The metadata in the headers can be avoided using Memoryhole and similar protocols which embed the headers inside the encrypted payload. The problem is again barrier to entry. Low-tech users generally can’t even handle app installs on desktops.

When you say “worry”, that’s not the right word for it. My boycott against Google is not fear-driven. I will not feed Google anything it can profit from as an ethical stance. Even if an expert linux tor user were on Google, I’m not sure we could exchange email in a way that ensures Google gets no profitable data. If we use PGP coupled with Memoryhole to strip out the headers, I’m not sure Google would accept a msg with a missing or bogus From: header. But if so, Google still possibly learns the user’s timezone. Though that may be useless if Google learns nothing else about that user. But we’re talking obscure corner cases at this point. Such an expert user would have no Google dependency anyway.

MS/google-dependent friends are generally extremely low-tech. They don’t know the difference between Firefox and the Internet. They don’t know the difference between Wi-Fi and Internet. Linux – what’s linux? They would say. At best, they just think of it as a mysterious nerd tool to be avoided. So what can I do wholly on my end to reach them via gmail without Google getting a shred of profitable data? Nothing really. So I just don’t connect directly with a large segment of friends and family. Some of them are probably no longer reachable. Some are in touch with people who connect to me via XMPP, so sometimes info/msgs get proxied through the few XMPP users. It’s still a shitshow because Google still gets fed through that proxied inner circle of friends and family. In the past when someone needed to reach me directly, they would create a Hushmail or Protonmail mail account for that temporary purpose (like coordinating a trip somewhere). But that option is mostly dead.

I just had to reach out to plumbers for quotes. All of them are gmail-served. All I could do is refuse to share my email address and push them to use analog mechanisms. They are not hungry enough for business to alter their online workflow or create protonmail accounts.

That’s exactly what I did with hushmail. I would tell low-tech folks to get a hushmail account then I would use hushtools.com to do all the key management, putting my key on the keyring and grabbing their key. So the other person did not need to know anything or take any special steps. That was best option of my time. But last time I checked hushmail was still entirely non-gratis.

Protonmail emerged when HM became non-gratis and messed with hushtools. But PM requires every one of their own users to do key management which creates a barrier to entry. I would have to walk a PM user through adding my key to my record in their address book and walk them through sending me their key. That effort is a show stopper for many. I might as well walk them through setting up a PGP-capable MUA. But then if they keep their gmail or MS acct the metadata still feeds those corps.

This simple answer is no doubt the most overlooked; probably as a consequence of the tyranny of convenience… people too lazy to go to the library.

I give out my XMPP address and offer Snikket accounts. Some go along with it and some do not. I lost touch with some friends. Some people are in contact via phone but that’s not ideal some connections are lost as phone numbers change.

I used to push some people toward Hushmail until they dropped the gratis plans. Then for a while I pressured people onto Protonmail but then distanced myself from PM when the brought in Google reCAPTCHAs and killed off Hydroxide. Tuta is a non-starter because Tuta’s variety of e2ee is incompatible with open standards, thus forcing me to periodically login to a web UI (also due to them sabotaging their Android app by way of forced obsolescence pushed in the most incompetent way).

So it’s a shitty state of affairs. 2024 and simply sending a msg to someone has become a total shitshow.

I refuse to fund my oppressors

Bingo. I live by this philosophy.

Although more precisely: I refuse to fund feed my oppressors. The reason for s/fund/feed/ swap is that our oppressors profit from our data too. So e.g. I won’t even email a gmail user because my data would then feed Google (an oppressor because of how they dictate e-mail terms among other oppressions).

The others are right. Trying to stream from a torrent seems wasteful and complex.

But if you must for some strange reason, perhaps it would work to use webtor.io to produce an http-reachable audio file which could be curl/wget-fetched and piped to an audio decoder/player. I doubt you could make webtor fetch pieces linearly from the beginning. You would likely have to wait until the last piece is fetched to start streaming.

I’ve not fetched subtitles in a while but back when I did, I recall all the websites hosting them were extremely protectionist… more so than any other category of content on the web.

Of course the fix is to have torrents for the subtitle collections, perhaps by language.

