Month: May 2017

TL;DR: I’ve renewed my subscription to Private Internet Access, and intend to continue using the service indefinitely.

This is the third and final blog post in my series on Private Internet Access. Part One lists the different problems I encountered when trying to use Private Internet Access, and Part Two discusses how I solved most of them. When Part Two was published, my remaining unsolved problems were (a) extreme difficulty checking mail in Evolution, (b) my first attempt to connect always failed, and (c) I was blocked from freenode. A day after publishing the second post, I updated it to discuss how to get the first connection attempt to work (save your password system-wide so it’s accessible by the login screen… seems obvious in retrospect).

So what did I do about email and freenode?

Email

I’m really happy with my solution for email. The problem was that I experienced a very high number of timeout errors sending and receiving messages when using Private Internet Access, far more than when not using it. A PR representative from Private Internet Access told me I needed to ask them to whitelist our mail server for SMTP, but I knew that wasn’t the problem because it worked OK sometimes, and I was having trouble with IMAP too. Everything email-related was just so much slower when using Private Internet Access.

My solution was to uninstall Evolution and install Geary instead. I now wish I had done this a long time ago. Geary has many shortcomings and significant room for improvement, but I’ve never been more pleased with a mail client. With Geary, reading my mail is no longer painful. Whereas Evolution takes several seconds to load every individual message, and often times out and fails, even when not using Private Internet Access, Geary takes a few seconds to load an entire conversation, which speeds things up tremendously. Conversation view is killer, a real must-have for a mail client. More importantly, timeouts and error messages are extremely rare with Geary, even when using Private Internet Access. Probably the difference is that Geary just waits a lot longer before timing out. I did experience one day shortly after switching to Geary where I was unable to send any mail from my Igalia account, which at the time I attributed to Private Internet Access. However, I’ve had no trouble since then, so I think this was  just an intermittent problem.  Geary also has a much slicker user interface than Evolution. I’m not comfortable saying that Geary is going to be the future of mail for GNOME, since there is no question that Evolution is a far more capable client right now, but I’m very pleased with Geary and am looking forward to future development.

freenode

I’m really unhappy about my solution for freenode. If you use an  IRC client that has good support for NickServ or SASL authentication, then apparently there is nothing you need to do to access freenode besides configure that. However, neither Empathy nor Polari qualify here, and those are the only IRC clients that are interesting to me personally. With a little experimentation (and some help from Florian), I found both clients could be configured to authenticate with NickServ automatically. However, there’s no way to avoid being pestered with a private message in GNOME Shell from NickServ every time I connect, with the accompanying chat box to type my response. The Telepathy integration in GNOME Shell needs some serious work.

So I went a couple weeks where I rarely ever logged into freenode, using only the KiwiIRC web client when I needed to join for something specific, like for a meeting or to contact a specific person. Now, KiwiIRC is actually pretty nice and functional, but a web client doesn’t really meet my needs for daily use. In the end, I settled on connecting to freenode via Igalia’s Matrix server. Yes, I’m using Riot and, yes, that’s another web client, but I have to use it anyway, so it’s no difference to me.  Now, Matrix seems to be a really nice chat protocol, and Riot is at least decent as a Matrix client, but it is an extremely terrible IRC client. For one, there’s no way to tell who is online outside your own Matrix server. Seriously. (Why so many people are using it to access GIMPNet, I have no clue.) So I still log in to KiwiIRC whenever I need to check if someone is online on freenode, while continuing to connect to GIMPNet from Empathy, because — and I never thought I’d say this — Empathy at least works properly. This is a very poor solution, but it’s a worthwhile tradeoff for me to be able to use Private Internet Access. It also allows me to avoid the disastrous non-bug where Matrix silently drops any private messages that a non-authenticated IRC user sends to a Matrix bridge user on freenode. (Silently!) I’m told this is an intentional anti-spam feature, but I think it’s totally unacceptable. It just sounds to me like maybe Matrix should not be in the business of bridging to IRC at all, if it can’t figure out how to handle PMs. I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced any PM spam. But anyway, this is supposed to be a blog post about Private Internet Access, not a rant about Matrix’s IRC bridge, so that’s enough complaining about that.

Conspiracy Theory

So besides the fact that IRC is terrible, I’m pretty satisfied with Private Internet Access. You have to trust it, though. It’s not often that relatively small companies decide to spend tens of thousands of dollars sponsoring free software projects like GNOME. (Private Internet Access does that!) For all we know, it could be run by the NSA, seeking to gobble up the web browsing history of people who think they have something to hide, and donating to free software because it knows that free software users will recommend the service to more people. That’s a totally-unsubstantiated claim that I just made up and for which I have zero evidence to support, but I don’t know, and you don’t know, and that’s the point. You have to trust it. Or at least, you have to trust it relative to the level of trust you have in your ISP. But you probably shouldn’t trust your ISP, at least not if it’s a national company, so that makes Private Internet Access an easy choice for me.

Update: Read the first comment below. What on Earth is going on?

When did reCAPTCHA become so maddeningly difficult and time-consuming?

I wanted to read Matthew Garrett’s post on Intel’s remote AMT vulnerability, but since I’m using Private Internet Access, Cloudflare has gated it behind reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is much, much harder than it used to be. Although there seem to be a couple of other variants, nowadays you’re generally expected to identify squares that contain street signs and squares that contain mountains. Now either the answer key is regularly wrong, or I just don’t know what street signs and mountains are. You’d think the former… but there actually is a good degree of ambiguity in selecting which squares to tag.  Do I only tag all the squares that contain the signage-portion of the sign, or do I also tag the squares containing the signpost? (The former seems to work better, in my experience.) What if only a little bit of the sign extends into a particular square? (Jury’s out.) What if there are very distant signs in the background of the image, with many big signs in the foreground: should the distant signs be tagged too? And what constitutes a mountain anyway? Most of the “mountains” I see in the reCAPTCHA images look more like impressive hills to me. My guess is that reCAPTCHA wants me to tag any bit of elevated land as a mountain, but who knows, really.

Worse, once you tag some squares as signs or mountains, more squares appear in their places, making the captcha seem almost never-ending: you never know when you’ll finish. I dread each time new squares appear. I regularly find myself taking much too long to solve the captcha, often as much time as I would actually spend reading the gated content. Once I finish, I await the answer… “try again.” Which squares did I get wrong, Google? There’s no way to know. Back to start.

Today, for the first time that I can recall, I gave up after I was told to Try Again a few too many times in a row. I refreshed the page, thinking to try the captcha again… no luck this time, either. So congratulations, Google, on designing a usability nightmare captcha that can keep humans out. I know it has to be hard enough to make it difficult to solve with computer vision, but if humans can’t pass it, your captcha has failed. And so I am stuck reading Matthew’s article in Liferea.

Remember the days when all you had to do was spell out two words?