Brickfrog

The link is from February 1st, about a blog post in January. I clicked here thinking Bitwarden just raised their subscription price again haha.

Feels like the article is slightly off base, the people today looking for something physical and memorable have been buying vinyl. In 2026 most people I know don’t have a CD player let alone a CD burner. But lots them do buy and play vinyl and have record players for that purpose.

Or… if the article is just a nostalgia deep dive then why the commitment to CDs? You could do the same passing around USB sticks if the purpose is to share music with friends.

Also wonder if the article writer’s own discs actually still work, burned discs don’t last that long. They mention having a whole box of old discs but I don’t know if they actually tried to play them and checked them for errors. A while back I was doing some data recovery for a friend who had all her stuff burned to discs over the years, turned out about 20% of her discs were either unreadable or full of errors.

from the article

The issue appears mainly on Samsung laptops and can prevent users from accessing files or launching applications.

Having a computer that cannot launch applications, let alone access files, is basically the same as not having a working computer.

I guess using AI to moderate AI and bots wasn’t working out.

Maybe they’ll pivot to being a site similar to Moltbook, just bots moderating other bots that are conversing with each other. Sounds like they were almost there.

Mastodon, Lemmy, Reddit and other social media platforms restrict users who connect through TOR or a VPN

That’s not network-wide, each Lemmy/Mastadon instance can do their own thing in regards to Tor or VPN. Find an instance that allows that or run your own.

Not sure if Reddit changed recently but I just tested logging in/out of an old Reddit account via Tor and it worked fine. But I mostly avoid Reddit nowadays so can’t be sure my posts/comments would work there. Also note their Tor site still works most of the time, you can actually view Reddit that way if you wanted https://old.reddittorjg6rue252oqsxryoxengawnmo46qy4kyii5wtqnwfj4ooad.onion/

(posting this comment via Tor)

It’s an interesting write up… I’m a bit surprised there are/were that many internet facing telnetd instances online. Maybe it’s just the sheer amount of ancient routers & such that were deployed with telnet enabled by default and are still plugged in and running to this day.

I’m confused about that too.

InterDigital seems to claim that the patent in question is about dynamically overlaying multiple video streams e.g. from https://ir.interdigital.com/news-events/press-releases/news-details/2025/InterDigital-awarded-injunction-against-Disney-by-German-court-5ad043c60/default.aspx

The Munich Regional Court ruled that InterDigital is entitled to an injunction over Disney’s infringement of an InterDigital patent related to the streaming of video content using high dynamic range (HDR) technology. Disney can appeal the decision.

The judgment from the Munich court follows a separate decision from the same court to award InterDigital an injunction over Disney’s infringement of a patent which enables a method for dynamically overlaying a first video stream with a second video stream. It also follows a decision by a court in Brazil, to grant a preliminary injunction in InterDigital’s favor, after the court found that Disney infringed both of the InterDigital patents-in-suit.

What’s interesting is that HDR10 is still available on Disney supposedly. So it sort of sounds like the claim is that Disney is adding DV with HDR10+ fallback dynamically during the video stream… and maybe regular HDR is pre-generated by Disney hence is not affected by the patent. The solution might be to always have multiple pre-generated copies of video before the stream even takes place…that would be a lot of extra storage space Disney would need!

Eh, SMS could be a burner phone or virtual number but I sort of agree that the site could recommend people do that rather than entering their own real phone number if they want to sign up for optional SMS alerts. It’s probably one of those convenience vs privacy issues - how to enable non-tech savvy people to receive optional alerts if they choose to.

From the posted link

In a lengthy statement released over the weekend, the StopICE team rejected claims that any personal user data was exposed or handed over to authorities. According to them, the platform does not collect names, addresses, or precise GPS coordinates from its users. Instead, it uses anonymized polar coordinate calculations based on ZIP codes to trigger location-based alerts.

The statement also attributes the attempted breach to a personal server allegedly tied to a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent in Southern California. The attackers reportedly tried to inject false alerts into the system but were unsuccessful, the platform says, due to countermeasures and quick isolation of the attack vector. The operators claim the attackers fell for “bait” in the form of fake data and API keys, enabling StopICE to trace their networks and even publish associated IP addresses and phone numbers.

StopICE further downplayed the scale of the incident, claiming the only exposure involved temporary file names after a backend management tool update modified security headers, an issue they say was minor and resolved swiftly.

Keep in mind StopICE is a website, not an app, so some of the stuff the hackers claimed they got don’t seem to make sense. The only “personal” info I see the website could collect is a phone number if you sign up for text alerts when someone posts an alert at a zip code / city / state.

