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?

I still use WMC, even in 2025, with EPG123: Of course I've been using it for a really long time, like ten years. I don't know how hard it would be to set it up again from scratch. I agree that it's a shame Microsoft abandoned this software. It was included in Windows 8, but you had to buy a key for $10 from Microsoft to unlock it, and there were no improvements between WMC 7 and WMC 8. Windows 10 abandoned it completely, although there are unofficial hacks to get it working on Windows 10. (Don't know for sure but they probably work on Windows 11 too.) As for tuners, I would probably go with a used SiliconDust HDHomeRun. That plugs into your home network, so you aren't locked into using it with just your PC, if you decide WMC isn't the solution for you. You would need the correct HDHR version for your country, since TV standards differ across the globe.

Interesting find. Can you narrow down the version that broke rt.com? There are only three versions in between. Also send a screen shot of the crash notification, so folks have some idea where the breakage is. And last but not least, if possible try rt.com on the latest official Basilisk (requires Win 7 so you may have to borrow a PC). Of course official releases are somewhat behind these test releases, so it may work there; but if it doesn't you can report it to @basilisk-dev and help more users.

We need a "benign exploit" page (a page that triggers the bug but doesn't do anything harmful) to test for this vulnerability. We had one for the WebP vulnerability.

You are right. You need version 138 or above to get the patch. If folks don't want to update, the patch is unavailable to them. For those folks, the only safe option is to turn off the V8 optimizer as described previously. I suppose, in theory, someone skilled in building Chromium could apply the patch to earlier versions, but I can't imagine anyone would do so, unless there were a very popular old version that many folks were reluctant to update from.

Version 138 is required for the fix; the bug goes back earlier though: Good catch. Google is being tight-lipped on exactly when this vulnerability crept in. I doubt it goes all the way back to 2008, though. Today's V8 looks nothing like the original. I believe (and should have said) versions prior to the V8 optimizer are not vulnerable. I suspect 360EE (and Kafan MiniBrowser) aren't vulnerable because the option to turn off the optimizer isn't there (presumably because there's nothing to turn off), but I can't be sure with the limited info we have.

It's well hidden: Settings / Privacy and Security / Manage V8 Security (near bottom of page - scroll down) / Don't allow sites to use the V8 optimizer (This will slow down Javascript) Really old Chromium versions (360EE) don't have V8 and so are (presumably) not vulnerable

(Actually Moonchild said:) Good; so the "collective punishment" of being banned for living in the wrong country will end soon, hopefully. MC is wrong about one thing though: As noted here, Anubis unfortunately does require one more thing beyond being "a little patient the first time they visit:" turning off certain privacy guards. MC himself won't abuse this requirement: ... but other Anubis-protected sites may not be so civic-minded, and how's the end user supposed to know? One user presented a possible workaround though: I don't know if MC has Anubis configured this way, but those outside the geoblocks may experiment at their leisure.

Yes; the page could've been clearer on exactly how "modern" your browser's Javascript needed to be. At any rate, UXP does seem up to the task, albeit inefficiently. There are many reasons that might have caused me to get the "denied" page, but it wasn't worth the effort to track it down. I was just wondering what kind of nonsense we WWW users have to deal with now, and why. My curiosity is "mostly" satisfied now.

If you take the Anubis explanation (posted above by @VistaLover ) at its word, it seems to make sense. The idea is to make the user agent (browser or bot) do something rather hard, but not too hard; the idea being if you're just an ordinary user, the extra work is just a short delay in getting to the Web page; but if you're a bot crawling millions of pages, that extra work isn't worth the effort so you'll just abort the script after a few milliseconds and move on. But, then - why insist on "modern" Javascript and why force users to disable their privacy guards? I'm still somewhat skeptical that Anubis was telling us the whole story above.

So it is a bandwidth issue. Fair enough. I had no idea that AI crawling had become such a burden for Web servers. Still having a hard time grokking why the AI crawlers don't respect robots.txt though. AIUI, their purpose is just to gather content to train AI engines; surely there's plenty of content even without violating such a longstanding norm! In any case, I question Anubis's assertion that "The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable." It took R3dfox v.139 several seconds to complete the challenge, to say nothing of UXP browsers. But I suppose there was a silver lining: MC probably had to ensure UXP could pass the challenge before using it to protect his own repo! It would be quite embarrassing if RPO couldn't be accessed by Pale Moon....