Not the person you replied to, but…

What would it take Mozilla to do, to break your trust?

To move out of the least-worst option position.

Right now it’s in that position. It’s always been in that position, and IMO it has never not been in that position.

And for the record, I am not talking about Mozilla specifically, but the browser ecosystem for that rendering engine that includes any forks and derivatives… because things like Chrome’s maliciously flawed and user-hostile Manifest v3 also cascade down into forks and alternatives that are based off of it, and so contaminate many other normally-good alternatives.

I was there, during the first advertising push of the mid/late 90s, where visiting the wrong website - or even the right one on the wrong day - spawned “uncloseable” pop-ups and pop-unders… uncloseable because as soon as you tried to dismiss the window, that action triggered a half-dozen more to spawn.

Eventually, the weight of all the browser windows would cause not only the browser to grind to a halt, but even the computer as a whole (single-thread CPUs & minimal RAM, nat), such that your only possible recovery path was to conduct a hard restart of the entire system, your unsaved work be damned.

I feel for those businesses whose only possible funding strategy is via ads, but that well was lethally poisoned for me decades ago. I jumped onto the world’s first adblocker the moment it became available for Phoenix (now Firefox), and I have never looked back. The only way I will ever stop using adblocking is to stop using the Internet entirely.

running it in an ssd is it can speed it up

Let me be absolutely clear: due to the finite write capabilities of solid-state technology, using SpinRite on an SSD is materially harmful to that SSD, and WILL shorten it’s operational lifespan by a non-trivial amount.

This is why SSDs have wear-levelling technology: to limit the number of writes that any one data cell will receive. By using a program that conducts intensive read/write operations on sectors, you are wearing your SSD out at a much higher rate than normal, dramatically speeding up any failures in the future.

I don’t care about living longer. I see no point in doing so when beset with dementia or unable to even walk, much less run.

Give me full vitality in body and mind until my last day, and I’ll be satisfied even if it’s only 80 or 75 years.

SpinRite is only meant for traditional “spinning-rust” mechanical drives.

SpinRite IS NOT meant for SSDs. The existence of TRIM makes SpinRite useless on any sort of solid state storage.

And since almost all laptops sold within the last half a decade use SSDs almost exclusively, it is highly unlikely your advice will be useful.

Cool, THANKS!! 😊 🙏

That is an interesting implementation of security through obscurity…

How does one enable this on the standard 7Zip client?

Removed by mod

Well… looks like I’m going to have to find a new payment platform to use.

Yet more evidence that CloudFlare is inherently damaging and hostile to the Internet.

I just want a small […] phone that fits in one hand.

How bloody small are your hands??

Mine are just average for a man’s, and the iPhone 15 Pro Max is eminently usable with just one hand.

Most dumb phones aren’t.

Dumb, that is. Virtually all of them have some version of Android or KaiOS or some other full-fat OS cosplaying as something “simple”. Litmus test: does your “dumb phone” come with a map app? A Facebook app? Can you install apps from an external source? If so, you don’t have a dumb phone.

The hallmark of a dumb phone is the lack of an OS that boots. You turn it on, and everything should be instantly and immediately available, loaded from ROM. No boot sequence, no waiting for anything to load.

The only truly “dumb phone” out there - as something “new” and not actually vintage - is the Rotary Un-Phone.

When the Parasite Class objects so vehemently to something that is impacting their obscene profits and sociopathic control, you know that something is being done correctly.

I used to take pride in that I could fully set up, configure, secure, minimally provision (with software) and neuter the more egregious aspects of Vista/7/8/8.1 within a 16hr time frame.

With Windows 10 this increased to 20 hours, and with my own Windows 11 install I am currently clocking in at 24hrs - three whole work days. The last day of which is spent in the Registry and doing multiple reboots to ensure the new UI fuckery has been appropriately castrated.

I have a handful of programs, both current and vintage, that are either inadequately or completely unable to be serviced by Wine. With that said, I am now down to only two rigs on Windows, the remainder being various flavours of Linux or BSD.

Medical care is single-payer in Canada, and we pay one-half the amount in our taxes with zero co-pays and deductibles on top of that for pretty much identical to slightly superior medical outcomes.

But yeah, the other three track up here as well.

Link to the program?

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=win10privacy

Win+e doesn’t even open to a panel that lets me open the c drive without clicking other shit and waiting for it to appear first.

I have been seriously considering creating a “graphical registry editor” that would be feature-focused and could be both portable (for one-off application) and installable (for constant on-login resetting of any changed preferences). Just open it up, browse the offerings, select the feature mods you want, apply and restart.

There is a lot of File Explorer shit that you can do to mod it back to WinXP days. Had to do this to a Win11 install for my Octogenarian father who has become very intolerant of unexpected changes, and while it needs regular maintenance to “keep”, it has worked out well for him.

Or you just use Rufus to create your USB installer. It provides the ability to add that option to the installer just before the burning process. Mouse clicks only, no CLI needed.

You can use Win10Privacy to bodily castrate nearly all built-in spyware and telemetry.

Downside is that it’s a damn powerful program, with few guardrails, so if you don’t have good knowledge of Windows internals you run a non-trivial risk of accidentally lobotomizing an important feature of your install by enabling the wrong setting. I mean, all settings can be easily reversed, but you gotta know which specific one did the nerfing in order to undo the oopsie.

For example, even the midrange firewall settings are mostly safe, except… a single one of them completely kills Microsoft Office Click-To-Run. It won’t install, and it won’t launch even if you installed it before you applied Win10Privacy. So if Microsoft Office is an essential (Access or Excel absolutely needed, for example), be careful.

A lot of men pay $800 - or even more! - just to pet a pussy.

But paying for pussy just ain’t my thang.