As if it wasn’t bad enough that they want me to use a random internet service to add a keyboard to a usb wifi receiver, they have the balls to put this for Firefox users. I clicked out of pure curiosity, as I’m not even remotely interested in involving a corporate internet service in getting my keyboard connected to my computer. This is the message you get now on Logi Options software if you have a Unifying Receiver:
For the curious: https://logiwebconnect.com
EDIT: some people on the thread have brought up that the error message being displayed for Firefox users is due to the WebUSB API not being implemented by Firefox due to security concerns. This still does not justify having to use a web app to plug peripherals to a PC.
I kind of see the point in this.
Things I can do with Chrome’ish browsers:
- Install GrapheneOS
- Reinstall my Pixel phone.
- Flash ESPhome devices.
All this with a single browser, no 3rd party applications. I think it’s called WebSerial and it’s a neat feature. Quite sad that Firefox doesn’t have it.
If you can really overwrite your operating system with your web browser, that sounds like a security nightmare.
You have to manually allow bootloader unlocking from within your phone’s developer menu which is hidden by default, and then you need to boot your phone into the bootloader menu. Only then will the browser be allowed to interact with the phone, and even then you get messages on the phone that you have to confirm to allow anything to happen.
Nobody’s accidentally going to replace the OS on their phone by visiting a website.
Wait until you learn about the government. To get your birth or marriage certificate, my county requires that you go to a totally shady URL of a private company that actually is in the business of printing those and shipping them, for a fee of course. Oh and enter your SSN and ID please, without knowing if there’s any security standards they follow.
Am I the only one spooked that the government would not keep those records itself??? And ask a private entity that returns almost nothing if googled by name?!?
This depends on your government I guess? In Germany the authority for passports is a private company (former state property and now again owned by the Federal Republic of Germany) - but indeed that sounds scary.
Yes, that’s in the US where shady things are done like this a lot. Having lived in diffeeent countries abroad this doesn’t happen anywhere else as far as I can tell.
Oh it does. Neolibs looooove privatization. I’m from Honduras, where the modus operandi is to drive public entities to the ground from the inside in order to justify privatization, and then just pretend it’s doing its job while corpos and politicians line their pockets. We’re currently under a leftist government, and one of the first steps it took was to retake control of the energy sector, since it got privatized and sold to a Colombian company, a stunt that ended up in millions in debt and led to a mud fight between the private company and the government, which resulted in, among all the lawsuits back and forth, constant country-wide blackouts during a few months this year. It’s the first leftist government in over a decade, and it’s admittedly not doing great (we really don’t have our shit together), but people here tend to forget we were sold a capitalist dystopia dressed up as a utopia, by a druglord-president that’s currently holed up in NY over drug and arms trafficking charges.
Mmmm… I sure love how if I want to check my credit score for free I have to go through several different companies, all of which have shady-looking websites that were probably last updated 10yrs ago (but only for the page where you request info on your credit score, otherwise they look fairly modern); especially when said companies have had a reputation for leaking everyone’s info and yet are still the official US contracted companies for it. Granted, it’s been a while since I last tried to do it, but it’s really uncomfortable.
In the beginning there was NCSA Mosaic, and Mosaic called itself NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1), and Mosaic displayed pictures along with text, and there was much rejoicing.
And behold, then came a new web browser known as “Mozilla”, being short for “Mosaic Killer,” but Mosaic was not amused, so the public name was changed to Netscape, and Netscape called itself Mozilla/1.0 (Win3.1), and there was more rejoicing. And Netscape supported frames, and frames became popular among the people, but Mosaic did not support frames, and so came “user agent sniffing” and to “Mozilla” webmasters sent frames, but to other browsers they sent not frames.
And Netscape said, let us make fun of Microsoft and refer to Windows as “poorly debugged device drivers,” and Microsoft was angry. And so Microsoft made their own web browser, which they called Internet Explorer, hoping for it to be a “Netscape Killer”. And Internet Explorer supported frames, and yet was not Mozilla, and so was not given frames. And Microsoft grew impatient, and did not wish to wait for webmasters to learn of IE and begin to send it frames, and so Internet Explorer declared that it was “Mozilla compatible” and began to impersonate Netscape, and called itself Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 95), and Internet Explorer received frames, and all of Microsoft was happy, but webmasters were confused.
And Microsoft sold IE with Windows, and made it better than Netscape, and the first browser war raged upon the face of the land. And behold, Netscape was killed, and there was much rejoicing at Microsoft. But Netscape was reborn as Mozilla, and Mozilla built Gecko, and called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826, and Gecko was the rendering engine, and Gecko was good. And Mozilla became Firefox, and called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; sv-SE; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041108 Firefox/1.0, and Firefox was very good. And Gecko began to multiply, and other browsers were born that used its code, and they called themselves Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040825 Camino/0.8.1 the one, and Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071008 SeaMonkey/1.0 another, each pretending to be Mozilla, and all of them powered by Gecko.
And Gecko was good, and IE was not, and sniffing was reborn, and Gecko was given good web code, and other browsers were not. And the followers of Linux were much sorrowed, because they had built Konqueror, whose engine was KHTML, which they thought was as good as Gecko, but it was not Gecko, and so was not given the good pages, and so Konquerer began to pretend to be “like Gecko” to get the good pages, and called itself Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.2; FreeBSD) (KHTML, like Gecko) and there was much confusion.
Then cometh Opera and said, “surely we should allow our users to decide which browser we should impersonate,” and so Opera created a menu item, and Opera called itself Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; en) Opera 9.51, or Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; U; en; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061208 Firefox/2.0.0 Opera 9.51, or Opera/9.51 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) depending on which option the user selected.
And Apple built Safari, and used KHTML, but added many features, and forked the project, and called it WebKit, but wanted pages written for KHTML, and so Safari called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; de-de) AppleWebKit/85.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/85.5, and it got worse.
And Microsoft feared Firefox greatly, and Internet Explorer returned, and called itself Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0) and it rendered good code, but only if webmasters commanded it to do so.
And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to be Safari. And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded.
The real game changer was going from 256 colors to 16 bit. The jump to 24 bit/true color after that wasn’t as huge.
This still does not justify having to use a web app to plug peripherals to a PC.
Unify is so you can add several devices to a single USB dongle. The keyboard itself should work out of the box without using that website, that’s an extra feature
OK that makes more sense. But still. I’m sure it would have been possible to do that with only local resources. This is just a security nightmare waiting to happen, even if you don’t care about the privacy implications.
My guess is that they wanted a single interface with a single codebase that works on all OSes, as long as they run a browser that supports it.
Having said that, they could just ship a HTML file and do it all locally instead of on the web. I still don’t quite understand why they changed this, as the feature used to be built-in to their app.
