Random randomness

[Blackhawk]

All the WIKI sites have started to annoy me. You cant simply highlight a word or phrase then right click to copy it . You have to highlight and use ctrl-c. I never remember that and use my old highlight and right click...then it hits me i cant and i try ctrl-c..and of course that wont work with my right click menu open. So then i close it and do it right...three tries....every time..lol.

Wonder why the rightclick way doesn't work?

What do you mean the right-click way doesn't work? If there's a "Copy" option in the right-click menu, then it works. There are some sites that block that option to prevent people from stealing their content but then it would give you a message when you tried to copy it.

On all WIKI pages when you right click the COPY is greyed out and does not work. But ctrl-C still does.

There are several gazillion different 'wiki' pages. And Firefox has a plugin specifically designed to prevent sites from disabling your right mouse button.

[gilraen]

All the WIKI sites have started to annoy me. You cant simply highlight a word or phrase then right click to copy it . You have to highlight and use ctrl-c. I never remember that and use my old highlight and right click...then it hits me i cant and i try ctrl-c..and of course that wont work with my right click menu open. So then i close it and do it right...three tries....every time..lol.

Wonder why the rightclick way doesn't work?

What do you mean the right-click way doesn't work? If there's a "Copy" option in the right-click menu, then it works. There are some sites that block that option to prevent people from stealing their content but then it would give you a message when you tried to copy it.

On all WIKI pages when you right click the COPY is greyed out and does not work. But ctrl-C still does.

There are several gazillion different 'wiki' pages. And Firefox has a plugin specifically designed to prevent sites from disabling your right mouse button.

Yeah, I don't understand what he means by "all wiki pages". There are Fandom wikis, and copying works just fine there (other than having an annoying overlay that pops up when you highlight text). Beyond that, like you said, there's a gazillion of them.

[Max Peck]

It seems likely that he is referring to Wikipedia.

[Blackhawk]

It seems likely that he is referring to Wikipedia.

Except he said, "All the wiki sites."

[gilraen]

It seems likely that he is referring to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia definitely doesn't prevent you from copying text.

[Max Peck]

It seems likely that he is referring to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia definitely doesn't prevent you from copying text.

I've had it happen occasionally with Wikipedia, albeit not often, which is why I thought that was the particular wiki that he meant. I don't remember which article it was, but in one that I was reading earlier today the copy function in the context menu was inactive when I highlighted some text and right-clicked. I have no idea why it happens when it happens. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Blackhawk]

That's odd. Usually they disable the context menu entirely.

[Anonymous Bosch]

BTW, if you use a more privacy-friendly Wikiless free and open source alternative Wikipedia front-end instead of Wikipedia.org, you definitely should not have any such copy and paste issues at all. Because it uses no JavaScript whatsoever.

[Blackhawk]

Is Wikipedia really a privacy concern requiring going through a third party front end?

And, FWIW, Wikipedia absolutely does not block copy-paste. They're very clear that everything on the site is free to copy and use under Creative Commons.

[Anonymous Bosch]

Is Wikipedia really a privacy concern requiring going through a third party front end?

Why should I use Wikiless instead of Wikipedia?

Why should I use Wikiless instead of Wikipedia?
There are couple of reasons why you might want to use Wikiless:

• Circumvent censorship (1)
• You prevent Wikipedia getting your IP address (2)

1: Circumvent censorship
Many countries have censored Wikipedia pages, including China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia... https://wikiless.org/wiki/Censorship_of ... ia?lang=en

2: What's the problem of Wikipedia getting my IP address?
Short: If you trust that Wikipedia has not been infiltrated and/or you don't trust the Wikiless instance you would use, then you probably want to keep using Wikipedia instead of Wikiless because there are nothing to worry about giving your IP address to Wikipedia.

Long: We know from the leaks by Edward Snowden that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has identified Wikipedia as a target for surveillance already in 2009.[1][2] Wikimedia filled a lawsuit against the NSA in 2015 in order to fight against the mass-surveillance done by the NSA.[2][3]

Some points from the lawsuit legal documents:

• Wikimedia hired a full-time Traffic Security Engineer who is responsible for implementing and maintaining technical efforts to protect its users' reading and editing habits from mass surveillance-including, specifically, from the NSA's surveillance.[4]
• Wikimedia transitioned to HTTPS-by-default primarily due to NSA's surveillance.[5]

One of the documents revealed by Snowden shows that both Wikipedia and Wikimedia has been listed as a so-called "Appid" in the XKeyscore – a program that covers "nearly everything a typical user does on the internet" – to identify web traffic, meaning that wiki related web traffic is something that NSA finds valuable.[6]

Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, and Lila Tretikov, former Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, has stated that, “[t]hese activities [viewing and editing Wikipedia articles] are sensitive and private: They can reveal everything from a person’s political and religious beliefs to sexual orientation and medical conditions.”[7]

Is it a far fetched idea that given the importance of the data what NSA (or other malicious actors) might gain from Wikipedia, that they haven't been able to infiltrate Wikipedia's servers in some way or another in the last 12 years? I don't think so. That's why I created Wikiless.

