I rarely get focus stolen on Windows 10. They now make it very difficult for applications to do this (see the allowed conditions here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/... ). In contrast, focus stealing is a way of life on XFCE, and I just have to put up with it. The settings they recommend to fix it don't actually help.
Really? There's two programs I know of that will take focus and they're both authentication prompts. The sort of thing that cranks my handle on Windows were mostly from the browser and almost anything else.
With XFCE though, I'm quite happy with the level of focus stealing, things that seem to be justifiable are at the right level, like authentication prompts.
Out of interest, what are the things that take focus for you? Maybe we're running totally different sets of programs which might give me an impression that isn't warranted.
Long time XFCE user here. Steam will absolutely steal focus. I usually start Steam and then move over to something else like the terminal or web browser and multiple times during Steam's startup it will steal focus. I just want it to start up in the background. Aside from that, I agree focus stealing isn't a huge deal in XFCE. (XFCE 4.18, Debian trixie/testing)
Now you mention it, my kid has sometimes had problems with Steam where it has started a game and we can't easily leave the game. I presumed though that was a deliberate design so that your game has focus as that's the thing that's most interactive. Usually a pkill -f <game> is needed.
I've not noticed focus stealing outside of Steam. What is steam made from, it seems very browserish.
This topic is causing some self-reflection and wonder if I am the peculiar one who does different things and just not bumping into it, I mainly work from xterm, screen, mutt, vim and a lot of time in firefox. Perhaps this combination just doesn't start things that request focus, but when in MS Windows I noticed it a lot.
You're right about steam, but now I'm on a path of wondering...
This topic confirms that focus stealing is a thing in XFCE, I have some research to do!
The Office 365 message that it is unable to log into a resource (usually because your VPN has dropped, not unusual for home workers nowadays) doesn't even go into focus when it's supposed to be at this point.
I am baffled as to how that has been allowed to go on so long. It makes Office a trainwreck usability wise.
What is the best approach to dealing with this problem as an individual?
Gmail? You might randomly get locked by some AI algorithm (or you might get banned!), or something else goes wrong, and there's no recourse.
Yahoo? I recently lost access to mine because they decided to start demanding verification with a deactivated email I haven't had access to for 15 years in order to login. Luckily, I had access in an email client, so I was able to migrate all the important accounts off of it.
Yahoo/AOL/Tutanota/Protonmail/Many others? These ones will auto-delete your account if you don't login frequently enough (not protonmail yet, but they allow it in their TOS)
Self-host? All self-hosting infrastructure requires an email in the first place. Lose access to that email, lose access to payment reminders, potentially your hosting account. I nearly lost my domain since the payment reminders went to an email that I rarely check because it doesn't support IMAP. And there is a greater increase of hacking unless you're a professional sysadmin and have plenty of time for maintenance.
Duo push? Your phone breaks.
SMS verification? Phone breaks, lose access to your plan, compromised employee gives your codes away, etc.
I've settled on using my university gmail address since (1) they promise alumni can keep it and (2) if something goes wrong with it (likely losing 2-factor by losing my phone), there is a good alumni support center. There really needs to be a human I can talk to somewhere. Still not sure if this is the best approach; am I still at risk from Google here?
You are missing the best solution which is your own domain and hosted email like Gmail. If you get locked out like you said, “just” change providers and you lose at most a couple of hours of emails.
Credit cards expire so manual action will be needed at some point, contact details change, people can be in financial troubles and even the ~€10 can be a lot, people can be temporarily indisposed due to illness (ranging from cancer to serious accidents to mental illness), etc. etc.
There's tons of exceptional circumstances where people can lose access to their domain. Some TLDs have no grace period at all and it can be fairly easy to lose access. For others it's larger, but even there, it's not that hard to see how people can lose access for one reason or the other.
There are registrars that let you pay ten years in advance. And of course, you should choose a reputable TLD. Seriously, this is not a problem in practice if you apply a minimum of diligence.
Some reputable ccTLDs don't have grace periods, and there may be good reasons for choosing such a TLD. Ten years is not the rest of your life (I hope, anyway) and you certainly won't be able to use the auto-renewal from your previous comment after 10 years. Sucks to be you if you happen to be in a hospital at that time I guess.
Are the chances small? Sure. But some are also outside your control and apply "small chance of [..]" to a large enough population and before you know it you're excluding millions of people.
To increase your chances with that issue, you pay for 10 years once, and then every year extend it by 1 year, giving you 9 years grace period in the worst case scenario (I don't know how but my providers allowed me to even stretch it to 11/10 years). If you're in a coma for 9 years that puts you on Wikpedia list of longest comas, so not really an issue. And if falsely imprisoned for that long, I think you can arrange something within that period to extend it.
No developer working on account authentication for sites has ever used the correct regex to parse and validate a legitimate email. I wouldn’t be surprised to see things like if you’re at anything other than @Gmail.com the email gets flagged as invalid. Maybe there’s a manual approval step here but better just flag your session as suspicious activity or failed bot check for the time being.
Or in the spaghetti parsing, obviously nobody is going to have swear words in their email. Go ahead and blanket ban all of that. And then @JohnsonAssociates.com gets banned.
I’ve also seen email parsing rules get applied to login screens too. So the valid email rules get updated and suddenly you fail validation trying to log into your already existing account. Ran into this today actually.
