statue of limitation

That sounds like it’d be Futurama joke.

Oh, cool. Thanks!

Chromite passed the EFF test for trackers. I had a unique fingerprint, though. Not surprising. It’s really hard not to.

How do you feel about DDG browser? It’s another chrome based option. I’ve been using it when the some rare website won’t work in a Firefox fork, and I’m curious to hear other people’s opinions about it.

I like their free email forwarding service for throwaway accounts. Obviously, the emails aren’t private in any way.

Google steals your data and I’m sure wants to enslave us, too. Microsoft would love that. DDG probably doesn’t but it’s search kinda sucks and gives shitty AI generated web pages as results most of the time. Probably because it just uses Bing.

I use ChatGPT to answer questions directly instead of wading through searches. It’s pretty good at it. Like, “What’s the word for the thing that does the thing with this other thing”. And it’s like “thingamajig”. Yup, that’s it. Perfect. It’s what I wanted.

The company isn’t profitable, and every question costs them money. They certainly aren’t profiting off of my dumb questions.

This is why I didn’t read it.

I can’t click that link. I guess Droid-ify doesn’t handle that protocol. If I try to paste the entire thing into the address field of the “Add repo” screen, it crashes the whole app. Merely pasting it!

I had to separate the bits and do it manually:

Address

http://fdroid.ironfoxoss.org/fdroid/repo

Fingerprint

C5E291B5A571F9C8CD9A9799C2C94E02EC9703948893F2CA756D67B94204F904

Hopefully FFUpdater will add the app to their list soon. And Droidify will probably add the repo to their default list, too.

Honestly, Obtanium might be the way to go.

South Korea is the leading consumer and producer of farmed Codium (commonly known as cheonggak)

Search for that.

Weird that I get a unique fingerprint in DDG.

Thing is most people just don’t care, and don’t understand it. Also, it turns out it’s really easy to fingerprint people. Your list of installed fonts alone is enough to fingerprint you in many cases, and it’s easy to figure out your entire list of installed fonts with JavaScript.

Add a few more data points like screen size and resolution, user-agent, and you can fingerprint 90% of people. And if that’s not enough, every device—even individual video cards of the same model—renders an HTML canvas differently enough that it’s detectable.

It turns out it’s very hard to not be completely unique when you add all the up.

I feel like it should be a crime to do fingerprinting like this, and to grab and store the browsing habits of every citizen for their whole life, but this is America (for me), and it’s never going to change.

I got it to be random in Fennec. That’s good. A unique, random fingerprint is probably as good as hiding in the crowd. Maybe. I dunno.

I feel like a lot of people on Lemmy will have unique fingerprints due to using uncommon operating systems, browsers, and extensions.

JShelter blocks fingerprinting. uBlock blocks scripts, cookies, and trackers. Trackers are going away, even Google says so, in favor of fingerprinting. Hence why Chrome is moving manifest v3 without third party cookie support. (I hope I got all those facts right.)

How long is this supposed to take? I just get this forever.

Turns out jShelter breaks it completely. It runs instantly in DDG browser and same if I disable jShelter.

I get an F- in both cases. 😅

The full name is VScodium. https://vscodium.com/

Codium is a genus of edible green macroalgae.

Thank you. That’s evidence that mine is not being randomized and is unique and repeatable.

I’m on mobile.

I’ve done that, and it’s a little of everything. The page doesn’t offer any advice on how to address anything.

The biggest ones are screen size and user agent. User agent can be faked with an extension. I can’t exactly change my screen size.

I don’t know what exactly what I did, but I managed to improve to “nearly unique” in IronFox. I think all I did was install Cookie Autodelete. It’s an extension I’ve used for a long time in Mull, and finally got around to installing it. Then I installed “User-agent Switcher” and chose a Chrome user-agent and now I’m back to “Unique”. 🤔

I’ve heard those “share IDs” (as I call them) are indeed tied to your account. My worry is that some day there will be a data breach and a mass doxxing of people who shared YouTube links, so I always remove them.

Léon - The URL Cleaner

Because they have AI voices and exciting forced captions that sparkle and bounce in the exact center of the video! Who wouldn’t want that?

Now I kind of want to make a parody of what would be a traditional educational video on YouTube in the style of shorts. Like annoyingly rushed, AI voice, and huge forced captions blocking everything. Making fun of kids today who have no attention span for ordinary videos. A difficult topic like programming or CAD software.

I just installed and tested out the app. I have been using Léon - The URL Cleaner for a while.

I “shared” your clearurls link to URLChecker as a quick test, and then hit the “Unshorten” button, even though I knew it wasn’t a short URL. This is what it resolved it to:

 url=../../../1.26.1/specs/rules

Haha… Thanks?

In the end, it takes more taps to do what I want than Leon does. If I share a YouTube link, I have to press “Unshort” then “Apply” to remove useless parameters. Meanwhile, with Leon, it’s already done. As soon as you share to it, it presents the plain YouTube URL with a simpler UI where the buttons have words on them instead of just icons.

Compare:

URLChecker

Leon

To be fair, it appears to have fewer features. Leon can’t simply remove all parameters or check the URL status. URLChecker also had it’s own quick list of share targets in that central drop-down in addition to a traditional Share button.

I think I’ll keep both installed in case URLChecker does a better job with non-YouTube URLs.