Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out, According to an Independent Audit “An independent privacy audit of Microsoft, Meta, and Google web traffic in California found that the companies may be violating state regulations and racking up billions in fines. According to the audit from privacy search engine webXray, 55 percent of the sites it checked set ad cookies in a user’s browser even if they opted out of tracking. Each company disputed or took issue with the research, with Google saying it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how its product works.” Yes, I know this is no surprise to anyone. I suppose one just hopes are many years of fines and negative feedback, there would have been some change. Other countries, like South Africa, have pretty advanced privacy protection legislation in place too, but there seems to be little evidence of South Africa actually hauling any of these companies over the coals. For example, Meta's T&Cs for WhatsApp clearly state they'll share user metadata with partners. See

404 Media

Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out, According to an Independent Audit

“This is the Strait of Hormuz in the data economy. If you want to make a change, this is where you cut it off. Anything short of that is theatric...

#technology #BigTech #privacy

Instead of upgrading your motherboard you may be able to use your spare PCIe x1 slot It's true that most often we just use one slot for the video card and there are another two or three empty slots waiting to be used. Such a slot can easily accept a card that will provide upgraded Wi-Fi, Ethernet ports, extra USB ports, allow mounting on NVMe drives or extra SATA drives, and more. It's not going to make your CPU faster, but it could mean not having to replace the whole motherboard and matching CPU in the shorter term. I did realise this when I wanted to install a NVMe drive a year back. Mounting a single NVMe drive on my motherboard meant giving up two of my SATA drives (their share the same data lanes), but buying an add-on card could have allowed the mounting of multiple extra NVMe drives without sacrificing my SATA drives. See

XDA

Stop ignoring your spare PCIe x1 slot — it's more useful than half the upgrades you buy

The smallest PCIe slot on your motherboard is surprisingly capable

#technology #upgrades

Immich Kiosk turns any screen into a photo display “No processing happens on the tablet, it is just a display for the image output. In fact, you won't even have much of configuration options since all of that is done through a config file. My tablet, which feels sluggish for practically everything, can handle this within the browser just fine. It loads quickly, transitions are smooth, and it doesn't crash. What else can you ask for?” Any old tablet that at least has a browser on it, can run this kiosk mode view of Immich photos, albums, people, memories, and a lot more. Good to see in the config that you can limit it to specific albums or people only, or hide specific albums or people. So the admin will just need to apply their mind to that side of things. Another alternative to this is Immich Public Proxy which requires each album to be configured and shared manually, but has the ultimate security as a result. Immich Kiosk's website also has a demo that you can try to see how it actually works. See

XDA

I turned my old tablet into an Immich-powered photo display

Transform an old tablet into a stunning photo display with Immich Kiosk.

or their project site at https://github.com/damongolding/immich-kiosk. I did a video about Immich Public Proxy at #technology #Immich #opensource

This Bicycle Bell Can Even Be Heard by People Wearing Noise-Cancelling Headphones because its 2026 “The unique Škoda DuoBell bicycle bell is a classic example of a completely analogue solution to a problem caused by digital innovation. Its ringing sound bypasses the noise-cancelling capabilities of modern headphones, which often isolate the wearer from outside noises all too well.” LOL we need new solutions to 2026 world problems. I'm wondering if cars won't also need something like this fitted. ANC headphones and ear pods are definitely becoming more prevalent. Seems the low frequency used here, is something that ANC does not easily mask. Although it is a frequency tone, bells have long been tuned for specific frequencies, so an analogue device can actually do this perfectly well. See

WIRED

This Clever Bike Bell Can Even Be Heard by People Wearing Noise-Canceling Headphones

Škoda's DuoBell is designed to avoid collisions between cyclists and pedestrians preoccupied by their podcasts.

