- Brave is great, but I just wish it wasn’t Chromium based.
It’s always been ironic to me that a Privacy browser is dependent on source code primarily controlled by a company that derives the majority of its revenue from ads… exactly what the browser itself was spun off to shield its users against.
- Thank you for putting together and maintaining Frinkiac!
I use Frinkiac multiple times a week to share memes with friends. We all grew up watching S1-8 weeknights over dinner and can quote those episodes almost flawlessly.
Would love to read some blog posts on how the site works, anecdotes from 10 years of maintaining it, legal troubles faced (etc)!
- I was surprised (and frustrated) that OpenAI’s and Perplexity’s browsers are both Chromium-based. I would have thought that they would have gone with a Firefox (or WebKit) fork given:
1. That Google is a competitor to them in the AI space.
2. That Google has such a strong stranglehold over the web, and Chromium/Chrome is a big part of that. I mean, why ultimately help your competitor here?
- 100% agree. I would happily run a dedicated enterprise browser that blocks downloads, has DLP, has watermarking (etc) if it meant I could use my own PC. Not Browser Isolation or VDI - An actual enterprise browser.
My job is pretty much 100% in browser though, so I realise this isn’t viable for everyone.
- Yes. The acronym is “ZTNA” (Zero Trust Network Access).
It is an alternative to a traditional corporate VPN that addresses a few architectural issues; namely:
- L3 connectivity (which allows for lateral movement) to the corporate network. - Inbound exposure to the VPN gateway (scaling can become a challenge, not to mention continuous vulnerabilities from… certain vendors) - Policy management can get convoluted if you want to do micro-segmentation properly.
ZTNA is essentially an “inside-out” architecture and acts (kind of) like a L4 proxy. I’m going to butcher this explanation, but:
1. Company installs apps/VMs/containers throughout their network. These must have network reachability to the internal apps/services the company wants to make available to its users.
2. These apps/VMs/containers establish TLS tunnels back to the company’s tenant in the vendor’s cloud.
3. Company rolls out the vendor’s ZTNA client to user devices. This also establishes a TLS tunnel to the vendor’s cloud. Hence the vendor’s cloud is like a MitM gatekeeper.
4. Company creates policies in the vendor’s cloud that says “User A can access App X via app/VM/container Z”
5. Even if App X is on the same LAN segment as App Y, App Y is invisible to User A because connectivity to the internal apps happens at L4.
It is an interesting architecture. That being said, ZTNA solutions have their own issues as well (you can probably already spot some based on my explanation above!)
(Note: I worked for a security vendor that sold a ZTNA solution as part of their ~4-5 years ago. Things could be different now.)
- Oh wow, it supports directly specifying a Pydantic model as an output schema that it will adhere to for structured JSON output. That’s fantastic!
https://github.com/googleapis/python-genai?tab=readme-ov-fil...
- Isn’t this the whole point of working; particularly at a FAANG?
> It’s a shallow post-mortem
I respectfully disagree. It’s an 8 minute read. Sure, it’s mostly in dot-point form, but personally I’d rather that than some massive 80,000 word blog post that I’m going to drop 1/8 of the way through.
Since when does a personal blog post need to be a well constructed and lengthy document?
Solitude in your 30s (particularly as a DINK or SINK household) is dangerously addictive.
No need to leave the house… but it does lead one to feel disconnected more broadly over a prolonged period.
They’ll have to pry WFH out of my cold, dead hands; but I must say, the times I do travel to the office and spend a day chatting with people are incredibly energising (though also very unproductive!)