They’re focused entirely on the shitty practices those other manufacturers engaged in. In that regard, Valve didn’t do much (and that’s a good thing).

Always has been

Good to know! I saw that mentioned on some (apparently outdated) Comodo marketing copy as a benefit over LE

EV certs give you an extra green bar or something along those lines. If your customers care about it, then you have to. If they don’t - and they probably don’t - it’s a waste.

Ethical

AI tools aren’t inherently unethical, and even the ones that use models with data provenance concerns (e.g., a tool that uses Stable Diffusion models) aren’t any less ethical than many other things that we never think twice about. They certainly aren’t any less ethical than tools that use Google services (Google Analytics, Firebase, etc).

There are ethical concerns with many AI tools and with the creation of AI models. More importantly, there are ethical concerns with certain uses of AI tools. For example, I think that it is unethical for a company to reduce the number of artists they hire / commission because of AI. It’s unethical to create nonconsensual deepfakes, whether for pornography, propaganda, or fraud.

Environmentally sustainable

At least people are making efforts to improve sustainability. https://hbr.org/2024/07/the-uneven-distribution-of-ais-environmental-impacts

That said, while AI does have energy a lot of the comments I’ve read about AI’s energy usage are flat out wrong.

Great things

Depends on whom you ask, but “Great” is such a subjective adjective here that it doesn’t make sense to consider it one way or the other.

things that people want

Obviously people want the things that AI tools create. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t use them.

well-meaning

Excuse me, Sam Altman is a stand-up guy and I will not have you besmirching his name /s

Honestly my main complaint with this line is the implication that the people behind non-AI tools are any more well-meaning. I’m sure some are, but I can say the same with regard to AI. And in either case, the engineers and testers and project managers and everyone actually implementing the technology and trying to earn a paycheck? They’re well-meaning, for the most part.

What exactly are you trusting a cert provider with and what are the security implications?

End users trust the cert provider. The cert provider has a process that they use to determine if they can trust you.

What attack vectors do you open yourself up to when trusting a certificate authority with your websites’ certificates?

You’re not really trusting them with your certificates. You don’t give them your private key or anything like that, and the certs are visible to anyone navigating to your website.

Your new vulnerabilities are basically limited to what you do for them - any changes you make to your domain’s DNS config, or anything you host, etc. - and depend on that introducing a vulnerability of its own. You also open a new phishing attack vector, where someone might contact you, posing as the certificate authority, and ask you to make a change that would introduce a vulnerability.

In what way could it benefit security and/or privacy to utilize a paid service?

For most use cases, as far as I know, it doesn’t.

LetsEncrypt doesn’t offer EV or OV certificates, which you may need for your use case. However, these are mostly relevant at the enterprise level. Maybe you have a storefront and want an EV cert?

LetsEncrypt also only offers community support, and if you set something up wrong you could be less secure.

Other CAs may offer services that enhance privacy and security, as well, like scanning your site to confirm your config is sound… but the core offering isn’t really going to be different (aside from LE having intentionally short renewal periods), and theoretically you could get those same services from a different vendor.

You can get wildcard certs with LetsEncrypt (since 2018): https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/acme-v2-production-environment-wildcards/55578

The purpose of slang is to signal group identity.

That’s a purpose of slang, not its only purpose.

Slang can also be more efficient (“cringe” is one syllable; “cringe-worthy” is three) and it contributes to the evolution of language, leading some terms - like “cringe” to become more mainstream and to see use outside of the group that popularized them.

Besides, Gen Z might have come up with “cringe,” but millennials were practicing nounification, verbification, and adjectification when Gen Z was still learning to talk, and that’s all “cringe” as an adjective is.

to my ear, calling something “cringe” sounds like something kids say, because mostly in my everyday life, I only hear children saying it like it made up a fair chunk of their entire vocabulary.

The oldest Gen Z-ers are 27 and the youngest are 12, so almost none of them are “kids” anymore - they’re teens and adults. But there’s also a difference between using slang on the internet and in in-person contexts, particularly more formal ones. Slang that’s common in one group might not be in another group in the same age range, even if they’re geographically similar. But even so, I’ve heard millennials use (and over-use) “cringe” in public and in private.

When a GenXer or old Millennial use it, it can come across as either affected or immature.

