Capital One data breach settlement. Amazon AWS to blame, but Microsoft Azure is also no solution. Malware in Bing Chat.

The Capital One Data Breach settlement hit my bank account this morning.

It was enough to….pay off some credit cards.

(I don’t carry a deficit from month-to-month, which credit card companies call “balances”, as if it was money you had.)

But how did it get here?

Well, several years ago, Capital One decided to make me an Amazon user without my consent, like so many companies and government agencies do.

They put the personal information of their customers into Amazon AWS, and then like Microsoft’s Azure “cloud” also usually does, it spilled everything out in a data breach.

Another Microsoft Azure breach at the US State Department recently had the attacker net 60,000 sensitive E-Mails.

These “Cloud” companies make it impossible to secure your data. They can’t even secure theirs!

Microsoft was a victim of their own setup, spilling out over 40 TB of company secrets.

In the case of Capital One and Amazon AWS, it’s just yet another way the bad guys will have my personal information forever.

I was expecting maybe $10-20 and it ended up being a lot more than that. You almost never get any amount of money for these things. They just comply with meaningless “regulations” from the government about informing you and giving you “credit monitoring” for a year. So I’m surprised they paid anything at all.

When I woke up and got the E-Mail about the size of the check I was….well, you always need money, right?

Unfortunately, the terms of the settlement did not require them to ditch Amazon AWS and develop some method of storing data that has some security to it, so there’s nothing preventing it from happening over and over again.

Microsoft Azure is hardly a choice either. After endless breaches, for its part, Microsoft usually screams that its customers are to blame for misconfiguring Azure.

If Microsoft can’t even configure it to protect Microsoft’s own trade secrets, who can?

The only reason companies choose these “solutions” is because they get to outsource from having proper IT and it sounds good to a bean counter, and it’s your information they’re exposing anyway.

Microsoft overbuilt and loses money, and burns through excess capacity with “AI”, and even that comes up to bite the user in the ass.

Bleeping Computer ran a story the other day that says “Chat with Bing” is now putting ads in that redirect the user to malicious software.

Microsoft obviously doesn’t care where it gets cash because it spent a lot on this lemon and needs to get some revenue on the books.

So have fun with that ransomware if you click on the Chaff Bot nonsense. I’ll just be over here with my actual search engine.

(SearXNG through Searx.be)

Hey, at least Windows 11 is so bloated that it lets you play a video game during the two hour install.

Unfortunately, the “game” is an advertisement for Microsoft Edge.

It’s Getting Harder to Do Anything on the Web That Doesn’t Demand Personal Identification. E-Mail, Included. Also, “Smart Cars” and “COVID”.

It’s Getting Harder to Do Anything on the Web That Doesn’t Demand Personal Identification. E-Mail, Included.

The Surveillance State wants to know everything people are saying to each other and it wants to know who is saying those things.

I noticed that the list of E-Mail providers that doesn’t immediately pop up and demand a phone number, which can be linked back to you, has fallen off a cliff.

Most also seem to be blacklisting burner phone number apps.

I’ve got a wide variety of E-Mail accounts set up across at least ten different E-Mail sites.

Why? Because it’s hard to tell when or if one will “go bad” and start demanding my phone number, like Discord would.

Ironically, Microsoft Outlook is one of the ones left that doesn’t have a hard demand for a phone number right away. So you can set up an account. But then the next time you log into it, it says a phone number, for “recovery purposes”, will be required within the next seven days.

This loophole means you can set up a throwaway and then use it as a “recovery email” to set up accounts at Vivaldi Mail and Proton Mail, and GMX. Then once the Outlook account demands a phone number, you just let Microsoft go ahead and delete it.

The authoritarians haven’t quite figured out how to stop Americans from using Proton Mail yet, so they’ve gotten their flunkies to brand an E-Mail service “Alt-Right” tech, something that they also slandered Brave, the Web browser, with.

You created the Outlook Mail from a privacy-respecting browser through a VPN tunnel, so Microsoft never really learned who you are, and then you told the other E-Mail provider about this throwaway account that they’ll never check again, and you access the other E-Mail account through a VPN, or Tor, (or both) each time.

For now there are still some things you can do, even if you have to take the long way around, to avoid personally identifying yourself to get an E-Mail address.

Almost every time I run into something that demands that I personally identify myself to use it, like Google Search, or Discord, I say “Bother.” and then, if it’s not actually all that important, I just leave it alone.

Interacting with surveillance monsters when you don’t need to or when there is a workaround is just dumb.

If an attacker with global presence wants to find out who you are, they probably eventually will.

But what is going on with all of these Web Disservices like “Social Media”, E-Mails that demand credit cards or phone numbers, and “IRC replacements” that are not VPN-friendly, is that they want it all in one place, where nobody is going to have to do any additional work to find out who you are, because the “flow” is automated.

I was talking to my mother, who is very right-wing, and thinks almost all abortion should be illegal.

I told her how they caught that little girl in Nebraska who had an abortion that would have been legal months prior, and how they dragged her off in handcuffs, to prison, screaming.

I said “VPN or Tor aside, it is more than likely, if she had simply not used Google or Facebook or her iPhone, they never would have known, much less proven it. But because she did, it required minimal effort and it lowered the bar for the prosecution. They got her chat and search records within a day, printed them out, and took her to court.”

And these are State people, right? Nebraska! Not even feds!

Look how easy Google and Facebook and iPhones made it.

You want to “fragment” your online presence and make each piece somewhat cumbersome to get and re-assemble.

I guarantee you that nobody at that Prosecutor’s office would have known how to take her to court had she been using SearXNG to look for abortion clinics (instead of Google), a VPN or Tor (to avoid ISP logging), and the Tox messenger (instead of Facebook saving her chats about the abortion).

Some people carry an iPhone, that constantly broadcasts their location, to the abortion clinic. It would also tell Apple and the carrier that she was there long enough to get the abortion. Then the prosecutor would have that too.

This is exactly the kind of case that the police love. It falls right into their lap and now they’ll hang you. You supplied the rope.

I was having some thoughts about Immigration “asylum”. I was wondering how long it can be before women fleeing prosecution for an abortion go to Canada and claim political asylum from the United States.

If they go to another US State, the Constitution says we have to turn them over. So this is like the Fugitive Slave Act all over again.

My ex in Washington State bought a Toyota Prius. He was telling me about all the spyware in it.

I have a car insurance company that wants to know everywhere I go, or else they charge a lot more. But, like anything else running on the phone, they don’t know anything if the phone is shut off, or not in my pocket for a particular trip. You don’t just lose your insurance if the battery dies or you went out for a drive and forgot to take the phone with you.

There’s nothing in my 2008 car that tells anyone where you are. It’s all on the phone. If you don’t want anyone to pinpoint you (except maybe license plate scanners on the expressway, which are avoidable because their locations are public information), you can deal with the problem at the source. Your phone!

But this Toyota tells the company where you drive, how many miles, exactly where you’ve been. And he gets text messages, from the car! About what he’s doing.

Then the dealership calls him and says “Well, your car says it’s time to come in for service.” And the dealership knows what the car knows, because the car is leaking everything to Toyota.

In my 2008 car, there’s a little sticker. This sticker says when it’s time for my next oil change. (One year or ten thousand miles, because I use special high grade synthetic oil and extended drain filters now.)

You match the odometer to the sticker and you know when to service the car.

It’s like, totally amazing. They absolutely MUST add 5g to this at some point so I can get texts from the car! /sarcasm

They don’t add any of this stuff to the car to help you. You are paying for this so that they can spy on you and give your data away.

Every time you jump into your Toyota, it will leak all of your information to the company. They’ll even know if you’re speeding or not wearing your seat belt.

You think being texted about oil changes is creepy?

Imagine when you start getting tickets in the mail for speeding or not wearing a seat belt that one time, and there was no traffic stop!

The laws are coming! Maybe even the car will video record you without your belt on, driving it, and attach it to the package it sends the police.

They already have cameras all over them. The insurance company will love it when they can pull the footage and blame you for something. Your own car blabbed.

It’s for your own good!

The State is mother, the State is father!

You will cooperate with the State for the good of the State and your own well-being.

You will confess to the crimes to which you have been accused.

Cooperation will be rewarded. Resistance will be punished.

You will cooperate with the State for the good of the State and your own well-being.

You thought trying to browse the Web safely was bad!

Oh child, eventually there will be nothing in this country that isn’t spyware.

The old machines will stop working, and be replaced with newer ones.

You will be “brought into compliance” with the New Order, you see.

You will cooperate with the State for the good of the State and your own well-being.

COVID was a huge disaster for personal freedoms.

They used fear of a virus that’s admittedly worse than the flu, but which everyone got, sometimes several times, vaccinated or not, even if they did crawl into a hole and pull it in after them, to make huge, radical changes to society.

The pharmacist giving me the flu shot this year tried to pressure me to take a COVID shot. I said no. My doctor did the same. I said no.

I will say “No.” one more time than they bring it up.