#technology #cycling #ANC

France's government is ditching Windows for Linux, calling US tech dependence a strategic risk “The French government has decided that enough is enough. It has announced that it will shift away from proprietary technologies from outside the European Union and focus more on open-source solutions — and part of that means ditching Windows for Linux.” The South African government made the same statement in the mid-2000's but mysteriously abandoned the implementation after the success of the pilot project. Brazil, Russia, China, and some others had also committed to similar objectives and have actually been making some stead progress. So time will tell in this case too. That said, it is actually right and proper that any government should want to invest money in localised efforts and ensure the digital sovereignty of their data. From the beginning I've not been a proponent of external cloud services. Ideally a government should consolidate all its various departments onto its own platforms, or at least have them fully managed locally by local companies. See

XDA

France's government is ditching Windows for Linux, calling US tech dependence a strategic risk

The ministries have until the fall to find a solution.

#technology #France #opensource #Linux

LinkedIn secretly scans for 6,000+ Chrome extensions, collects data I initially ignored the first post about this after LinkedIn had stated it did not dispute that it detects specific browser extensions, telling BleepingComputer that the info was used to protect the platform and its users. The company also claimed the report was from someone whose account was banned for scraping LinkedIn content and violating the site's terms of use. But others have been digging deeper into this issue, and it does appear that the data collection is a lot broader than the reasons that LinkedIn gave. For example LinkedIn is scanning for over 6,000 extensions (most of which have nothing to do with scraping of data from websites), and they do this by scanning the files on the drive for those extensions, as well as collecting other data about the user's machine. It was not verified though that LinkedIn is actually sharing this data with any other parties. My own website's Matomo stats engine for example does also collect machine data (type of device, browser, pages visited, and city) but the data stays on my platform and I don't identify anyone from it. It is just worth remembering that there are some companies who do aggressively collect data and some (like Facebook) who openly state they share that with upstream providers and 3rd parties (yes you can assume data brokers). If I ever visit a Facebook page it happens in a private browser via a VPN. In LinkedIn's case I suppose we do need to remember it is owned by Microsoft, and they have an AI service. Their record around security and privacy has also not been great over time. See

BleepingComputer

LinkedIn secretly scans for 6,000+ Chrome extensions, collects data

A new report dubbed "BrowserGate" warns that Microsoft's LinkedIn is using hidden JavaScript scripts on its website to scan visitors' bro...

#technology #privacy #LinkedIn

You Should Be Using Reddit on Your RSS Reader “You may know that Reddit can be a treasure trove of useful information and opinion, and that RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a clean and straightforward way to keep up with what's happening on the web—but you might not be aware that you can combine both Reddit and RSS in numerous ways.” So yes no real news that RSS is already baked into Reddit, and that can be a cleaner way of ensuring you don't miss posts for s specific Subreddit, or a keyword search. But what I did not realise is you can also put some qualifiers on at the end of the URL to sort, limit the number of posts, filter on top posts only, etc. You can even combine two or more feeds into one. See

Lifehacker

You Should Be Using Reddit on Your RSS Reader

You can connect your favorite RSS reader to your favorite subreddits, and you should. Here's how it's done.

#technology #RSS #reddit

The EFF is quitting X “Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.” I don't think many legacy corporations have really been looking deeply into their numbers on X. We've seen in the past that X faked the advert views, so one also has to be careful of accepting X's numbers at face value as well. Many accounts on X today are also bot accounts and actually not real human views at all. See

The Verge

The EFF is quitting X

“We’ll Keep Fighting. Just Not on X.”

#technology #X #twitter #socialmedia

Yes Blossom shows an image / blob for my media post! View quoted note →

Little Snitch, the macOS network tool, is now available on Linux “Little Snitch for Linux is written in Rust and uses eBPF for kernel-level traffic interception (this lets sandboxed code run inside the Linux kernel without modifying it). The tool shows processes on your machine making network connections, and give you options to block them using rules. While Linux has native network monitoring tools, the best known being OpenSnitch (inspired by Little Snitch). None of those, as Christian puts it, gave him what he wanted: see which process are making which connections, and deny any a single click. So he built it.” Compared to OpenSnitch, this app works via a browser tab, and can visualise at process level. It is not open source software though, like OpenSnitch is, but it is free to download and use on Linux. It does have both automated blocklists at domain level (such as Hagezi, Peter Lowe, Steven Black) and also rules that can target a specific process, port/s, or protocol/s. By default, it is open access, but you can configure it for authenticated access too. See

