Tag: yandex

Links of the week: A bunch of tech stuff and a fun video

More than a week has gone since my previous Links of the Week post, but whateverrrrr. I’ve been busy just trying to live life with a 2 year old kid who is always feeling a bit ill, the drama of some local kids trying to kick our windows in every night, trying to fix everything that keeps breaking in the apartment, keeping up with all the chores or just trying to catch a break.

Anyway, here’s some stuff what I did see with my eyes since the last time I posted. Most of it is on the internet:

Twitterrific: End of an Era

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter there have been a lot of wild things happening and one of those is that they cut off a lot of third-party apps.

From a purely commercial point-of-view, I get it. There are a lot of apps using the API that don’t serve up any of the ads or tracking that Twitter uses to make money. But these third-party apps were what once made Twitter’s community spirit great – and apps like Twitterific have a great part to play in the history and making of Twitter.

Anyway, Big Bad Musk didn’t want this happening anymore, and so they are gone. But on the plus side, a good number of these developers are refocusing their efforts on Mastodon support.

blog.iconfactory.com

Related: If you live in Oslo, check out my Mastodon instance oslo.town and if you don’t live in Oslo but want to give Mastodon a try, check out this list of Mastodon servers.

Design Conferences List 2023

Whether you do UX, UI, Product Design, Design Research, Interaction Design, or another form of digital design you can attribute to this field, then you might want to check out this big ol’ list of design conferences.

Every year, WhatsApp Product Designer and Twitter user @nunosans collects together all the design conferences that are happening around the world and dumps them in one collaborative spreadsheet, together with dates, links to the official websites, and pricing details.

It’s very useful if you are either looking to go to a conference, looking to speak at a conference, or even just looking to see the recordings of talks they make available live or after-the-event.

The tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet hop between previous years.

docs.google.com/spreadsheets

Wonders of Street View

The website of address of Neal Agarwal is appropriate; neal.fun. It has lots of fun little playthings that Neal has coded together. One of the newest additions to the page is a Google Maps mashup.

Launching the site will throw you to random interesting Street View location somewhere around the world. Take a look, drink it up, and then hit the Random button to be whizzed off to the next location.

There’s a lot to look at and I’m sure the more curious-minded amongst us could spend hours clicking away on the site.

neal.fun/wonders-of-street-view

CatGPT

There has been a lot of hype about AI technology recently and much of that has circled around ChatGPT from OpenAI. I even wrote a little thing about it on my blog.

Anyway, some genius has made ChatGPT even better by ditching the robots and replacing them with cats. Now here’s some tech that I can fully get behind.

catgpt.wvd.io

Diigo to Pocket ?

For years and years and years I’ve used the bookmarking service Diigo to save any web links I find interesting. It’s been reliable and consistent, but the developers have been awol for some time.

I’m trying out Mozilla Pocket. If you want to follow me there, you can follow the user @shit-hot to see any bookmarks that I share publicly.

getpocket.com/@shit-hot

Yandex source code leaks

If you know of Yandex, you’re probably Russian or very much into technology. They run a lot of different products and services; web search, email, maps, a web browser, alternative DNS, a taxi service, yada-yada-yada. The simplest way to describe Yandex is Google, but for Russia.

Recently a big chunk of their code was leaked and it gives a really good insight into how a modern search engine is run. For most people, going through this would be very boring, tedious, and uninteresting.

For me, it’s a bit interesting. My time in work is spend designing Microsoft 365 search experiences – so it’s right up my street. The breakdown does get a bit technical, but I’m glad someone at Search Engine Land took the time to do this write-up.

searchengineland.com

C’est magnifique

The dance scene from Pulp Fiction but they’re dancing to the Only Fools and Horses closing theme tune.
@Pandamoanimum@mstdn.social

Bye.

3 February 2023
Searching… 🔎
Where do you go when you want to find something on the internet? If you are like most people, you start at Google. Over the last year, a whopping 92% of searches conducted were with the Silicon Valley tech giants. But where do the other 8% go?

