gub09

Does fastmail let you use your own domain?

$5/month and an afternoon to set up unlimited email accounts on unlimited domains on one server. There are a few scripts/services out there that limit the pain.

This makes sense. Possibly the value of increased corporate sales of G Suite is worth more than the loss of the information gained from reading diminishing numbers of personal emails, as people turn more and more to social media and phone apps for personal communication.

HEADLINE: Consolidation of Documentation; Removal of Outdated Documentation

DESCRIPTION: Any time you do a web search for anything regarding Debian, the search results include a huge amount of official but outdated information. Normally for Linux-related questions I refer to the amazing Arch wiki, but there are topics that are Debian-specific, and then sifting through all the detritus is a huge waste of time. There's a wiki, a kernel handbook, a manual, random xyz.debian.org pages, mailing lists, user forums, the Debian Administrator's Handbook...

Granted, it's a huge effort to clean all of that up, but perhaps there's a way to incorporate user feedback, so that pages can be marked as "outdated" by users, or updated by users (wait, there's a log-in page- does this mean I can edit wiki pages? Did not know that...:( ), or otherwise made more systematic.

In particular, it would be great to have more complete information on the installation process: which images to use (RC, ..., or weekly image?), how to put them on a USB stick (why does my 32GB stick now say it has 128GB?; you mean I can just copy the files to a FAT32-formatted drive?), what the options are (for hostname, is any name, a FQDN necessary?), etc. For every single clarification, there will be a hundred, thousand, ten thousand people who are helped; that seems like a worthwhile investment. Everyone is a beginner at the beginning, regardless of knowledge outside this specific domain, so why not make it easier.

All that said, have been using Stretch/testing for a few years, love it, love the Free/Libre Software ethos, love what you guys do, keep it up, thank you!

I like the idea of genius as derived from genus, and meaning something like a particular kind of excellence, an exemplar of its kind, something's characteristic disposition. One can think of there being not one class of geniuses, but think of it as excellence of a particular kind, in a particular activity, that is related to the intrinsic and highly developed talents or disposition of the genius. So, Rafael Nadal is a clay court genius, because he is a great tennis player, and in addition he puts maximum effort into the kind of tennis that requires it, and his physical, top-spin heavy tennis is ideally suited to the surface.

No doubt Google considers it a best practice, because they are in the business of knowing what people do on the internet. How often will a browser get the jquery for a particular website or check with the CDN? There are a lot of jquery versions in use, the cache gets deleted (often on browser close) or expires, cache-age=0, etc. Almost always?

Besides providing jquery themselves, websites can use a CDN from another provider. OK, that might cost an extra 20 ms.

It depends on what you do with that blob; if you use it to request some required encrypted content, for example, users won't be able to do much about that.

My point is that anyone can use an adblocker or Squid proxy filtering to block GoogleAnalytics, but if the site uses jquery from a Google CDN to render content, that cannot be blocked without making the site unusable. It's even worse if the Google CDN request is made with https, because then a redirection needs to be made inside the browser.

Yes, why does a private website needs 10 trackers/data-miners? For the ad revenue?

Please, web developers, as a minimum, set up your websites so that they do not depend on Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon or Apple for their functionality. That means, for example, use DoubleClick or AdSense or GoogleAnalytics if you like, but please do not use jquery from Google's CDNs. If you do that, and the site is dependent on that functionality to work (i.e. for text to be displayed), those of us who don't allow Google CDNs will not be able to use the site. The same for WebAssembly: use it if you like, but please don't make your actual content unnecessarily dependent on the use of services from these multinationals. It makes the Web less free.

Someday, there will be a topic on HN about which I too am knowledgeable... someday.

In addition, the blog post uses Google Fonts and jquery from a Google CDN. Could people please consider using a non-Google CDN for things that affect webpage functionality? Those of us that block HTTP requests to Google servers will then also be able to use the website. (In this case the webpage content appears entirely usable even with jquery etc. blocked.)

I read the Share Lab metadata report, based on an examination of the metadata in the headers of the emails exchanged between Hacking Team members. The level of detail this provides on the network and on the individual members of the team is extraordinary. Now in the case of Facebook, imagine that times 100, then add AI to slice and dice the data better than a team of the world's top 1000 data scientists working on the analysis of some tiny portion of the data for some particular purpose, for a year... Just one consequence: think of what Facebook and Google have on every politician in the United States, in the world.

My vote doesn't mean anything either.

This is probably an unusual opinion, but for me privacy is similar to freedom. Freedom is usually defined as a negative: people are free of oppression, have freedom of speech (freedom from speech being constrained), freedom of movement (not forced to stay in one place), religious freedom (freedom to believe what one will and not be limited in practice or assembly), etc.

Privacy is the freedom from being watched, from having one's movements and actions and consumption and words observed, tabulated and stored. I hope that one day whether by laws or technological solutions, privacy will again be the norm in our lives.

It would be better if scripts like jquery were not encrypted. This forces users to use e.g. a google service instead of caching/hosting the scripts themselves or getting them from another CDN. I do not understand why so many people do not consider the privacy implications of every single webpage requiring calls to google services. There are ways to avoid this, but it gets a lot more complicated when that requires MITM methods for SSL. Please: use a non-tracking CDN, host it yourself, or at least leave it HTTP.

The "Year of the Linux Desktop" has been a running joke for a long time, but perhaps it's no longer a joke. Not wanting to lose control as far as updates and privacy is concerned, I switched to Linux when Windows 10 came out.

Running Debian Testing with Gnome has been a joy. In my opinion the user experience is easier and better than that of Windows 7 or 8. Office staff could quite easily be trained to click on the Start key or the drop-down Activities menu or move the mouse to the top-left corner to start a program. Office software is quite good. Program-switching keyboard combinations are excellent. The Evolution mail client is very good. Browser software is the same as on Windows or a Mac. Problems with bad fonts, poorly designed UI, lacking drivers etc. are things of the past (with the notable exception of very new hardware).

This may not be possible due to the necessity of using specific proprietary programs that run only on Windows, for example. On the other hand, the level of tech support required is perhaps not significantly greater than what is necessary for installing and maintaining Windows on a bunch of machines.

On the plus side, everything is very fast, tasks like backing up files or systems are simple with GUI or terminal interface, and if you want to learn iptables and set up that router/firewall you can do that too. Everything you learn is an investment instead of an annoyance. Nobody is going through your company or personal files to serve you ads.

There's no reason any more, besides defaults and inertia, why Linux should have 2% desktop market share instead of 10% of somewhat technical people or even 20 or 30% of the general population.