Years back, I had that happen on PayPal of all websites. Their account creation and reset pages silently and automatically truncated my password to 16 chars or something before hashing, but the actual login page didn’t, so the password didn’t work at all unless I backspaced it to the character limit. I forgot how I even found that out but it was a very frustrating few hours.
Complete side note, I saw your pfp and checked your profile to confirm my suspicions. Thank you for your work on OpenRGB! It’s been a great tool for managing the LEDs on my computer.
I’d also consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but that came from plenty of mistakes growing up including putting malware on the family computer at least twice (mostly ads for these “Pokemon MMOs” back in the mid aughts that were too enticing for my kid brain to refuse 😅).
It’s very easy for me to forget how much of an outlier my tech experience is among most folks around my age. I had an acquaintance in the first year of college I helped by giving essay advice, and was very surprised to see that the only thing they really knew how to do was basic use of apps on their iPhone. They got a laptop for school, but no computer experience, no keyboard typing experience, and even just the iPhone Settings app was a scary place to be avoided for the most part. To this person, Microsoft Word was a new thing they had to learn on top of everything else. In college. It was also in the South so I don’t know if I should be that surprised unfortunately.
Regardless, it was pretty wild to me, but a very real reminder that not everyone has access to the same resources education, and/or experience to draw on.
Aren’t there still massive issues with the Colorado River running dry? Hopefully they’re not too dependant on that water source for their chips
Why not just put up a Moonlight Tower?
That’s really good to know, and not how I thought the system worked previously. I thought instances were responsible for all vote aggregation and simply reported totals to each other at regular intervals, plus submitting comments/edits from users which are more obviously public
Y’know, that’s fair. I think I misspoke, and meant to say that the admins of your instance can see your IP but not the admins of another (assuming you’re not self hosting on your home PC without a VPN), but I’m not 100% sure that’s true because I’ve never looked at the protocol.
If every interaction is already public on the backend/API level, then simply not showing the info to users is just a transparency issue.
The more I’m thinking about this, the more I believe it’s a cultural/expectations thing. On websites like Tumblr, all of your reblogs and likes are public info, but it’s very up front about that. Social media like Facebook, IG, and sites like Discord, it’s the same; you can look through the list of everyone who reacted.
Data is not suddenly public just because some people have access to it. Data is public when it’s available for anyone to look at. Privacy is almost always going to be a trust issue on some level, and very few things are possible to do truly anonymously. Some data will always be available to someone in a position where it’s possible to abuse. Instance admins can see your IP address. Should that be available for everyone to see?
I mean, that’s already true and why the federation model is used in the first place. If another instance can’t be trusted, you can disconnect your own from it (extremely easy if you self-host, if you are a standard member of a larger instance it might require convincing)
I’m pretty sure the traffic for the ads still gets sent to your device over the Internet, it’s just that the ad blocker keeps it from rendering in your browser.
The device wouldn’t necessarily have to be constantly streaming the audio to a central server. If it’s capable of hearing wake up words like “Ok Google” it’s capable of listening for other phrases and having onboard processing to relay back the results much more compressed. Whether or not this is common practice is another matter, and yes the algorithms are scary good even without eavesdropping.
Any time a news headline asks a question, the answer is almost always “no”
Imo their issue was in not forming a broader union coalition before picking their workplace
I don’t understand this take. You can enjoy a product but still understand that it brings more harm than good to society as a whole. I’m guessing tobacco is something you “need to function” because of the very fact that you regularly used it in the first place, probably at least partially due to the industry’s predatory practices.
Don’t get me wrong, withdrawal is an absolute nightmare I am blessed to never have experienced firsthand, but cases of lifelong dependence are why those companies should burn in the first place. If there were a way to get you and others like you what you need while wiping the rest of the industry off the face of this planet, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
If you genuinely enjoy smoking and believe tobacco has enriched your life, more power to you. Perhaps someone selling tobacco to people in your situation doesn’t bring harm, but selling that same product to someone who’s never smoked before and might potentially become hooked for life? Yeah, straight to hell. Fuck them.
Mine shows ads but doesn’t play audio. Plus the ads are just for like their Citi credit card, relatively unobtrusive.
Tangentially, I recently came to the unfortunate conclusion that it’s just not worth my time to get gas at Costco if there’s a line, especially if I’m out and about on a lunch break. The gas is good and it’s much cheaper, but if it’s like 6 cars back and a 15-20 minute wait, I actually save money by filling up elsewhere and just getting back to work sooner.
Advertising is like the Kudzu vine: neat and potentially useful if maintained responsibly, but beyond capable of growing out of control and strangling the very landscape if you don’t constantly keep it in check. I think, for instance, that a podcast or over-the-air show running an ad-read with an affiliate link is fine for the most part, as long as it’s relatively unobtrusive and doesn’t put limitations on what the content would otherwise go over.
The problem is that there needs to be a reset of advertiser expectations. Right now, they expect the return on investment that comes from hyper-specific and invasive data, and I don’t think you can get that same level of effectiveness without it. The current advertising model is entrenched, and the parasitic roots have eroded the foundation. Those roots will always be parasitic because that’s the nature of advertising, and the profit motive in general when unchecked.