The media assisted them, including running wall-to-wall coverage about shots that didn’t work, “Hug Condoms”, and loudspeakers at every Walmart telling you to scrub your hands raw, followed by “Well, surface contact is low risk.”

This was never about any virus.

It was about wearing people down to where they would go insane and no longer value freedom or privacy.

Regardless, the “COVID Zombies” are still out there.

I could name five that I know personally that have college degrees and are both sticking their arms out for more shots, as their health strangely fails them, all at once, in their mid 20s through early 40s around the same time as the shots.

The COVID Zombies would tell me that correlation doesn’t equal causation, but they were fine until they got 5 or 6 of these shots.

Two of them are now having problems with their eyes. One of them had his heart basically destroyed. When his doctor admitted that Pfizer’s shot did it and wrote him a medical letter, he still had to drop out of college because the school said he could go get the J&J, which the FDA removed from the market later.

But totally normal that five healthy people have this happen and each time they stick out their arm to virtue signal, it gets worse.

Cataracts and heart attacks.

My dad said he would trade every modern technology to just go back to when the world made sense and was in better shape.

He isn’t wrong.

Admittedly, back when I didn’t fully realize how bad these platforms were and what they would be used for someday, I did have accounts on things like Reddit and Facebook and policies with insurance companies like Lemonade.

There’s no taking that back now even though the accounts are gone. But for my part, I am engaging in lawsuits against the companies. Years later, 7-8 years in some cases, they still pay me damages and agree to delete my information from their records and have partners do so as well. In particular, the Illinois BIPA law has been very helpful in changing the way biometric data has been stolen and abused.

I am fighting with what I can get ahold of, to change some things so that people who continue doing business with these firms are not harmed in all the same ways, but it’s not enough. If you haven’t engaged with these people, don’t, and if you have, delete your account and fight them.

Because if you aren’t fighting them, you are helping them.

I replied, to my dad,

Things are actually getting a lot worse.

When I was in my 20s, Web sites were something written by real people that you visited on the computer. They were informative documents.

If you had a check, you could go to a bank branch with it. The banks now shut down all the branches and the people working there are always looking over their shoulders for the next round of layoffs. In my State, Wells Fargo has been in the WARN Act for almost every month this year.

If you had a bill, you could still pay it with a check through the mail, no extra fee.

Now, the electric and phone company want $5-6 just to send you a paper statement with the return paper coupon instead of just letting them suck whatever they want out of your bank, even if they made a mistake.

Now, if you want your medical records, they demand you use a computer. They will not just print them for you. Although, they often store them in Microsoft Azure, where they get stolen by criminals and dumped out publicly if the “healthcare” provider doesn’t quietly pay them some bitcoins. Then it happens again and again because they often don’t improve their security and the criminals know they will pay.

When you have a bill, you are pressured to use the computer. The Web site often won’t work in a Web Standards-compliant browser, because it’s a Chrome App now.

You want to chat with people, “Get an app!”. And the app is totally packed with spyware of course and demands your phone number, and surreptitiously copies your contacts list and watches your location.

The car insurance company says, “Let us follow you around and see if we like your driving, or we’ll charge you another $600 a year!”. They call it a discount to get the rate you already paid them, only now there is spyware.

Sharing culture is almost gone.

They call it “piracy” and brainwashed people, especially younger ones, with these concepts. BitTorrent will get you thrown off the Internet and sued into the ground quickly.

(How can you steal something with piracy that you would not own if you paid for it?) (DRM)

Even in Free Software, companies like Microsoft and IBM have invaded and are changing it in malicious ways. To install DRM hooks, to sabotage the GNU GPL with shim and systemd-boot, and to lock down the computer and take away the user’s freedom to tinker, even if they are the administrator.

Most of the Web now is just propaganda, a spam farm, or bait.

The American government says they pay for Internet access now if you’re broke because you need it to function. Partially true.

The real reasons, of course, are Chinese or North Korean-style surveillance, of everyone, and propaganda (social media, “news”, etc.), and baiting people to do things that are even dumber than just passively letting them watch you browse, hoping you’ll chat on Facebook or upload files to Cloud Storage that are some sort of crime evidence. Even if that “crime” is an abortion that was legal in America for over 50 years.

Uploading things to “Cloud” storage is a forever expense, when hard disks are cheap, once, and you control them and whether things actually get deleted when you press delete.

It’s being done because it serves a corrupt and autocratic state that has gone totally paranoid about Internal Security.

What should you do? Poke them in the eye.

I always browse and download and chat on IRC over a VPN in the Netherlands. I have an amnesiac browser with all of the “traps” turned off that I can open with split tunneling to pay a bill or something. Then you close it and it forgets everything they told it to store.

I browse with “special” browsers that are very hardened and secured.

Sometimes I overlay the Tor Browser onto the VPN network. Then not only can’t your ISP see what you’re doing, you have some protection for a potentially compromised VPN server.

The majority of the apparatus is set up to deal with the majority. Not the 0.02%.

Be the 0.02%.

-Me

What Frightens Me the Most About Stock Investing? “AI” (Microsoft, Google, Coca-Cola…..) Bonus: Crypto and Samsung

“AI” frightens me.

No, not the thought of living in the Future War of The Terminator. Skynet said that it “evolves in seconds”. ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Bard still get simple interest wrong and can’t tell me what things will cost when I ask them to factor in coupons or rebates.

NPR’s article about “AI” building rockets that would explode if anyone tried building them was just amusing. We’re a long way off from rockets when GPT and Bard can’t tell me how much interest $1,000 will make in 5 years if I put it in a CD that compounds daily at a given APY.

The entire point of “generative AI” is to create a seductive mirage for stock investors.

Google and Microsoft are examples of giant tech companies whose established products are still fairly widely used despite having degenerated quite a bit.

Google and Microsoft Bing search are an arm of the state propaganda mills, and Windows 11 is noticeably slower than Windows 10 even on faster hardware, carrying on Microsoft’s usual tradition there, and even Windows XP was more reliable in terms of uptime and hotfixes and service packs installing and rebooting successfully.

According to Gartner (which itself is Microsoft-affiliated), PC shipments have fallen more than 30% in the first quarter of 2023 vs. the comparable period last year, and so new PCs sales are not happening. Are people switching to Macs? Apple had the worst decline of a single OEM. Even worst than Lenovo.

Microsoft has basically given up on demanding “TPM 2.0” or new PCs, and has unofficially started trying to cannibalize all the Windows 10 systems it can by waving them through. Figuring that they’ll at least make some extra money with all of the additional adware and spyware if they can’t sell you on a new PC?

No, Microsoft said that they would make money with “Cloud”, but even Yahoo Finance articles admit that “Cloud” revenue growth is slowing and will be a disappointing miss.

There’s simply nothing here to justify MSFT stock nearly doubling in the last few years and it’s time to dump it if you have it.

Every major company, even Coca-Cola (we don’t want your White money), has “plans” to “Chaff Bot” now. This has jumped the shark already and they’ve been at it for less than 60 days. Amazing!

Consider the amount of money and potential being wasted to juice the stocks while the important people dump shares and, hey it’s not insider trading if it’s scheduled, right? 😉

Bill Gates himself has to know full well that GPT is a great big fat nothingburger, but the speculation makes him other people’s money, so he’s buying columns talking it up about how it will teach your kids to read. (Don’t teachers already do this?)

The “AI” bullshit was a major factor in my decision to exit stocks in the retirement portfolio recently. I expect the bond fund to right-size because those are binding obligations to pay and with a very low default rate, and prioritized during bankruptcy proceedings.

(Like Bed, Bath, and Beyond…. Now if only they had put out a press release about using AI to sell people coffee makers and pillows, and sold shares are horrifically inflated costs with no promise to pay anyone back.)

Walmart recently fired their global chief of marketing. This is the guy that said they were going to start selling NFTs and taking Cryptocurrency.

I read a news article today about the US Government’s war on crypto. At first it was just the IRS, then it was the New York “Department of Financial Services”, and now it’s the SEC.

The SEC just issued a notice to Coinbase that is the final step, usually, before criminal charges. Coinbase is threatening to exit the United States.

There are no Crypto exchanges you can trust. Ask FTX and Celsius customers.

Ask people who used Uphold and have Uphold freezing their account or money disappearing, and nobody from Uphold will talk to them.

Crypto had its day. Now these companies are saying there’s “AI”.

The reason why Microsoft can burn so much time in Azure to run GPT is because they weren’t doing anything with it. It was sitting there as dead, unsold, capacity.

They’ve cooked up this thing, and it’s an utter scam, and people will lose their life savings if they don’t get out quickly.

Investors should take serious note of the fact that while Microsoft is trumpeting an AI that returns false information, and can’t be fixed, they fire thousands of people in Bing, Edge, and other divisions that are responsible, theoretically, for fixing it.

It shows that their plans are, in fact, to deceive investors about what the potential future applications for generative AI really are, and not to fix it, and to dump inflated shares before the little people using Robinhood and their 401(k) to invest in Microsoft lose their asses on it.

This is a picture of the history of Microsoft stock.

When a stock moves like this, tread very lightly.

