Month: June 2018

Yep, I use Adblock Plus. I like this new announcement!

Adblock Plus now blocks social media tracking for Chrome & Firefox

TheNextWeb – By: Rachel Maser – “Adblock today announced it was joining the fight against social media tracking by allowing users to block what has become so ubiquitous on almost every site out there.

Specifically, the tracking which Adblock Plus now aims to thwart is that which originates from social media buttons. You might recognize them — there are some on this very article. Through these buttons, sites can track and build a so-called ‘shadow profiles’ on you even if you don’t click on them, even if you aren’t logged into any of the sites in question.

This tracking has been a sticking point for sites like Facebook. Among the many other questions posed to CEO Mark Zuckerberg at his Congressional interrogation earlier this year was about these profiles of non-users — the existence of which might violate a 2011 consent decree handed down to the company by the FTC.

To use the feature, Adblock Plus users subscribe to a button blocking list, either in Chrome or Firefox. The company is also considering whitelist options for certain social sites.

A company spokesperson listed Apple as inspiration — or at least an example — for the new security. Specifically, they mention the anti-fingerprinting measures announced at this year’s WWDC. Mac and iPhone users who update to Mojave or iOS 12 will have all social media tracking blocked by default, though they can enable it for certain websites if they choose. Adblock will patch the gap for those who don’t use (or currently have) the requisite Apple software.

The company behind Adblock, Eyeo, won a successful lawsuit in April against German publishers attempting to stop its adblocking services. The judgment handed down by the German Supreme Court deemed it the right of the consumer to block any ads they didn’t wish to see.”

Hell continues to freeze over! Not only is Microsoft buying GitHub, the Linux Foundation actually approves of the move! A Slashdot poster says:

“The Linux Foundation has endorsed Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub. In a blog post, Jim Zemlin, the executive director at the Linux Foundation, said: ‘This is pretty good news for the world of Open Source and we should celebrate Microsoft’s smart move.’

The Verge reports:
10 years ago, Zemlin was calling for Microsoft to stop secretly attacking Linux by selling patents that targeted the operating system, and he also poked fun at Microsoft multiple times over the years. ‘I will own responsibility for some of that as I spent a good part of my career at the Linux Foundation poking fun at Microsoft (which, at times, prior management made way too easy),’ explains Zemlin. ‘But times have changed and it’s time to recognize that we have all grown up — the industry, the open source community, even me.’

Nat Friedman, the future CEO of GitHub (once the deal closes), took to Reddit to answer questions on the company’s plans. ‘We are not buying GitHub to turn it into Microsoft; we are buying GitHub because we believe in the importance of developers, and in GitHub’s unique role in the developer community,’ explains Friedman. ‘Our goal is to help GitHub be better at being GitHub, and if anything, to help Microsoft be a little more like GitHub.'”

Yahoo! announced that as of July 17 of this year, its chat app will be dead! The desktop version was killed off in 2016, so this comes as no big surprise. It was first launched in 1998, so it has had a long run. Back then it was called “Pager” (remember pagers?) No? I thought not.

Yahoo says, “We’re constantly experimenting with new services and apps, one of which is an invite-only group messaging app called Yahoo Squirrel (currently in beta).”

Yep! This will freak you out!

Guess what? I spoke too soon! VLC Media Player has been fixed! The latest release of 3.0.3 was released on May 31, 2018, and fixes all my issues! I am happy again! VLC is fast, cross platform, and I like seeing all those little orange and white pylons in my media folders again!

Okay, it’s time to tell you a sad story. As you know, I’m a big fan of the VLC media player. I have been using it for years. And, I have installed it on every computer that I have built, refurbished, or worked on for probably the last 10 years. It has been a Geek Software of the Week several times, and through several versions. However, in a recent upgrade, which added the additional capability of using your Google Chromecast with VLC, it was rendered extremely hard to use because it started so slowly.

By this I mean, you could click on the VLC media player icon and it would take as much as five minutes before the player would start. I researched online and found that others were having this problem as well. I’m sure that the good folks that write VLC are working on it pretty feverishly right now!

However, I regret that I could no longer recommended it as a player for the time being. I’m not going to uninstall it right now, in the hopes that the folks at VideoLAN will be able to fix it in the near future. In the meantime, I’m looking at other players that I can use day-to-day to play media. In fact, I have one for this week’s Geek Software of the Week.

I’ll talk about it in the next blog entry.