Mathwiz

I wasn't misleading anyone. I said "pluck some 100 Euro notes", not pluck ONE 100 Euro note," or even "pluck a few 100 Euro notes!" We're all well aware that the cost of a modern PC is more than a few 100-Euro notes. I figured the reader would know how many notes would have to be plucked! But quibbles over adjectives aside, I think we actually agree! My whole point was that there's no such thing as a money tree! Most of us actually have to work quite hard to earn enough money to buy a modern PC; thus it was quite arrogant for someone to respond to a complaint about a Web site being deliberately blocked from working on an older PC with "just go out and buy a new one," as if that were a trivial thing for anyone to do!

Not me. I've never understood that. I'm still using a 10-year old 4G phone. People like you describe act as if they actually have money trees, throwing away an over-$1000 piece of equipment every 2-3 years just because there's an even more expensive version out! Because that's how the World Wide Web was designed to work, that's why! The original idea behind HTML was that, no matter how many fancy bells and whistles were added later on, a Web page should still look the same to folks using a browser that didn't support the new bells and whistles. The page may be slow and look like one of those ugly pages from the '80's, but it's still supposed to work. (And for the most part, the WWW really did work that way for its first couple of decades.) I know we got away from that ideal long ago, but I still think it's an ideal worth striving for, rather than Discourse (or whoever) shutting you out of their sites completely because your browser/OS doesn't support all the HTML features they think they might want to use someday. Someone once told me there's a difference between dealing with organic change like the shifting seasons, and the change forced on you by someone who is whipping you forward like a drover, toward a destination of their choosing, not yours. You misunderstand the situation. We don't get to choose whether to use "old school" or "new school" methods! If the Web designer used the "old school" method of sniffing the UA (e.g., chase.com), then we have to use the corresponding "old school" method of spoofing the UA just to get in! Of course, we often have to use "new school" methods as well, like those built into a Web browser like R3dfox or Supermium, or the site will likely not work well (see above) but that doesn't mean we can ignore UA spoofing just because it's considered "old school."

I'd estimate that upwards of 75% of new CSS and Javascript features fall into that category. I wish I could say "unbelievable," but the arrogance of some folks is totally believable. Just go out to your money tree and pluck off some 100 Euro (or whatever your local currency is) notes, and hand them to your local PC dealer. Doesn't everyone have a money tree? And even if you're willing to spend the money, does anyone have any idea how much work goes into making your PC, well, personal? No, they want you to just throw that old PC in the rubbish and start customizing your new PC from scratch - with a new OS version that removes support for much of the personalization that Win 7 lets us do. You will have the Win 10/11 "look" whether you like it or not! Because Micro$oft says so!

BTW, I do think PayPal is going a bit overboard here. Think about it: you (eventually) have to provide a correct user ID and password, then pass the 2FA challenge - so what's the point of a captcha? To make sure that, if anyone hacks into your account, at least it's a human? "Oh, thank goodness! All my money was stolen by a real person, and not a bot! What a relief!" And in my case, the captcha came up first, so all a hacker would have to do is solve the captcha and then turn on the bot! To be fair, perhaps the captcha comes up again after each unsuccessful login attempt, so that wouldn't work. But if so, you still don't need a captcha on the first login attempt! And it's not even one of Google's reCaptchas. If it were, I'd just guess that PayPal was getting paid by Google to put the reCaptcha up and help Google train their AI. I think some of these sites think that the more "security-adjacent" hurdles they throw in your path, the more "secure" they are - or at least, the more secure you'll think they are (security theater) - when in fact all it does is make them more inconvenient to use.

