Looks like things have changed:

Will my registration expire?

No, your registration will never expire. The FTC will only remove your number from the Registry if it’s disconnected and reassigned, or if you ask to remove it.

https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/national-do-not-call-registry-faqs

Maybe one of these?

https://system76.com/desktops/

https://www.dell.com/en-us/search/linux

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/

Cloudflare is a provider that you can choose to have as a part of your own infrastructure.

Indeed.

man in the middle implies “attack”

That can be a convenient shorthand if the parties in a discussion agree to use it as such in context. For example, in a taxonomy of cryptographic attacks, it would make sense. It is not the general meaning, though, at least not a universally accepted one. Similarly, “counter” does not imply “counter attack”, unless we happen to be discussing attack strategy.

More to the point, nothing that I wrote misrepresents the situation as was claimed by that other person. If I had meant attack, I would have said attack. Rather, they made a leap of logic because I (like most of my colleagues) don’t happen to follow a convention that they like, and picked a fight over it. No thanks.

You’re conflating MitM,

Heh… It’s safe to assume I’m well versed in this topic.

You’re going to have to prove any of your claims, or else I am just going to assume you’re talking out of your ass.

I am not, however, inclined to indulge rudeness. Bye bye.

It bugs me when people say Cloudflare is a MitM, because that is a disingenuous representation the situation.

No, it is a clear description of what is happening: Instead of https keeping the traffic encrypted from user to service, it runs only from user to Cloudflare (and then in some cases from Cloudflare to service, although that’s irrelevant here). The result is that a third party (Cloudflare) is able to read and/or modify the traffic between the two endpoints. This is exactly what we in mean in cryptography discussions by man-in-the-middle.

You can decide that you don’t mind it because it’s not a secret, or because they haven’t been caught abusing it yet, but to say it’s not a man-in-the-middle is utter nonsense.

and you opt into it.

No, the service operator opts in to it, without consulting the user, and usually without informing them. The user has no choice in the matter, and typically no knowledge of it when they send and receive potentially sensitive information. They only way they find out that Cloudflare is involved is if Cloudflare happens to generate an error page, or if they are technically inclined enough to manually resolve the domain name of the service and look up the owner of the net block. The vast majority of users don’t even know how to do this, of course, and so are completely unaware.

All the while, the user’s browser shows “https” and a lock icon, assuring the user that their communication is protected.

And even if they were aware, most users would still have no idea what Cloudflare’s position as a middleman means with respect to their privacy, especially with how many widely used services operate with it.

To be clear, this lack of disclosure is not what makes it a man in the middle. It is an additional problem.

it cannot be a MitM because both sides of the connection are aware of this layer.

This is false. Being aware of a man in the middle and/or willingly accepting it does not mean it ceases to exist. It just means it’s not a man-in-the-middle attack.

music group IFPI complained that while Cloudflare discloses the hosting locations of pirate sites in response to abuse reports, it doesn’t voluntarily share the identity of these pirate customers with rightsholders.

“Where IFPI needs to obtain the customer’s contact information, Cloudflare will only disclose these details following a subpoena or court order – i.e. these disclosures are mandated by law and are not an example of the service’s goodwill or a policy or measures intended to assist IP rights holders,” IFPI wrote.

So the corporations enjoying enormous profits from other people’s work are unhappy that Cloudflare doesn’t make it easy for them to circumvent due process. What a surprise.

(I’m generally not a fan of Cloudflare, because its man-in-the-middle position between users and services has grown to an unhealthy scale, making it ripe for dragnet surveillance and other abuses. But it would be even worse if it was actively helping these greedy, predatory corporations dodge the law.)

https://archive.today/biVWD

When I’m driving, it’s actually unsafe for my car to be operated in that way. It’s hard to generalize and say, buttons are always easy and good, and touchscreens are difficult and bad, or vice versa. Buttons tend to offer you a really limited range of possibilities in terms of what you can do. Maybe that simplicity of limiting our field of choices offers more safety in certain situations.

Or maybe being able to consistently and reliably operate the thing without taking your eyes off the road has something to do with it? Hmm… Yes, this is really hard to generalize.

Cloudflare has a long track record of not abusing that position, though.

Well, Cloudflare is not all that old, and we can’t see what they do with our data, so I would say it has a medium-length record of not getting caught abusing that position. But that’s not the point.

