I use Firefox pretty much exclusively, on both mobile and desktop, and it is fine.

I don't get involved with the drama surrounding the people at Mozilla.

From what I understand, it is not easy to toggle those switches accidentally, especially both of them at the same time. They have a metal bar on either side and to move the switch, you can't just push it into the other position... you have to lift it up and then move it; there's a spring-loaded locking mechanism that enforces this.

So it was either deliberate or a massive, massive fuckup by one or both of the pilots.

... is: Who wants to bring a kid into this f*cked-up world?

I have three adult kids. I am almost certain none of my kids will have kids and I can't say I blame them.

... mining for high purity silicon ...

Say what? Silicon comes from quartzite or sand that's found just about everywhere. Sure, you have to purify it, but that's not a super hard problem.

Transmission lines are not the whole story. They're an important component, but not the only one. But also, Trump has imposed steel and aluminum tariffs as well, so even transmission lines will be affected.

And the stupid thing is that aluminum requires a ton of electricity to produce. Quebec has ample electricity and can produce a lot of aluminum, but that's tariffed. For the US to produce more aluminum, it needs more electrical capacity... so... yeah...

Building new electrical infrastructure will be cheap and easy now that Trump slapped tariffs on copper.

Websites run arbitrary code on your system all the time unless you disable Javascript.

It may be hard if not impossible to exploit these vulnerabilities from Javascript, but one should not be complacent about the "arbitrary code" requirement.

His LinkedIn post looks like it was written by ChatGPT, so everything checks out. Maybe "Matt Turnbull" doesn't exist and the AI bots really are taking over?

OK, yes, the free Wifi scenario makes sense.

But I still think it's a bit weird to have proof of identity for IP addresses. For example, if a host presents a valid certificate for "example.com", then I can be reasonably confident that the host I'm talking to is controlled by whoever registered the domain "example.com", barring a compromised machine or leaked private key. There's a trail from the domain registrar to the name servers to the host.

But if someone tells me to visit 16.34.212.76 I have no idea who that is. Great! Whoever controls 16.34.212.76 has managed to prove they control 16.34.212.76 from different vantage points around the Internet... but so what? Who the heck is 16.34.212.76 anyway?

I can see this being useful for DoH if you configure your name servers with IP addresses like 8.8.8.8. Struggling to see other use cases that can't be handled better with a FQDN.

The SSL cert doesn't "encrypt the traffic". It's solely used as proof of identity.

You can have proof of identity without encryption, and you can have encryption without proof of identity.

If an attacker can reroute traffic destined for a specific IP address, then they can also obtain a certificate for that IP address by running the ACME challenge. (Same for the ACME HTTP challenge, actually...)

The only way this would fail is if an attacker can reroute my traffic, but not the traffic needed for the ACME challenge.

I don't understand the use case. If I connect via TCP to some IP address 42.42.42.42, it's rather difficult for an attacker to actually connect me to a different IP address... much more difficult than spoofing a domain name.

So, the certificate tells me "Yes, this really is 42.42.42.42." But I knew that already.

Maybe for UDP, attacks are a bit more feasible, but even so... they're not exactly easy.

I guess the only real use case I can see is to avoid a scary browser warning if you navigate to an IP address instead of a domain name.

Ignorance is knowledge. Superstition is science. Cruelty is compassion. Greed is altruism.

Maybe in the past. But now with the Rethuglicans aiming their ire at education, US universities are no longer going to attract the best and brightest, and innovation in the USA will decline. Do you honestly think Google, Amazon or Meta have innovated recently? All they've done is consolidate monopoly power.

Meanwhile, China is in fact innovating in many areas. And if you want to see innovation in Europe, you only need to look to Ukraine to appreciate their ingenuity in standing up to a much larger military power.

"This will stifle innovation!!" is the 2020s version of "Think of the children!!!"

Transparent bullshit. The USA is a lost cause, but maybe the rest of the world can stand up to the oligarchs.