There are actually many alternatives to searching the web with Google. Once you scratch beneath the surface you’ll find a range of search engines all promoting a slightly nuanced set of features.

DuckDuckGo is a US-based search engine that claims to be private. Unlike Google, they don’t remember what you search for and promise to not track you. The results they show? Well, they mix together results from two other search engines – Bing and Yandex.

Ecosia is another alternative to Google. Based in Germany, they promise that 80% of their profits will go to tree-planting projects. The results they show? Also taken from Microsoft Bing.

In fact, if we zoom out, there are only six search engines that scan the web and rely on their own catalogue of the internet:
1. Google (USA)
2. Microsoft Bing (USA)
3. Gigablast (USA)
4. Brave Search (USA)*
5. Yandex (Russia)
6. Mojeek (UK)
* Note that Brave Search use Google as a ‘Fallback’ when they don’t have enough results of their own.

Competition is healthy for the internet and what’s healthy for the internet will ultimately be good for you. Google having a monopoly on web searches is not healthy.

And so, dear reader, we have reached that part of the post where I make a radical suggestion. If you currently use Google to search the web then maybe you should… switch?

Try Bing. Try Ecosia. Try Qwant or DuckDuckGo. Why not go back in time and use Yahoo or AOL. Give Mojeek a shot – they are one of the only six indexing the web!

Set one of the above as your default search engine and see how it goes. For most searches, I’m sure you’ll find the answer you’re looking for. And, for the few times you don’t? Well, Google it.
12 October 2021
Know when you are being scammed and how to report it
Quite often when people say they have been “hacked” it turns out they haven’t been hacked. They’ve often fallen victim to something called “phishing”. That’s the term used when someone creates a fake website that looks like a real website to trick you.

You might often get emails that look like they are from your bank and then link you off to a website that looks like it’s from your bank – and they ask for all your login details – tricking you into handing over important information to the scammers.

Don’t feel too bad if you have fallen victim to this recently, or in the past. The web pages that people create for phishing are looking ever more real and professional. I discovered one recently that even went as far as getting a security certificate to show a little padlock icon to make you think you’re safe.

The Exodus Phishing Scam

I recently highlighted a phishing site pretending to be Exodus, but even after a manual independent review, the reviewers said there is “No threat found”. That’s because it’s a very convincing fake.

An email landed in my inbox claiming that 94,000 of Exodus customers have been hacked and need to update their 12 word seed phrase and pin number. Yet, I know that giving away your 12 word seed phrase and pin number is like giving a car thief the keys to your car.

A very convincing looking email, advising me to update my passphrase.

If you receive an email like this and you aren’t sure whether it’s real – do not click any of the links or buttons in the email. Close the email, open your web browser, and go directly to the Exodus website. This is a simple way to avoid getting phished from email; when the email is asking you to update or give some personal or security information never click any links in your email.

Clicking the link in the email might save you the 10 seconds it takes to open a web browser and type in the website name yourself – but spending the 10 seconds to do it manually will save you from getting phished.

But since I know what I’m doing…

I clicked the “Update” button. It takes you to a fake website which had my email address added to the end. This helps make it look legitimate, but also for the scammers to know I’ve been blind enough to fall for the scam.

Everything looks like the official Exodus website. If I do a web search for ‘Exodus wallet support‘ I will find the official support website. At the time, this was http://support.exodus.io and the website I was taken to by the email was not exodus.io.

Here is a comparison of the fake site, versus the real one.
The first image is the official Exodus Support website, the second image shows the fake phishing website.
Looks pretty real, huh?

There are sections of the Exodus Support website which say that they would never ask for your 12 word seed phrase. No website or customer support should ever need to know your seed phrase and so alarm bells should ring at this point.

And whilst the fake site looked real, the scammers will rarely copy the whole website. This means that clicking the navigation doesn’t go anywhere. The Products, Support, Community, and Download links all keep you on the same page, asking for the seed phrase.

