Text-Based User Interfaces (TUI; CLI)

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Forum for advanced users who grok the power of text-based apps, the advantage of tmux/GNU screen, the keyboard and who often find the mouse a hinderance to a fast workflow. A text-based UI is also a decent escape from enshitified resources.

This forum broadly covers tools, hacks, and advocacy of text-based environments.

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evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org

Just dodged a tracker pixel (I think) -- thanks to a text-based mail client and Tor (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org to c/text_ui@lemmy.sdf.org

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Tracker pixels are surprisingly commonly used by legitimate senders.. your bank, your insurance company, any company you patronize. These assholes hide a 1-pixel image in HTML that tracks when you open your email and your IP (thus whereabouts).

I use a text-based mail client in part for this reason. But I got sloppy and opened an HTML attachment in a GUI browser without first inspecting the HTML. I inspected the code afterwards. Fuck me, I thought.. a tracker pixel. Then I visited just the hostname in my browser. Got a 403 Forbidden. I was happy to see that.

Can I assume these idiots shot themselves in the foot with a firewall Tor blanket block? Or would the anti-tor firewall be smart enough to make an exception for tracker pixel URLs?

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[–] Zachariah@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

As long as your graphical email client has the loading of remote images turned off, the tracking pixel won’t be visited.

Most/Many email software has this be default or can be enabled: Thunderbird, iOS Mail, FastMail app and website, etc.

Text-based email is cool though. My college had us using Pine back in the day.

[–] evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I suppose you could even say text-based clients are at a disadvantage because when we opt to render the HTML graphically, a full-blown browser is launched which is likely less hardened than something like whatever profile and engine Thunderbird embeds.

In my case I created a firejailed browser with --net=none so I could hit a certain key binding to launch the neutered browser to render an HTML attachment in a forced-offline context--- but I was too fucking lazy to dig up what keys I bound to that which is why I (almost?) got burnt.

[–] kchr@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Good idea to open HTML attachments in an isolated browser. I normally open them in lynx but sometimes it doesn't work as intended.

For any (neo)mutt users out there, you can configure this quite nicely by defining your MIME handlers in ~/.mailcap:

text/html; firejail --net=none [...]

Then bind your Enter key to open attachments via mailcap:

bind attach <return>    view-mailcap

[–] evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

In neomutt I ended up customizing the print function. So if I “print” an attachment, it launches a script that runs wkhtmltopdf inside firejail --net=none followed by rendering in Firefox (also inside firejail --net=none), so I get an instant isolated firefox view as well as a PDF.

I’m happy with that replacement because I would never want to send something straight to a printer anyway. I would want to preview before printing. And the print function is documented right on the screen when looking at attachments, so no key binding to try to remember.