Spyke

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firefox

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On Linux, Firefox stores site-data in a folder named the same

The tilde (~) means that path is located in the per-user home directory. The default behaviour is for user home directories to be only accessible by that specific user.

The encryption you're referring to is likely specific to Firefox Sync (i.e. syncing your FF settings, history, etc. across devices). Sync is end-to-end encrypted. But I'm not surprised that it's unencrypted on disk.

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A rare polar bear showed up on the shores of Iceland. Police shot it

We can all agree that it's a tragedy that this animal died.

The other consideration is that polar bears are amongst the most relentless and vicious predators around. A polar bear around an inhabited area is very much a serious safety threat. Iceland doesn't have any animal predators and therefore also wouldn't have the trained people or equipment necessary to deal with neutralizing and relocating this bear.

I would have liked to have seen the animal safely moved. But I suspect there's more context to this story that we don't have beyond the headline.

canada

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WestJet flight diverts to Winnipeg after passenger tries to open door

Do you end up on a no-fly list from doing something like this?
Because it was a flight from Richmond to Toronto. The person likely lives in one of those two places and was released in Winnipeg. Are they now faced with the only option of bus/train/car to get home?
Then, similarly, have to do that again to get back to Winnipeg for their court date?

I hope they can't fly, because that would be some sweet consequences.

privacy

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Question for those knowledgeable about alternative web protocols (gopher, gemini, etc): Would it be possible to create a tool that translates http sites to those formats, on demand?

The simple answer is yes.
It's possible to encode or tunnel anything over any protocol.

The next question is why isn't it done more?

  1. http has basically become the defacto internet protocol for all media content. This has resulted in a lot of other protocols from becoming blocked due lack of support or due to firewall rules.
  2. efficiency. http (and all the other protocols it runs atop) have become highly optimized for doing what it does. To layer something like http over another protocol, would certainly be possible but it would likely be slower, less responsive and lack a lot of the niceties that make http work as well as it does.

For the above reasons it's actually more common to see other protocols run on top of http. This is especially common to prevent blocking and censorship by making the traffic look like normal http traffic when it may actually be private messaging apps, file transfers, VPN, etc.