Cyberdevil 2020-10-22 10:48:56

Not sure what Flex is (though the name rings a bell) but it seems related to AIR/Flash, of course I could just Google at this point but...

What's the planned use for this? Can you embed it? Standalone program?

I'm not really catching the use case but fun to read regardless... and hell yeah that's too much... bought my current stationary for a similar amount. Bought second-hand computers for half of that since, if not less. Yeah.

Reminds me of... well that didn't work. Was going to link to a jukebox I made for my site back in the day in Flash that fetched audio files/titles/etc from an .xml file in the same directory, but apparently it doesn't support the latest version of Flash Player now... new times new problems. :/ Would be cool to implement Ruffle on a site outside NG though. Should work fine for pretty much everything I've made...

Cyberdevil 2020-10-23 16:29:32

Ah like Bootstrap with HTML/JS/CSS. :) Good to know. Soo what is the plan with this? Will you be making some kind of personal portfolio with the layout? Just playing around?

Actually... now that I'm really looking at the source code it's probably a problem with the JS I'm using to embed the Flash, not the actual Flash itself, maybe doesn't account for versions past a certain point... I'll have to go through it more later. Low on time with this Inktober shizzle. The page if you're curious, which at some future point of time shall hopefully start working again: https://cyberd.org/jukebox/

AS2 btw.

Cyberdevil 2020-10-24 06:10:48

For sure. :) Looking forward to seeing it in action.

Say what... damn man you're right, I switched over to Opera just a while back since FireFox was getting to slow with the hardware I'm on right now, and they do both run the Chromium engine but... this really doesn't bode well for the future of Flash, broken embeds and libraries in addition to the future hassle of keeping the plugin...

We do have Ruffle of course, but so many pages that need to be updated with this kind of shizzle.

Anyway thanks, probably saved a lot of time with this. :) Just a minor adjustment to scale to full browser window there aaand it's working again! Old MediaFire links are still up and everything too, seems people occasionally do download some of this old stuff...

Cyberdevil 2020-10-24 10:23:34

Ah, schooled. :) People need to know about this potentially relatively huge FireFox benefit, wonder what else it might affect other than Flash... I really would love to keep going with them but the slowness just ain't tolerable. Possible Gecko plays a part in that too I guess. Planning to switch back soon as I upgrade.

Nice, hadn't read that bit! They got it all covered then. Just a problem if you're using a non-standard way to embed. You by any chance helping out with that project too?

Been using a lifetime account with pcloud.com for a while now. :) Of course not absolutely certain they'll be around forever but it seemed worth the gamble... so far so good. They're great both for backups and sharing, very lightweight interface, even have a public folder you can basically use a CDN directory, to offload certain resources on your site. Not the same process/bandwidth restrictions as you get with a regular shared host so it's really a huge thing if you have a lot of file archives. Or embedded music, like this stuff. Haven't started using it for anything yet but if bandwidth ever starts rising/it becomes an issue... great encryption too if you need that. Though not on by default/for everything.

Had Mega before this but no paid accounts, and having to login every three months to keep files started becoming a chore... pcloud came along at the perfect time.

Yeaah I know I've had files on Mediafire before that DID expire, and didn't have everything backed up back then. :/ The one thing I still grieve to this day is a pretty big GTA SA mod, somehow lost the source files with some move and was hoping I'd get it back via that... but alas, gone. That's the danger. Also had a bunch on MegaUpload but that didn't go so well...

Was seriously considering getting a lifetime account there too at the time but fortunately didn't have the budget to just jump on it...

You're using Mega yourself I guess? Started using this a bit recenyly too but looks like that didn't last very long: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-happened-firefox-send

Bummer, was pretty handy. Tons of similar alternatives of course but was happy to see Mozilla jump in on that, felt a bit more reliable then. Ironic their particular service lived a shorter life than pretty much any other I've tried...

Cyberdevil 2020-10-24 12:11:58

Wouldn't it be better then to focus on a future-wise more beneficial and prominent language like Rust over the now so ancient and outdated AS? ;) I jest of course. Hope all this stuff runs fine with Ruffle (and Rust, then) in the future too, will be cool to see... time's that universal problem though fo rizzle.

If you're ever thinking of buying best wait for a rebate though! If they don't have anything now. Last year I think they had a 70-80% discount around Halloween/Black Friday. Missed out on that, bought for maybe half the price a bit earlier. Still not bad though if they stick around at least a few years... yeah if you don't need that much space maybe it's overkill, Mega's great if you really use it frequently and don't need to think about the login routine (I had three full accounts with just backup stuff at the end). Optimal backup strategy though is both local and cloud. If the house burns down a local external drive won't be much use, worst case scenarios... of course different thing if say you have a good friend you can swap backups with. Offsite. I'm not following the perfect strategy myself, don't trust the cloud enough for anything, but currently working well at least as an archive on things like all photos/music-related projects. And occasionally sharing files without thinking about limitations on availability/time.

