I asked nicely why do I need to give my phone number and I was told that to register me as a member so I can get the discount.

I declined and said I don’t want to join and would like to just pay.

I’ve just said “I don’t have one” when asked this for awhile. This never seems the phase the cashiers, I’m guessing they know what that really means. Half the time I still get whatever discount, though I’ve never tried to sign up for a membership saying that.

If it’s an online form my phone number is just (local area code)555–5555. I’ve never had that not take, except for one case where it automatically enabled 2-factor auth and I had to create a new account.

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Yep, I’m genuinely unsure if the conversations actually happened or not. I’ve gotten different answers to that from different people.

As someone who is currently hiring: Anything

Beyond that it depends on what you know and what kind of work you want to do.

At work we have a contractual design deliverable that was due yesterday, I still can’t get anybody to tell me what I’m supposed to be designing/building. I’ve got the contract, but its so vague that it’s more unhelpful than it is helpful and there’s apparently been 9 months of conversations with the customer, none of which have included engineering, nor has anything from them been written down. So we’re designing something just based on rumors.

So we’re in crunch mode, but also we don’t know what we’re trying to accomplish… 😩

They may block IP addresses associated with consumer ISPs. Assuming that’s the case, I would guess you’re seeing that as an HSTS/TLS error because their network is trying to trick your browser into redirecting to/displaying an error page hosted by some part of their network.

[edit: To be clear, I assume the part that OP is not sure if it’s satire or not is “or switching to a more privacy-conscious browser such as Google Chrome.”] The emphasis in

Firefox is worse than Chrome

is in the original. To me that clearly implies that they are of the opinion that in general Google & Chrome are worse on privacy than Mozilla & Firefox. The comment at the end is just tongue in cheek snark alluding to the fact that in this particular case google did better for privacy in Chrome than Mozilla in Firefox.

or switching to a more privacy-conscious browser such as Google Chrome.

Definitely satire, the context from earlier:

2. Firefox is worse than Chrome in their implementation of ad snitching, because Chrome enables it only after user consent.

I am still interested to know the details of how they came to this decision. Why Signal instead of Matrix.

AFAIK, signal doesn’t federate, There is no “signal server-to-server” protocol. When people say “The Signal Protocol”, they are talking about a cryptographic protocol, not a network protocol.

As for why they wouldn’t use Matrix, I would assume it’s just too heavy of a protocol for the scale they operate at. IIRC, Matrix isn’t just a chat protocol. It’s a multi-peer cryptographic state synchronization protocol. Chat is (was?) just the first “easy” application they were going to apply it to. (Now I’m curious if they still have plans for that at some point.) They’ve been making great strides in improving the efficiency, at least in the client-server API (I haven’t been paying attention to the server-server API at all), but it’s still going to be a heck of a lot more compute heavy than whatever custom API they’re providing.

IMO, the best free option is https://freedns.afraid.org/. The biggest downside of that one is that you have to login a couple times a year (IIRC?) to keep it active. I actually still use this even though I have a paid domain, I just CNAME my real domains to the afraid dynamic name. That was easier than changing the config every time I become unhappy with my domain registrar and have to reconfigure everything after swapping.

For the purposes of data collection, the US basically isn’t foreign for AU: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

We tried that in the 90s, it went poorly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_fat#History

You’re not mistaken, it is definitely possible with at least RSA, though, I would guess it may not always be possible. It also sounds like it’s still a bad idea unless you know all of the parameters used to generate the keys and can be sure what information is actually encoded in the keys.

Less commercial interest means only hobby level development

Podman is developed by RedHat: https://github.com/containers/podman/graphs/contributors

As others have said, it’s quite good on privacy. For the truly paranoid, IIRC you can even self-host the sync server.

From the security perspective of privacy, do make sure to use a good password for the Mozilla account, the account password is also the encryption key for the E2E encryption.

The day Firefox shutters its doors is the day the internet truly dies.

*the web

The internet has so far been doing a much better job surviving as a proper decentralized system than the web.

Assuming you meant de-federate, there are a few listed on https://fedipact.online/ that seem to be lemmy instances.

Unfortunately, no. Samba needs a different label. Doing that relabels things so that only containers (and anything unrestriced) can access those files.

IMO, yes. Docker (or at least OCI containers) aren’t going anywhere. Though one big warning to start with, as a sysadmin, you’re going to be absolutely aghast at the security practices that most docker tutorials suggest. Just know that it’s really not that hard to do things right (for the most part^[1]).

I personally suggest using rootless podman with docker-compose via the podman-system-service.

Podman re-implements the docker cli using the system namespacing (etc.) features directly instead of through a daemon that runs as root. (You can run the docker daemon rootless, but it clearly wasn’t designed for it and it just creates way more headaches.) The Podman System Service re-implements the docker daemon’s UDS API which allows real Docker Compose to run without the docker-daemon.

The light is visible, the flashing isn’t.