You see that little bump way back between 1986 and 2004?

That was around 1998-2001. The DotCom Bubble.

Hardly a blip compared to what’s been building up recently.

Microsoft isn’t alone at severely overvalued “tech” companies.

There is a wipeout coming.

And it’s not only fraudulent accounting, “AI” hype, and such. It’s not just “irrational exuberance” as Alan Greenspan might say.

A lot of it is also legal embezzlement, known as “share buybacks”, which are done to increase executive pay. Share buybacks should be illegal. They don’t add value. They destroy value.

Democrats in Congress put a 1% tax on share buybacks into law.

That’s better than nothing (which is what the Republicans want), but it doesn’t do very much to discourage them.

It’s saying “We’re going to let you do something incredibly wrong and fraudulent, but we want some money first.”

Captured government.

Don’t look for the government to help you. They’re figuring out how to shut down your retirement money and take it all back so they can bail banks out again; so they can run Super-TARPs.

As an investor in a retirement plan, there’s just not many safe options, but given that last year was already the worst year in 250 years for Bonds, I think that other people have taken the hit and fixed income will be the name of the game for a while.

I think that Gold and Silver could do well too. At some point, the large market caps are going to have to be companies that really make things and mine things and build things again. This tech surge is a seductive mirage.

“Intellectual Property” is just a fancy way of saying “slavery with extra steps”. It’s a way to extract rents from the productive sectors using nothing but the threat of law.

That being said, while some companies do make money like this, it’s normally a form of economic parasitism. “Non-Practicing Entities” and “Patent Trolls” come to mind, but Microsoft operates like this too, and it ruins companies that made stuff.

I was reading my email today, and Samsung emailed me about having until July to remove everything from “Samsung Cloud” before it got deleted.

I don’t even have a Samsung phone anymore. They turned a loyal customer into “Eww, Samsung.” with the increasingly buggy firmwares, and shoveling Microsoft crap into the phone and making it impossible to remove fully.

Then when I found secret Facebook spyware running in the background by default (“facebook service” or something), it was the last straw. I wiped the phone (which was malfunctioning anyway thanks to T-Mobile making my Sprint phone, which they sold me, incompatible with their network), and used T-Mobile’s buyback to switch to a Pixel.

Microsoft doesn’t add value, they ruin it. I can’t imagine that I was the only Samsung phone user who saw Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft popping up everywhere and went “LOL, no!”.

Bill Gates said in one of his “Creepy Uncle Says” articles the other day, that his “biggest mistake” was not “making Windows Phone what Android is today”, when “that was a natural place for Microsoft to be”.

Microsoft had Windows Phones, and they were cheap. Nobody wanted them. The only way they could dispose of them was selling them at a loss to Cricket Wireless customers with bad FICO scores and writing them off their taxes.

But they came back and forced themselves, as in rape, on people who used something else. That’s what they do. They corrupt and corrode. Samsung is finished.

The Galaxy S20 was the worst tech thing I ever bought, and I’m just glad I didn’t end up selling it to Amazon for a bag of cat food because T-Mobile offered me a 100% credit for giving it back.

It was such a bad phone (mostly because of the Microsoft deal) that I went in and said “Show me the iPhones and the Google phones.”

And almost like some sort of horrible comedy, the guy says “We’ll give you a Galaxy S22 if you want one.” I was like, “No.” He says, “Well it is a more expensive phone.” and I replied, “Well then anyone who pays that and gets another Samsung has my sympathy.”

Microsoft can’t seem to really enter into new markets, but it can do an enormous amount of damage on the way down. It’s basically turning Samsung into the sequel of what happened to Nokia.

There’s no telling exactly when this stock market is coming down, but it is probably “soon” and when it does, it will come down hard, and they’re not going to tell you when they plan to do it to you.

The people gravitating towards Microsoft and its ilk will get burned worse than others.

In the meantime, we can all enjoy the comedy. CNBC calls the Business Software Alliance (a legal trolling outfit operated by Microsoft, Adobe, and a few others, best known for running ads encouraging people to rat their employers out for “unlicensed software”) a “tech advocacy group” calling for “AI regulations”.

:/

Your bank and other Web sites are running creepy JavaScript that records your every action. NoScript can block that from running. Bonus: “Web Rot”

Your bank and other Web sites are running creepy “Session-Replay” JavaScript that follows you around the site recording your every movement.

You’re not “supposed to know” about this, but NoScript can block that from running.

I had a conversation with Matthew Garrett (alleged security person, actual drama bomb thrower) on IRC the other day about the “security” of JavaScript.

He had previously promoted it as a “great way of running untrusted code”.

Unfortunately, there’s just nothing secure about JavaScript. It’s the most widely abused platform in all of computing because almost everyone ends up running it without thinking of the consequences, and browsers which are instructed to do so, do it without bothering to allow any user control over the process in their default state.

If you can’t trust code, it’s better to not have it running at all.

Especially if it’s not doing anything to help you, and is proprietary.

Garrett said that “total sandbox escapes” where the program gets out of your browser sandbox and starts interfering with another tab or running arbitrary malicious code outside of any sort of confinement is “rare” to the point where someone would need to be “targeting you” and willing to blow a Zero Day exploit to do it.

That’s not exactly true as we see time and time again in the real world. But let us not hang ourselves up too long on what the Dalek of Social Justice has said.

If you drop a copy of O’Reilly’s book on Sixth Edition JavaScript from the kitchen counter, you’ll be walking with a limp for a while. Far from something that adds a little bit of “interactivity” to a Web page, JavaScript is a full blown computer programming language, Turing-complete, that can be used to write and run almost anything.

(I laughed the other day when I noted that someone had ported all of the LAME MP3 Encoder to JavaScript. It’s like, you could. But why? This is even dumber than online Office suites. People have spent years and lots of effort writing high performance encoding routines in C. Let’s make things worse and shove it to a Web server!)

Very little of what I do on the Web calls for something like JavaScript.

Nobody asked me if I wanted applications that run best on my computer, where I control them, where Big Brother is not looking over my shoulder replaced by some online version on someone else’s computer that I may or may not be able to access, and if I can, it’s watching what I do with it.

I don’t use Services as a Software Substitute where I can avoid it, and the ones I do use tend to be licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, which makes them Free and Open Source Software.

If I don’t like someone’s Searx search engine, I can use someone else’s. If I don’t like a Matrix (protocol) chat server’s moderation, I can go use another one. If anyone wants to know what the source code does, or make their instance work differently, they can!

Web applications don’t have to be malicious. It’s just that many of them are.

In general, every way that Microsoft’s proprietary software could hurt you before is wrong with their Web applications, and then they’ve invented new ways of being nasty as well. So thanks, no thanks.

The people who invented the Web and the earliest browsers (such as Marc Andreeson, who said as much in 1994) wanted to keep it lightweight. The idea of JavaScript and even Cascading Style Sheets were controversial.

They knew that if these “features” were added, the consequences would be severe. And they are severe!

The Web has basically become Microsoft Windows. Bloated, fat, slow, and requiring a new computer every 4-5 years because of how painful things get. Features that are only useful to advertisers and marketers and spyware and other parasites being bolted on with no debate by Google and Microsoft, and tossed in by Mozilla and Apple “for compatibility”. Worse, it’s all impossible to secure and it’s rather embarrassing how complicated the standards are to get it to do much at this point. (There are starting to be chat servers implemented in GeminiSpace. But on the Web, you need to run a 600 MB tab for that!).

Worse, the Web rots. It’s become mostly a spam farm. Things disappear. Domain squatters come in. All your links go to a scam now. The entire thing has become so balkanized by megacorporations that come and go that if you use those “services”, every 10 years you have to figure out where all the people you used to talk to are.

We have to start backing away from standards that are hacked together by companies that won’t exist in a few years based on speculative business plans, many of which ought to be criminal.

Attackers take advantage of whatever they can.

They take advantage of poorly coded applications, gaps in security policy whether deliberate or accidental (some Windows malware includes the calculator from Windows 7 to get past User Account Control and evade virus scanners, for example), or software distributors like Apple which do not ship Web browser security updates quickly (giving the attackers time to study the fix and start exploiting a long time before most users are patched), or users who do not apply fixes.

Recently, Apple had to rush two emergency fixes for the kernel in Mac and iOS and for Webkit (Safari) for zero day vulnerabilities, and it’s hardly even like it’s rare for in-the-wild attack code to be targeting these platforms.

A while back, China attacked and targeted Uyghurs using a Safari vulnerability in the JavaScript engine. They’re not the only nation state that hoards software vulnerabilities. The US FBI and NSA are known to do it.

But aside from the sandbox escapes and arbitrary code execution are privacy problems that Tracking and Session-Replay scripts cause.

According to an article from VICE from 2017 (compacted with NewsWaffle and archived), at that time, 482 of the top 50,000 Web sites had JavaScript programs that followed the user around and recorded things that can even include keystrokes that aren’t “submitted” yet, and mouse movement patterns, and some even tie your activity to your real identity.

This is….super creepy and super sketchy!