So having your own domain might solve some problems but you may still end up needing multiple accounts with devs refusing to use correct parsing rules.
Unless you're actively committing something that can be considered a crime in the jurisdiction of your registrar, you're unlikely to just loose it though. Unless you're hosting stuff at CloudFlare and they decide you're a "bad person", then anything goes.
Here's an additional problem with using your own domain: some websites (Discord for example) require you to contact support using the email tied to your account. Many corporate systems will reject emails from "untrusted" domains, so you won't be able to contact them.
What about iCloud? I guess in theory they can ban your account, but at least with apple I feel like you generally have some recourse and can talk to a human.
There are two issues I ran into after setting up iCloud mail for someone else:
1. Apple’s spam filtering can be very proactive, and the only way to (allegedly) influence it is to move false positives back to the inbox. There are no settings to whitelist addresses (having them in Contacts doesn’t work reliably) or to turn off spam filtering altogether. As often with Apple, you have to accept their design choices of how they think stuff should work, and can’t do much about it.
2. If you’re transferring or forwarding emails from another account, Apple has a 20 MB email size limit while it’s 25 MB for GMail, which means there may be emails that can’t be transferred.
In any case, I would recommend having your own domain and choosing email providers that support custom domains. That way, you can switch email providers at will while retaining your existing email address(es).
Afaik iCloud supports adding custom domains for your mail account, and I am currently looking at something called iCloud Mail Rules in the Settings with which you can apparently define custom handling rules for each sender.
The term you want to search for is "Telematic Control Unit." If there's a fuse for it (or if you can remove it entirely), that should take out most of this stuff. I found this thread[1] where people reported pulling the fuse for it in a Ford truck and the rest of the vehicle still working properly.
In good news, if your car is old enough and came with a 3G transmitter, data transmission won't work anymore since most 3G networks have been shut off [2]
If someone knows of a wiki somewhere that lists the years/car models and what types of tracking they actually perform (not just what's theoretically in their privacy policy) that would be much appreciated. It would be nice to know if, when I get in someone's car, the conversation might be recorded and sent somewhere. Or which car models are sending the recordings of the cameras installed on the outside (or inside?) that can be viewed by the employees and shared around the office (not theoretical) [3]
It supports downloading all the raw formats (the video only ones, audio only ones, and the 360p & 720p integrated formats). More meant for watching than downloading, but some more advanced downloading features, such as merging audio+video with ffmpeg to get more downloadable qualities and auto-downloading options for playlists are planned.
This is a good time to consult Chesterton's fence [1]. If you go up to something that's existed for thousands of years, and find it tempting to declare it pointless cruft that should be swept away in the march of progress, maybe there's something you're missing. I don't have time to make an extended argument but one idea is that the most important part of marriage isn't for the happiness/benefit/pleasure/romance of the couples, but for the benefit of children. Studies demonstrate that children of single-mothers have worse outcomes, such as worse mental health outcomes. A marriage is supposed to be difficult to get out of, to disincentivize broken families. Not that this is anywhere close to a full answer; cultural evolution [2] means we may never get to a full understanding of whether/why the customs we have are beneficial, simply because societal dynamics are extremely complicated and still beyond our understanding.
> Toyota couldn't push out a fix. They had to issue a recall and have a technician update the software whenever that car ended up being serviced.
This gives all the more incentive to get the software correct in the first place. The model of "get the software as bug-free as possible upfront using stringent processes, testing, formal methods, and not using software in the first place when it's not actually needed" is better than the model of "put software into as many components as possible to make it shiny and get the software good enough to release before our competitors and play whack-a-mole on the bugs later through updates". Instantaneous updates make it easier for an attacker to take control of the update infrastructure and push an update that will trigger a mass-crash of cars during rush hour. When people have to asynchronously take the car to dealerships over many months, it makes this attack harder to go undetected.
> does Youtube actively do anything to prevent such clients from existing?
Not really, no. Though they took some kind of legal action against Hooktube I remember.
> Will they one day change the service so the video stream urls are generated randomly, or obfuscated, and break every 3rd party client?
They already do this to some extent for videos with copyrighted content, but it's not very aggressive and has long been reverse-engineered and dealt with. They use a series of three string transformations like reversal, replacing a single letter, etc. on an alphanumeric signature parameter. The sequence of transformations varies per video but can be extracted from the Javascript source using regular expressions.
Here are some available clients I know of. I do not know if there any that use floating videos or dim the desktop as you say:
> "For basically all of history, using reason would get you killed."
Relevant to this is the analogy by Phil Goetz of reason as a memetic immune disorder [1]:
> The reason I bring this up is that intelligent people sometimes do things more stupid than stupid people are capable of. There are a variety of reasons for this; but one has to do with the fact that all cultures have dangerous memes circulating in them, and cultural antibodies to those memes. The trouble is that these antibodies are not logical. On the contrary; these antibodies are often highly illogical. They are the blind spots that let us live with a dangerous meme without being impelled to action by it.
> A little reason can be a dangerous thing. The landscape of rationality is not smooth; there is no guarantee that removing one false belief will improve your reasoning instead of degrading it. Sometimes, reason lets us see the dangerous aspects of our memes, but not the blind spots that protect us from them. Sometimes, it lets us see the blind spots, but not the dangerous memes. Either of these ways, reason can lead an individual to be unbalanced, no longer adapted to their memetic environment, and free to follow previously-dormant memes through to their logical conclusions.
