC really does fix a lot of issues.
But in Windows, you have to go to a sub-sub-sub-menu of the old control panel, click on a button called “choose what closing the lid does”, then on “change settings that are currently unavailable” and then disable “fast startup (recommended)”, just to get your pc to reboot properly.
Hold shift while you click start and shutdown (or reboot) when necessary. This will have windows do a full shutdown instead of a hybrid shutdown.
Thank you, this will save my monday morning restart after a weekend of
off‘hibernation’
Press windows D to go to desktop and press alt F4 until you get the shutdown menu.
Here’s an even easier hack than all of that :effort:
Just hold the power button down for about 10 seconds, ez-pz
I like to call that the “putting a pillow over its face” method of rebooting. Reserved for when even a
shutdown /r /t 0doesn’t work
I call this one forbidden knowledge because I see it so little in public, but I’m sure it’s well known in privacy communities: A password like “I have this really secure password that I type into computers sometimes” is a much stronger and easier to memorize password than “aB69$@m”. It seems more often than not I find networks where the SSID is a better password than the WPA key.
I agree but I think the problem is that some apps/sites have strict password requirements, which usually includes adding upper-case, symbols, numbers, and then limits the length even sometimes…
At my previous bank the password had to be a 5 digit PIN code…
At one point, Charles Schwab allowed a password of infinite length, but SILENTLY TRUNCATED ALL PASSWORDS TO 8 DIGITS.
This is something I sent a few angry emails about wherever I could find an opportunity.
Sketchy indeed. I’ve seen this as well, and the redeeming thing about it is that you’re locked out after 3 unsuccessful login attempts - so no matter how easy bruteforcing would be, there’s a safety catch dealing with it.
“correct horse battery staple” remains firm in my memory
xkcd #936. Nice.
Difficulty to remember: You’ve already memorized it
It’s true! And nobody remembers the first panel’s password.
I agree - I do use passphrases in some critical cases which I don’t want to store in a password manager.
However, I believe passphrases are theoretically more susceptible to sophisticated dictionary type attacks, but you can easily mitigate it by using some less-common 1337speak character replacements.
Highly recommend a password manager though - it’s much easier to remember one or two complex master keyring passwords & the random generated passwords will easily satisfy any application’s complexity requirements.
Password managers. People will use anything but that: paper, notes app (without any security), using the same password everywhere…
Came to say this exact thing.
FFS I have 100’s of passwords saved in my keepass DB, they are all different.
Passwords will only autofill on the correct site, so look alike sites are captured by that simple bit of security.
I keep telling myself I need to start using a password manager but I’m worried I won’t be able to log into things on my phone or other devices like my work computer when I need to because I don’t know the password. Is that a legitimate worry or is there a solution for this? How do you sync passwords between computer and phone?
Eh, I don’t trust any 3rd party enough to give them all my passwords and I don’t trust myself enough to secure a server for self hosting a password manager.
I know all my passwords, can’t forget em, no paper or notes, no repeat passwords.
If you know all your passwords and can’t forget them, I’m assuming your using some sort of pattern to remember them in which case you have a major issue in case of data breaches as your other passwords can be guessed.
Just as a heads up, sometimes the pattern is not that easy for computer to brute force. As an example, my old password contains a birth date but with an alternating shift making them a combination of digit and symbol.
The issue is if you are a) targeted, and b)involved in multiple breaches. If they can get the pattern, they potentially get everything.
Is it worth it? That depends. Are you willing to risk it NOT being worth it to a random guy in Africa earning a few $ a day?
Keepass. Password database is a local file.
Sorry stupid question, but how do I import my passwords from Proton Pass to KeepassDX?
I looked it up for you; you can export your Proton Pass database as a .csv file and then import it into KeePass. Not sure about KeePassDX but on XC, there’s a csv import option. There’s also a json import option but it says BitWarden for that so I’m not sure if the json Proton Pass exports is in the same structure as KeePassXC expects.
Fucking THANK YOU.
A very good friend of mine doesn’t use any password manager. I’ve often in the past told them why don’t they? They argue that then all their passwords would be gone if they forget that one master password. Okay, I say, how the fuck is having to remember 1 password harder than having to remember 20 passwords?
Any good password manager nowadays also has an account takeover feature if you opt in. Basically your spouse / child / parent can take over your account to recover it for you if you can’t get in.
I had to save my wife’s account before on 1password family. It worked nicely!
What annoys me about webcams is that they could have easily used the power line to the camera to light the LED. Then if the camera was on the light would be on.
But for some reason the LED is enabled separately from the camera, so it can be hacked through software that the camera is on but LED is off. Leading to a lot of paranoia. It’s just a non sensical design choice.
It’s simple enough to just cover a camera. I’d be far more worried about the always listening microphones.
