Gender is somewhat relevant here-- according to my women studies course in uni. When women are describing a problem, they don’t usually want solutions. They want support, understanding, & sympathy, contrary to the typical male response which is to give advice & propose solutions, which then has a good chance of ending badly.

More fun to mention 11 “states” at a 5.1% uninsured cutoff, because number 11 is Peurto Rico -- a US territory that you might expect to be less developed. Since people are forced to run javascript to see the list, I’ll copy it here up to the 6% point:

1. Massachusetts
2. District of Columbia
3. Hawaii
4. Vermont
5. Iowa (what’s a red state doing here?)
6. Rhode Island
7. Minnesota
8. New Hampshire
9. Michigan
10. New York
11. Puerto Rico
12. Connecticut
13. Pennsylvania
14. Wisconsin
15. Kentucky (what’s a red state doing here?)
16. Delaware
17. Ohio (what’s a red state doing here? OH will worsen over time; to be fair they only recently became solidly red)
18. West Virginia
    …

(22) California (6.5%.. worse than we might expect for CA)
…

(52) Texas ← ha! Of course Texass is last. 16.6% uninsured in the most notable red state showing us how to take care of people

The general pattern is expected.. the bottom of the list is mostly red states.

I don’t get why my fellow pirates try so hard to justify what they’re doing. We want something and we don’t want to pay the price for it because it’s either too expensive or too difficult, so we go the cheaper, easier route. And because these are large corporations trying to fuck everyone out of every last dime, we don’t feel guilt about it.

Justification is important to those who act against unethical systems. You have to separate the opportunists from the rest. An opportunist will loot any defenseless shop without the slightest sense of ethics. That’s not the same group as those who either reject an unjust system or specifically condemn a particular supplier (e.g. Sony, who is an ALEC member and who was caught unlawfully using GPL code in their DRM tools). Some would say it’s our ethical duty to do everything possible to boycott, divest, and punish Sony until they are buried.

We have a language problem that needs sorting. While it may almost¹ be fair enough to call an opportunist a “pirate” who engages in “piracy”, these words are chosen abusively as a weapon against even those who practice civil disobedience against a bad system.

1. I say /almost/ because even in the simple case of an opportunistic media grab, equating them with those who rape and pillage is still a bit off (as RMS likes to mention).

I think you see the same problem with the thread title that I do - it’s clever but doesn’t really give a solid grounds for ethically driven actions. But it still helps to capture the idea that paying consumers are getting underhandedly deceptively stiffed by crippled purchases, which indeed rationalizes civil disobedience to some extent.

I wonder if the 2024 diesel Volvos will become high-value collector’s items. There’ll always be that niche of hobbyists who refine their own biodiesel from waste oil.

I’ve been saying for years that Invidious needs to support comments. Glad there’s finally a free world option.

I’m not keen on browser extensions though. Is there a manual way? Is it a matter of searching a particular Lemmy instance for the video ID?

Among the primary benefits: no commute, flexible work schedules and less time getting ready for work, according to WFH Research.

They forgot: being able to secretly simultaneously work 3 full-time overlapping jobs to triple your income.

Can’t read the article (Cloudflare blockade).

In principle there needs to be pushback on the power of defaults for sure. Yes, all the options are shit anyway, but that’s in part due to the #powerOfDefaults.

it’s about time we restructure the workforce.

I suppose a big part of that will be managers learning how to measure productivity more accurately than your clocked-in hours. That’ll be the most interesting change.. the “corporate welfare” program of just getting paid to occupy a desk space will have to be replaced with more sophisticated real performance measurements.

I have no idea how that pans out in software. Every bug is vastly different so they can’t merely count the number of bugs you fix. SLOC is a bit of a sloppy measure too.

Not sure people are finding meeting-free gigs. I read about someone holding down 4 jobs who once had to attend 3 meetings at once (that story might have been in Wired mag, not sure). Like a DJ he had multiple audio streams going with headphones and made a skill of focusing where his name would most likely come up. I’m sure there’s also a long list of excuses like “had to run to stop the burning food” or whatever. Presumabely a long list of excuses to wholly nix a meeting in the first place as well.

Some people are secretly outsourcing some of their work as well, which works for workload but not for meetings.

Isn’t this different because there are specifically truth-in-advertising laws? Not even a natural person is immune to truth-in-advertising laws. So it seems like Tesla is making a despirate move.

Banks are gradually removing features from their websites in a progression toward complete elimination of the website. Some banks have already taken that step. They impose an app whilst also closing their over-the-counter service.