But, this looked like an official email. And the website looks quite real. And if I look in my web browser, there is a little padlock assuring me the website is safe!

Wrong.

We’ve been told to trust the padlock. If you see a padlock in your browser, the connection is secure – everything is safe, right? But this just means the you have a safe connection between your computer and the website you are visiting. The padlock doesn’t tell you if the website is real or fake. If that website is a scam website, the padlock confirms you are safely connected to the scam website. Nothing more.
The first image shows the secure connection to Exodus, verified by Cloudflare. The second shows the secure connection to the phishing site, verified by Let’s Encrypt.
On closer inspection — the official Exodus team use Cloudflare to verify the connection to their website. The fake site uses a different provider; Let’s Encrypt. There is no good reason why one company would use two different companies to issue their security certificate.

This isn’t something I would expect most people to pick up on. On seeing the padlock, people presume the site must be legit. But in this case, it’s not.

These are the biggest tell-tale signs:
1. The email is asking you to update or provide personal or security information AND provides a quick link to click to update your details.
2. The website address is not the same as the official website — if you are unsure, use a search engine to get to the official website before signing in or giving away information.
3. Often, none of the other links on the website work. This is not a fool-proof way of detecting a scam, but you can try clicking around the site before you start entering information to see if the website is real.
4. Don’t enter information on a website without the padlock icon. But also know that the padlock icon doesn’t tell you whether the website is real or fake.
How to report phishing

If you receive an email or find a website you think could be trying to trick you out of some information, you could simply ignore it or delete it. However, there are people out there who aren’t as savvy or aware as you – and with just a few clicks, you can help protect them from falling for the scam.

A lot of the big tech companies try to stop you getting scammed. If they know a scam site exists, their apps will jump in and tries to protect you. It sometimes looks like this:

But to know these sites exist, they need people like you to report them. And you can do that in a few different ways; by email address, or visiting a website.

Reporting phishing by email

This is a very straight forward approach. You receive a phishing email and before you delete it, choose the “Forward” option in your email app and send it to one or all of these email addresses:
```
phish@phishtank.com, scam@netcraft.com, phish@office365.microsoft.com, report@phishing.gov.uk
```
This will send the fake email and any websites to companies like Phishtank, Netcraft, and Microsoft who decide whether they think it’s a phish or not. If they do, they’ll block it for everyone.

Interestingly, the last email address sends it to the UK Government who as of 31st March 2021, received more than 5,500,000 reports and work with hosting companies to remove links to malicious websites.

Report phishing manually

Google! That’s the big one. There are so many Google Chrome users that you should probably report any phishing to Google. Unfortunately, they don’t have an email address to forward your junk to. You have to use the Google Safe Browsing Report a Phish form.

This means you’ll have to manually copy and paste links across into the form. So tedious. I’d expect something more from Google, but it is what it is.

Russia’s answer to Google – also allows you to manually submit sites to Yandex. This means people using Yandex browser for desktop and mobile, Yandex mail, Yandex DNS and other Yandex services I don’t really know about will benefit from your reports.

You can report manually to both Phishtank and Netcraft too, but they have the email address for quick-submission.

Stay safe

So, that’s pretty much it. Be aware of what you are clicking on and what information you are about to leak.

If you find a phish, help others catch it first by reporting to the email addresses or websites mentioned above.

Good luck out there on the wild west web.

If you ever want to geek out and chat with me about internet privacy and security – drop me a message via Matrix to @matt:gossip.land or via Mastodon to @matt@oslo.town
9 April 2021
The best web browser for iPhone

Apple have updated (or will soon update) your iPhone to iOS 14 – a shiny new version of everything Apple for your handheld computer. One of the new features of iOS 14 is that you can change your default web browser away from Safari.

But why would you want to?

To be honest, Safari on iPhone is a pretty good web browser, but using other web browsers have other benefits. Maybe you want one that is going to protect your privacy more aggressively? Maybe you want to use a different search engine? Maybe you want to sync your bookmarks between your computer and phone?

