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I really wish I could use Firefox!

But I gave up after trying repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, to force-enable hardware acceleration and bypass their 'video card blacklist'.

From what I understand they check driver versions in a couple places on Windows, and disable hw acc. if the version is lower than X, or the versions they get, say from registry and dll's, are different, mismatch. Thing is, the matter is quite complicated on dual-gpu laptops (intel+dedicated) since manufacturers give us all kinds of custom drivers. Firefox will try to find a driver version, it won't find anything from Intel or AMD/NVidia, and it will default to software rendering.

As a user I don't have the luxury to simply 'Update my graphics drivers', I have to live with whatever custom software I got from the manufacturer.

Not in my experience.

With 4 GB ram, Chrome will happily give ~2GB to any tab that requests it in a couple of seconds, leaving me with an unresponsive Windows aggressively paging memory to disk, only to give whatever it finds... back to chrome

Measuring memory usage is hard ...

Exactly, I usually find that chrome is eating a little more than what it's displayed in task manager in windows ;) I have no idea how it can achieve that to be honest. Restarting it seems to bring back the 5-15% missing ram in my case.

Funny thing, most if not all 'client-side failover' strategies you might find through google or the likes won't work either.

This is because the loaded resource will 'fail' anywhere between x seconds up to minutes, or never! In the meantime the user just sees a blank page, or best case, some 80-90% page that keeps trying to load something...

I've experienced this myself a couple times. Most probably my ISP messed up some stuff taking down whole chunks of 'internet' :)

And that's why I moved most of my website registrations to a name@mydomain.com address and host the server myself on a $4/mo VPS. Still, my domain name is tied to my gmail address. Now I'm paranoid I'll lose access to my gmail, and my domain name quickly after. (remember the @N guy?)

Unless I manage to learn some social engineering skills or hire myself a marketing team I doubt I'd be able to get my stuff back. I'm no social butterfly, I'm not pretty and I've got some serious Eastern European accent.

So I'm considering maintaining two mail servers with different companies and different registrars, both pointing at each other. Such that in case I lose one, I can recover with the second.

Am I crazy?

I'm actually planning on renting a VPS soon to use as a personal VPN, dedicated IP, hopefully dedicated bandwidth etc.

I don't have even the smallest idea how to configure one or what software I actually need, BUT, my greatest fear is that I'll end up with a pretty "broken internet" since I won't be using a residential IP anymore.

Cloudflare will just think that I broke into some random wordpress site and started using the server to ddos (who? with 1-2 requests/minute?).

It doesn't look that they implement any kind of serious IP reputation algorithm. I have a static residential address since I remember signing the contract, almost a decade ago, pretty paranoid about security with a clean PC and I never seem to stop getting captchas.

Is PIA a paid only service? I doubt any "hackers" will be using it to break cloudflare sites. On the contrary, I'd argue its users are actually more civilized than the residential folks.

This is actually not just about Tor. Their definition of "suspicious" is quite liberal and naive to be honest.

As an anecdote, I get ~1 captcha per month because I live in Eastern Europe. Add to that Linux, Firefox, NoScript and you're in for a fun ride.

I believe it's wrong to say that users don't care.

Rather, users, don't really have a choice.

From personal experience, linux is still far from actually being user-friendly. And it's easy for me to compare: 1) I haven't had a blue screen on neither my, or my mother's laptop since XP SP2. 2) 6 months ago when I wanted to switch to Ubuntu I had my HDD suddenly die after an update. No mo trying for me.

Besides, these "clueless" users everybody imagines are not the ones making the choices. They resort to their kids, nephews, or that computer kid down the road to reinstall their Windows. And I am not that crazy yet to install linux on my mother's laptop. I bet it won't even work.

Speaking as a past student I'm really glad I started with C.

In the beginning, the fear of getting some random Segmentation fault out of nowhere actually taught me more than any textbook, school or best practices blog could ever do. It also forced me to learn how to use debuggers :)

At least for me the change log is one of the first items I read when looking to try new software.

It often tells quite a lot about how involved the developers are, what direction the project is heading to, or how mature it is overall.

I would like to see more control options for the end users.

Let users chose if their account can be recovered through a password reset form, let users leave 'secret memos' for support which can't be viewed on the site later, let the users decide if their accounts can be altered in any way by support staff, etc, etc.

In my experience it was the other way around. I signed up with gitlab only because they offer free private repos. Now since I already have an account with them and I don't have to go through the hassle of setting up stuff again, I'm only a couple clicks away from putting some project in the open.

Not accept, but adapt and learn to live with it.

I'm saying this because I don't see any solution. Our data can be sold. Our data can be 'shared' by our less educated friends,etc. Our data can be 'leaked' through all kinds of breaches/hacks/etc from both private companies or even governmental(incompetence, old software).

Treat our public records as public, as an interface to the outer word. Why do we think that our names, emails, phone numbers or addresses are private? What's the point of them being private?

If history serves right, I upgraded to Windows 7 around 2-3 years after it was released, and I still had occasional blue screens or hiccups. About one year later it finally started calming down. Now, in 2016, I could run my machine indefinitely without ever restarting (if not for updates). It's that stable. Going to wait at least 1-2 years before upgrading. I don't trust big companies anymore.

I think the OS itself is stable, but once you throw in a bunch of rushed drivers, a bunch of software that was 'fixed' to run on the newest windows and another bunch of outdated software, then something is bound to break.

In my case, I want a stable OS. Also there's a high chance the Windows 10 video driver for my 4 year old Dell laptop is broken, just like the last 3 versions Dell released for Win7. Only the first one from 2012 has no bugs.