OMG! Ubuntu

Little Snitch for Linux: Monitor & Block App Network Connections

Little Snitch is now on Linux. See which apps are making network connections, block unwanted ones and find out how chatty your system really is.

or their site at

Objective Development

Little Snitch for Linux

Discover powerful applications such as Little Snitch Mini, Little Snitch, LaunchBar and Micro Snitch.

#technology #firewalls #security #Linux

PacHub finally lets you manage pacman and the AUR on Arch without touching the terminal “PacHub provides a GTK4/libadwaita GUI for pacman and AUR, so you can avoid the terminal. PacHub can install/uninstall packages, perform upgrades, and provide auto-AUR support via yay or paru. It's not in the Arch repos or AUR, so you'll need to grab it from GitHub manually.” Well actually pamac has long installed on Arch too, which would also browse AUR etc and even optionally includes Flatpaks, Snaps etc too. But it is good to see a more Arch dedicated GUI app as I always seem to prefer doing my searches and package comparisons in a GUI interface. It looks like this project is only 2 months old and does not yet even appear in the AUR packages. So expect to see improvements still taking place. See

XDA

PacHub finally lets you manage pacman and the AUR on Arch without touching the terminal

It also adds shortcuts for useful pacman commands.

or the project at

GitHub

GitHub - mrks1469/PacHub: GTK4 + libadwaita Front End for Pacman/AUR

GTK4 + libadwaita Front End for Pacman/AUR. Contribute to mrks1469/PacHub development by creating an account on GitHub.

#technology #opensource #Linux

Turn paper hiking maps into real-time GPS guides with Matchy Maps “Trails may not be visible on the digital map, but things like roads, rivers, ponds, lakes, and other natural features are. The app allows you to take a photo of a physical map in the real world—whether it’s a paper brochure or a trailhead sign—and precisely line it up with those natural features on the digital map. Then you can see your real-time location displayed on top of the physical map. It’s a great trick.” The name actually says it all. The app superimposes a photo of a paper map, and allows you to rotate and scale it to fit precisely over the digital map. Paper maps have really great local detail which is often better than many generic global digital maps, so this marries functionality with that. A skilled navigator can certainly find their way around with just a paper map, and of course the paper map does not have a battery that goes flat either. Seeing you already have the paper map, it can still go with as a back-up. The app is available on Android and iOS for a one-time payment of US$4.50 and there is no AI nor data collection in the app. See

How-To Geek

Turn paper hiking maps into real-time GPS guides with this app

Paper trail maps just got a GPS upgrade.

#technology #navigation #maps #hiking

Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom So why did Sweden pivot? In an email to Undark, Linda Fälth, a researcher in teacher education at Linnaeus University, wrote that the “decision to reinvest in physical textbooks and reduce the emphasis on digital devices” was prompted by several factors, including questions around whether the digitalization of classrooms had been evidence-based. “There was also a broader cultural reassessment,” Fälth wrote. “Sweden had positioned itself as a frontrunner in digital education, but over time concerns emerged about screen time, distraction, reduced deep reading, and the erosion of foundational skills such as sustained attention and handwriting.” Yes implementing digital devices across many schools and classrooms also comes at a financial cost, and then they get outdated, lost/stolen, have licensing costs, Internet outages, etc too. Often we have great ideas, but they may not be based on real evidence. I have seen cases where analogue technology is just more reliable and robust than the latest digital technology. I've realised too how vulnerable digital technology is — great while it works, and then we get paralysed when it doesn't. Considering the cost etc of digital devices, have educational results noticeably improved? See

Ars Technica

Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom

Sweden is bringing back books amid declining test scores.