Oooh if they don't have a limit there then... ah well, still happy with the new. That's cool to hear though. Neither files nor account then apparently. You don't get email reminders along the lines of 'login now to keep your account'? Was following Kim's trials and tribulations for a few years here: torrentfreak.com

Great site if you're interested in that type of stuff. :) Lots of articles on the MegaUpload case, and the new Mega, and Kim's Mega 2.0 project that never happened... he's not particularly happy with the new owner there. Hope he stays free. As far as I'm concerned Hollywood is the big villain in that case, and raiding his house with weapons drawn... it's crazy how much the government gets away with. These extradition plans too. He's not even from the US!

Mmm, probably more trouble than it was worth, but it's sad people abused it to the point they had to take it down. Simple things. Stumbled upon a smaller service I can't remember the name of that got around legal issues by basically giving a 48 hour response window on DMCA notices... and hosting files for at longest 48 hours. :) Genius.

Regarding Mozilla, to me they really are the privacy company. The one big browser still standing upp for personal integrity. Chrome's keeping up with the features out of necessity I feel, Mozilla's the one really pushing the bar. Respect.

Cyberdevil 2020-10-26 08:46:56

And some of us like to live on a farm too. :P Too true. Bit wondering what'll happen to FlashKit in a bit, hasn't been maintained in ages but still there, not everything works though... as long as the sites that have at least been involved with certain languages keep those resources up it's bound to be a great help in the future, feels like the Wayback is the only one you can really rely on though. Oooh, did not know that! I'd heard COBOL was still in use, read some article about it last year but not for banks! Interesting... only similar real-life example I can think of was visiting Bucharest a couple years back and their airport computers were running Win XP. :) Could tell since a few of them had crashed; were displaying more info than they were probably supposed to...

Ah that's not a bad discount, but yeah, still not cheap. It seems cheaper if you compare to other storage providers and what you'd be paying on a yearly basis overtime. Think I calculated that the initial investment pays itself in 3-4 years in that regard... I just really want something cloud-based in addition to local hardware though. Something far from home. Haha yeah you could, though would be difficult to actively keep backups mirrored on all drives with something like that. ;) Underground NAS in your backyard that's actually connected though hmm, that'd be interesting... would stand against most natural (or unnatural) disasters if done right... ah Pareto Principle, the 80/20 thing, didn't know it by name. True you really don't need most things, it's easy to realize every time you move to an OS and think about what programs you actually use again... it all amounts unnecessarily after a while.

But: photos, personal videos, stuff like that? Would think those are still important to have around if you don't actively need 'em. Do you have a different system for those? Use something like Google Photo so they automatically end up in the cloud as you take 'em? I have a lot of stuff like that so space amounts pretty fast. With regard to pCloud I reckon 2TB will easily last me at least a decade though if I only use it for the important stuff. At that point we'll see, maybe there are better ways for future storage. In terms of local storage though I'm closing in on 20TB, excluding copies. Bit of a collector. :P

Too true. :) Y'all have so much influence over the rest too, bit scary when you see how far the American arm of justice can reach when it really wants to...

Ah you know more about the underlying stuff than I do. Was thinking of how FireFox was first out with blocking unnecessary cookies, sending 'no tracking' requests, etc. Google followed suit. I appreciate that kind of stuff, even if it's more symbolic than really any additional layer of security. You'll still get tracked anyway. Appreciate how Google pushed for HTTPS everywhere in return, but since they did I'm wondering if maybe HTTPS doesn't really matter either, if it's easy enough to sniff out what kind of data you're accessing whether you're encrypted or no just by going after size and similar...

But you're right Google really get more attention for anything they do do...

AMP? Don't think I know the story there? Ever since Google removed their old 'Don't be evil' mantra I've been a bit more wary too, only words but still, felt good to have it there, if naught else it showed they still had personality...

Do you use Google services though? Gmail, Android, all the usual things? Or actively try to find alternatives that really follow a particular code of ethics/push the bar? Big fan of alternative franchises yet I must admit I'm still pretty reliant on the giant, it permeates every day life whether I want it to or not unless I'm ready to sacrifice some ease of use and comfortable cross-platform integration for real integrity...

And even then real integrity only works if everyone's on the same boat. Most people I know don't use end-to-end encrypted email anyway for starters.

Cyberdevil 2020-10-26 13:42:10

Yeah that saying doesn't really hold true much now... except possibly with agencies like the NSA. :) Though they can't possibly have limitless storage capacity, maybe they keep all public data for a certain amount of time, however long it might be relevant, maybe have AI used to sift out what's worth keeping or no... who knows. Would be interesting to know exactly what's being saved, and how, and for how long. Of course no way to capture anything that's not public in the first place too, but I wouldn't be surprised if for example harvest everything that comes onto YT is getting harvested continually. And of course anything controversial gets shared to oblivion. Should rephrase that as: "what goes on the internet that you don't want to go on the internet stays on the internet".