On this PayPal thing, I think everyone is making a lot of unwarranted assumptions here. First, I don't think the captcha is the same thing as the security challenge. From your description, it sounds to me like the captcha works, but then, PayPal tries to load the "security challenge," which fails. Second, I don't think either of those things has anything to do with the 2FA method you choose. In my case, the captcha is the very first thing to come up. Then comes the "security challenge," which, for me, fails on the latest St 55 (even with a clean profile). I never even get to a login screen, so PayPal doesn't even know for sure who I am or what my preferred 2FA method is. It just fails to load the security challenge. That's all that happens. Other people may get these things in a different order. I'm just pointing out that in my case, I can't possibly be getting the security challenge because PayPal thinks I chose an inferior 2FA method. I don't think anyone else is either. If PayPal thought that poorly of email 2FA, they wouldn't offer it in the first place. (BTW, there are ways to hack SMS 2FA too, such as by malware on the phone that forwards the 2FA text to the attacker. And the security of an email account can be anywhere from poor to very good, depending on everything from how good your password is, to whether you also have 2FA on your email account!) Keep in mind there could be other things blocking the security challenge besides the browser or browser add-ons, such as a hosts file, PiHole on the network, etc. So to be sure, you may need to try a more modern browser. In my case, I can log in successfully using r3dfox (Win 7+ only; if you're on XP, try Supermium instead), so I know in my case it's an issue with St 55 (at least, the latest version). And the captcha is still the very first thing to come up, before it even asks for my ID.

Thanks, both of you. As I don't use Supermium myself, I'd forgotten that it isn't "unGoogled" and, therefore, Google Sync is available to back up one's passwords with a somewhat reasonable level of security.

The discussion of "whether one should" use Supermium's password manager is sort of irrelevant to @kwisomialbert's question anyway. He "does" want to use it but it's not working for him. So, is password manager broken in the latest version? (I don't have Supermium myself so I can't check.) As for losing your passwords if the HDD crashes, I know; make regular backups, yada yada. But again, the computer is supposed to do some of the work for you, and storage isn't that expensive. So why doesn't the password manager make multiple copies of your passwords, ideally on different drives if you have them? For that matter, why isn't mirroring/RAID more common in PCs today, so if an HDD fails, you just replace it and let the PC take care of rebuilding everything? Two or even three 2.5" drives don't cost that much or take up much space.

Unfortunately the Thorium author has not released a new version of Thorium since v.122. But for a user agent to make Thorium "look" newer, you could try adding --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/132.0.5047.196 Chrome/132.0.5047.196 Safari/537.36" ... to the end of the command in your Thorium shortcut. Any Web server looking at that will think you're using Chrome 132 on Ubuntu Linux. That may get you past "please update your browser" pages or nags at some sites.

I no longer bother to determine Chase's minimum browser version, as there's very little point, once I find an SSUAO that works. But I used to. It never seemed to make any sense though. It would be just some random version or other that was "somewhat" older than the then-current ESR version for Firefox or Chrome. I always wondered if they chose minimum versions that had patched some specific security flaw they were worried about, but who knows? Still, the currently supported version should always work, at least as long as you remove the "R3dfox" bit, or any other clues that you aren't using genuine Firefox / Chrome.

This page explains what some of the "referer" prefs do: https://notepad.patheticcockroach.com/4256/tweaking-referer-settings-in-firefox-and-tor-browser/

And another surprise. I set referer.trimmingPolicy to 2 on my work PC, then went to do the same thing on my home PC - and my home PC was already set to 2! Where did that come from? Turns out it's in the "UOC Patch" - a set of preferences intended to improve performance, developed by @looking4awayout long ago. Since this particular setting has little to do with performance, I assume he set it for privacy reasons, and it found its way into his UOC Patch by accident. Apparently he was ahead of his time, since it's now the default setting in newer FF versions.

Fascinating. The setting was always there (since FF 28 or so); Mo just changed the default.

The "Phishing URL Blocklist" broke AVSForum.com today. I don't know why but suddenly it's blocking all CSS URLs with an ampersand (&), which made a complete mess of AVSForum.com. Weird. Turned it off in the UBO Legacy dashboard and AVSForum is good again.

The change to browser behavior makes some sense: The Referer header was always an information leak, so the change improves privacy when following links (the target doesn't know where you came from). But if you're right, CloudFlare is abusing that change to block older browsers. Hopefully either MCP or @roytam1 can develop a fix soon.

We seem to have drifted off topic a bit here. IIRC, the thread was originally about Micro$oft Copilot invading our privacy on PCs running Windows 11. I haven't even tried to use Copilot for anything, but for those of us forced to use Windows 11 at work, is there any way to avoid or block this BS?