The point is that most Lemmy users’ actual browsing is in fact not private between them and their server. Many instances have a big network service corporation like Cloudflare watching everything read or written by every user, so that info is available to anyone with sufficient access or influence there, like employees and governments.

That applies to most of the internet,

Not exactly, but it does apply to a great many of the biggest web sites, so we could say it applies to much of the internet’s traffic.

And that’s part of the problem. Cloudflare is in a position to watch much of what people do on the web, across many unrelated sites and services (often including domain name lookups), and trivially identify them. This includes whatever political, religious, or NSFW posts they’re reading on Lemmy, and who they are when they log in to their bank accounts.

In any case, I replied not to be pedantic, but just to let our community know that they shouldn’t assume their reading habits on Lemmy are safely anonymized behind a made-up username, or confidential between them and their instance admins. If your instance uses a provider of DDOS protection or HTTPS acceleration, as many big instances do, then the walls have ears.

Your actual browsing of lemmy is moderately private, provided you trust your server.

Not exactly. Many of the big instances have Cloudflare (or similar) sitting between you and the server, providing the HTTPS layer while watching everything you read and write on Lemmy. In cryptography circles, we call this a man-in-the-middle.

Your instance (sh.itjust.works) is one such instance, by the way, as is lemmy.world.

A quick search for the mentioned product names found their safety data sheets:

https://www.crcindustries.com/media/msdsen/msds_en-1003333.pdf

https://www.tmkpackers.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/FUELITE-TMK-SDS-ISSUE-6.pdf

This comment from PaulG.x caught my eye:

Electronics technician with 48 years in the industry here.

The common cause of the buttons losing sensitivity is that the silicone absorbs skin oils and these oils act as insulation on the pads and tracks.

If you look at the tracks under the pads that are least sensitive , you will see the oily residue. You can clean the tracks and pads with alcohol for a short term fix but the pads will exude more of the oil that is within the silicone.

A longer term fix is to soak the whole key pad sheet in Fuelite (Petroleum Spirit) Fuelite is the main ingredient in CRC Contact Cleaner (in fact it is the only ingredient). Use liquid Fuelite to do this , not Contact Cleaner because you have to immerse the silicone sheet.

Soak the sheet for 5 minutes , it will swell a little , let it dry thoroughly and it will return to normal dimension.

While the silicone has still some absorbed Fuelite in it , it will be easily torn so treat it carefully.

Then reassemble the device.

This fix should last several months depending on the state of the silicone sheet

It’s important to post these things every so often. There will never be a day when everyone already knows. :)

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Good luck. :)

The existing distro Neon has issues generally because of their choice to use Ubuntu LTS as a base. This is because KDE Plasma needs newer libraries usually than Ubuntu LTS can provide

In other words, they don’t have enough resources dedicated to doing it well. This is part of the problem I described.

Basing it on Arch means they’ll almost always have the latest libraries ready to go.

That could reduce the work required in one area, but would increase it in another. Arch fails the “doesn’t break” goal on its own, which means someone would have to do more work if they want to achieve it.

Beware online “filter bubbles” (2011) - Eli Pariser

https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles

I think dropping loadable module support would severely limit what users can do when a driver misbehaves or doesn’t handle a particular device as well as an (in-tree) alternative.

Also, I wonder how they expect to achieve being “The KDE operating system” or “doesn’t break” when their existing distro has been more than a little rocky so far. Who do they think will do the long-term work of raising and maintaining the quality bar?

It would be kool to have a solid reference distro where Plasma could shine, especially for organisations and newer users who don’t know how to replace GNOME on existing distros. But this proposal gives me the impression that they underestimate the effort required, so I am skeptical.

You are correct. Traditional X middle-button behavior is to insert the primary selection, from any application. It is distinct from the cilpboard(s), has no “copy” step, and doesn’t behave the same as “paste” (it can’t paste over another primary selection).

Many people don’t notice the difference, though, especially if they’re used to an environment that lacks that functionality, like Windows. Some might even get confused or frustrated when the middle click doesn’t work quite as they expect (which, of course, is because it’s actually doing something different).

https://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html

It’s also possible that OP remapped their middle button to paste from the clipboard, although their phrasing makes it seem unlikely.

You can’t know with certainty on Signal that the client and the server are actually keeping your messages encrypted at rest, you have to trust them.

This is untrue. By design, messages are never decrypted on servers when end-to-end encryption is in use. They would have to break the encryption first, because they don’t have the keys.

Some advantages are listed in this /c/Technology comment:

https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/15398090