Which git repo is used to host the article doesn’t matter. That project is mirrored on ½ dozen other repos. Did you follow the links of the citations? The article is well cited but sometimes the links go stale (or become cloudflared). If you had trouble reaching the cited sources plz let me know & I’ll get the author to fix it. Or you can file a bug report in the issues tab.

The bug is most likely in the scenario of a default Cloudflare config. Cloudflare pushes a captcha to all apps other than the Tor Browser that come over Tor (in the default config). This would of course cause the #Lemmy javascript to go apeshit.

Better or worse depends on who you ask.

I boycott Cloudflare and I avoid it. Some CF hosts are configured to whitelist Tor so we don’t encounter a block screen or captcha. For me that is actually worse because I could inadvertently interact with a CF website without knowing about the CF MitM. I want to be blocked by Cloudflare because it helps me avoid those sites.

The CF onion (IIUC) cuts out the exit node which is good. But CF is still a MitM so for me that’s useless.

Some users might not care that CF has a view on all their packets - they just don’t want to be blocked. So for them the onion is a bonus.

W.r.t CSAM, CF is pro-CSAM. When a CF customer was hosting CSAM, a whistleblower informed Cloudflare. Instead of taking action against the CSAM host, CF doxxed the ID of the whistleblower to the CSAM host admin, who then published the ID details so the users would retaliate against the whistleblower. (more details)

There is no way to “disable” cloudflare if an instance has chosen to use it. It will sit between you and the server for all traffic.

Some people use CF DNS and keep the CF proxy disabled by default. They set it to only switch on the CF proxy if the load reaches an unmanageable level. This keeps the mitm off most of the time. But users who are wise to CF will still avoid the site because it still carries the risk of a spontaneous & unpredictable mitm.

wow… that is terrible. You should not have had to go on a dig for such a simple limitation. All this fancy javascript and it failed to do a simple field length check.

Ah, well if the front page is 80kb that might explain it. So apparently there’s just some really heavy text especially if each subsequent page is anywhere near 80kb.

thanks for the tip. Yes I can see that there is an attempt to load images but there is a little prohibited icon. So I’m not sure what that really means. If images are disabled in the browser settings, then I think there should not even be an attempt to fetch them. I wonder if javascript is bypassing the config and fetching the image, but then the browser is simply blocking them from display.

Glad to see they are tagged. It could evolve more but the tags are the most important thing.

I think this project has some tools that might automate that:

https://0xacab.org/dCF/deCloudflare

They ID and track every website that joins #Cloudflare. It’s a huge effort but those guys are on top of it. A script could check the list of domains against their list. There is also this service (from the same devs) which does some checks:

https://karma.crimeflare.eu.org:1984/api/is/cloudflare/html/

but caveat: if a non-CF domain (e.g. example.tld) has a CF host (e.g. somehost.example.tld), that tool will return YES for the whole domain.

Manually adjusting availability is a can of worms that I don’t want to open

I would suggest not bothering with any complex math, and simply do the calculation as you normally do but then if a site is Cloudflare cap whatever the calculated figure is to 98%. Probably most (if not all) CF sites would be 100% anyway, so they would just be reduced by 2%. Though it would need to be explained somewhere – the beauty of which would be to help inform people that the CF walled garden is excluding people. Cloudflare’s harm perpetuates to a large extent because people are unaware that it’s an exclusive walled garden that marginalizes people.

If the message is edited for typos/grammatical errors, then there’s really no need for a notification as the message displays the posted time in italics (e.g., ✏ 9 hours ago).

I’m not sure why the relevance of the posted time in this scenario, but indeed I agree simply that typos need not generate an update notice, in principle.

If the message is so reworked as to say something else, “Bob” (your example) should do the right thing and post a new, separate reply to “Alice” in the same thread, donchathink?

This requires Bob to care whether Alice gets the update. Bob might care more about the aesthetics, readability, and the risk that misinfo could be taken out of context if not corrected in the very same msg where the misinfo occurred. If I discover something I posted contained some misinfo, my top concern is propagation of the misinfo. If I post a reply below it saying “actually, i was wrong, … etc”, there are readers who would stop reading just short of the correction msg. Someone could also screenshot the misinfo & either deliberately or accidentally omit Bob’s correction. So it’s only sensible to correct misinfo directly where it occurred.