A 6 year old in 1994 would have been born in 1988, which is right in the middle of the millennial range (1981-1996), meaning they wouldn’t be an “old Millennial.” But even if they were born in ‘81, my opinion wouldn’t change. Focusing too much on who “should” use a term like “cringe,” especially online, isn’t at all productive, and isn’t very different from telling someone they’re not a big enough fan to wear a t-shirt or to cosplay as a character they think is cool. They’re both just gatekeeping, plain and simple.

The original movie came out in 1994, meaning that if you were a kid when it came out, you’re a millennial. ”Cringe” is early Gen Z slang and it’s a derivative of “cringe-worthy,” so it’s not like anyone is going to be confused about how to use it. What are you, the age police?

Tldr: Okay, Boomer.

Does your script handle bi-directional sync or one-way only?

The main disadvantage I can think of would involve a situation where your email (and possibly also other personal data) was exposed without your name attached. It’d be possible for your DLN and/or SSN (or the equivalents for other countries) and email to be exposed without your name being exposed, for example. This wouldn’t have to be a breach - it could be that, for privacy purposes, certain people working with accounts simply don’t get visibility to names.

It’s also feasible that an employee might have access to your full name but only to partially masked email addresses. So if your email is site-firstname-lastname@example.com and they see site-firstname-****@domain.com, they can make an educated guess as to your full email address.

Also, if your email were exposed by itself and someone tried to phish you, it would be more effective if they knew your name.

Thanks for that! I recommend anyone who wants to minimize risk to follow their instructions for self-hosting:

Is the source code available and can I run my own copy locally?

Yes! The source code is available on Github. Its a simple static HTML application and you can clone and run it by opening the index.html file in your browser. When run locally it should work when your computer is completely offline. The latest commits in the git repository are signed with my public code signing key.

Generally people don’t memorize private keys, but this is applicable when generating pass phrases to protect private keys that are stored locally.

Leaving this here in case anyone wants to use this method: https://www.eff.org/dice

Doesn’t their API also require you to allow-list IPs, making it basically useless for dynamic DNS?

From https://www.namecheap.com/support/api/intro/ under “Whitelisting IP.”

Ah, like using Edge to download Firefox!

Should I apologize for hurting your feelings by suggesting that Windows is bad?

Is there a right way to use Windows?

Every single App Store out there uses “free” to refer to propriety software today, because it’s free.

“Free” as an adjective isn’t the issue. The issue is the phrase “free software” being used to refer to things other than free software. And afaict, no app store uses the term ”free software” to refer to non-free software.

The iOS App Store refers to “Free Apps.”

Google Play doesn’t call it “Free Software,” either; they just use it as a category / filter, e.g., “Top Free.”

There’s a reason many are … starting to refer to such software as “libre”, not “free”

Your conclusion is incorrect - this is because when used outside of the phrase “free software,” the word is ambiguous. “Software that is free” could mean gratis, libre, or both.

There is no path to any future where someone will be wrong to use the word “free” to describe software that doesn’t cost anything.

Setting aside that doing so is already misleading, you clearly lack imagination if you cannot think of any feasible way for that to happen.

For example, consider a future where use of the phrase when advertising your product could result in legal issues. That isn’t too far-fetched.

They don’t become invalidated. They’re not capable of becoming invalidated.

They certainly can. A given meaning of a word is invalidated if it is no longer acceptable to use it in a given context for that meaning. In a medical context, for example, words become obsolete and unacceptable to use.

Likewise, it isn’t valid to say that your Aunt Edna is “hysterical” because she has epilepsy.

But more importantly, that’s all beside the point. Words don’t just have meaning in isolation - context matters. Phrases can have meanings that are different than just the sum of their parts, and saying a phrase but meaning something different won’t communicate what you meant. If you say something that doesn’t communicate what you meant, then obviously, what you said is incorrect.

“Free software” has an established meaning (try Googling it or looking it up on Wikipedia), and if you use it to mean something different, people will likely misunderstand you and/or correct you. They’re not wrong in this situation - you are.

That, or you’re trying to live life like a character from Airplane!:

This woman has to be gotten to a hospital.

A hospital? What is it?

It’s a big building with patients, but that’s not important right now.

Thought you were talking about Linux at first.

I use both Windows, Linux, and macOS - my opinion is that Windows is the least user-friendly of the bunch.