Richard Stallman’s JavaScript Trap essay pointed out that many users end up running non-Free JavaScript programs without thinking much about it. I pointed out in an earlier post about how much I like the add-on NoScript.

In many cases, JavaScript is bloated, it’s spyware, it’s proprietary, and at the very least, it does something unwanted and aggravating, such as powering news site paywalls.

Firefox, some time ago, joined the majority of Web browsers in removing the user’s ability to turn off JavaScript globally, but NoScript can add this back. You can do whatever you want to. You can whitelist domains that are “Just Enough” to make the site work.

Even browsing in the non-default mode of “Temporarily Allow All Top-Level Domains” would provide a lot of protection from malicious, annoying, and bloated third-party scripts without forcing you to do too much manual intervention.

But it isn’t even like JavaScript engines really are that secure. By the time Mozilla finally does declassify security hole fixes for a Firefox release, you can go back and easily see that the majority of really nasty ones involved JavaScript, so the more domains you have it coming in and executing from, the more likely one is to come in and do _something_ nasty.

Odds approach 100% very quickly that your browser is running some kind of malware without telling you.

It’s bad enough when programs are “legitimate” in the sense that they are what they say they are, do something useful, and just won’t tell you how they do it. That’s what Stallman’s complaints were in The JavaScript Trap.

Unfortunately, there’s never been a more useful language to abuse the user with, or a better place to run it, than JavaScript in a Web browser.

Admitting defeat and turning it all on out of laziness simply ensures that you will be encountering serious malware at some point.

Unfortunately, the JavaScipt Problem is bigger yet than proprietary software and malware running behind-the-scenes. Some site owners set their Web sites to simply lock out people who are using Tor Browser, a VPN, or just simply have JavaScript turned off.

CloudFlare, a Web cancer that just keeps growing bigger, now hosts about 1/5th of major Web sites and about as many smaller ones too, and has convinced site owners to set “security” settings high to bounce people who fit these categories. I’m a VPN and Tor user with NoScript, so I run into problems with those “Checking your browser” pages somewhat frequently.

The other day, I was trying to look at an article on Bleeping Computer, and CloudFlare blocked me for using my VPN. So I opened up Opera, which I only occasionally use because CloudFlare blocks their Opera “VPN” (proxy) except in the EU for some reason, so I had to view the article in Opera and then close Opera.

JavaScript is a major annoyance on banking Web sites. One of the advantages of running NoScript and just whitelisting the top domain for the bank is that I use 6 banks, and they all work with just first party scripting turned on. The rest is Session-Replay, data analytics, and other crap and garbage.

Why do I want some creepy third-party script looking over my shoulder while I’m banking or using any Web site for that matter?

When I went to the United States Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service, I even found Session-Replay scripts that they were attempting to load from third-party domains!

Once again, with these scripts excised from the site, the functionality I wanted to use still worked. With your Web browser’s default settings, spyware companies are recording your actions even on government Web sites that you have to use!

I counted at least six tracking companies monitoring your usage of the Social Security Administration’s site. They’ve even outsourced compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act to a tracking company that records your session!

On top of the security and privacy concerns are more practical ones.

Some JavaScript malware is designed to commit theft of utilities. Some sites resort to “mining” cryptocurrency with JavaScript and WebAssembly (which NoScript also handles). This runs your CPU hard and causes your power bills to rise as your battery life falls.

Firefox, indeed most major Web browsers, now have some sort of anti-cryptomining feature, but nothing’s perfect. The less sites even have the permission the less chance they’ll get one of these loaded.

Tracking scripts also take resources to run. They slow down page loads and instruct your computer to do things. That’s not “free”.

The Web site owners don’t want to make a big fuss about all of this crap that they load, because when you investigate what the companies are telling them, it’s usually like, “We can help you monetize your site and optimize your search engine results and tell you all of these things about your visitors and what they do.”. Stealing your resources to benefit themselves is what they do.

How does this compare with ad blocking, or running add-ons such as Decentraleyes?

Ad blocking and Decentraleyes (which hosts commonly used Web frameworks locally to avoid Content Delivery Network requests) compliment NoScript and add to the privacy you can expect to gain from it.

uBlock-Origin (an ad and tracking blocker) is already a pretty big hammer. It will block ads and tracker lookups completely if they’re in your blacklists.

Unfortunately, many things are not included for whatever reason. They tend to give priority to not breaking anything on a site you could conceivably want to use, and there have been cases where tracking companies used the US DMCA to be removed from ad blocking lists. So it’s not bulletproof. There are too many things that slip past them, and that’s where NoScript comes in.

Between these things, you should be able to reduce your browsing data usage by about half.

There are a few other extensions I really like, such as Google Container. I don’t use Google very much (preferring the Free and Open Source Searx instances) and I’d like to stay logged in, but not outside that container (so Google can’t easily track me in general across the Web).

As I’ve increasingly focused on Gemini (such as Chilly Weather and the NewsWaffle on Gemi.dev) instead of the Web, I’ve found few cases where I actually need JavaScript to run to power something I want or need to do on the Web.

Ironically, writing this blog post about JavaScript requires me to run some JavaScript.

Even then, not all of the domains that the WordPress.com editor wants to load are necessary, and when I go to read blogs, I don’t need JavaScript at all. You don’t even need a graphical Web browser to read this. You can load it in text browsers that don’t even support JavaScript, with cookies turned off.

You should block most of WordPress’s JavaScript. I think most of it comes from analytics sites.

As I continue looking into an escape from the Web for most activities, I still occasionally need to watch a video or refill a prescription or make appointments with my doctor, or use some dumb banking site, and pay my taxes. Unfortunately, thanks to JavaScript being as widely abused as it now is, you need NoScript to make sure that these creepy programs can’t run.

I’m considering moving to a Gemlog instead of WordPress, but I’m going to have to learn how to do that so it may be a while. Eventually, I would like to leave an “I’m not here anymore. Use Gemini.” message on WordPress.

We’ll see when I manage to get around to this.

Until then, turn off your JavaScript, mostly. The Web is more pleasant when there’s less of it.

Although I mostly read news in the NewsWaffle, most of the annoyances and slowdowns (bloated JavaScripts, annoying videos, tracking) are gone from news sites with NoScript. Even when I load a CNN article with uBlock-Origin and NoScript, it comes up instantly. CNN is infamous for its terrible page load performance.

You can get NoScript here:

Firefox Add-Ons / Homepage

License: GNU General Public License Version 2

There is also a port of the extension available for Firefox on Android.

Unfortunately, iOS users will just have to live with JavaScript. The version of Firefox on iOS isn’t the real Firefox with Gecko. It’s a neutered version that has to use the same engine as Safari by diktat of Apple.

Unfortunately, this means Web browsers on iOS are insecure and impossible to fix, and issues such as the one Apple rushed an emergency fix for cannot be user-mitigated by blocking active content.

The SeaMonkey Internet Suite is still developed. Is it right for you?

The SeaMonkey Web Browser and Internet Suite (Web page editor, Mail and News client, and ChatZilla for IRC) is still producing releases.

I installed version 2.53.13 as packaged in Fedora GNU/Linux 36.

The program is based on a forked version of the Gecko Web engine that Firefox uses.

Ironically, it was Firefox that was forked from SeaMonkey.

It was also SeaMonkey that caused AOL’s iteration of Netscape Corporation to go ahead and collapse.

(It was not on solid footing following Microsoft’s attack on the original company, which is what made AOL decide to buy it out as a distressed asset.)

This is because many people, myself included, saw no point at all in using Netscape’s version of “Mozilla Suite” (SeaMonkey’s original name) and started following Mozilla Suite instead, because the browser was open source, highly Web Standards compliant, and packed full of features.

AOL turned these releases into “Netscape 6/7” by adding proprietary software (useless) and a bunch of garbage bookmarks to shopping sites, and having their setup program put icons for “Free AOL Trial” on your desktop.

(Which seemed to be their only concrete business plan for anything they took over, including another of my favorite programs, Winamp.)

The “done thing” by people like me was to just grab a new nightly build and install it every once in a while manually to get at the latest new features in “Mozilla” as the Suite was commonly referred to, happily ignoring the “This is just for testing. End users should go to Netscape.” warning.

We knew that “Mozilla” was a fully functional browser sans AOL crap, so why use something from AOL?

Meanwhile, AOL made a series of unforced errors, including pressuring Mozilla to declare something “stable” and then finally giving up and basing Netscape “6” on something that was clearly not ready for average users and throwing a multi-million dollar advertising budget behind it. This, only to get booed in the tech media as a “bloated program that crashes all the time”.

Microsoft Windows, especially in the 1990s, was really really ugly to look at. Honestly, it’s the ugliest operating system of its time in any decade, but that’s an aside.

One of the things AOL pressured Mozilla to do was create a “theming engine” that had performance problems on everything it ran on, especially the “Modern” theme (which Netscape made their default), and especially on Windows, where the majority of reviewers would be evaluating it.

(Mozilla with the default theme usually ran fine on my old AMD K6/2 system, so I mean…..they clearly weren’t the only problem here.)