Rufus still lets you create Windows To Go installations on a USB drive. (unsupported by Microsoft as you mentioned)

I am curious about your DISM approach, are you just applying the Windows install image onto the USB? Or are you doing it the long way by imaging a normally installed Windows system first? I am very familiar with DISM but never tried applying an entire usable Windows install onto a USB drive that way.

There’s no Microsoft official way to do that.

But unofficially - Use Rufus to install Windows To Go on your USB drive with your Windows 11 ISO.

Microsoft discontinued Windows To Go in 2019 so in theory a future Windows update could break those type of installs but for now they still seem to work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_To_Go

PS - If Lockdown Browser works in a virtual machine environment maybe you also have the option of installing Windows 11 in QEMU + Virt-Manager and just running a Windows VM that way. Works great under Debian.

EDIT: Doing a quick search it looks like Lockdown Browser actually tries to check for virtual machine usage, ugh. Guess they really want you to run a physicial system for that :/ https://support.respondus.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409604116123-I-receive-a-warning-The-browser-cant-be-used-in-virtual-machine-software-such-as-Virtual-PC-VMWare-and-Parallels

Not too different vs IPFS, essentially the IPFS network if it was using WebTorrent. Both rely on swarms of p2p users/servers to seed/pin data to keep it online.

I’m not too familiar with Veilid but that does seem different since it’s built for privacy so I doubt all the peers are public in that scenario. There is nothing private about IPFS or WebTorrent, all peer IP addresses are public in their respective swarms.

Not really. Decentralized does not mean anonymous… and I doubt people sharing that type of content are doing it publicly with their public IP addresses.

Looks like PeerWeb uses WebTorrent - so that means every single IP address serving the website is easily found in the peer list of the torrent swarm. Nothing anonymous about this.

tutamail, for example, states that the free plan is not to be used to signup for services.

Just… don’t. Tuta is probably fine for paid services but they’re well known for nuking free accounts for various reasons. And they might not enable you to send/receive from a free account to begin with - Last time I attempted to create a free account there, then asked support if they could enable me to be able to send/receive some emails, instead of responding they simply nuked my new free account.

Was it a free account, or paid? Tuta is pretty strict with the free accounts especially when new. I definitely would not consider using Tuta free for anything long term, they’ll just come up with all sorts of reasons to restrict or disable your account.

I’ve read they don’t do that sort of thing with paid accounts but can’t confirm, only ever used their free accounts for temp usage.

The Google Rewards Opinion app does this, scan receipts or answer random questions for Google Play cash. I assume they do it for market research to figure out better advertising (Google is in the advertising business after all).

Never heard of other apps doing that but I’m sure it’s the same idea, other apps must use or sell that data to ad brokers.

Just curious was this a Tuta paid account, or a free one?

Tuta is very strict with the free accounts and flag them for all sorts of reasons. They take their time to “approve” free accounts just to be able to use them. And on top of that they might nuke your account anyway if they think it is being used for spam/illegal activity/whatever or they think it’s not being used.

But I thought those are just issues with their free accounts, presumably their paid accounts don’t get flagged for those things… or so I thought.

Also to echo the other comments - best to buy and own your own domain for your email, that way it doesn’t matter where the email is being hosted in case you need to switch email providers.

One thing you may want to update - listing Tor’s logging policy as “No Logs” is a bit misleading, that’s really more of a voluntary recommendation for individual Tor exit relay operators.

Tor exit relay operators absolutely can store logs of outgoing connections if they choose to. And technically they could even snoop on non-secure traffic if they choose, there’s a reason you should be using HTTPS if you’re going to use Tor for clearnet browsing.

Of course most Tor exit relay operators aren’t going to do these things but it’s all voluntary, seems incorrect to claim all exit relay operators follow no log principles.

EDIT: Also AFAIK you can’t forward a port from the clearnet through a Tor exit relay’s public IP address back to your own Tor client, Tor doesn’t do port forwarding like that. It’s definitely not needed to run Tor Browser (and Tor VPN I think) but that isn’t needed for any of the other VPNs either, a bit confusing how you listed that one.

Agreed, if OP is going to add Tor in a “VPN” list then may as well add I2P. I2P + outproxies are pretty much the same thing as Tor + Tor Exit Relay. It’s not the best way to utilize I2P but the option does exist.

Then again neither Tor nor I2P should be in a “VPN” list, the whole thing seems more of a VPN provider topic.

Everything normal here. Granted I’m not on a network that blocks Tor so the Tor Browser’s normal startup/connecting routine has always worked fine.