• 15 Posts
  • 257 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • The delay makes intuitive sense especially since it will give the target a chance to complain about it to their friends and family who will hopefully stop it from there.

    However, I’m not sure if it’s worth it. I imagine this would stop exfiltration apps which scan the users device to useful data and maybe passive screenshots but this pales in comparison to apps with subscription dark patterns, gambling and apps that harvest and sell your data legally already. If this was a case of apps prompting the user to enter sensitive information into a form then they could just use a browser.

    I don’t know. I think this is a good measure to prevent scams. I’m just uncomfortable about Google’s motivation.



  • I recall spreadsheets being particularly painful on mobile when I’d try to select multiple rows and it would select way more at a time but would need to fouble-check that or find a screen recording if I made one at the time.

    The main issues is there was a bug where if there is an open session for a document in Collabora (including dead sessions say from mobile) and that Collabora server is shut down in the wrong order, then all changes including if you click “Save” will be lost. A bug was opened for this and closed by making sure the servers shut down in the correct order, but I don’t know if that fixes cases where the servers a hard shutdown.



  • You would need a way of verifying that the SHA256 is a true copy of the site at the time though and not a faked page. You could do something like have a distributed network of archives that coordinate archival at the same time and then using the SHA256 then be able to see which archives fetched exactly the same page at the same time through some search functionality. I mean if addons are already being used for doing the crawling then we may be mostly there already since said addons would just need to certify their archive and after that they can discard the actual copy of the page. You need need a way to validate those workers though since a bad actor could just run a whole bunch at the same time to legitimise a fake archival.








  • I generally get the reasoning behind the whole martyr thing but it just doesn’t work in this case. The individual is 1) in the country where the Nazis came to power in the first place, 2) is a member of parliament, 3) has now demonstrated that they wish to bring back the ideology which caused multiple genocides, the 2nd world war and the complete destruction of Europe. There’s “they are minuscule minority and have zero chance of gaining traction and so we only stand to lose by making them a martyr” and “they are already in parliament and part of a party that is the thinnest of veils for the Nazi party and are doing so in the backdrop of the rising popularity of the AFD and far-right politicians around the world”. No! This lesson has been learned in Germany. Knock the fucker down (put them in jail) and show no remorse. They don’t deserve a benefit of the doubt or leniency here.



  • Both ends of this are frustrating. Buying a domain either as a purely speculative asset (as the judge correctly labeled this purchase as) so you can 1) get under someones skin enough to make them want to buy the domain from you, or 2) just buying up every popular or potentially popular domain just to sell if off is scummy behaviour that ideally this guy should never have been able to do in the first place.

    The other end of this I don’t like though is the possibility of somebody being able to convince a judge that they should own your domain and then just being able to take it. In this case I think the judge ruled correctly but the idea that somebody (especially in the US government) would be able to just take away my domain on a whim is terrifying when you can’t just go to people and say “hey, the person you are going to this domain for has now moved and is now here”. Things like e-mail address, monitoring, firewall exceptions and many self-hosted sites assume that the owner of the domain does not change hands without permission, and trust the domain blindly. Taking away a domain isn’t just like taking away somebodies nickname. It’s taking away their online identity and forced impersonation.

    I really wish there was a way to address each other in a decentralised way that doesn’t just push the problem down to something like a public key, where the same problem exists except now you worry about the key being compromised.

    The fact that we have ways to coordinate globally unique addresses that we collectively agree on who owns what is a feat. It just sucks that it’s also something which somebody can take away from you.





  • The key is that they target what most people need, and given the average Steam user has a 3060, the bar isn’t set very high. It also doesn’t have to be when your competition is consoles. Anybody who isn’t dumping their salary into PC upgrades will brag about it when they finally upgrade to a new machine, but in that 5+ year gap between upgrades, they will drift towards the average. If Valve prices it right, then they’re just selling you the equivalent of a 3 year old machine but with new parts, and that’s fine at the right price.


  • “We should privatise service X so it’s more efficient” X collapses “We can’t afford to let X fail despite the fact that it ran at massive profits all the way to it’s collapse so we’ll bail it out” THEN WHAT WAS THE POINT OF PRIVATISING IT IN THE FIRST PLACE?!

    You can take on the burden of running the thing and therefore the cost of making it public, or you can allow it to be private with the caveat that they must pay a substantial (enough for the government to not be at a net loss) tax as a kind of insurance in the event a bailout is needed, but don’t take on the worst of both worlds where the profits are private and the losses are public.