By the time Microsoft had a theming engine in Windows XP, running Netscape 6/7 on it looked even worse, because they looked like two clown cars with a different paint job crashed into each other.

After AOL divested itself of Mozilla, Blake Ross (who left to work at Facebook) and David Hyatt (who left for Apple, to work on Safari) spun off the far less capable Firefox browser, whose selling point was ease-of-use for people who couldn’t figure out how to use an Internet Suite.

They also claimed Firefox was “less bloated”, however most of the bloat was in the engine and loaded with Firefox anyway, so it did not consume significantly fewer resources than the Suite. In fact, if you used ThunderBird as a separate program, you’d load everything twice instead of opening Mail and News and observing a ~1% increase of RAM consumption.

Over the years, since the fork, Firefox has continued to bloat up to the point where people used to complain that the entire program was using 1 GB of RAM, and now it often uses almost that much per tab. So, we should begin by dispelling this revisionist history that led to the forking of Firefox.

At the time, I was one of the people who kept on using the Suite and pooh-poohed Firefox for being “dumbed down”, but clearly the Suite’s days were numbered. And even I began using Firefox as fewer people used or developed for the Suite anymore, and you could add most of the missing features back to Firefox with extensions.

SeaMonkey 2.53.13 (released July 11th, 2022) uses Gecko 60.8 “with backports and fixes” and advertises itself as Firefox 78.

For the most part, I was able to browse the Web just fine in SeaMonkey.

However, it had problems dealing with certain Web sites, including the Element chat software (incorrect rendering) and the WordPress Editor (malformed rendering, but usable).

I also had a problem when I went to log in to Facebook, which I barely use except to occasionally message distant relations about something.

(I don’t even use my real name and always load it in a private window, but relatives know it’s me.) Facebook text entry boxes do not function, which is also a problem I had near the end with Firefox 78 ESR.

I also had problems with some video sites not playing videos.

I ended up having to drop to about:config and set site-specific user-agent overrides sometimes, identifying it as mobile Safari for some video sites, or desktop Safari for some others.

Why Safari? Well, it’s pretty much the least Web Standards compliant browser, but it has too many users for Web developers to ignore completely.

Since Apple has so much of the Web platform missing from Safari, that leads to a situation where developers have to make changes and not use those features to get a site to work, which means your chances of having it work (or at least work better) in an old version of Gecko should improve.

In most cases, lying to a particular domain to get the Mobile Safari version at least got the site to work, even if it looked odd on my laptop computer.

This is exactly the same approach that Cameron Kaiser used in Clasilla, a long-lived fork of the Mozilla Application Suite 1.3.1 for old version of Mac OS, which couldn’t run anything else.

Mobile Web sites assume that your computer has less resources, a partially functional Web browser like Safari, and tend to foist less code for the browser to figure out what to do with.

While the current state of the Web on SeaMonkey is almost certainly nowhere near as bad as a fork of a browser from 2003 (Clasilla) that was maintained mostly by one guy, a browser core rooted in 2018, even with modifications, is going to start having some trouble in 2022.

As GNOME Web, which is actually based on Webkit (like Safari, although with improvements) found out, even if you use the same rendering engine, lying globally and identifying as Safari turns out to be radically destructive. Sites start trying to send you files meant for Mac OS, for example. Or, with the mobile version, pressuring you to use an Apple store, which doesn’t exist on a real computer.

Still, for a Web engine from 2018 (plus some enhancements), I was still somewhat surprised at how quickly things have managed to degrade.

In some cases, such as YouTube or the News Web sites, which are far too bloated anyway, I was able to bypass them using an instance of Invidious (for YouTube), or double converting news Web sites to Gemtext (meant for Gemini browsers), then back to a simplified version of HTML that SeaMonkey fared better with. I bookmarked the Gemini NewsWaffle through a proxy that sends it back to Web format, and SeaMonkey now has a fast and efficient way to get at the news without bloated JavaScripts, crap formatting, in-page pop-ups, and paywalls.

You can try out the NewsWaffle without a Gemini browser (such as LaGrange) by clicking this link.

Most news sites that are unbearable on a modern PC could be loaded this way even on a computer from the 90s with a dial-up modem.

(I tested it out, including the “enter any news site” feature, and found it to work about as I expected.)

Certainly nothing important must have been added to the Web platform in the last few years that could account for all of these problems. Sites are just getting morbidly obese to the point where you have to find some way of “tricking” them. Even in browsers like Firefox that can handle them better, they’re still far too annoying.

All of those sites and apps that are now giving SeaMonkey so many problems existed in 2018 and all of them did pretty much what they do now without trouble. That proves that this is all gratuitous bloat.

I found the process of installing Extensions (Add-Ons) to be somewhat annoying and indirect in SeaMonkey.

For starters, I absolutely need an ad blocker. The Web is totally unusable without one, unless you use Lynx, which can’t load ads in the first place. (No images, no scripts.)

When I went to SeaMonkey’s Add-Ons Manager and tried to look for ublock-origin, nothing showed up. Same when I went looking for anything to block ads with. Okay, that’s irritating.

Not to be discouraged, however, I remembered something about a “legacy” version which Raymond Hill maintained for Pale Moon, which might work in SeaMonkey. Sure enough, it still exists and still works. Problem solved.

(I found this page and installed the “Firefox Legacy” version, and then set up my usual block lists.)

For e-mail, the SeaMonkey documentation says it shares code with Mozilla Thunderbird’s back-end.

It seems to do this while preserving the classic Mail and News GUI layout and features. These will be immediately recognizable to people who were around in the Netscape Communicator days.

The problem is, while you will get it working eventually, there’s too much trial and error, especially if you want to set up Microsoft or Google IMAP account. Both of them make it incredibly difficult, and for my Outlook Mail, for example, I did not get the settings correct on my first try.

Once I found the IMAP and SMTP servers, and the non-standard ports that Microsoft and Google use, and the security protocols to use, I also had to create an App Passwords, which both also made hard to find. Google is actually worse than Microsoft, in that you additionally have to find a setting hidden in your GMail account to enable IMAP, or else the server will refuse to deliver mail.

When I tried to simply use OAuth with Microsoft, it told me that I couldn’t use it with a personal account and they only let you use it with a work or student account. However, GNOME Online Accounts and Thunderbird get to use OAuth. Do they have some sort of Microsoft deal?

I set up GMail to. Google is apparently threatening to cut off anything that doesn’t support XOAuth2 in the near future. So far, I have K9 Mail on my phone set up to check GMail and my Outlook to avoid their official application.

(I wonder how long that will keep working. Bark Bark.)

Other than Microsoft and Google deliberately making their IMAP settings hard to get at and use to drive people onto their terrible 500 MB per tab WebMail with built-in spam, which is not SeaMonkey’s fault, I found the Mail and News client to be quite enjoyable to use, once properly set up. I don’t understand why people with many e-mail accounts don’t insist on a Mail client running on their local machine. It’s gotten to the point that even many GNU/Linux distributions don’t offer a Mail client because people have been trained to roll over, fetch, and play dead by megacorporations with “free” WebMail.

The good usability of SeaMonkey’s Mail and News client comes from the fact that it hasn’t really changed much at all since AOL/Netscape paid to have Netscape Mail re-written as part of the Suite. I knew of people continuing to use Netscape 4 in a limited capacity into the mid and late 2000s just because it could open Netscape Mail, and that still worked.

AOL was the butt of a lot of jokes, but they always did e-mail really well, and you even still see a few @aol addresses out there in use today.

Due to the “If it’s not broken, don’t ‘fix’ it.” mentality, Mail and News works! This was always the strongest part of Mozilla/Netscape/SeaMonkey line in my opinion.

To give an example of how badly “WebMail” has devolved under Microsoft, one of my attorneys PAYS them for Microsoft “365”. It crashes all the time, it loses attachments. It’s a complete disaster. I had to resort to uploading sensitive documents onto a Google Drive and then deleting them as soon as she told me she had it(!) to get around Microsoft’s shit that people actually pay for!

SeaMonkey allows the user, of course, to customize their interface.

The GUI works much like Netscape Communicator did by default, because that’s what it was modeled on, but the user can customize it, even to resemble Firefox.

Unfortunately, in all of these years, nobody has added per-tab close buttons as an option. So, you need to either right-click and close the tabs, or middle click on them. Which is a little annoying. First there was an extension called SeaTab to add close buttons, then it was abandoned, then forked into SeaTab-X, and then SeaTab-X-2.

What’s frustrating is that this extension was listed as incompatible with my version of SeaMonkey, but then I told it to install anyway, and it works as it’s supposed to.

As SeaMonkey is an Internet Suite and designed for power users, expect a lot of advanced preferences.

If you don’t like them, then this program is probably not for you.

One thing that greatly annoys me about GNU/Linux is that the traditional behavior of pressing the middle mouse button is to paste whatever is in the clipboard into the application. I have never been able to get used to this. You can change that behavior in “GNOME Tweaks”, which is good, because middle mouse paste is bizarre for a modern GUI. Actually, any GUI in my opinion. Maybe it’s because I started out as a DOS/Windows users years ago?