I get what you’re saying though, that there should be some real integrity toward post/reply history, like diff maybe.

It would be interesting to see exactly what Mastodon does… whether it has an algorithm that tries to separate typos/grammer from more substantive edits. I don’t frequently get notices on Mastodon when someone updates a status that mentions me, so I somewhat suspect it’s only for significant edits.

(update) one simple approach would be to detect when a strikethrough is added. Though it wouldn’t catch all cases.

So let me get this straight… Bob does something no one else does

Straight away you don’t have it straight. Edits happen. The mere possibility of edits in fact encourages authors to produce ½-baked drafts in the 1st place knowing that they can always edit.

edit messages on somewhere no one else goes, adding significant content to something no one sees

Not sure what drives this logic. If no one goes there, the post/comment is unlikely to happen in the 1st place. And with no interaction in the thread, refinements are even less likely. If you don’t have at least two people participating in a thread, there are no notifications to speak of.

and then Bob wants to spam the world about the update with notification?

Bob wants to take no action at all and let a smart system handle notifications as needed. So your attempt to “get this straight” got everything crooked. Furthermore, your proposed solution is moreso aligned with Bob pushing “spam”, as Bob’s new & separate msg forces a notification as the platform has no way of distinguishing an update from a new msg. Thus it would be treated like a new msg and a notice would be sent.

Also, in this context, this wouldn’t be a bug, but rather a feature request

One man’s bug is another man’s feature. Luckily bugs and feature requests are handled in the same venue so it’s a red herring.

a feature that no one is asking for

Certainly not true anymore.

and doesn’t make the software better

One man’s bug is another man’s feature.

except to those that doesn’t follow social norms yet still demands to get into others’ inboxes.

You’ve misunderstood where the demand is coming from. It’s not the author; it’s the recipient. Someone posted a useful reply to Alice, Alice read it, marked it as read, & then Bob made a useful update. Alice did not receive the notice of the update. This “demand” comes from the recipient (Alice), not Bob the author. The update was for the recipient’s benefit not the author’s. It’s purely incidental that Alice discovered that an update happened because #Lemmy was not smart enough to notify me of the update (unlike Mastodon which is quite a bit more mature).

Instead, the appropriate behaviour is to not allow Bob to make edits after sometime (which many softwares have such feature for)

That’d be fair enough, but it would not have helped in this case where the edit happened the same day.

and/or make edit logs visible (also a common feature)

You’re imposing too much manual labor on humans. Machines are here to work for us not the other way around.

such that people who doesn’t follow expected norms

The norms adapt to the software. When the software does an extra service for people, they abandon norms that attempt to compensate for a feature poor system. And rightly so.

Heh… the funny irony here is that you actually missed my update to the OP, which says:

“For comparison, note that Mastodon (at least some versions) notify you upon edits of msgs that you were previously notified on.”

That’s of course a different scenario since crossposts don’t update (which could be a separate interesting discussion). But funny nonetheless because you missed an update while saying that tools should not be improved in favor of social / cultural change. I guess you should have thought to read the OP and compare it for changes (the social solution) :)

that’s kind of how things have been since pretty much early 2000s if not earlier.

We can dispense any sort of “conventional wisdom” in the course of moving forward with improvements.

Very specifically the comment that inspired my post was someone posting misinformation, then going back and adding a s̶t̶r̶i̶k̶e̶t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ and highlighting their correction in red text. No correction would be more readable than that. The problem with your proposal is that misinformation is left there persistently misinforming. That can then be taken out of context (e.g. someone screensnaps the misinfo & uses it against the author). There’s also the problem that readers often do not read a whole thread top to bottom. This is proven by the number of votes (up or down), which appear in high numbers on high comments and drop dramatically after ~3 or so replies. You might argue that the post can be deleted, but that then creates a problem of responses not having context. And it creates confusion as people wonder “didn’t person X say Y?”

Are you sure it’s not just hiding the images but still loading them for layout purposes?

No, in fact this is my concern. It’s hard to know considering javascript is in the mix.

Is this mobile Firefox or desktop Firefox?

I should have been more clear-- it’s actually Tor Browser on the desktop. I said firefox to simplify, but then it occurred to me it could be relevant. Although I think the tor overhead is negligible.