#technology #education

Proton launches new “Meet” privacy-focused conferencing platform “Meet provides end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) calls to protect the confidentiality of the conversations and does not require a paid plan or even a Proton account to use. It is free for one-hour meetings of up to 50 participants. Proton says Meet was created in response to the increasing need for privacy-first, EU-based alternatives that make it easier to comply with GDPR, or even CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), addressing the complexities of laws such as the US Cloud Act, and overcoming challenges posed by an increasingly unstable geopolitical environment.” Supposedly no AI training in this video conferencing tool. Good to see adding other people is as easy as sharing a link, so no need to install an app first. Also, Proton is not retaining records of who met with whom, and there is no sensitive data to be hacked from the servers. Of course there is also still Jitsi Meet as another alternative which is open source and can be self-hosted. See

BleepingComputer

Proton launches new "Meet" privacy-focused conferencing platform

Proton has announced a new video conferencing service named Meet and positioned it as a privacy-focused alternative to mainstream services like Goo...

#technology #privacy #videoconferencing

Dangerzone — an open source app to safely open suspect PDFs, office docs, or images Dangerzone works like this: You give it a document that you don't know if you can trust (for example, an email attachment). Inside a sandbox, Dangerzone converts the document to a PDF (if it isn't already one), and then converts the PDF into raw pixel data: a huge list of RGB colour values for each page. Then, Dangerzone takes this pixel data and converts it back into a PDF. It has been independently audited and apart from the obvious use by journalists and similar professions, even every day users can be most often targeted by attachments that carry payloads of malware. This is exactly how bad actors bypass firewalls, and secure messengers like Signal. I would not necessarily put every document I receive through this process as it does at least double or triple the size of the file (converts every page to an image). But from anyone you don't know, this is a useful tool to have ready to use. Everything is processed locally on your machine, and it will install on Linux, Windows, and macOS. See

Dangerzone

Take potentially dangerous PDFs, office documents, or images and convert them to a safe PDF.

#technology #security #opensource

Easy way South Africans can find fuel stations with the cheapest diesel “Unlike petrol prices, retail diesel prices are unregulated in South Africa. Only the wholesale price at which suppliers may sell to stations is fixed by the government.” I thought both diesel and petrol prices were regulated in SA so this was news to me (I don't drive a diesel car). With the price increases coming, anything to improve competitiveness between suppliers is going to be good for consumers. The linked article discusses the use of MyTank and Pitstops apps for this purpose. I actually use the Fuelio app already to track all my fill ups, and it also crowdsources the prices. But either way, all the apps really rely on the users who input the prices, so the most used one in the country is probably going to provide the better value. See https://mybroadband.co.za/news/smartphones/636728-easy-way-south-africans-can-find-fuel-stations-with-the-cheapest-diesel.html #technology #southafrica #diesel

ClipCascade is an open-source lightweight utility that automatically syncs the clipboard across devices This is a nice private option to sync across all your devices in real-time, and you can self-host you own sync device, rely on peer-to-peer between devices, or use their cloud sync. Traffic is end-to-end encrypted. It can support multiple users keeping data separated. It syncs across Linux, Windows, Android, and macOS. An iOS version should be coming in future. See

GitHub

GitHub - Sathvik-Rao/ClipCascade: ClipCascade is a lightweight utility that automatically syncs the clipboard across devices, no key press required.

ClipCascade is a lightweight utility that automatically syncs the clipboard across devices, no key press required. - Sathvik-Rao/ClipCascade

#technology #opensource #privacy #clipboard

I just moved from Manjaro Linux to EndeavourOS I’ve been on Manjaro Linux for a good ten plus years now and been pretty happy with it. Not only that, but I love the rolling distro type updates as there has been no need to ever reinstall the OS. The problem with that is a mass of tweaks as well as software crud you collect over the years. So I felt that it was probably time for a change, and at the same time, for a re-installation, at least as far as the apps and the main configs go. I have long had a separate partition for my /home directory with all my user data and app config settings. One other reason that prompted the change, and yes it was partly the Manjaro company changes that sparked this thinking, but Manjaro does hold back new packages for testing for 2 to 3 weeks. If you do not use the AUR (really does anyone not use it on an Arch based distro?), then this is great for stability. Many AUR packages are also not going to be an issue if they are stable releases, but if you have ventured into git releases for example for OBS Studio, then the Manjaro “way” can break these packages. Once I knew this I drastically pruned back on any git releases where I could. And therefore Manjaro has still worked well for me. See