SeaMonkey/Gecko, however, ignore your system-wide preference. To stop that, and to change it so the middle mouse button “auto-scrolls” when you press it, you have to drop to about:config and look for “general.autoscroll” and double-click it to “true” and “middlemouse.paste” and double-click it to false.

To be fair, Chromium browsers (Chrome, etc.) don’t allow for auto-scrolling in GNU/Linux, it seems. I don’t use them much. I have ungoogled-chromium for emergencies when a site is being difficult, but I don’t open it much.

SeaMonkey has some potential security pitfalls even if they are properly backporting fixes for security issues.

For example, I noticed that TLS 1.0 and 1.1 are still allowed in SeaMonkey, even though you’re unlikely to run into a site that uses it and other browsers disabled them years ago.

If you leave them enabled, you could be the victim of a protocol downgrade attack if an attacker finds a vulnerability in them and uses it to intercept your communications with the “secure” Web site you are visiting.

This could allow them to record everything you’re doing, or to insert tampered pages or files into your connection.

ChatZilla has returned! With IRCv3 features!

The only other Web browser I’ve known about that had a built-in IRC client was Opera, before the Chromium version (which was widely panned by Classic Opera users).

With many younger people moving to Matrix or Discord, they may have never even heard of Internet Relay Chat. IRC still exists, and some networks are very popular.

Matrix.org has “bridged” some of these IRC servers in to pressure people to use Matrix.org. The unfortunate thing about “centralizing” something like this is you get to deal with arbitrary moderators.

Matrix.org banned me four times in the middle of the night, and with no explanation. They didn’t tell me why. It didn’t even say I was banned or who did it. Just BAM and my account “didn’t exist” on the server anymore. I’ve watched their “moderators” at work. They designed the protocol to just say “people log out” and “won’t be active anymore” when it happens. No hint that they were kicked, banned, anything. Being black-bagged anonymously is baked into the software.

Being taken out back and knifed caused a major upheaval for me. While I eventually created an account they haven’t banned, yet, I don’t trust Matrix.org to handle my chats anymore.

Especially not bridging them into IRC servers that also have their own moderation and policies. I only use IRC clients to handle IRC now so there is no middleman that can censor me and cause me to lose everything, even on other networks.

Many people are fleeing Matrix.org and causing the protocol to fragment, as servers that supposedly “decentralize and federate” mutually ban each other and the whole thing falls apart into an incoherent mess where you need to run multiple tabs of Element, each one consuming hundreds and hundreds of MB of RAM, to deal with the servers warring against each other. It’s completely stupid. Someone told me that Matrix.org is just another way to say “Reddit”, but it’s much worse.

IRC is a “social network” by definition, but the benefit of it being more “mature” is that the leftist hate groups don’t tend to hang out there and abuse their power to run people off the network. I mean, Libera Chat might, but the older established networks don’t. It also doesn’t demand gobs of system resources and use it to drive advertising and clickbait, like Facebook or Twitter, which are a waste of time.

Hopefully, some people that fell for the “Social Network” trap and get tired of the absolute parasitism that is unfolding there will re-discover IRC and allow the Reddits, the Matrix.orgs, the Discords, Facebooks, and Twitters to rot in Hell.

~20 years ago, I used ChatZilla to save system resources. Computers didn’t have much memory and ChatZilla was a way to free some up since you already had a Web browser running anyway. Today, resources don’t matter as much, but the relative simplicity is nice. For outright minimalism, you’d probably use ircii or something. Right now I have ChatZilla set up to do all of the things I have HexChat configured for. Maybe using ChatZilla makes me a hipster or something. I don’t know.

Probably so would using SeaMonkey, or not subscribing to a million streaming sites so I can play song files that I already possess.

Another positive thing to note about SeaMonkey is they don’t seem to even offer the user DRM (Widevine).

This is a plus. I hate the entire idea of Web DRM on so many levels. It’s dangerous (software that can be used by malware), it restricts what I can do with my own computer, and it’s proprietary. It was specified and dictated by entities that are hell bent on ruining the Interoperability of the Web.

When Tim Berners-Lee envisaged the Web, he specified document formats for the easy exchange of information. Formats that nearly anyone could learn to write and use. DRM is one prong of an attack on the Web, designed to turn it into some idiotic “content delivery pipe” for outfits like Disney and the other streaming disservices.

Since they have specified it, the only thing that seems to stop smaller video sites from deploying it is, ironically, that Apple specifies competing DRM for Safari.

For many years, YouTube has been resorting to nastier and nastier tricks to prevent people from getting at the videos and saving a copy. Microsoft has collaborated to knock projects like YouTube-DL off of “GitHub”.

I’m surprised YouTube hasn’t just pulled the trigger and gone DRM-only. Who would be left to fight them? Mozilla capitulated anyway with nothing but a “sorry/not sorry” letter about it.

The fact that SeaMonkey doesn’t support Widevine may be due to SeaMonkey being a separate organization from Mozilla (registered in Germany, since 2012) and being unable to obtain a license to Widevine, but I don’t care why it’s gone, I’m just glad that it is gone.

It’s always such a nuisance to have to turn off DRM and hide the prompts in Firefox browsers. It is actually something that requires dropping to about:config, because Mozilla doesn’t respect your choice to leave it off and stop asking.

While SeaMonkey is a browser that has quirks, doesn’t handle some “Web apps” particularly well, and needs some fine tuning to customize it for your use, I can’t say that I hate it.

As weird as it may sound, given some of the troubles I found with it, I found it overall surprisingly pleasant to browse in, most of the time.

For stubborn Web sites, GNOME has a browser called GNOME Web that is roughly comparable to Safari. So anyone with GNOME has a GAFAM-compatible browser engine anyway, all they have to do is install the user-interface shell.

Theoretically, SeaMonkey could just jump to a more recent release of Gecko and it would solve almost all of these rendering problems. I spoke with one of the developers on IRC, who told me that the reason they use “Gecko 60.8 plus backports” for now is because Mozilla keeps removing APIs that SeaMonkey developers don’t want to lose access to.

In fact, I already knew that Mozilla quit viewing Gecko as anything other than a Firefox component many years ago, and SeaMonkey is one of the few surviving independent organizations that is trying to make something useful out of it, and that’s commendable.

Mozilla has made numerous “breaking” changes to Gecko over the years, that many of their users disagree with. The end result has been Firefox turning into a badly performing clone of Google Chrome instead of having the vibrant third-party application ecosystem that it once did, which is Mozilla’s loss. More applications needing Gecko, using Gecko, would make Gecko more important. Instead, they have chosen to isolate themselves and die in silence. Bleeding users. Negotiating for Google stipends that get smaller and smaller. Pissing off users with advertising and spam every time Firefox opens.

While Firefox still has some clout and there was sort of a recovery in the number of browser extensions after “quantum” brought in Chrome-style and did away with XUL-based extensions, they aren’t as high quality as they used to be.

One of the reasons I used to recommend Firefox or Mozilla Suite to anyone who would listen to me is that the extensions were nothing short of revolutionary. If the browser or Suite could run on a platform, an extension could too. If the browser could do something, an extension could do it too. This opened up a world of opportunity that Mozilla threw in the trash by adopting Google Chrome’s vastly inferior extension model.

Gone are the days where Mozilla’s platform was an “operating system that runs on an operating system”, where entire applications could be developed and you could point people at them as long as they had a computer because the browser engine abstracted away differences between operating systems.

Some of the other browser vendors have tried to hash out a “public specification” of what a Google Chrome extension is, and Mozilla’s term for them is a “WebExtension”, but like Sun Microsystem’s effort to “standardize” Win32 (the Windows programming interface) in the 1990s, Google (as Microsoft) has absolutely no reason to want to help out and every reason to want to kill the standardization effort.

They dictate what a browser extension is, and everyone else just has to copy it and tell developers that this is what we have now. Nobody is adding APIs and removing limitations. They just copy Chrome.

One reason this system is so terrible is that Google is an advertising company. They’ve never allowed ad blockers in Chrome in Android, and they’ve released an update to “Manifest” (the specification for Chrome extensions) that will neuter ad blockers in much the same way that Safari’s Content Blocking scheme did.

Many of the people who made the best ad blockers for Safari gave up, quit, and left, because they couldn’t make it do what they wanted it to anymore.

Raymond Hill, maintainer of ublock-origin, responded to Google’s Manifest V3 by saying he’d rather quit developing ublock-origin than to make it “less than it is now”.

For years, Adblock Plus had been the only game in town, until Google and other major parasites started paying into a protection racket set up by Wladimir Palant.

Point is, unless something changes drastically, I’m just simply not sure where the future of the Web is going. Nowhere good, I’m sure.

You can already just barely get an ad blocker for SeaMonkey, and it’s because Raymond Hill still cares that there are users who find it useful.

(I guess you might be able to rig up a filtering local proxy like Privoxy.)

