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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Comcast introduced the “Xfinity” branding in 2010. I still call refer to it as “Comcast”. Any conversation I have where an ISP comes up, the word “Comcast” is used. If someone says “Xfinity”, they often follow it up with “you know, Comcast”.

    Now that’s a VERY clear brand change.

    The name “X” is a VERY confusing brand change. It will likely be called Twitter forever. In fact at some point Musk will sell or give up on “X” and I guarantee within a year the new owner will change the name back to Twitter.





  • So first off I appreciate your “about:config” dump, that is helpful.

    However, having ONLY that dump makes it difficult to actually diagnose your issue. It would be helpful to have an idea of what fails.

    • Are you only unable to join meetings?
    • Can you create meetings?
    • Only audio?
    • Only video?
    • Are there any error messages?
    • Are there any messages at all on screen?
    • Are there errors in the JavaScript console?
    • If there are a lot, can you compare it against the working vanilla version and see where the errors are unique/start to differ?
    • When did this issue start to happen? (It worked a week ago, but not now?)
    • Is your config based off a guide online?

    Second, you have “media.peerconnection.enabled” set to “false”. That setting controls WebRTC. Google Meet uses WebRTC. If I set that value to false my Google Meet meetings fail to load, it just stays stuck at the joining meeting phase.

    So maybe that’s your culprit. Of course I would expect if you’ve had this set for a long time I would have expected it to fail for a long time. Also both alternatives you mentioned use WebRTC, so I would expect those to fail with that setting disabled.

    Of course if it used to work with that disabled then it’s possible Google Meet changed and had a fallback no longer in use or something else.

    As an aside, I understand that WebRTC has (had?) issues leaking local IP addresses while connected to a VPN. So I understand why you might have it disabled.


  • in my hardened config firefox browser

    The only conclusion I can draw is that google is so desperate for my data that they refuse to service me unless I give them this.

    What is your config? It’s possible you’ve got things configured in an unexpected, but valid, way that causes Google Meet to fail.

    How does it fail? Are there errors in the console?

    You’re immediately assuming malice, but it may simply be a mistake (Google’s or yours).



  • Re Google Safe Browsing

    I would argue it’s a security feature with potential privacy concerns, however I would agree it is more of a failsafe or suggestion.

    However it being disabled by default or not included at compile time versus enabled by default may also be relevant when it comes to security. As a hypothetical a high severity bug with Google Safe Browsing could arguably make a browser less secure. However even as a failsafe/suggestion, the small security benefit may make the overall browser more secure, e.g. filtering known bad websites that attack known vulnerabilities.

    I’m also just using Safe Browsing as an example here, it may or may not be worth focusing on since a browser is basically an operating system.

    You mentioned sandboxing, which I think is perhaps a more reasonable scope.


    1. Do you have your current list of sources? You mentioned you want more, but where are you looking to start? For example are you looking at the CVE database? Are you looking at competitions like Pwn2Own? Or detailed project group like Google Project Zero?
    2. Is it fair to compare Chromium, which is not an end user product, to Firefox which is? Do you plan to look at or compare forks of the software? As an example both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox enable “Google Safe Browsing” by default, however the fork “ungoogled-chromium” does not include “Google Safe Browsing” (and they provide their reasoning).

  • It’s hard to say.

    For discussion threads I think it makes sense and that’s what I really want to see grow. When we only had films it was easier since you had only a few new films per week, and even less if you focused only on the blockbusters/comic book movies.

    Now with TV shows you’ve got a new episode every week.

    If you look at Reddit communities you had great discussion and memes week to week, and it only worked with folks hyper focused on the TV show.

    Ideally I’d have separate communities for each show, but that would be spread super thin.


  • If you’re a fan of Comic Book TV & Movies I want to highlight,

    We’re discussing the latest MCU films and TV shows. Agatha All Along is airing right now, but we’re also excited for next year with Captain America: Brave New World & Thunderbolts*.

    We’re also open to discussing Sony’s terrible Marvel films like Venom and Madam Web. And I’m looking forward to Sony’s excellent Marvel films like Spider-verse.

    Of course to be fair I’ve also reignited,

    It’s just discussing The Penguin TV series at the moment, but as James Gunn and Peter Safran put together their DCU I expect we’ll talk about it a lot more. Also the upcoming Joker sequel. If it’s DC it’s fair game.

    And of course for either community if you just want to visit after watching the latest film or TV show, that works too.




  • I thought the same for a long time. I had a gaming PC, I had my Switch (or earlier Nintendo consoles), I was covered. Eventually my gaming PC reached the end of the road (15+ years, minor upgrades along the way.) I was happy enough without it so I decided against building a new gaming PC.

    Then Baldur’s Gate 3 was announced. I knew I’d need a new gaming PC to play it. Of course alternatives like Stadia showed up at that time, but we know how that story ends, and it ends before BG3 came out.

    Steam Deck truly is a savior. I can play the latest games. I can play my old games. I can emulate games.

    Plus unlike Android it feels like a Linux machine underneath. I don’t say that to shame Android, but I don’t feel like I own the device. I can customize a lot, but I’m just a user. But the Steam Deck? I can open the hood if I like and it’s a Linux machine with a built in touch screen and controller. It’s my PC.


  • To extend this a little further, computers also don’t actually store books, they store blocks.

    For example, you have a computer that can store 50 blocks of information. You store “Moby Dick”, taking up 20 blocks & “Tom Sawyer”, taking another 20 blocks.

    Next you decide you don’t like “Moby Dick”, so you delete it. You also decide you want to store an ice cream menu, taking up just 1 block.

    That menu will be stored based on where the computer thinks the block fits best. So you might have 20 blocks that still contain “Moby Dick”, or you might have only 19 blocks that contain most of “Moby Dick”, but it might be missing the beginning, middle or end.

    If I were doing data recovery I might not be able to provide you with the complete “Moby Dick” story. I might only be able to give you part of it.

    Looking into why blocks, let’s say you’re writing up the first draft of a book report, it might take up 4 blocks. Then later you edit, improve and add to that that book report, and now it takes 5 blocks. The computer took care of making space, even though your report got larger. It didn’t know if you were going to add 1 new block of information, or 1000 new blocks of information, it figured it out and did the rearranging for you.

    However when it comes time for you to look at it, it automatically knows how to put it together. (And usually it does group things together if it can).

    This is important to keep in mind when it comes to data recovery because the more you use your computer the more likely blocks are allocated and data gets moved around.

    If you delete important photos, then spend the weekend surfing the Internet, those photos might be gone. Or if they are available, might only be partially available.