Just like some people mentioned in the comments on the previous article.

I have every important update installed. And every optional/recommended update hidden. I can't replicate the behavior.

The older GWX update (KB303555XX something) is still tagged as recommended, not important.

The only time I saw the ad, is when I visited msn.com before updating. Now I can't seem to replicate even that.

From personal experience, yes.

I've got an older dell laptop that came with Ubuntu 12, bought in 2013. I assume everything worked back then, but I needed Windows for school.

Some months ago, wanting to switch, tried Ubuntu 14 and Debian 8. Couldn't get the graphics driver to work on either. Proprietary drivers, other than the ones in the Ubuntu repos, required a mismatch of older/newer library/kernel versions which I couldn't figure out how to get in Ubuntu. The open source driver claimed my hd7670m worked, but in reality I was getting the hd4000 performance out of it.

Everything else worked, a bit noisier though. Either way, I would definitely not feel safe when buying another Linux laptop, proper research is still required.

I find it infuriating how much traction this whole anti ad/tracking war is getting.

People mention there's no choice anymore. Wrong! It's still there, just like it was 10 or 15 years ago. Stop sharing your personal information online and the whole tracking thing doesn't matter anymore.

This analogy seems completely flawed imho. Nobody can get inside my home, or force my door or any of that nonsense, unless I specifically allow them when they ask!

I fail to understand how all these trackers can read my browsing history without me installing <popular plugin> and allowing it access to my browser? Or how are they going to read my contact list from my Android phone, or the one from my Thunderbird? Through thin air?

Nobody took the choice from us, we just happened to open wide our front and back doors, and then complain that random people come in and look through our stuff.

Anybody else getting a 'Forbidden' error?

Tried some isitdown services, they told me the site returns 200... I'm getting a 403 response.

First it was cloudflare with their captchas because I'm lucky enough to be born in Eastern Europe, now individuals put blacklists?

I setup my own server recently and could share my experience.

Using postfix + dovecot(imap) + thunderbird. 1 user, set to check mail every 9 minutes. Not even sure if I have IDLE on my server (unless it's on by default).

The SolusVM control panel shows 15-30 bytes/second (in+out) when it's idling. Now add how much your email weights and you got your bandwidth.

This isn't how the internet is supposed to work. As we continue to consolidate on a few big mail services, it's only going to become more difficult to start new servers.

And this is exactly the reason I setup my own mail server. I'm only 1 man, but I hope more people will do so with time, thus requiring the "big ones" to work on better algorithms for filtering and not base it on reputation.

Sorry I'm dying here...

I opened the site, saw two identical boxes of text with some ascii in the middle, read the first paragraphs.. then scrolled down and saw some license thrown in there...

Almost got too happy seeing a satire get so popular on HN. :(

What if he's using an Android phone? Most third party apps on the Google Play store have access to both your location and accounts.

I even remember seeing back in the day questions with valid answers on stackoverflow about how to get the email associated with a device without requesting the accounts permission, but some other close ones.

I also made the mistake of using a personal account with my first Android phone. I had zero spam on that account. 2 months later I was getting about 10 emails a day. (not targeted though since I didn't live in an very active area)

At first, when I switched to Ubuntu and saw dnsmasq I was a little happy. I thought I could finally have something lightweight and slightly more powerful than a hosts file plus more control over what happens with my queries.

But then I tried to search online and at least try to understand what it actually is, what it does or is supposed to do, or what it doesn't do and so on. Then I thought that running bind9 might be easier, at least I know what it's supposed to do.

I finally decided to leave it the way it came with my Ubuntu. Some articles say it's there to act as a dns cache and something else with VPNs while other articles claim the caching functionality is turned off by default. Really confusing for somebody who's not that experienced.

Sorry it took a while to reply.

Thanks a lot for recommending Sieve, I really mean this. There isn't even a single mention of it on the myriad of the half-baked 'how to setup isp-mail for personal use' blogspam I keep stumbling into when googling issues.

It looks like a great tool. Now I can probably have 'n' junk mailboxes with varying personal filters (always wanted this).

What do you mean by mail filters and processing? Is there anything fun I can get, may you point a few links for further reading?

It happens that I'm right in the middle of configuring my own server. I've got only postfix and dovecot for now, nothing fancy yet.

It's baffling for me that designers/coders don't realize that desktop and laptop display panels are probably the first thing a manufacturer will look at when it comes to cutting some corners and lowering the overall price of the product.

Also most 'normal' users will never pay the x4-x10 premium price for some fancy IPS display and calibrate its colors.

From the perspective of a user who isn't really experienced in running servers:

* I think they're called snapshots. Let me setup my VPS the way I want it, upload my stuff, etc, then let me backup/save my entire VPS on your servers. Two weeks later, when I'll try to setup a mail server for the first time in my life, I will probably break a lot of stuff. With a few clicks, I should be able to restore everything in a matter of minutes.

* Slashdot 'protection'. If I bought some starter package, and at some point I start getting 100%-1000% my usual traffic, then instead of killing my VPS for abuse or letting it suffocate on its own, make minimum effort, like boosting my resources, etc. Reach out, help me decide if I want to upgrade, or give me enough time to move out.

* Wiki/guides/tutorials. Maybe try creating a community where users can request guides, and (heavy) contributors could get some free server time :)

Funny how the three you linked are all US-only..

If you're lucky enough to not live in a country accepted by PayPal, there's no service, that I know of, that would allow you to accept payments, cash out, and not require your customers to sign up.

International payments. Anybody? Please?