As for other extension developers, they don’t seem to be paying SeaMonkey any attention. If they did, they’d also have to keep a version of a Firefox “WebExtension” around that’s old enough to work in SeaMonkey, which would essentially mean checking how things are going in a browser with less users than Firefox.

It’s not like SeaMonkey got to retain its powerful “XUL” extensions. It gave that up when it brought in the “Firefox Quantum” version of Gecko. Yet, usually what will happen when you try to install a WebExtension meant for Firefox into SeaMonkey is it will not function at all, or will malfunction.

Again, aggravating, but entirely Mozilla’s fault.

While it is ironic that the browser that essentially invented extensions (Mozilla Suite) is the browser that only has a few left that you can use, in some ways it’s for the better.

Why? Many Firefox extensions are proprietary software. That means you don’t have unconditional rights to use them or improve or share them with others. Furthermore, since Mozilla doesn’t monitor most of them for code quality or to see if they have malicious software in them, they can destabilize the browser, or even spy on you, when you run them.

Firefox itself is spyware (telemetry+the Firefox Suggest keylogger) and has remote backdoors, such as Normandy, which allows Mozilla to run experiments without your consent, even if you’ve disabled the preference that allows them to install extensions behind your back!.

Adding extensions, many of which are from large corporations, is a guaranteed way of having your browser send off more data to be spied on by more people.

I keep getting Capital One badgering me to install an extension that applies coupons. What else is it collecting? Well, SeaMonkey can’t even run it. Same goes for all of those Avast! and AVG “anti-virus” extensions that flout their own alleged privacy policies.

Extensions aren’t necessarily always a good thing, and Mozilla doesn’t always make it obvious what license you’re even agreeing to when you run them.

Since probably all you’re installing into SeaMonkey is ublock-origin, which is under the GPLv3, and the most important browser extension anyway, you’re at less of a security risk than Firefox users.

While the LibreWolf developers have gutted Firefox of a lot of non-Free software, spyware, and the keylogger, and have done a lot of good work, you still need to be very very careful which extensions you install. The vast majority are “not monitored by Mozilla” and “you install them at your own risk”, says Mozilla’s own site.

The big problem SeaMonkey really has is that Firefox is an ongoing disaster with SeaMonkey in tow.

I can only imagine how the developers of SeaMonkey must feel about this. From the outside looking in, I’d compare it to being in the car with a drunk driver.

So, do I recommend SeaMonkey?

That’s a qualified yes. If you’re like me and you’re fond of the way Internet Suites used to work, it’s really your only option. Many people who stuck to Opera 12 ended up with an experience that degraded until it couldn’t render Web sites and couldn’t even connect securely to others over TLS. If you appreciated “real” Opera, SeaMonkey might be for you.

You’ll need to hack your way around some limitations, mainly due to the fact that “Web developers” are a bunch of idiots, being given too much to work with, by a captured W3C that’s at the beck and call of two advertising companies, who dictate what the “standards” are.

Long term, we need to overthrow the Web and go back to something with largely static content. Or developing small programs such as the NewsWaffle that take bloated Web sites and strip them down and feed them to our browsers. As Anthony Hopkins (as Dr. Ford) put it in WestWorld, “The Earth does not want to move. We will move it, regardless.”. It’s time to beat uncooperative sites into something more…..manageable…..more rational.

What’s really important with the Internet is what people choose to do with it, and what people want and what big corporations want are two entirely different animals.

Take news sites, for example. They set out like 10 KiloBytes of text and haul in 300 MegaBytes of garbage to read it. The news text is like the cheese in a mousetrap. What’s the garbage? Oh, don’t mind them. It’s just autoplay videos, scripts that spy on you that you’re not even supposed to know about. Crazy video streaming specifications that only exist to obfuscate how to download the video or to call DRM so you can’t save a copy even if you have an extension that could figure out where it’s at. Advertising. Formatting junk to “make it look pretty” (who cares?) often by pulling in Web Fonts that spy on you.

You know, “important stuff”. 😉

The focus away from Internet Suites like (Classic) Opera and SeaMonkey, mostly-static content, and local computing, towards badly-written Web applications that chow down on all of your system resources while controlling you was a hit job that Richard Stallman warned about repeatedly in various essays, ranging from “What Does That Server Really Serve?” to “The JavaScript Trap”.

You’re always better off running local applications on a computer that you control, and only backing up your data, which those local applications create in formats that are well understood, to storage that you control.

For starters, we know that every “Cloud Storage” site has a backdoor. Your files are accessible to governments. Maybe not even your government. Do they need a warrant? Probably not.

Just as bad, creeps, weirdos, and perverts that work at companies like Google can get into all of your files. This isn’t hypothetical. They had a child sex predator working there doing it to people, to stalk children.

If that wasn’t enough, they fired dozens of employees over the years for inappropriately accessing user data, leaked documents say. What did they do with the data? How many copies did they make?

In return for this, you’re supposed to pay them by the month to store your files.

How convenient is that? If one of their hard disks crashes, you can still lose data. If they have a security misconfiguration, you can’t fix it. You won’t even know about it. If there’s a data breach, they’ll hide it from you. If they can’t hide it and get sued, it’ll go to a class action and you’ll get a year’s worth of identity monitoring and coupons to Bennigan’s while the class attorney gets $500 million dollars. 🙂

Some people encrypt their laptop in case it gets stolen, then upload all of these files to OneDrive and Google Drive and Apple iCloud, where they are at much more risk.

When you really consider the situation as a whole, which is the only logical way to consider any situation in life, is SeaMonkey perhaps maybe not working too well with this shit really a loss?

If it pulls up your recipes, sends and receives e-mail, and lets you browse 99.9% of the Web, bank, and use IRC, it’s probably fine. Isn’t it?

I’m unaware of anything I’m doing that SeaMonkey can’t do. Buy some thumb drives for crying out loud. Use an office suite on your computer.

(When thumb drives were new, they held 32, 64, or 128 MB. I don’t remember what my ex paid for one when he was in college, but he was amazed by them, and it was a lot of money. Today you can get a 512 GB model for $45.)

People say Richard Stallman can be a bit abrasive. Can you blame the guy, sometimes? Look what he has to deal with.

He goes to give a speech and is surrounded by people who think that loading a word processor in a Web browser on someone else’s server, puts out files in secret undocumented formats that are not well specified (and change), which can change in ways they don’t like, or lock them out, charge an unlimited amount of money, crash, and any combination of these things…. is a good idea. Every time someone interviews him, they make the same mistakes the last interviewer did and you have to skip past minutes of the interview while they’re asking stupid and obvious questions like why they should care about local computing and use weak language like “open source”.

When you’re surrounded by these people, you probably get tired of it.

To Recap:

SeaMonkey, it’s a browser which has its roots in the before time, from the long long ago. Before everyone took leave of their sanity and stopped demanding to do their own computing.

If you’re a heavy user of “Web Apps” it’s probably not right for you, but if you use the Web like I do, it generally does work fine.

If you’re looking for a browser to handle “Clown” computing and lots of heavy “Web apps” with that wonderful Digital Restrictions Malware, go use Google Chrome. I hear you’ll like it much better. You’ll have nothing good to say about SeaMonkey once you’ve seen it. If you’re a “Web 3.0” basket case, just give into Chrome. You know you want it.

You can use Google Chrome or one of the “Also-Google Chromes”, like Vivaldi, Opera, and Edge.

Or you can go to Firefox, for whatever that’s worth, as Mitchell Baker turned the program into something that’s just a damned pest. It’s why they’re losing their users. At the same time, several years ago, Mitchell Baker attacked the entire concept of supporting other use cases involving Gecko, essentially accusing them of parasitism (“why should we pay a tax blah blah blah”). This is, of course, back before Mozilla itself stopped “dogfooding”, using their own technologies, conducting development in the open, where people could participate. A lot of the development now goes on in proprietary malicious platforms, like Discord (they shut down their IRC server) and GitHub (instead of NNTP newsgroups and BugZilla). They’ve been closing out what’s left of the community, firing people, and outsourcing to Microsoft and Google.

One more reason why SeaMonkey deserves consideration is because they conduct development and discussion openly. You can just open ChatZilla and point it to Libera Chat and join #SeaMonkey and you’re talking to the developers and community, and you don’t need to create some sort of Microsoft account and participate in this major fraud and parody of “open source” that Mozilla has created.

Baker also said they would be “laser focused” on Firefox. Instead, they fire engineers and keep “Diversity and Inclusion” people, and the Mozilla Foundation has turned into a political party calling for more Web censorship and Cancel Culture. So much “Free and Open Source” software today is endangered by letting in people who should have never been there in the first place. Mitchell Baker is “Exhibit A”.

What’s going wrong is that the far-left crowd, which is a hate group, has commandeered these communities, thrown in with the enemies like Microsoft and Google (who want FOSS to be in turmoil so that they can sit back, laugh, and watch us destroy each other), and the idea of people of good conscience being able to have disagreements isn’t tolerated. This is why Mozilla and Matrix.org are a match made in Hell and deserve each other.

