Monthly Shaarli

All links of one month in a single page.

December, 2021

Paywalls

or more accurately, how to get around them.

12ft Ladder by Thomas Millar uses a very clever approach - pretend to be the Google crawler!

Does not work for every site (some sites are clearly more serious about locking away their content - one could ask why they even bother publishing on the web?) but works for many.

Only negative is that the code behind 12ft is not available. Which means that the service will only live for as long as the domain stays up, which by the way is hosted by Vercel. Also, any article URLs (along with other metadata such as your IP address) might be logged by the web service or their service providers.

Crypto exchanges

What I could find about some of the popular crypto exchanges.

Both Crypto.com and Coinbase are crypto exchanges and each offers its own native coin.

crypto.com

Foris DAX MT Limited, a company incorporated in Malta with Company number (C88392) trading under the name “Crypto.com” via the Crypto.com app is licensed as a Class 3 Virtual Financial Assets Service Provider by the Malta Financial Services Authority.
Foris DAX MT Limited is authorised to provide the following VFA services: 1. execution of orders on behalf of other persons; 2. dealing on own account; and 3. custodian or nominee services to experienced and non-experienced investors.
https://crypto.com

If you are a U.S. resident, your USD balances are held at Metropolitan Commercial Bank, an FDIC member and insured depository institution. Your USD balances held at Metropolitan Commercial Bank are insured up to USD $250,000. You retain ownership of those funds in Metropolitan Commercial Bank accounts, meaning your fiat funds cannot be claimed by Crypto.com or its creditors.
https://crypto.com/eea/security

Malta is a member of the European union and a member of the Economic and Monetary Union. Men innebär det att insättningsskyddet gäller? Inte än, om jag förstått saken rätt.

Ett europeiskt insättningsgarantisystem är under uppbyggnad. För mig ännu oklart om Sverige är del i detta (vi är ju utanför euro-zonen, men är vi med i bankunionen?).

A proposed European deposit insurance scheme, the European commission.

Foris DAX MT Limited (listing on opencorporates.com) is incorporated in Malta and headquartered in Singapore.

crypto.com appears to have its own subreddit.

coinbase

Coinbase Global

comparisons

talking about crypto

what if the exchange goes bust?

اللغةُ العربية .. تَسحرُكَ بكلماتها وجمالها وعذوبتها
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LCD monitor test images

By Han-Kwang Nienhuys, lagom.nl.

Use Firefox extensions (add-ons) on Android

Turns out this is harder than it should be.

First of all, you need to run Fennec (from F-Droid) and not Firefox (from Google's Play store), and you need to enable debug mode (which is incidentally a requirement for Firefox sync using a custom server). Note that even if you have previously enabled Firefox sync using a custom server, you must re-enable debug mode again for the custom add-on collection setting to become visible.

To enable debug mode, open Settings, click on About Fennec, then click on the logo a number of times until a popup that says debug mode is enabled pops up.

Now you will find a section called Custom Add-on collection in the Fennec settings.
Create your own custom collection by going to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections, login using your Firefox account (you have to create a Firefox "profile", whatever that is).

My add-on collection: ID: 17175532, name: fennec.
Fennec will quit automatically at this point. Restart it, and now you can install any of the add-ons in your collection.

Side-note: it's too bad that Mozilla forces us through these hoops to use extensions on Android. I hope this becomes easier in the future.

Hydrophobic Patterns Make Spinning Water Drops - The Action Lab
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I show you how how I made spinning water droplets

Neat!
Read the paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08919-2

Emojis
Most commercial VPNs are demonstrably useless
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A recent report by Digital Lab highlights their security and data integrity practices, and also examines their ownership structures, clearly demonstrating that many VPN "brands" are owned by the same companies, many of whose owners or executives have known prior legal or moral problems.

Some VPN services are honest in their marketing, though. Still, many (including some of the more popular) employ dark patterns, e.g., making it unnecessarily hard to cancel subscriptions, or auto-renewing subscriptions, etc.

Read for yourself: "Security and Privacy of VPNs Running on Windows 10", by Digital Lab at Consumer Reports, which is an illuminating expose of 16 commercial VPN services.

Via kryptera.se, Swedish, who also graciously hosts the report (PDF, English).

Take care to define what you are trying to achieve before deciding to subscribe to a VPN. Do you primarily want to hide your web traffic from your ISP? A VPN can do that, but you are simply substituting your ISP for the ISP of the VPN provider.
But if all you want is to change the apparent geographic location of your traffic, then a VPN works fine. But you could just as easily make do with a proxy server.

PS. Do you have an extra computer or a Raspberry Pi lying around? Well, then you could build your own virtual private network. This is particularly useful when travelling abroad or anytime you have to use someone else's network.

خطبة في ذكرى المولد النبوي الشريف من الجامع الأزهر
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في ذكرى المولد النبوي الشريف خطبة الجمعة من الجامع الأزهر مع د./أحمد عمر هاشم، عضو هيئة كبار العلماء