One example I can think of is Widevine DRM, which is owned by Google and is closed source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widevine

Google currently allows Mozilla (and others) to distribute this within Firefox, allowing Netflix, Disney+, and various other video streaming services to work within Firefox without any technical work performed by the user

I don’t believe Google would ever willingly take this away from Mozilla, but it’s entirely possible that the movie and music industries pressure Google to reduce access to Widevine (the same way they pressured Netflix into adopting DRM)

For disappearing messages to work, your conversation partner has to promise they won’t take photos of their screen, and they have to promise to use an app that actually implements the feature instead of just pretending to, and the app developers have to promise to have implemented the code to delete a message when the service says it should

Is there actually a cryptographically-sound and physically-complete method for ensuring that a message is only legible for a temporary duration once it leaves your own device and is delivered to someone elses?

Hmmm, is CloudFlare known for being a bad actor in terms of privacy?

Setting that aside, no matter what you pick, you’ll be exposing your IP address, from which your ISP and/or general location may be derived

If you don’t trust CloudFlare with that information then you basically cannot trust anyone else, so maybe you’d need to run your own service and ping that instead now that you’re in a situation where you can only trust yourself 🤷

The other issue that comes to mind is that you’re only testing reachability to one address, which means you could get a false negative where that address stops working but the rest of the internet is actually fine

I did actually do this already, separate from working on this issue, but can confirm the intermittent problems with the combination of wpa_supplicant and systemd-networkd

I’m not an expert, but my understanding of the Global Shortcuts portal is that it’s very much designed for the push-to-talk use case where an app is not focused but still receives button events for exactly the keys its interested in and no other keys: I think this would cause problems if an app requested every key (e.g. if the request was approved then no keys would work in every other app)

It’ll be interesting to see how the remaining compatibility/accessibility issues are tackled, either in portals or in wayland protocols

There’s a portal for Global Shortcuts: https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.freedesktop.portal.GlobalShortcuts.html

KDE and Hyprland already implement it, and COSMIC seems likely to

On the app side, if we can get the major toolkits to adopt it, then hopefully that covers most actively-maintained apps (but it’s unlikely to cover legacy apps): https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/38288

Gosh, I’m so fascinated by the concept of removing/hiding the tabs implementation from every app and relying 100% on the window manager to provide this

Wayland breaks global hotkeys: I present to you: Hyprland (where you can get global hotkeys). Now, it is normally not allowed by design, as a security measure

Not disagreeing at all, but I’d like to add some information here to support your correction

There’s a GlobalShortcuts portal ( https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/#gdbus-org.freedesktop.impl.portal.GlobalShortcuts ), and this is implemented for hyprland in xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland ( https://github.com/hyprwm/xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland/blob/b2fc1110963fa583ad5348a9dc0101bd58ceac7a/hyprland.portal#L3 )

So, technically, there is nothing in the wayland collection of protocols that supports global keyboard shortcuts, but (along with lots of other supporting functionality), this is addressed via the collection of portal APIs

As it happens, KDE already supports the GlobalShortcuts portal: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/xdg-desktop-portal-kde/-/blob/master/data/kde.portal#L3

Any desktop can provide an implementation of the GlobalShortcuts portal, and any app can adopt it as required (although if it’s implemented within popular toolkits/frameworks, then app developers won’t have to even think about it)

Here are related tracking issues:

• https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/xdg-desktop-portal-gnome/-/issues/47
• https://github.com/pop-os/xdg-desktop-portal-cosmic/issues/4
• https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/issues/240
• https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/38288
• https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/issues/3578

Proton emails are stored in an encrypted form that goes beyond the simple authentication that is part of the POP/IMAP specifications

Proton does have open-source bridges/proxies, so they aren’t hiding these details from us

Perhaps Thunderbird could be enhanced to support the Proton features directly?

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Google is also going with a combined approach: https://security.googleblog.com/2023/08/toward-quantum-resilient-security-keys.html

I encounter misinformation and other FUD about immutable distributions quite frequently

Imagine a root filesystem that is only modified when you expect, instead of at any time by any software on your system, the horror! </sarcasm>

LLVM supports fewer target machines than GCC

https://gcc.gnu.org/backends.html has a big table

           |      Characteristics
Target     | HMSLQNFICBD lqrpbfmgiates
-----------+--------------------------
aarch64    |     Q        q  b  gia  s
alpha      |  ?  Q   C    q    mgi  e
arc        |          B      b  gia
arm        |                 b   ia  s
avr        |    L  FI    l  p   g
bfin       |       F            gi
c6x        |   S     CB         gi
cr16       |    L  F C          g    s
cris       |       F  B         gi   s
csky       |                 b   ia
epiphany   |         C          gi   s
fr30       | ??    FI B     pb mg    s
frv        | ??       B      b   i   s
gcn        |   S     C D  q       a e
h8300      |       FI B         g    s
i386       |     Q        q  b   ia
ia64       |   ? Q   C    qr b m i
iq2000     | ???   FICB      b  g  t
lm32       |       F            g
m32c       |    L  FI    l   b  g    s
m32r       |       FI        b       s
m68k       |                pb   i
mcore      |  ?    FI       pb mg    s
mep        |       F C       b  g  t s
microblaze |         CB          i   s
mips       |     Q   CB   qr     ia  s
mmix       | HM  Q   C    q      i  e
mn10300    | ??                 gi   s
moxie      |       F            g  t s
msp430     |    L  FI    l   b  g    s
nds32      |       F C           ia  s
nios2      |         C           ia
nvptx      |   S Q   C    q    mg   e
pa         |     Q   CBD  qr b   i  e
pdp11      |    L   IC    qr b      e
pru        |    L  F              a  s
riscv      |     Q   C    qr    gia
rl78       |    L  F     l      g    s
rs6000     |     Q   C    qrpb   ia
rx         |                         s
s390       |     Q        qr    gia e
sh         |     Q   CB   qrp    i
sparc      |     Q   CB   qr b   ia
stormy16   | ???L  FIC D l   b   i
tilegx     |     Q   C    q     gi  e
tilepro    |   S   F C          gi  e
v850       |                    g a  s
vax        |  M     I        b   i  e
visium     |          B         g  t s
xtensa     |         C

https://www.llvm.org/Features.html

An easily retargettable code generator, which currently supports X86, X86-64, PowerPC, PowerPC-64, ARM, Thumb, SPARC, Alpha, CellSPU, MIPS, MSP430, SystemZ, WebAssembly and XCore.