20 years ago, FOSS was a different beast entirely. It was fun. It was novel. You could make tasteful jokes. In #techrights IRC yesterday, I pointed out that there is a program, now called GNOME Planner, that used to be called MrProject. The joke was that Microsoft had a MS Project. Today, this sort of thing is considered “inappropriate” and gets censored out as “offensive”. It’s offensive for some on the left that there are men and women, so they have to stop you from referencing that, even in a joke. It’s not offensive, so these people create “offense”, then they’re offended on behalf of other people. Then if you tell them to chill out, they’ll attack you by lashing out in bizarre ways. Using tactics like these, they’ve ran off, or tried to run off, people who are actually doing something important for the community. Such as how Matthew Garrett, who participated in Microsoft’s attacks on GNU/Linux (including Security Theater Boot, which he now hypocritically complains of as an anti-user lockout mechanism…duh), goes after Richard Stallman and Ted T’so using trumped up allegations which are bullshit.

Firefox isn’t fun anymore because Mozilla has gone to the dark side.

After the Firefox fork, Mozilla never cared much for the Suite continuing to exist, but there was enough interest to keep it around.

Eventually, they forced it to spin off into an unofficial program called SeaMonkey, which they never gave warm regards to. Then they forced SeaMonkey out of Mozilla completely.

But like Dick Van Dyke continuing to bring a little bit of decency into a new world mostly devoid of such, SeaMonkey is still there with us.

It reminds us of a more civilized time.

Apple plans to offer the iPhone as as Disservice (iaaD), ensuring you never own even the hardware.

Apple plans to offer the iPhone as as Disservice (iaaD), ensuring you never own even the hardware.

Dave Ramsey offers simplistic financial advice to “consumers”, but his advice on “extended warranties” is dead on. People should refuse to buy “extended warranties”.

They’re essentially a way to pay a “service company” that you may not actually get to honor any claims, or worse, the manufacturer itself, a portion of the device’s cost, in order to get a “service plan”.

The reason I say paying the manufacturer is worse is because it essentially tells the manufacturer that it’s fine to produce junk that breaks a lot, and even if you are buying it through the store, it signals to the store that it’s fine to carry products that are unreliable because they’ll only make more money when customers bet against the reliability of the device they are there to purchase.

Ramsey advises not to buy them because devices tend not to break down within the extended service period, and by the time one thing you buy has a problem, you’ll have paid for so many plans that you’ll be out more money than had you declined all of the plans, and have to fix one thing yourself out of the money that you saved by turning down the plans. And that’s _if_ you can get anyone to honor the plans. Half the time, they come up with some total bullshit reason why they don’t have to, or never even respond to your claim.

Car “warranties” are the worst. My mechanic says never buy one because most of them don’t pay and then customers get mad at the shop. He says it becomes a hassle where they fill out papers, and then 90% of them deny the claim while the remaining 10% usually want to buy a part on eBay and then haggle with the mechanics for half their hourly rate to put it on your car.

I just bought a deep freezer for $259 from Home Depot, and they wanted my to buy a $75 extended service plan that covers breakdowns for 4 years after the warranty ends. That’s nearly a third of the cost of buying another one and these things usually work for 10-20 years or more, trouble free. So the plan is a license to print money for the store and the con artists who sell them.

Now, you may be wondering, why I’m talking about cars and freezers and stuff on an article headlined “iPhone”. Well, Apple has their own extended service plan called AppleCare, and they arm wrestle people (I guess that’s a pun since the iPhone is an arm device.) to get them to bet their new $1,429 iPhone will fail between the end of the year that Apple has to warrant it, and the two following years. Even though in most cases, the hardware doesn’t fail if you just take care of what you buy. (In addition, carriers like “protection plans” with deductibles. They wanted $13 a month on my Google Pixel 6 (MSRP $600) and $18 a month on my spouse’s iPhone 13 (MSRP of $800)….

(I got them on an upgrade promo for $0 and $400 because they took over Sprint and shut down the network our old phones used.)

Even if you have to pay full MSRP at some point because your phone is totally destroyed, you’ll never break even with the plans over the long haul.

Ten years of the plans are $3,720 added to your phone bill even if you never use the plans once, and then each time your phone has an issue, there’s some bullshit deductible preventing them from even covering the full cost of repair.

In other words, if you used the plan twice over 10 years, you could have fully replaced 6 brand new phones. New phones….not some “You pay a $129 deductible and we throw you an old phone someone else traded in…..LOL!”

Remember that the longer you own it, the less remaining value it has. Shortly, the carrier is basically charging you for the market value of the phone even though they call it a deductible to your “service plan”.

This is how bad people are at doing basic math! Or budgeting. They keep throwing money at “service plans” because they go “I’m too broke to buy a replacement for this.”

If you’re too broke to replace it, what are you doing buying it?

They “asked nicely” to pay for a “service plan”, and something like half the people out there are not stupid enough, so it will no longer be a request. 🙂

I suppose Apple is angry that some people prefer to own their phone outright at some point and spend the next 4 years with no phone payment running it into the ground, like my mom did with her iPhone 6, albeit AT&T kept billing her for the “protection plan” because she’s not financially savvy. She just kept using the old iPhone because she didn’t want to pay money to upgrade, which she would have had if she had turned down the plan.

With iPhone as a Disservice, Apple can just refuse to sell you a device that you own, and they can call it a “subscription”. If you modify the phone at all, you’ve messed with “their property” because you’ll never be able to pay it off, and included in the plan of course, will be “AppleCare” so that you won’t have the option to decline it and save money and just be careful with your phone.

And while they’re in there, they can force you to pay for i”Clown”, Apple Music, and i”Clown” drive, and Apple TV, even though they collapsed twice in the past week and weren’t even accessible for hours.

The more people accept in order to stay in the “Cult” the more the cult leaders try to get away with. There’s no telling what Apple will try to shove into these “subscriptions” that you’ll be forced to pay for even if you don’t want them and never used them before.

The Verge keeps saying Apple doesn’t charge any “interest”. Why would they? The iPhones only cost them between $150-$350 to produce and they sell them for up to $1,429, and they get more expensive every year.

What is the profit margin when they start making you pay every month whether you “upgrade” to a phone that’s not that much better than the last one or not?

All of this is clearly designed to shore up Apple’s bottom line. They did lose a lot of money YTD and at some points, alarmingly so if you’re an investor.

They have had no new products in the pipeline since the iPhone came out (unless you count a watch that overworked ER doctors hate because it panics people when there’s nothing wrong with their heart), and they’re selling phones into a saturated market where Android clipped their wings a while back.

Steve Jobs was always furious about Android, because he knew it would limit the iPhone’s success with iterative updates that improved it until it overtook the iPhone…..which is what has happened, certainly with the Pixel series from Google. Then Jobs died and the Peter Principle put Tim Cook in as the CEO of Apple.

Unbelievably, Apple’s stock price has continued to rise, until you look at the fact that they’re using share buybacks and other financial engineering to raise Tim Cook’s salary without adding any real value to the company.

How else does a company that treads water continue to “add value” even as the job destruction in America and indeed the world (COVID-19 being the excuse) cause the number who can afford their products to plummet? The Federal Reserve has had interest rates at zero, so not only has Apple bought its own shares, but it did it at the expense of the American public, taking in subsidized loans which help strip the American dollar of its value, and putting it right into the hands of American Oligarchs, which include Tim Cook.

Also, being “so valuable” puts them in the S&P 500, where American workers who are basically forced at the end of a gun to put their life savings (401(k) plan) are captive investors.

How else do you think they buy a megayacht while you can’t get chicken at the grocery store? Whoopsie.

The curtain pulls back and the charade reveals itself. They do have a real business, but their “side hustle” is much better.

Buying anything on subscription where it goes away if you stop paying for it, instead of doing your computing locally, is a really really BAD idea.

When we were sending files to our immigration attorney last year, her Microsoft 365 kept crashing and it was really annoying. I kept having to send documents two, three, five times before she got them. We’d go down to Chicago to her office and she’d try to open her mail and it didn’t work and we’d have to take a lunch break.

Clown Computing is unprofessional and it saps productivity, but Apple doesn’t want you to choose. They want to license the iPhone to you and then bundle all of this crap so you’ll start using it because you have to pay for it anyway.

Pretty much all Apple Clown disservices went down today. Apple had no comment.

Pretty much all Apple Clown disservices went down today. Apple had no comment.

This happens to all Clown Computing disservices, including Google and Microsoft.

When it happens, it’s not affecting them, only the fools who don’t realize the value in avoiding Disservices as a Software Substitute. (DaaSS)

It’s terrific when your business can’t access files, emails, and documents for hours on end, isn’t it? What is the lost productivity worth? And yet you still keep paying these people.

Even when it’s not terribly important (music, movies) it is annoying. When you have stuff on your hard disk or on the device, you can always access it. I have a lot of music in Opus files because they’re a tiny way to store stuff that would have taken a lot of room in CD quality.

As a result, I don’t need streaming music disservices that cost more all the time for a catalog of music where I listen to absolutely nothing past 2007 or so anyway.