Melody Fwygon

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  • 149 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • So much for using airplane mode to conserve battery.

    Your understanding is slightly off.

    Airplane mode Does In Fact Turn off your CELLULAR Radio This radio is what powers your (2/3/4/5)G and LTE (This is 4G btw) connection to the cell towers.

    Most international radio communications laws can prohibit the use of Cellular Radio in flight; however they often don’t prohibit the use of shorter range radio technologies such as WIFI or Bluetooth.

    It’s all about ‘loudness’. Think about it. Your phone must ‘scream louder’ at a farther away cell tower than it would need to communicate with a nearby WiFi router or a Bluetooth headset.








  • Unsurprisingly, Brave will try to profit from privacy seeking users…I hope their company dies a horrible financial death.

    I’ve always disliked Brave for their carelessness in pursuing their business needs, adding stupid things like worthless crypto to try to buy out the advertisers and selling out their search indexing to the highest bidder.

    Instead of just going the meta-search route by indexing by themselves; spreading out queries to multiple services; caching results; and just providing the results to users privately like a real company offering privacy would; they just gave up and let Bing do all of it.

    They could’ve even negotiated their API usage and allowed for relevant ‘in-result list ads’ that were clearly marked as Ads without compromising the privacy of their search services to help defray costs of hitting the APIs of bigger players like Google, Yahoo or Bing and allowing advertisements relevant to queries to flow without compromising on user’s privacy or letting big advertisers know who’s searching what.

    Additionally Brave has done a number of other shady things that on the surface might be advertised as helping your privacy; but really isn’t. In my opinion they should have hard-abandoned Chromium over Manifest v3 and rebased onto Firefox to keep their browser from becoming less privacy respecting overall.



  • I think I can explain some of the “inexplicable creepy” moments you mention here. Note that I’m not advocating for YouTube’s favor; I’m just explaining how things tend to work in general.

    1. Your spreadsheet seems to contain two key words or terms that are trending in the current year/week/month/day in your area. I wouldn’t be too creeped out about this, it’s just a lucky guess; Firefox cannot access your clipboard history, nor does it allow websites to do so. Furthermore websites cannot read your clipboard unless you have them focused as the active window and you click on a text field in that web page. Once again Firefox here is protecting you and most browsers behave the same way anyways. They don’t get data about clipboard contents at all until they’re focused. CAVEAT: If you were using Google Sheets or a spreadsheet application ONLINE that IS IN YOUR BROWSER then we have a different story. For sake of simplicity I assume you are using something like LibreOffice Calc or Microsoft Excel.

    2. Second verse, same as the first! Your musical tastes are probably highly similar to many people in your vicinity and Google is using that to suggest content to you. This can even get spookily accurate if it even only knows your gender and age range based on what you watch. RECOMMENDATION: Clear your Watch History and keep it Paused.

    3. Discord actually does load the video embed / information from the YouTube API. But unless you’re living in SF; this is not linking back to you unless you are clicking on those videos at all. However, if you are loading Discord in your Browser; YouTube might be able to make some weird fingerprinting connections. The solution is simple: Download Discord Desktop and install it…or if you don’t like Discord software you can always use Beeper ( https://www.beeper.com/ ) which is slightly more privacy preserving, but has limitations. Alternately you can isolate Discord tabs to a Private Window.



  • With that being said; I do fully support an Instance’s choice to federate, not federate or even limit their federation with them.

    In most cases this should not affect instances; but unfortunately there are people who will ignore all warnings and use the Fedi Garden as a whitelist instead of a list of instances that you know will handle policy violations quickly.

    On the other hand I absolutely also respect the needs of communities who ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY WILL NOT TOLERATE instances who choose to federate with either X, Threads, or any other instance they deem to be too toxic to play nicely. As instance operators you absolutely have the right to block problems BEFORE they happen, and if you happen to KNOW an instance will absolutely be a HEADACHE, you have every right to say NO. If the users do not like your decision; they are free to find a better instance for themselves; or spin up an alt account on a better instance.


  • I would argue that federating with either of the biggest companies on the fediverse is a monumentally bad idea.

    Not just because of “Reports of genocide” or anything specious like that; which can be debated for days and days on end by people in both good and bad faith; but because both Threads and Meta are simply too large to be moderated correctly and be capable of managing basic issues such as harrassment and extended bouts of hate-speech which should never be considered acceptable; even if you do not necessarily agree with all of the goals and policies of the Fedi Garden; as strict as they are.