Whatever your reasons, there are lots of web browsers to choose from. And below, I’m going to go through the most popular and best alternatives to Safari for your iPhone.

A lot of this info is entirely subjective. I used to work for a web browser company for 5 years, and now work at Microsoft (who have their own web browser) – so I would like to think I know what I’m talking about.

Here we look at 11 web browsers. From worst to first.

11. Google Chrome

Ok, one thing you should be aware of is that I am pretty much anti-Google. They are the biggest advertising company on the web. Their business model is to know as much about you as possible.

Google Chrome is the default choice for many web users. It works well. And, if you are happy with using Google, then continue to use Google. But if you value your privacy in any way, the maybe don’t use Google or Google Chrome.

The browser itself isn’t that bad but Google owns a monopoly on the internet so it might be nice to support someone else.

Official Site · Google Chrome on the App Store

10. Cake web browser

This web browser disappoints me so much because it had so much potential and then just turned out to be… trash.

I loved that when you did a search, instead of showing the results page, it opened the top results in tabs that you swipe between. And the home screen had cool illustrations – and the app icon was nice.

But then you couldn’t really pick from a good amount of search engines, and then they switched out the cool home page with lots of celebrity news and other crap.

The way the product developed screamed that they are torn between making a good product and making money. And their desire to make money is killing their product.

Official Site · Cake web browser on the App Store

09. Brave

Started by Brendan Eich – known for being the creator of the JavaScript programming language, co-founder of Mozilla, and opposing same sex marriage.

Brave is privacy-focused and block trackers. On one hand they are stopping you from from seeing adverts on websites. Then with the other hand, they serve you “privacy respecting” ads themselves and pay you money to see them. Well, they pay you in cryptocurrency.

The browser itself isn’t bad, but the way their advertising model works benefits Brave as a company more than anything else. Oh, and did I mention that Brendan Eich opposes same-sex marriage?

Official Site · Brave on the App Store

08. Qwant

Based in French France, Qwant is another web browser made by a search engine company. As a search engine, they promise not to track you as you search. As a web browser, they are very basic.

I like when a European company steps up and offers a privacy-driven alternative to the technology giants in the United States of America. So, I can fully get behind Qwant in that regards.

But building a browser is not their focus. Updates are slow. At the time of writing, their app hasn’t been updated for 10 months – which is a lot of bug fixes you are missing out on.

Official Site · Qwant on the App Store

07. Ecosia

The Germany-based search engine that plants trees with their profits has their own web browser. And it’s… very average.

By far the biggest selling point about Ecosia is their commitment to environmentally friendly projects and, during this battle against climate change, it’s a very welcomed addition to the search engine market.

I can highly recommend the search engine. But, as a browser? Average.

Official Site · Ecosia on the App Store

06. Yandex

Imagine Google, but in Russian.

Yandex is Russia’s answer to Google and whilst that might sound scary to some, it’s probably no more scary than using Google Chrome.

Presuming you have a Yandex account, you can sync everything with Yandex on your computer, it has a Turbo Mode to load pages faster if your internet is slow, has a nicely presented news section called Zen.

It’s a polished product and nice to look at, but is that enough for me to use it? Their ad blocking and search engine options are basic, so, No. Probably not.

Official Site · Yandex browser on the App Store

05. Firefox Focus/Klar

Firefox Focus (or Firefox Klar if you are in a German-speaking nation) is a lightweight version of the full Firefox browser. It’s a privacy-focused browser with all the tracking protection and content blocking of the standard Firefox.

Where Firefox Focus differs is that every time you close the web browser, it deletes all information about what you were doing. That means it logs you out of all sites, forgets your browsing history and basically self-destructs. Nice for privacy, but a real pain if you want to stay logged into a specific website.

What you can also do is have Firefox Focus installed and then set it as a Content Blocker in Safari – which means you can use Safari with all the privacy protection of Firefox. Nice.

