• 26 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I use TB under Debian and there is a tray icon and an arrival notification, poll time of maybe a few minutes, seems fine. Showing the # of messages in the tray icon could be sort of handy I guess, though I had never thought about it before and didn’t miss it. Basic features = shut off the “email contains remote content” banner or “spam filter thinks this email is spam” (I can recognize spam for myself). I just want a preference that permanently disables remote content without throwing banners at me. And eliminate the client side spam filtering completely since I have that on the server side, and can manually flag any that gets through. Plus various other stuff like that. Yes, get rid of the calendar and contacts stuff. Biggest feature needing significant code changes: make message search not suck.




  • What do you mean by highlight via email? Target is reasonably close to here. There is not really anyplace closer for kitchen stuff etc. There are a few grocery stores that are closer and I do use those. Anyway this is getting way off topic. I mostly just wanted to know what was going on inside Android resulting in the app’s observed behaviour. My shopping practices are the best I can do given my requirements, as far as I can tell.



  • The web site lets you order stuff for home delivery or for in-store pickup (you go into the store and wait a long time at the customer service desk). Gettnig stuff brought to the parking lot requires the app. It’s annoying and I don’t know why they do that. The app also needs network connectivity when you’re in the parking lot, to let them know which parking space you are in. I don’t have a working sim in the burner phone, so I bring another phone to use as a wifi hotspot, what fun.

    Other stores do let you order on the web for parking lot pickup, and then call a phone number once you get there, so Target just insists on being special.


  • I realize you’re being facitious but as a matter of fact, the Target app (plus Google Play) are the only apps I have installed so far that didn’t come from F-droid. Google Play was needed to install the Target app. I figure that the F-droid apps have had enough vetting that I tend to not worry about them too much. I have never installed or used Google Play on my “real” phone. I only installed it on the burner in order to install the target app there.

    I confess to occasionally using some of the preinstalled google apps on my main phone, such as the camera app. I will get around to checkng out F-droid versions one of these days.


  • I prefer to avoid going in the Target store because of the long waits and for healh reasons. Parking lot pickup is preferable. Also, I sometimes have to take my mom with me when shopping. She is elderly, has serious mobility problems, and is probably more susceptible than most people to airborne pathogens from the holiday shoppers in Target. So it’s way easier and safer for us to sit in the car and let Target staff bring the stuff to us, instead of going into the store. Plenty of other people order everything from Amazon for similar sorts of reasons, and at least this avoids a lot of packaging and shipping.

    It’s not like I went to great lengths to get the burner phone to run the Target app. I had the phone anyway, and the Target app seemed like a good use for it.

    Installing the Target app from Google Play requires a Google Play account, and I didn’t want that on my main phone either. Plus using the Target app requires a target.com account, besides having the app itself installed. So the burner phone actually separates off three annoying things: 1) Google Play account, 2) target.com account, 3) Target app.

    Thanks for the info about Firebase Cloud messaging. What I’m wondering now is, does the target app have to keep running to receive those messages? That means it’s potentially continuously collecting the phone’s location. That’s part of the reason I keep the phone powered off. Location permission is emabled because that makes parking lot pickup a little faster. Basically they juggle their order queue to prioritize users who are getting close to the store. So I turn on the phone and start the app when I’m a few miles away from the store.

    I guess I could keep location permission disabled except when needed, but that’s more nuisance, and anyway there’s still data collection possible from other sensors and the availability of the network.







  • I don’t bother with a proxy host or with LetsEncrypt, though I guess you could use LetsEncrypt perfectly well. Back when I was doing this, LetsEncrypt didn’t exist and you had to actually pay for public certificates, so using locally generated free ones saved money. It also had a minor(?) security advantage in that if the private server key somehow leaked, it wouldn’t let people impersonate our internet domain.

    For the private CA I simply used the crappy CA.pl script that comes with OpenSSL or did at the time. There are much better ways to do it, especially at any kind of scale, but CA.pl sufficed dealing with a few development machines.


  • Not sure what you mean. If you want to stay focused on the task, then try to do so. If you want to let it slide, then do that and get back to it whenever. It’s possible that you’ll completely forget or it’s possible that you will get back to it. Back in college there was a certain book (fiction) that I wanted to read. I finally got around to it 20+ years later. I’m glad that I read it and the delay wasn’t a problem. It wasn’t like it was bugging me for all those years. Something eventually reminded me of it and I followed up.




  • The initial post is a somewhat incomprehensible rant but I think the objection is that any number of skeezy websites all have domains pointing to the same Cloudflare IP. So when a malware app opens a TLS connection to one of those domains, the shared IP doesn’t tel you anything, and the ECH prevents you from seeing with Wireshark just whose home the malware is phoning. You have to resort to more drastic methods like intercepting DNS. Better yet, don’t run malware.


  • Not sure what you mean? He didn’t really care. Linux started out as a hobby project, and became usable at around the time that the GNU userspace was mostly sufficient for a full system, the Hurd kernel project bogged down from technical overreach (maybe still is), and BSD was bogged down by licensing snags (later fixed). The GNU project by then had somewhat quieted its naysayers by releasing some very impressive userspace code such as GCC and Emacs. Plus the X window system was a thing. So once there was a runnable complete GNU/Linux/X system, maybe it wasn’t for everyone, but there weren’t real doubts about its viability. I guess there was always more uptake in the server space though, and it’s still like that.


  • Nextcloud might handle what you want. There are a zillion places that offer hosting for it, or you can self-host it. MediaWiki is another possible choice, that despite the name is more document oriented and less media oriented than NextCloud is. Again, you can self-host, or there are commercial hosts for it. Lots of VPS providers also offer one-click installers for it. I haven’t run a MediaWiki instance myself, but am familiar with it as a user through editing Wikipedia. I’ve run Gitit, which has a similar UI, but is backed by a Git repo.