Webcams should not have mics built into them, they all suck anyways.
Like putting speakers in monitors.
They should both have hardwired LED indicators. Actually, every powered component should, because why not?
LEDs are fucking annoying
Electrical tape is your friend.
To each their own, I guess.
Removed by mod
I’ve been helping my parents renovate their house recently, and I’m trying to get them to understand this. Just watch a video, it instantly gives you context for commonly agreed upon solutions. You don’t have to reinvent solutions to solved problems.
For example, my mom decided to refinish her cabinets doors. They were painted with one layer of a typical latex house paint you could even still see the original finish in the brush strokes. I sanded the paint and the original varnished finish off the interiors in just a few minutes with an orbital sander.
She decided that because she saw that her aunt use a paint stripper on Facebook, that she should do that. So instead of sanding it down to wood in a few minutes, she’ll coat the doors with stripper, scrape the paint off, clean the caustic paint stripper off, and then sand the varnish/wood at the end anyway. I tried to explain this, and pull up a video showing how messy and overkill the paint strippers were, and she got mad that I played a video.
Meanwhile, my step dad was helping me install quarter round over their baseboards, I showed him 3 options to finish the ends. A simple 90° cut, a standard 45° bevel, and another mitre with a tiny triangle to round over the end. I explained that the mitre looks the nicest, but it takes twice as long to do.
He proceeded to freehand two bevels for half an hour with a dull chipped chisel. They were completely uneven and jagged. Then I explained he had to repeat that work 18 more times in the hallway alone, assuming he was happy with his… handiwork.
They have been trying to finish renovating this house for 20 years. Now I see why it is taking so long.
I have done stuff by myself they in anybtime before yt would need someone to show me.
Whem car mechanic tells me I have problem on my car I can find yt on how to detect it and how to solve it. I don’t get knowledge to do it, but I can definitely appreciate their work more and not think they are just ripping me off.
It is amazing what we have and take for granted.
Youtube has helped me save on so many home repairs. 400 service calls become a 30 part and an afternoon of taking the dryer apart with video guides.
Saving a picture and posting it somewhere.
I see people making screenshots of their whole phone’s screen and posting them just to show a picture. In reality, maybe 90% of the time, if you see a picture on the screen of your phone, you can save that picture, with no pointless information around it, no black bars and so on. Even if that’s not possible, Android for example has been doing something from the recent apps screen that lets you extract a picture from an app’s screen - and that’s arguably even easier than doing a screenshot.
Always get the version of the gadget with replaceable batteries unless you want a brick in 3-10 years. Additionally, prefer 18650, AA, AAA batteries, and keep some rechargeable ones around.
Eneloop batteries (the white ones, not the black ones) are the best AA and AAA batteries out there for sure. Panasonic sells a package of Eneloops with a charging device that accepts both AA and AAA batteries, it’s very good. Can be charged via USB and can also charge other devices, it’s the kind of device I dreamed about in the 90s.
Why not the black ones?
They don’t last as long and have less charge cycles, but IIRC they have a larger charge capacity. Eneloop white batteries have 4x more recharge cycles than the Eneloop black batteries. Hard to justify larger capacity (2550 mAh for black, 2100 for white) at 1/4 of the lifespan/charge cycles.
Some people use them for specific things like gamepad controllers (i.e. X-Box/Playstation controllers) because you’re less likely to have interruptions but personally, I just change batteries when I dip below 30%. I keep 4 spare AAs in a charging cradle (La Crosse Technology, apparently they don’t make chargers anymore which came as a huge surprise because they were THE battery charger back in the day 🤓). I use a program on my PC for keyboard macros that has an additional feature displaying gamepad battery percentage and I find it far more accurate than the native app or alternatives.
To me it’s like having a 16 gal gas tank and some guy tries to tell you he can swap it out for a 20 gal gas tank, but then you find out the "upgrade" has 1/4 of the lifespan because it’s far more likely to corrode. Not worth the tradeoff for the vast majority of drivers who can simply fill up a little more often.
It’s a gimmick to basically upsell people an additional battery type that in fairness to Panasonic is literally right on the packaging (2100 vs 500 charge cycles) but unless you’re actively comparing charge cycles between battery types, which the vast majority of people buying batteries aren’t paying attention to because they (reasonably, IMO) assume all AA batteries have a similar life cycle/capacity these days, it’s hard to notice the above differences that I pointed out. So a lot of people buy the white, then the black thinking "ooOoOO Pro edition = better", only to find out 2+ years later that their black batteries are dead while their white batteries keep chugging along.
I know that’s a super long winded explanation but I think it’s good to explain all this. I mostly recommend Eneloop whites because I’m not a big fan of waste, battery waste in particular, so I think that if someone has to use batteries then it makes sense for them to use the ones that are reasonably priced and will last far longer than any other battery. That said, the price of them definitely has gone up over the years, though that applies to most things.