Official Site · Firefox Focus on the App Store

04. DuckDuckGo

A privacy-based search engine making a web browser. And, from a privacy angle, they do a pretty good job. The browser has a variety of built-in features to keep you from getting tracked online.

Much like Firefox Focus, DuckDuckGo has a self-desctruct mode for when you are done with your browsing and want to delete all traces of whatever filth you were looking at.

Is it private? Yes. Does it only let you search DuckDuckGo? Yes. Is it a pain to stay logged into websites? Also yes.

Official Site · DuckDuckGo on the App Store

03. Microsoft Edge

Microsoft don’t have a great reputation when it comes to web browsers but, I have to admit, Microsoft Edge is not that bad. Especially if you use Microsoft Edge on a Windows computer too.

Sign in with your Microsoft Account and everything will sync between your Windows computer and your phone. The default search engine is Microsoft Bing – but as you use other search engines they appear in the settings so you can switch your default.

However, syncing is Microsoft’s thing. They, like Google, want to know as much about you as possible. You are encouraged to share your browsing data and opt-in to a “personalised experience”.

Official Site · Microsoft Edge on the App Store

02. Opera Touch

This browser has two of my favourite features of any mobile browser;

The Fast Action Button – where all menus are hidden behind one button which fans out as you hold your thumb on it. Nice!

A built-in cyptocurrency wallet – so you can send, receive and buy Ethereum straight from your browser and sign into services like CryptoKitties.

Other than that, the app is fairly standard. It does ad blocking. You can pick from a fixed list of search engines. It doesn’t sync with your computer, but will let you send pages between your phone and Opera on your computer.

Most of the time, I enjoy using this app. But then sometimes I don’t because it lacks a bit of polish in places.

Official Site · Opera Touch on the App Store

01. Firefox for iPhone

Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, have gone for the privacy angle. Today that is their bread and butter and so include some content blockers to make sure the big evil tech companies aren’t tracking you as you browse the web in an attempt to sell your information.

They also let you customise the search engine. Don’t want to search using Google? Good. Then switch to whatever search engine you want. You can pick one of the search engines bundled with the app or add your own.

Sign in with a Mozilla account and you can sync all your bookmarks between your phone and Firefox for your computer.

The way the app is designed is… okay. It doesn’t look super sleek in places, and can sometimes feel “clunky”. But, it’s a solid web browser and comes with a good hearty recommendation from me.

Official Site · Firefox on the App Store

Conclusion

As I started to write this blog post, I didn’t really know where it was going to end up or which browser would top my recommendations; and it turned out it was Firefox for iPhone.

But, that said, I would immediately change the default search engine in Firefox away from Google to something like tree-planting search engine Ecosia, or a privacy-respecting search engine like Qwant or DuckDuckGo.

Ideally, I want a good privacy-based web browser with a built-in crytocurrency wallet that isn’t made by a multi-million dollar tech company in the USA. I guess the closest you get to that is Opera Touch – which is a Norwegian company, majority-owned by a Chinese consortium, with the product team based in Poland (I think).

Respectable companies like Qwant and Ecosia, whilst based in the EU, apparently don’t have the resources to make both a good search engine and a good web browser. They rightly focus on their primary product; search.

But Firefox for iPhone is probably the best all-rounder. It’s good on privacy, it lets you customise the search engine, you can sync between your computer and mobile. Mozilla are a US-based not-for-profit organisation and don’t harvest, sell or monetise your personal data.

I guess that’s as much as we can expect from a web browser in 2020.

Worth mentioning

If privacy is really high on your agenda, you could also check out Onion browser – which runs on the Tor network. If you know what the Tor network is, you probably know which browser you want to use anyway.

17 October 2020
Why I switched to Firefox

My obsession with the internet began long before I left the UK for colder climates. Upon starting my first job in 2001, I ran a gaming website and was geeking out to colleagues about Opera browser.

