Category: Internet

How to Enable Pasting Text on Sites That Block It

Some companies think they’re increasing security by disabling your ability to paste into form fields, such as the password field. But in reality, all they’re doing is frustrating users–and probably decreasing security by blocking password managers. Here’s how to solve this annoyance in Chrome and Firefox.

Source: How to Enable Pasting Text on Sites That Block It (How-To Geek)

Ted Cruz Pushes Bill to Hinder Community Broadband

Ordinarily, this is not a political blog – there are plenty of political blogs out there for those into that sort of thing, and there are also “Faux News” outlets for the racists, religious zealots, and just plain hateful people among us. Assuming you are not a total idiot (hopefully you would not be reading this blog if you are), you understand how important it is to prevent huge corporations such as Comcast and AT&T from enacting policies that are increasingly anti-consumer, and from successfully preventing new competition in areas where they have near-monopoly status. So, the last thing we need is a president that is in the pockets of the huge incumbent ISP’s and cable providers, and apparently that is exactly what you’d get with Ted Cruz (not to mention that many reports from former acquaintances indicate he’s just an awful person; kind of like the schoolyard bully you probably hated as a kid – if you want a repeat of a Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson presidency, Ted is probably your guy).

Now Presidential candidate Ted Cruz is the latest to rush to the defense of AT&T, Comcast, and other large providers with a new amendment aimed at defending these bills, which sometimes even ban communities from striking public/private partnerships to shore up broadband coverage.

Source: Ted Cruz Pushes Bill to Hinder Community Broadband | DSLReports

Why Comcast’s Main Justification For Broadband Caps is Crap | DSLReports

This is a bit outside the normal content of this blog but I thought it important to pass along. For more articles of this type I suggest you visit both DSLReports and Stop the Cap! on a regular basis.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts recently justified the company’s slowly-expanding usage cap “trials” by insisting that broadband should be treated just like gasoline and electricity. According to the CEO, broadband is just like both, in that users should be forced to pay more money for more usage, because it costs Comcast significantly more money when individual consumption soars.

“We don’t want anybody to ever not want to stay connected on our network, but just as with every other thing in your life, if you drive 100,000 miles or 1,000 miles, you buy more gasoline,” stated the CEO. “If you turn on the air conditioning to 60 vs. 72, you consume more electricity. The same is true for usage, so I think the same for a wireless device. The more bits you use, the more you pay.”

The problem with Roberts implying Comcast faces higher costs with higher usage? Broadband is absolutely nothing like electricity, water, gasoline, or any other utility. Over at its POTS and PANS blog, CCG Consulting is the latest to make the important point that bandwidth isn’t a spigot. They note that Comcast faces two major costs for bandwidth: transit and and raw bandwidth. …..

Source: Why Comcast’s Main Justification For Broadband Caps is Crap | DSLReports

How To Disable Annotations and Pop-Ups on YouTube Videos (with or without login)

Do you hate those overlays and annotations that appear on YouTube videos? Me, too! Here’s how to disable them. If you are logged into YouTube it is a simple procedure as described here:

How To Disable Annotations and Pop-Ups on YouTube Videos (Field Guide/Gizmodo)

But what if you don’t have a YouTube account or don’t want to login? Well that’s also easy, if you have the popular ad-blocking extension uBlock Origin installed (the link is to the addon’s Github site, but it should be available in the usual addon repositories for Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, and perhaps a couple of other browsers). All you need to do is this:

In the Addon manager (Firefox) or Extensions page (Chrome(ium)), click the button to go to the Preferences for the uBlock Origin addon, or click the Options link.

If a “Show Dashboard” button appears, click it.

Click on the “3rd-party filters” tab. Scroll to the bottom of the page, to the “Custom” section.

In the textbox you should see a line that looks like this (possibly the last line in the textbox:

! https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/yt_annoyances_other.txt

Uncomment this line by removing the exclamation point and space character from the start, so it looks like this:

https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/yt_annoyances_other.txt

Click the “Parse” button below the text box.  Now, just above the textbox, you should see a new entry that says:

https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/yt_annoyances_other.txt‎ : 0 used out of ? [outdated]

Don’t worry about the word “outdated”, this isn’t a filter that needs to be changed frequently.  Now look for the “Apply Changes” button in the upper right hand corner of the page.  Click it.  The word “outdated” will change to a “purge cache” button.  Don’t click that.  Just close the tab or window.  You’re done.

If you use AdBlock rather than uBlock Origin you might want to consider switching, because in my experience uBlock Origin is more effective in blocking ads and other annoyances.  You can always switch back if you don’t think it’s a better blocker.