The MAU of lemmy.world is ~18,600 which is a bit greater than the combined MAU of the next 7 instances (a big help here is lemm.ee which has ~7000 MAU). This is a really healthy spread of users and it means we don’t lose lemmy if the biggest instance goes down.

Compare that to Mastodon, where mastodon.social has more MAU (~372,000) than the combined MAU of the next 30 instances at least (I gave up counting). Thats not healthy for the ecosystem. Though tbf the total MAU of mastodon is ~899,000 so without mastodon.social they will still have ~527,000 but it will be very spread out.

I feel like its just the first step in completely removing the off option (like how on Windows you cant turn off Defender, only pause it). Am I being too cynical?

Yeah fedora does it even for small updates, not just kernel updates. But only if you update through the store.

I wonder if immutable systems could negate the need for kernel anti cheat. If the game can ensure the current kernel and image is one from a list of acceptable ones, it doesn’t need to kernel anti cheat. They could do this by comparing the checksum or something.

of course, no problem

Yeah I was talking in general, its weird and a potential privacy risk.

OT but its weird how links shared from discourse exposes your username in the url

im not up on the latest lore admittedly but looking at the github repo, it seems there has been little activity in terms of new code. Its also not well integrated with KDE despite it being primarily used by KDE Plasma.

The options are generic enough that I imagine they wont cause issues with updates. Or you could use a simple bash script to automate the update process, like the ones suggested here: https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox/issues/167.

Arkenfox is for a much more hardened and private Firefox. It will enable many options that can cause site breakage. Use this if you want max privacy or security and dont care too much about some sites not working.

I hadn’t heard of betterfox until now but it seems to be a more balanced option. They offer multiple options for speed, distraction free, etc. I looked at a few of them and they enable many of the sane options and also disable all tracking/data collection. I would say go with user.js which seems to be a sum of all the other profiles without any problematic options.

This is very weird, are using the default lemmy interface? I dont think the default lemmy interface has anything special so not sure why it would be acting like this.

You could use firefox only for apps that do not work well with librefox. Or try an alternative lemmy frontend like photon or voyager or tesseract or old lemmy (I forgot what the project is called).

Unfortunately it seems to be a completely proprietary kernel. I did find a paper on it (presented by Huawei in a conference): https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-haibo

The first line of the abstract reads

This paper presents the design and implementation of HongMeng kernel (HM), a commercialized general-purpose microkernel that preserves most of the virtues of microkernels while addressing the above challenges.

Another interesting tidbit from the paper:

We started the HongMeng kernel (HM) project over 7 years ago to re-examine and retrofit the microkernel into a general OS kernel for emerging scenarios. To be practical for production deployment, HM achieves full Linux API/ABI compatibility and is capable of reusing the Linux applications and driver ecosystems such that it can run complex frameworks like AOSP [42] and OpenHarmony [35] with rich peripherals.

Thats weird, lemmy shouldn’t need any access to fingerprinting stuff. Its probably something else. What part of lemmy specifically does not work?

privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager suggests it could be due an addon/extension (the flag enables extensions to work on ‘restricted’ pages such the new tab)

This is something people suggesting librewolf as an alternative to firefox don’t get right, that librewolf is not just any fork of firefox, but a very hardened fork, with many options for privacy and security enabled at the cost of increased site breakage.

thats a very fair point, I had not seen anyone else make this one But the problem is that in this case, this functionality was entirely undocumented. I dont think it was intended for programmers.

Now if the firmware was open source, people would have gotten to know about this much sooner even if not documented. Also such functionality should ideally be gated somehow through some auth mechanism.

Also just like how the linux kernel allows decades old devices to be at the very least patched for security risks, open firmware would allow users of this chip to patch it themselves for bugs, security issues.

It was a skin, now its a completely different OS. The initial version, HarmonyOS, was based on Android/Linux, the new HarmonyOS Next, is a proprietary version (or successor) of HarmonyOS based on an open source project/OS, OpenHarmony. It uses a new microkernel instead of the linux kernel.

OpenHarmony is essentially an open source base for making an operating system on top. Its not like the Linux kernel, in the sense that its not just a kernel (in fact you can use the linux kernel with it), but rather a bunch of components people can build upon. And since it uses a permissive license, you can build a proprietary OS on top of it (like the HarmonyOS Next).

Huawei actually launched OpenHarmony many years back but it was not ready for phone usage yet. It was only with the launch of the 5th version that Huawei was confident enough in it to start using it on their own phones.

Its really a shame Huawei went for a closed source OS on phones (and probably laptops in the future if not now) instead of Linux or another open source OS (they even started with an open source version of their os). I hope this harmony os doesn’t take up in other countries or we would be going backwards.

So the data of the 24 people, who signed for the beta program, were accessible to each other, to all the 24 people? Sounds like nothing burger to me. The odds of someone in the 24 people knowing about this issue beforehand I would say are pretty low.

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We really should be pushing for fully open source stack (firmware, os) in all iot devices. They are not very complicated so this should be entirely possible. Probably will need a EU law though.

I saw a comment somewhere that to exploit this a person has to be physically in the area (i think it was in a radius of few meters iirc). Thats not much better i guess since its not hard to be around random iot devices but it at least prevents mass attacks (if true).

thanks for all the work! 2.0 is a lot snappier than the previous version, no more weird hangs on my phone.