"Ad blockers" nowadays do much more. From the horse’s mouth, which describes itself as a “wide-spectrum content blocker” [1]:
“uBlock Origin (uBO) is a CPU and memory-efficient wide-spectrum content blocker for Chromium and Firefox. It blocks ads, trackers, coin miners, popups, annoying anti-blockers, malware sites, etc., by default using EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Peter Lowe's Blocklist, Online Malicious URL Blocklist, and uBO filter lists. There are many other lists available to block even more [...]
Ads, "unintrusive" or not, are just the visible portion of the privacy-invading means entering your browser when you visit most sites. uBO's primary goal is to help users neutralize these privacy-invading methods in a way that welcomes those users who do not wish to use more technical means.”
I'd like to install uBlock Origin, when I try, Chrome warns it needs the permission to, "Read and change all your data on all websites". That seems excessive, to give that much power to one extension. I currently use no extensions to keep my security posture high.
I never get the fear behind extensions, at least not to the level where you wouldn't use an open-source extension that's extremely well vetted. And even if that isn't good enough for you, choosing to browse the web without using a content blocker is a far, far greater security risk.
Appreciate the clarification, I would clarify to say the origin story of Ad blockers are ads, and the underlying behaviours may not capture everything that fingerprinting may do where people don't advertise.
Ublock is great, but I am finding fingerprinting that gets past it and that's what I'm referring to.
Similar experience here: I setup Debian stable for my 76 yo mother, and for a 79 yo friend. Works like a charm, and the 2 years release schedule is perfect for people who don’t care about bleeding edge and would rather have stability.
Unattended security upgrades keep it secure, and in my experience a bit of initial “locking things down and simplifying” is valuable, but after this it’s smooth sailing compared to other older folks I help with Windows systems where MS is constantly throwing at them insane bugs, complete UX changes, ads, or Copilot everywhere.
Sadly, doing the trick with a single ball yields a FactorySingleton and scores an extra Java point, but doesn’t impress as much. We can’t have nice things ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .
You probably meant The Black Parade (a mod for Thief I), not to be confused with The Dark Mod (a standalone thief-inspired game based on the Doom3 engine)
To Thief heads who played I and II and want more of it: play The Black Parade, an enormous mod 7 years in the making that is actually an entire new game.
From what I've heard The Black Parade mission style hews close to the style of Thief: The Dark Project. If your tastes are closer to Thief II: The Metal Age (or you'd just like more taffing about), I enjoyed T2X: Shadows of the Metal Age[1] quite a bit. The voice acting was pretty rough in places, but I found that kinda charming. I've also heard good things about Death's Cold Embrace[2].
4. These days even Thief III is enjoyable, thanks to the https://www.moddb.com/mods/thief-3-sneaky-upgrade megapatch doing crazy things like stapling back together maps that had to be cut-with-loading-screen due to Xbox limitations!
Both are fabulous community efforts, and I agree with the sister comment by HN user klaussilveira. Now, they are very different things:
- The Black Parade is a single experience: one campaign with a beginning and end, on the oldschool Thief I foundations. Nothing more, nothing less.
- The Dark Project as of today is more of a “platform”: a modern base engine for creators and players who want a shinier Thief, and who acknowledge that with today’s graphical standards comes extra effort to create a satisfying map/campaign (need bigger assets, less “blunt” architecture, etc). To add to the “platform-ness”: as of today, out-of the box TDP has only a couple built-in missions and no meaty story arc. There are many excellent 3rd-party Fan Missions (maps in Thief lingo, go visit https://www.thiefguild.com/fanmissions/ ) for TDP, but it’s not “a game” the way Black Parade is clearly a game. This is not a judgement call and I had an excellent time with many TDP maps, and community members do discuss expanding the campaign & story... but for now it’s more of a technical foundation to download maps and tinker with, than “a game” :) . You can do some spelunking on the TDP forums if you want more details, the maintainers make no mystery of this.
Gaaaah, words. Yes thank you ! Coz in another thread I was mentioning both.
The above post -which I can no longer edit- compares The Black Parade / TBP (a mod for Thief I / The Dark Project / TDP) to The Dark Mod (TDM, a mod for the doom3 engine). Phew :D
As for the original question of comparing TBP to TDP: I’m personally not fond of Thief I and prefer Thief II, as it focuses on what works: stealth! Thief I is wildly creative, but also full of muddy combat with unconvincing monsters & zombies, and annoying maps / missions. So, to me, TBP (which is pleasingly weird and avoids TDP gameplay pitfalls) kinda beats its parent game TDP at its own game.
This specific point about maintaining his own version of python2 to not move to python3 was addressed by Calibre contributors who did the job (that author didn't want to do) of migrating to python3.
This is why I fork the extensions I use, with the exception of uBlock. Basically just copy the extension folder, if I can't find it on GitHub. That way I can audit the code and not have to worry about an auto-update sneaking in something nefarious. I've had two extensions in the past suddenly start asking for permissions they definitely did not need, and I suspect this is why.
Btw, here's a site where you can inspect an extension's source code before you install it: https://robwu.nl/crxviewer/
Yeah, and thx for the link to the neat crx explorer.
Close to what you do, I started writing my own addon to replace a couple addons whose featureset I use only partially.
For example, when I use Chromium I want 1. to customize the New Tab page, and 2. to add a keyboard shortcut to pin/unpinTab. These two features are absolutely part of extensions, but in addition to the security risk I find them heavy (I don’t need the kitchen sink, just need 2 micro-features!). And so, I have my little personal addon with zero resource usage with just these two features. It’s tiny (20 lines of code!), git-versioned, and never changes / gets pwned. When I need an extra micro-feature, it’s easy enough to add it by searching addons docs, of asking an LLM.
You shouldn’t need an extension just to add a keyboard shortcut for a menu item. Doesn’t your OS let you map that? On macOS you can in Keyboard Settings
No I don’t. But Wladimir Palant is where I get most of my information on the topic (and is probably where I got this link). His blog might have a post (or a comment) that links to similar lists: https://palant.info/categories/security/
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