Non-Wikipedia related fun facts about the NSA:

• NSA pushed for the adoption of the Dual EC DRBG encryption standard which contained a backdoor deliberately inserted by themselves. The backdoor would have allowed NSA to decrypt for example SSL/TLS encryption which used Dual_EC_DRBG as a CSPRNG.[8][9]
• NSA spends $250 million per year to insert backdoors in software and hardware.[10][11]
• NSA classifies Linux Journal readers, Tor and Tails users as "extremists".[12]
• NSA intercepts routers, servers and other network hardware being shipped to organizations targeted for surveillance and install covert implant firmware onto them before they are delivered.[13]
• NSA has spied extensively on the European Union, the United Nations and numerous governments including allies and trading partners in Europe, South America and Asia.[14][15]
• “For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies,” said a 2010 memo describing a briefing about N.S.A. accomplishments for employees of its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. “Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable.”[16]
• At Microsoft, the NSA worked with company officials to get pre-encryption access to Microsoft’s most popular services, including Outlook e-mail, Skype Internet phone calls and chats, and SkyDrive, the company’s cloud storage service.[16]
• NSA has contacted Linus Torvalds with a request to add backdoors into Linux.[17]
• Under the PRISM program, which started in 2007, NSA gathers Internet communications from foreign targets from nine major U.S. Internet-based communication service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. Data gathered include email, videos, photos, VoIP chats such as Skype, and file transfers.[18]
  NSA is cooperating with 'third party' countries which tap into fiber optic cables carrying the majority of the world's electronic communications and are secretly allowing the NSA to install surveillance equipment on these fiber-optic cables. The foreign partners of the NSA turn massive amounts of data like the content of phone calls, faxes, e-mails, internet chats, data from virtual private networks, and calls made using Voice over IP software like Skype over to the NSA. In return these partners receive access to the NSA's sophisticated surveillance equipment so that they too can spy on the mass of data that flows in and out of their territory. Among the partners participating in the NSA mass surveillance program are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Spain.[19][20]
• GCHQ, with aid from the NSA, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing. The surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats (one image every five minutes) in bulk and saved them to agency databases.[21]
• The NSA has built an infrastructure which enables it to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale by using automated systems that reduce the level of human oversight in the process. The NSA relies on an automated system codenamed TURBINE which in essence enables the automated management and control of a large network of implants (a form of remotely transmitted malware on selected individual computer devices or in bulk on tens of thousands of devices). As quoted by The Intercept, TURBINE is designed to "allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually."[22][23]
• NSA "hunts" system administrators. The Intercept published a document of an NSA employee discussing how to build a database of IP addresses, webmail, and Facebook accounts associated with system administrators so that the NSA can gain access to the networks and systems they administer.[24][25]
• Angela Merkel has compared NSA to Stasi.[26]

[Exodor]

My wife was filling out her evaluation for one of her direct reports and noted that she couldn't give them an "outstanding" rating (the highest) because the criteria requires the person to be able to step in and do her job ie. the person supervising them.

I have never heard of a review system that judges employees based on their ability to do their supervisor's job. It just seems like pure craziness to me.

[Daehawk]

For some reason i got an email from Wagner Reese today. Strikes me as a scam. There IS a place called that in Indiana and its a personal injury lawyer place.

My email said...

Hi Bk,

Thank you for contacting Wagner Reese. We are sorry to learn that you are going through a difficult time right now. Please call us at *snip* or email *snip* with the best time for us to speak with you. Thank you for considering Wagner Reese to help assist you in this serious situation. We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Thank you,

Wagner Reese

Double strange since BK is what I go by sometimes.

[Daehawk]

Found another email from them. its their pic and says...

Thank you for contacting Wagner Reese!

A member of our team will call the phone number you provided to learn about your case and find out if we can help.

I wonder if this has to do with my id stolen?..or if this is some scam.

maybe i should call the real place...this seems to be them as the stuff in the mail matches real links.

[Blackhawk]

Is Wikipedia really a privacy concern requiring going through a third party front end?

Why should I use Wikiless instead of Wikipedia?
Short: If you trust that Wikipedia has not been infiltrated

Infiltrated? Really?

