Yeah having a messaging app I enjoy using is important. Good UI and fun features make something worth using, it's why telegram is still my most used messenger.
Telegram is great indeed. I'm happily paying for premium for two reasons: first it's not expensive at all (2€ per month) and secondly it offers so many fun and useful features. I often buy it for friends too as a gift. They really have a good thing going.
On most other platforms it's usually more the stick than the carrot (pay up or we bombard you with ads) and it's tons more expensive, eg Instagram alone costs 3x as much.
This might be harder to do on linux because filesytems are different. If I'm not mistaken, NTFS has big tables that can be directly read without iterating through the filesystem tree. I don't think this is true of most popular linux filesystems.
Yes in my opinion the benefit of smart home stuff is not controlling things from my phone or tablet or some touchscreen on the wall. But instead having the same physical switches and controls as one normally would, with the ability to automate things in the background.
Smart home setups where a failure stops you from turning on a light or opening the garage is the worst possible combination.
The trend of smart devices that require internet access to function even when on the same local network as my phone or smart home system are a good example of very poorly designed products.
Getting a capture card that supports VGA is another possibility. Or don't and just say you did. Is there realistically any way to know whether a video was screen-recorded or if it was downloaded?
I assume if you download the stream directly it could be shown that your copy and youtubes copy are identical, since encoding a video and compressing it is different every time.
I guess my habit of running a firewall and not allowing programs to access the internet unless they actually need it is helpful for stuff like this.
Absolutely no reason a text editor needs internet access.
I only update stuff through winget, which fetches the installer from github in a lot of cases, and changing a package requires a PR to the winget repo AFAIK. Not foolproof of course though.
As for updates - my OS has a built-in package management system, which is responsible for installing and updating packages. Why should notepad++ bypass that and do its own independent update process?
Because other OSs do not and the notepad++ team wants all users to have a similar experience.
If you don’t need auto updates, just disable them.
More importantly, notepad++ being able to update itself is not the exploit here. Your OS’ package manager would download the same compromised binary as notepad++’s built in updater.
A browser can download updates and plugins to be installed locally. I too do not want all my apps making internet connections. Sandboxes / namespaces can help a little.
I think these days updates through the OS package manager is a better option, windows has had winget for 5+ years now, and obviously linux and macos both have their own established systems.
LittleSnitch is great for MacOS; it is easily configured to alert you every time your machine makes ip/domain connections, which can then be accepted, denied, or rules made
> LittleSnitch is great for MacOS; it is easily configured to alert you every time your machine makes ip/domain connections, which can then be accepted, denied, or rules made
For an open-source alternative, consider checking out - Lulu [0]. It's not as feature rich nor has impressive UI like the former but gets the main work done.
I use LuLu, it works great. Its kept my older versions of Photoshop and Acrobat from complaining and showing me ads for newer versions for the last couple years!
Binisoft WFC for Windows is a free outbound firewall. It was acquired by MalwareBytes awhile back, but they have not interfered with development so far.
It has some areas where improvement is needed, but the fundamentals work and the user interface design is decent.
I am surprised it's not more popular for Windows users. All of the alternatives I've tried have critical issues which made me dismiss them as unserious.
Yeah I've been using Fort on windows, it's easy to use and not closed source and full of bloat like the commonly suggested windows firewalls from various security companies.
It shouldn't! Fort just flashes the tray icon if there's a new connection request and you can click it whenever you want, instead of a popup in your face in the middle of something.
It doesn't matter really because nowadays all of them are just a front-ends to Windows Firewall.
Also legitimate software (i.e. firewall/AV) cannot use "oldschool" tricks like system service descriptor table hooks to obtain godlike privileges these days, while malware sometimes can do this by exploiting vulnerabilities, so in such cases it may be an unequal fight.
It's the best one I found after trying a few, because it's pretty easy to use, and lets me disable notification popups which is a part that always frustrates me about other options.
Why am I hearing about that specific FW in year 2026, this seems really good, at least the features written if it really supports rules based on parent processes, wildcards, SvcHost granularity without gotchas.
Been wrangling with Windows FW for ages, trying to get some badly behaved programs to update like Discord, Teams and others that change install paths or updater executable names or hiddenly use msedgewebview2.
PolicyAppId and tagging based rules have given some success but Windows FW is still really broken. Definitely giving Fort a try.
> A "Core Isolation: Memory Integrity" feature of Windows 10+ prevents creating such memory area (leading to BSOD).
> We tried to attestation sign the driver via new EV certificate by MS to fix the driver's limitation, but failed (see #108).
> So for now users have to disable the "Core Isolation: Memory Integrity" feature
Disabling HVCI doesn't sound like a good idea honestly. I mean they abuse kernel memory protection to bypass EV Certificate restrictions leaving the system in a state where another driver can mess with FW's internal structures using the same trick.
If the application handles them serially, then yeah. But one can imagine the application opening files in threads, buffering them, and then finally sending it at full speed, so in that sense it is an application issue. If you truly have millions of small files, you're more likely to be bottlenecked by disk IO performance rather than application or network, though. My primary use case for ssh streams is zfs send, which is mostly bottlenecked by ssh itself.
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