GadgeteerZA

I Just Moved From Manjaro Linux To EndeavourOS

I've been on Manjaro Linux for a good ten plus years now and been pretty happy with it. Not only that, but I love the rolling distro type upda...

#technology #opensource #Linux #endeavouros

US Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft’s Cloud Was Garbage — They Approved It Anyway “The government relies, in part, on third-party firms to vet cloud technology, but those firms are hired and paid by the company being assessed. The tech giant’s ‘lack of proper detailed security documentation’ left reviewers with a ‘lack of confidence in assessing the system’s overall security posture,’ according to an internal government report reviewed by ProPublica. Or, as one member of the team put it: ‘The package is a pile of shit.’” Not only are many countries outside the USA very worried about potential access by the US NSA and others to their sovereign data, but even the US federal government is just as worried about the security of their own data in the Microsoft Cloud. Yet Microsoft sees no slowdown in terms of cloud adoption, probably tanks to wonderful marketing and other economic leverage that is applied worldwide. One can also now realise why the term Microslop is taking hold so effectively in 2026. It is all our own faults though as there are truly reasonably good alternatives to Microsoft's cloud. It is just a matter of also separating the glosssy marketing wants versus the real needs for document management. As I pointed out in another post earlier in the week, we do not all have to be on the same brand of document software to exchange documents (just think of different e-mail providers like Proton, GMail, Zoho, Outlook, and many more all talking together). It's up to us if we want to see change. See

Gizmodo

Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft’s Cloud Was Garbage. They Approved It Anyway.

The government relies, in part, on third-party firms to vet cloud technology, but those firms are hired and paid by the company being assessed.

#technology #microslop #security #USA

OpenSpeedTest an Open-Source Self Hostable HTML5 Network Performance Estimation Tool “OpenSpeedTest is written in Vanilla JavaScript. No Third-Party frameworks or libraries were used. The unexpected side effect of using Vanilla JavaScript is High Performance. OpenSpeedTest contains only STATIC Files like HTML, CSS & JS, so you don't need to worry about Security Updates or Hidden Exploits that may compromise your secure environments.” You may want to use something like this if: * You have employees working from home, and they want to do a basic speed test to the office to check their connection is OK. * You want to stress test or benchmark your home network from various devices to a server, a media machine, etc. * Or to test between two client devices across your LAN. * By doing the test from various locations around the home, you can see how your Wi-Fi speed varies from different places. * Also test from a private browser window to see if extensions are slowing your browser down. * Do tests before and after network changes to see what impact it has e.g. when adding a LAGG interface between the server and the router. * Host it on a public web server for users to check their connection speed. The server side stores no data so it is just a question of spinning up a docker container, and connecting with any browser to run the test (nothing to install on the client device). My docker container used 0% CPU while not doing a test, and used about 45 MB of RAM. It jumped to 17% CPU during the test. You can optionally save speed test results to a database, but it points to an external database that you have running somewhere. See

GitHub

GitHub - openspeedtest/Speed-Test: SpeedTest by OpenSpeedTest™ is a Free and Open-Source HTML5 Network Performance Estimation Tool Written in Vanilla Javascript and only uses built-in Web APIs like XMLHttpRequest (XHR), HTML, CSS, JS, & SVG. No Third-Party frameworks or libraries are Required. Started in 2011 and moved to OpenSpeedTest.com dedicated Project/Domain Name in 2013.

SpeedTest by OpenSpeedTest™ is a Free and Open-Source HTML5 Network Performance Estimation Tool Written in Vanilla Javascript and only uses built...

#technology #networking #speedtest #opensource #selfhosting