Are Wikipedia or other sites surveilled by investigative agencies? Who knows. And, honestly - who really cares? I'm not doing anything on Wikipedia that hundreds of thousands of other people are. Do I prefer not to be tracked? Sure. But going to that level, hitting every site through a third party front end with multiple layers of security just so somebody doesn't know that I looked up how Cass Elliot died (it was not a ham sandwich) or that I browsed Amazon for T-shirts, or that I watched an Adam Savage video on YouTube.

If I were planning mayhem? Sure.
If I lived in China or Russia? Sure.

But for a run-of-the mill Joe?

Well, there's privacy (and I'm far more active and aware in that regard than the average user), and then there's paranoia.

[Max Peck]

You know who would set up a service catering to people who want to evade surveillance by the NSA? The NSA, obviously.

Just kidding. It would actually be the CIA.

[Blackhawk]

Not the Illuminati, with support from the Deep State?

[Anonymous Bosch]

Is Wikipedia really a privacy concern requiring going through a third party front end?

Why should I use Wikiless instead of Wikipedia?
Short: If you trust that Wikipedia has not been infiltrated

Infiltrated? Really?

Are Wikipedia or other sites surveilled by investigative agencies? Who knows. And, honestly - who really cares? I'm not doing anything on Wikipedia that hundreds of thousands of other people are. Do I prefer not to be tracked? Sure. But going to that level, hitting every site through a third party front end with multiple layers of security just so somebody doesn't know that I looked up how Cass Elliot died (it was not a ham sandwich) or that I browsed Amazon for T-shirts, or that I watched an Adam Savage video on YouTube.

If I were planning mayhem? Sure.
If I lived in China or Russia? Sure.

But for a run-of-the mill Joe?

Well, there's privacy (and I'm far more active and aware in that regard than the average user), and then there's paranoia.

FWIW, I couldn't care less what you do on Wikipedia; I was simply addressing your original question, and have no interest in trying to persuade you one way or t'other. There is no perfect option for privacy and security. Not everyone necessarily shares the same priorities, concerns, or access to resources. So, how you personally choose to balance security, privacy, and usability is entirely your prerogative, and is best decided based upon your own particular privacy and security threat model.

[Blackhawk]

It was more that my argue-sense was tingling after your initial post up there, which implied that Wikipedia was a security/privacy risk that actually needed some sort of solution.

For 99.9% of US users, it's a silly level of overkill and excessive complications.

[Anonymous Bosch]

You know who would set up a service catering to people who want to evade surveillance by the NSA? The NSA, obviously.

Just kidding. It would actually be the CIA.

Right, because free and open source code is clearly the most prudent surveillance option for three-letter intelligence agencies.

[Anonymous Bosch]

It was more that my argue-sense was tingling after your initial post up there, which implied that Wikipedia was a security/privacy risk that actually needed some sort of solution.

I know how to use words; if that were what I meant, I am more than capable of expressing myself without the assistance of your misguided argue-sense.

[Blackhawk]

It was more that my argue-sense was tingling after your initial post up there, which implied that Wikipedia was a security/privacy risk that actually needed some sort of solution.

I know how to use words; if that were what I meant, I am more than capable of expressing myself without the assistance of your misguided argue-sense.

If you say that there's a more privacy-friendly alternative to Wikipedia, and think that doesn't imply that Wikipedia has privacy concerns, then you might not be expressing yourself as clearly as you think.

[Anonymous Bosch]

If you say that there's a more privacy-friendly alternative to Wikipedia, and think that doesn't imply that Wikipedia has privacy concerns, then you might not be expressing yourself as clearly as you think.

And perhaps you might not be interpreting what I have articulated as clearly as you think. Because as explained above, Wikipedia does have documented privacy concerns. Though as I further clarified, this does not imply those concerns are necessarily applicable to your subjective privacy and security threat model (or those of any other arbitrary percentage of US users you choose to cook up). So, if this still confuses you, I genuinely don't know how much clearer I can make it for you.

[Blackhawk]

If those are 'privacy concerns', then we all need to be living in a digital bunker.

[Anonymous Bosch]

If those are 'privacy concerns', then we all need to be living in a digital bunker.

[Daehawk]

If those are 'privacy concerns', then we all need to be living in a digital bunker.

You guys aren't already?