So, when my inbox lit up with a job offer from the Norwegian-based company, I packed my bags and never looked back. I didn’t know anything about Norway, but what I did know is that I would be joining a company of very talented people.

Over the next five years at Opera Software, I learnt so much about web browsers. One of the toughest decisions developers had to face was switching the code at the heart of the product. The rendering engine. It meant a move away from their own model to Blink, which powers Chromium – the basis of Google Chrome.

This was an important decision. From a business perspective, it was due to work out well for Opera. The company was able to get rid of a huge development cost and concentrate efforts on features.

When it came to other players in the browser space, there were a few different rendering engines:

Microsoft Internet Explorer used Trident
Apple Safari used WebKit
Mozilla Firefox used Gecko
Google Chrome used Blink (based on WebKit)
Opera used Presto

Although Opera Software were very proud of Presto, I could see the logic behind the decision at the time. Opera’s market share on desktop hovered at around 3%. Google’s strength online meant that Chrome‘s browser share grew fast. And Chrome used Blink – an open-source project that both companies could contribute to.

For website owners, this meant that Safari, Chrome, and Opera would render pages in a similar way. Less headaches all-round when it came to compatibility issues. A good thing, right?

Let’s fast-forward to 2019

The state of the browser industry looks quite different. Microsoft replaced Internet Explorer with Edge, and there is more competition than ever. At least on the surface.

Apple Safari
Brave
Google Chrome
Microsoft Edge
Mozilla Firefox
Opera
UC Browser
Vivaldi
Yandex

And now that same list, grouped by rendering engine with market share added:

Blink / Chromium
61.75% – Google Chrome
4.22% – UC Browser
3.15% – Opera
2.15% – Microsoft Edge (uses EdgeHTML, soon Blink)
0.41% – Yandex
0.05% – Vivaldi
??% – Brave

WebKit
15.12% – Apple Safari

Gecko
4.92% – Mozilla Firefox

As you can see; Blink/Chromium has the lions share.

Google’s Chromium project sparked an easy way to build a browser. The core components are now handled out-of-the-box, allowing companies to focus unique features. Or money-making opportunities.

All you need to know; Chrome is the green line.

Google Chrome is force-fed to users of any Google product. Any non-Chrome-based browser on a Google product results in a “worse experience”. Google websites optimise for Chromium and the masses rely on Google websites.

What is worse than making a website that doesn’t work the same in all browsers? Making changes to the browser to “fix” your broken websites.

This week, a Mozilla developer reverted a patch in Chromium which did not comply to spec. The patch in question was there to fix a problem on Google Photos.

A change like this means Google’s mistakes in web code would be “fixed” by using Google’s web browser.

A screenshot of a tweet by @ecbos_

Chromium holds a majority akin to the monopoly Microsoft held with Internet Explorer. And with Microsoft making questionable decisions, that was not a good place to be in. Even the European Commission recognised this under competition laws.

And that’s the long-winded version of why I’ve turned to Mozilla Firefox.

Sat near the bottom of the browser usage tables with a weak market share, Mozilla holds strong values. The company is a non-profit foundation – relying on partner deals and user donations. They aren’t looking to collect and sell your data (unlike a lot of other companies).

Having competition in the market is healthy for everyone. Using less Google products is healthy for everyone.

I’d encourage you to give Firefox a try. Set it as your default browser for a few weeks and see how you get along. If not for “the good of the internet”, then because it’s currently rated “The best browser of 2019” by Top 10 Reviews.

After 80 hours of researching and testing, we found Mozilla Firefox is the best overall internet browser because of how fast pages load, how quickly it navigates to websites and, most importantly, how secure this browser is.
Google Chrome is also a very good browser with the same toolset as Firefox, and while it typically comes down to personal preference, Mozilla Firefox did do slightly better in our speed tests and proved to be much more secure than Google Chrome.
The Best Web Browsers 2019 (Top 10 Reviews)

What web browser are you using? And are you willing to give Firefox a try?

1 February 2019