ManifestV3 is 100% driven by Google enshittification. Down with Chrome. Long live Firefox.

Every time I see “lichess”, it makes me think about “lich-ess”, i.e., a female undead wizard.

Cowsay should be installed by default on every distro.

[Citation needed]

Every reverse-engineering study I’ve read has been about the apps built in top of the Google API, not the Google binaries. Here’s one, and here’s another, and neither paints a flattering picture.

Maybe it’s possible to build a perfect implementation, but that is not what we got.

You know what does work? Masks and vaccines. Phone-based tracking was a dangerous waste of time.

The Google system allegedly shares hashes of a ID-number salted with a rotating timestamp over BLE. But it’s also a closed-source binary. Can you or anyone else actually inspect its implementation? Can you really guarantee it doesn’t have even the smallest design flaws?

This technology is exceptionally dangerous. There is very little difference between these two scenarios:

• A doctor has identified a COVID patient. Let’s notify everyone who’s spent time with them recently.
• Secret police have identified a “dissident”. Let’s round up all their close associates.

It’s voluntary (for now). It’s allegedly secure (for now). But did anyone actually benefit from this complicated system? All I see are downsides.

Good riddance. It’s a totalitarian privacy nightmare that never functioned as advertised.

Similar systems were widely deployed in Singapore, on the premise it would only be used to fight COVID. Then to no one’s surprise, law enforcement started using for criminal investigations.

Once they’re built, governments cannot resist abusing such systems.

Cowsay is a vital program. I’ve never understood why it isn’t installed by default in every distro.