For sure. I wish more site owners placed felt a bit more importantly about continuity, but of course no time to think much about the future if you're dealing with financial issues; just need to get by. So many sites that pop up out of necessity and disappear, but so many that also get spawned from such enthusiasm and joy, and then for some reason something goes awry. Been saving screenshots of 'site's closed' messages for a while now, probably have a few hundreds. Ones I just stumble upon, nothing I actually go out of my way to search for.

Regarding the Wayback funding, I wonder if it's not also NOT in the interest of governments, and corporations, and a lot of heavy players to have everything archived forever... it's all material that can potentially be used against them. The Internet as a whole has really become a tug of war between those in power. Everyone has their own interests as two what's allowed and how it should be allowed to be used. Don't think Wikipedia's very popular either, but it's more susceptible to corporate pressure than the Wayback, it seems. At least I get the impression they're uncompromising. It really is like a record of humanity; how it's changing now as technology and the global structure of all evolves.

Hmm if people start pushing for government funding though why not, as long as they don't get any influence over the content... in a way I hope not everyone's aware of exactly how much information that place harbors, it's a treasure trove of truth, though hard to find the gems if you don't know what you're looking for...

Hehe yeah, the digital sphere's a strange one. I keep some collections I get an urge to just get rid of sometimes, but I ask myself why, and so I keep them... the 'why' would also be peace of mind though. Less material to manage. The clutter builds up to a point where it's just not manageable sometimes, even if it's nothing you're actually active maintaining. But getting rid of files I don't need now would also mean I saved all those files for nothing...

Anyway, regarding backups as a peace of mind thing: it's great for production work. :) Recording music, writing a book, anything like that. Ideally I'd have automatic backups that just continually copy everything for me and I never have to worry about losing anything I've poured hours into making the last X days but haven't yet gotten around to publish or upload anywhere... happened plenty of times. I was super bad at backups in the day, had plenty of drive crashes and viruses and stuff like that too, lost a lot of creative work that way, but now that I occasionally DO move around copies of everything I'm working on I rarely lose a thing, but not because of the backups, everything's just been working really well... it really is like insurance though. Still have to have it. If something happens you know you'll need it. But if you can't afford it you'll probably get by fine anyway. The less you have the less you have to worry about, too.

Ironically the one time recently where I really lost a LOT of stuff was when I accidentally cloned a blank backup drive over the source instead of vice versa. XC Bit by bit copy so I couldn't recover a thing.

Classic XKCD genius. XD Must've read something relevant regarding backups in particular but can't recall anything now...

Haven't really thought to read the pCloud SLA actually. :) But they seem reliable. Switzerland-based. The thing I worry most about is integrity, if they'll be doing something with the files I store with 'em, which I definitely wouldn't trust Google with, but I avoid uploading anything truly sensitive anywhere really... or used to, might've gotten lazy with certain things... I have my photos sorted in folders by year/month at this point, been doing that the last 15 years or so, pretty substantial collection. :) occasionally something I can dig up from a particular event but yeah, for the most part I don't go through them either. Also one of those you never know things, though! You might want the memory when the rael thing's gone.

Btw personally still take plenty of pictures by camera, not phone, so that complicates with the Google thing even if I did trust them enough with everything. :P it's awesome they have that service though...

Cyberdevil 2020-10-26 13:42:44

Hmm! Good to know about those Tor exit nodes... I suppose VPN/proxy services might be a possible step too? Opera does have one built-in but it's not really secure. More so for getting around geographical blocks. Probably could be potential to build in additional in-browser encryption in addition to the protocols you use when browsing, but I imagine that'd eat RAM too. Getting a bit heavy as it is already. Yeah JS is a potential problem too...

Interesting. Indeed size doesn't sound perfect, but if you for example download a certain file of a certain large size, from a certain site (they do get the domain even with HTTPS) then, if said site isn't abundantly large and difficult to navigate, they could theoretically match exact download size with exact file size on whatever's available on said site. Would be interesting here if it's possible to randomly add a certain number of bytes to downloads so that actual fingerprints never fully match - could be a new FireFox thing maybe. ;)

Problem is such a feature would seem pretty geared at certain less legit use cases...

And right, the lock symbol does give a false sense of security, still have to be browsing a site you trust in, and there better not be any third-party tracking implemented or that protocol may be all moot anyway...

Ahh right, I probably do have AMP activated on my phone... how do you know which sites use AMP though? Visible in the domain/adress bar? If you use their search it's still so easy for them to track you regardless though. All things from the same place.

Cyanogen hmm, finna look that up... agreed, big question is also how much they're really interested in us; how all of our browsing habits and exotic kinks may be exploited. At the end of the day I think the comfort of it all just makes me feel like it's probably no problem. But I SHOULD be a bit more paranoid.

lmao, was contemplating a move until the Facebook part. XD There are some good alternatives there though, like that huge Russian one that refused to open a backdoor to the government; moved their servers abroad...

Ah, the poor, the poor being the banks in this case hmm. :) Interesting how that works.

Was testing unicode support in some other page, pasting in all foreign characters and emojis I could find, some worked great, some didn't, strange that.

Also crazy how long these messages are getting...