Thanks for that info re Black vs White.
No problem! I love removable/rechargeable batteries.
Unplug your inbuilt webcam?
Some laptops now have physical privacy shutters for that - and for those that don’t, you can get one that you can stick on top.
That still leaves the microphone.
The actual simple and sane solution would just be to require indicator leds hardwired to the literal power supply lines of the camera chip/microphone, so they’re physically impossible top turn off while recording.
But that would require US or EU legislation.
If you don’t have your files on another physical location you can show me, you don’t have a backup, you don’t own your files, you basically give your “digital life” to someone else.
But that extremely expensive NFT I bought has my name on it, not yours. Therefore it is owned by me and nobody else.
No I won’t show it to you.
The other day, I was chatting on a Discord server about how people manage their photos, which keep piling up each year. I asked which cloud service they use, and one person replied, ‘Save them offline.’ That really struck me because I haven’t invested in offline storage devices in years, and I realized I wasn’t storing anything offline.
Even if you don’t use it as a password manager, bitwarden has an excellent pass phrase generator. The only annoyance is when I run into maximum password lengths at times.
The generated password lenghts can be set in the UI at least. It’s worse when the password form accepts only SOME special symbols (looking at you bank)
Wires:
- Ethernet
overpreferred over WiFi for non portable desktops - Audio gear : wired will sound better. Bluetooth headphones have batteries that almost certainly aren’t repairable.
- Peripherals, in the sane vein. I just don’t get having to charge a keyboard or mouse that sits on my desk all day.
The fuck is “Ethernet over WiFi”. Isn’t ethernet by definition wired? If it’s x over WiFi, isn’t that just WiFi with extra steps?
Edit: I see from other comments they mean “preferable compared to”, not “used atop of”.
Ethernet over WiFi is WiFi. Ethernet is a protocol not the cables and its used with wired networks and WiFi.Source?
I’ve never heard anything like this.
It appears I either misunderstood or misremembered what I read.
It probably referred to MAC addresses being reused on WiFi. However the frames used are not Ethernet frames.
Ethernet however is not restricted to twisted pair cat cables it’s on fiber and originally was on co-axial.
I was only referring to wired vs wireless. The type of wire is kind of irrelevant. Fiber, co-axial, whatever. :)
I agree with everything except a wireless mouse. I have a magnetic usb “nub” that plugs into the mouse so when I need to charge it every couple of weeks it’s as simple as moving the mouse near enough the magnetic cable and it pops into place.
For me, the benefits of a wireless mouse far outweigh the imperceptible-to-me lag from the 2.4ghz dongle 10cm away in clear view. The only downside I can see is the weight of the battery, but I’m not a competitive FPS player so I’m good.
But what are the benefits of a wireless mouse? You don’t have to string the cable from the back of your PC to the mousepad, sure, but that’s something you do once a blue moon (unless you often go to LAN partys (which, in itself, are probably not a thing anymore)). At work, okay, I sometimes get up off my chair and have my company-provided wireless mouse on my leg to keep scrolling while I read through legal documents, but that’s a rare use case, too, no?
I don’t like the feeling of the cable dragging on the desk. Or the cable snagging on the monitor stand, or anything else on the desk.
I also prefer the aesthetics of a wireless mouse. One less cable to manage. The charge cable is tucked away and only comes out every week or so to charge overnight.
Yeah, my keyboard has a cable but my keyboard doesn’t move, and it’s a pretty sexy (and heavy) cable so it’s different than a mouse cable.
As for latency, from what I understand in many cases a wireless mouse can have less latency than some wired mice. So that’s nice too.
I guess the main downside is weight but that has never bothered me. That said, I’m not a competitive fps player, but even so some wireless mice are quite light.
Fair points you’re making there!
I guess it never bothered me enough to have even crossed my mind.
I need to look into the latency thing. From my limited knowledge it makes no sense that a wireless mouse could have better latency than a wired one. Unless the wire is made of something barely conductive to electricity and the wireless works with stupidly fast transmission tech, I guess o.o
Great review of several high end mice, wired and wireless. He found no correlation between wires and latency. Ultimately, he concludes that the most important properties of the mouse are weight and feel.
- Ethernet
I’m surprised by how many people use Overleaf for writing LaTeX instead of installing something locally. It’s not that hard, guys. And the experience can be infinitely better as you can actually customize it however you want.
Well yes but overleaf makes it possible to work on it with a mate, on any device without having to install anything, and it also saves your progress online so you don’t lose it or forget you document at home.
If your not seeing were i’m going it’s perfect for school project. Through high school and college i’ve done all my projects with it… I think that’s where it shines.
