I've personally grown to hate the security theatre of rotating my bank passwords every six months, especially because of requirements like "must contain one uppercase, one symbol, one lowercase, one special case and the blood of a unicorn."

When mathematically, a simple, grammatically incorrect sentence of 25 characters is much harder for a machine to crack than a gibberish 8-character password with symbols.

Entropy loves length.

I love the idea that the most secure key to your digital life could just be a weird little poem or an inside joke that only you know. Security doesn't have to be painful.

#infosec #passwords #cybersecurity #UX #security #sysadmin #programming #foss #linux #privacy #enshittification #reading #finance

This film is for anyone trying to understand why the world's going to shit and what they can do about it.

From Uber rides to endless battles with customer service bots, Cory’s journey becomes a frustrating, absurd mirror of the very platforms he’s trying to expose.

We’ll be there as Cory dives in headfirst to confront the Enshittocene. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it’ll be entertaining!

Stay tuned and join us as we wade out of the enshittosphere #Enshittification @pluralistic

Fascinating @pluralistic is developing his theory of #enshittification into a general theory of the rise and eventual collapse of power based on network effects.

Short version: Network effects make switching costly. User are trapped and become sitting ducks for ever-increasing exploitation. As long as the cost of switching is larger than the costs of being exploited, nominally free users rationally decide grin and bear it. But when the costs of being exploited becomes too onerous, it starts to look attractive to buckle the costs of switching. Particularly if the burden of exploitation rises for lot of people in parallel.

This, so the general theory, not only applies to social media, but also to other systems with strong network effects, such as the dollar system.

I'm sure economists could turn this into a formula to predict the point where networks suddenly crumble.

pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-d…

Microsoft confirms it will give the FBI your Windows PC data encryption key if asked — you can thank Windows 11's forced online accounts for that

Windows 11's online Microsoft Account requirement means your PC is automatically backing up its data encryption key to the cloud, and Microsoft says it will hand those over to the FBI if asked.

windowscentral.com/microsoft/w…

#Microsoft #Windows11 #privacy #surveillance #enshittification #encryption #technology #software #dystopia

Search on YouTube is at its worst right now. You type "how to make apple pie," and the algorithm gives you three ads, a viral cat short, and a "For You" video about gaming.

It is what @pluralistic rightly calls enshittification.

I spent the last month refactoring the core script for search fixer. Big improvements:
> A new settings UI that doesn't look like an airplane cockpit.
> Improved anti-shorts protocol: Revert shorts to the normal player.
> Fixed the filters for those annoying auto-generated "mixes" that clutter the results.
> Optional grid view for search.
> Experimental keyword matching.

homepage:
phoennix.gitlab.io/youtubesear…

update and new features:
phoennix.gitlab.io/youtubesear…

Reclaim your feed and I hope you give it a try✨🙏

#opensource #enshittification #firefox #chrome #mozilla #browser #youtube #distraction #adhd #mentalhealth #cooking #reading #tumblr #art #design #nature

Extension : Search Fixer

YouTube Search Fixer is an extension designed to fix YouTube search and de-clutter your search page to make it less distracting. It removes suggestions like For you, People also search for, Related to your search, etc from your feed.

^{phoennix.gitlab.io}