[hitbyambulance]

fwiw i'm fairly paranoid (by the standards of most people with whom i associate), but a front end for wikipedia also strikes me as a bit too far out there for most people. (and 'most people' themselves would just dismiss such measures out of hand)

[Anonymous Bosch]

fwiw i'm fairly paranoid (by the standards of most people with whom i associate), but a front end for wikipedia also strikes me as a bit too far out there for most people. (and 'most people' themselves would just dismiss such measures out of hand)

Fair enough, and to reiterate: the only reason I ever even mentioned Wikiless here was specifically within the context of providing a convenient alternative solution for Daehawk to ensure functionality of his right-click menu for copying and pasting Wikipedia content (since Wikiless explicitly does not use JavaScript, so it would not require blocking any JavaScript with a browser plugin). Blackhawk subsequently asked, "Is Wikipedia really a privacy concern requiring going through a third party front end?" So, in the interest of addressing his question, I quoted the developers' reasons for creating and using Wikiless. Which his tingling argue-sense misconstrued and distorted as if I were personally implying that he -- and 99.9% of US users -- must use it as a needed solution for Wikipedia's particular security/privacy risks. But this was incorrect for the reasons I explained.

[Blackhawk]

You know, I had a post typed up, but decided against it. There's no way to continue that isn't personal. I'll just say this: Your views of privacy are absolutely your right, and I don't know you well enough to say whether they're justified or not. You do you - and that's awesome. But most of the time, those kinds of solutions are going to be excessive for the average user, and for some users they're more likely to create more problems than they solve.

[Anonymous Bosch]

Your views of privacy are absolutely your right, and I don't know you well enough to say whether they're justified or not. You do you - and that's awesome. But most of the time, those kinds of solutions are going to be excessive for the average user, and for some users they're more likely to create more problems than they solve.

I dunno what you're still hung up about or misunderstanding here, because I expressed much the same suggestion and sentiment myself:

…how you personally choose to balance security, privacy, and usability is entirely your prerogative, and is best decided based upon your own particular privacy and security threat model.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Blackhawk]

But most of the time, those kinds of solutions are going to be excessive for the average user, and for some users they're more likely to create more problems than they solve.

I'm 'hung up' on the fact that your solutions are often only peripherally related to the problem (Dae's problem was not with Wikipedia, and that was pretty clear from the beginning), and are presented as The Solution to both the question and to a real issue (that isn't a real issue for 99% of people) rather than as an alternative approach that may or may not be appropriate. It's misleading, and honestly - it's sometimes potentially harmful, which is the only reason I say anything at all.

That disclaimer you quoted? That's awesome. Put that in your solution posts rather than 10 hours later after someone calls you on it.

People are long-since sick of reading this conversation. If you want me to explain why I used the word 'harmful', feel free to PM me.

[Anonymous Bosch]

People are long-since sick of reading this conversation. If you want me to explain why I used the word 'harmful', feel free to PM me.

I am long sick of it myself; but my interactions with you here leave me with no particular interest or desire to PM you. But by all means, please do elucidate how this particular suggestion, of using an alternative non-JavaScript front-end for Wikipedia as a simple workaround for Daehawk to ensure full functionality of his right-click menu when copying and pasting Wikipedia content would necessarily be harmful. Because I don't believe it is, and for the umpteenth time, I am not and was not trying to present Wikiless as some sort of everyman privacy and security cure-all panacea, and I don't know how much clearer I can make that for you. So you're barking up the wrong tree.

[Isgrimnur]

https://sciplus.com/flamingo-watering-c ... ttachment/

[hepcat]

Flamingos. Flamingos can ease all conflicts.

[GreenGoo]

Using a plastic bottle every time you water some plants seems to be the epitome of single use culture.

Sure, you can reuse the bottle. Why do you (global you) need a bottle in the first place?

Anyway, it's cute.

[Isgrimnur]

Maybe those bottles can be recycled into something more useful. Like a watering can.

[GreenGoo]

Maybe those bottles can be recycled into something more useful. Like a watering can.

[stessier]

Using a plastic bottle every time you water some plants seems to be the epitome of single use culture.

Sure, you can reuse the bottle. Why do you (global you) need a bottle in the first place?

Anyway, it's cute.

This confuses me. Are you implying you think they use a new bottle every time?

[Daehawk]

My friend gave me my taxi'n round town today to do everything I need to do. We ate at Five Guys. Not ate there since me and my wife did about 10 years ago. I dont remember the fries tasting this amazing.. My goodness. i brought the extra fries home and am eating them now. So good.

[em2nought]

My friend gave me my taxi'n round town today to do everything I need to do. We ate at Five Guys. Not ate there since me and my wife did about 10 years ago. I dont remember the fries tasting this amazing.. My goodness. i brought the extra fries home and am eating them now. So good.

You've made a real life in person friend? Congrats! I hope you bought his meal as a thank you. I'm too cheap to eat at Five Guys.

[em2nought]

Maybe those bottles can be recycled into something more useful. Like a watering can.

Or a sculpture of garbage that has to be trucked across the country at the cost of $250,000. https://stpetecatalyst.com/florida-aqua ... a-message/