Unlike the US, 1-factor authentication by banks is illegal in Belgium. So for web access banks typically hand out devices for 2FA. Some banks avoid that cost by imposing a smartphone app in lieu of a card reader or RSA token (BYO smartphone).

There are many problems with bank apps in Belgium:

1. You must buy smartphone hardware (the apps detect when they are executed inside a virtual machine & deny service [tested with Ing’s app])
2. You must patronize a surveillance capitalist (create a Google or Apple account)
   2.1. You must subscribe to mobile phone service in order to satisfy Google’s unreasonable demand for a mobile phone number as a precondition to obtaining an account
   2.2. You must trust Google with your mobile phone number, IMEI number, and inventory of apps & versions you download (thus a reconnaissance risk)
   2.3. When Google records your place of banking, you must trust Google not to share that info (with debt collectors, for example)
3. All bank apps in Belgium are closed-source, so you must trust the apps not to carry spyware and to work in your interests
   3.1. The bank’s privacy policies are written to allow your realtime location to be tracked via the app.
4. You must chronically upgrade your hardware every few years because the bank apps are upgraded with reckless disregard to the lockstep-coupling of hardware to software on all phone platforms that are supported by Belgian banks. You cannot run a VM to prevent irresponsible electronic waste (see point 1)

The #GDPR possibly (and only symbolically¹) protects from some of that, such as Google sharing your place of banking with debt collectors. But the GDPR does not prevent criminal exfiltration of data that cavalier consumers trustingly agree to the collection of.

Footnotes:

1. I say “symbolically” because consumers only have two pathways for remedy under the GDPR: article 77 & direct lawsuit. Article 77 has no teeth. When the DPA ignores/mothballs an art.77 complaint, there is no mechanism for action against the DPA. So DPAs are largely neglecting to treat art.77 reports. That leaves direct lawsuits. The EU has decided that GDPR plaintiffs are not entitled to compensation for legal fees. So that kills that option. You can get a symbolic win in court but you still lose because lawsuits are costly and the damages you can prove are negligable. So the GDPR boils down to an honor system.

I’m not even willing to visit shields·io¹ because it’s a Cloudflare site.

If so, it might be worth adding the badges to the sidebars.

I would oppose cluttering the sidebar with 100+ stats. Ideally there would be just 1 line:

subscribers: 310/30.6K (local/fed)

If someone wants subscribers per instance detail, that should require some deep clicking around or a dedicated site that keeps track of that.

BTW, #Lemmy has lemmyverse.net (though I think the subscriber counts are misleading there too). What does #Kbin have for finding communities… anyone know? #askFedi

footnotes:

1. note that I raised the dot (.) to (·) so as to discourage visits and so my msg does not add to the search engine rankings of a Cloudflare site.

That link goes to a tor-hostile site. Would someone please copy the text here so everyone can read it?

Just curious- what exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean abandoning/trashing your google account, or do you mean also refusing to send email to gmail recipients?

Personally I’ve gone all the way. Ditching the Google acct was just the 1st step (which implies also ditching Google Playstore). Then I quit sending email to gmail & outlook recipients. Then I went further and do an MX lookup on all email addresses to verify whether a vanity address like bob@lastname.com resolves to google. This has made #email mostly dead to me.

Flowchart attached showing the ethical factors of various printer & scanner makers…

Dirt on Microsoft

#Microsoft

I am seriously ½ tempted to get a drawing robot. These things seem to have gotten down to us$160 in price:

https://uunatek.com/top-5-writing-drawing-robots/

Or us$140 for a handwriting drawing robot kit (which you assemble IIUC). Those kits are made by “Doesbot” but I see nothing on doesbot.com about them. Looks like some of these devices operate with an ordinary pen designed to be held by a hand.

Would be cool to be able to send letters to the gov in protest of their misuse of tech (e.g. forcing people to solve CAPTCHAs), and have those letters appear handwritten. Would pair nicely with the blood-as-ink suggestion by @Please_send_nudes.

Note as well sometimes these scanners miss things even when not abused. E.g. I checked out at a sporting goods store where you dump all your purchases in a box which is then scanned. Got home and noticed I was not charged for a bicycle lock. It had its packaging but I wonder if someone inadvertenly bent the rfid chip somehow.

We’ll probably see people walking around Amazon shops bending the rfIDs back and forth as they shop to see if they can kill the tag. Some thieves will probably carry around hole punchers as well.

Photographers don’t have that option. Last time I checked, laser printers sucked for photos.

I’m glad I don’t need to print photos. But if I did, I would probably consider one of these options:

1. a continuous ink system (“CIS”). There are CIS kits for modifying a rip-off printer. There are also complete printers that come with an integrated CIS but they charge a fortune for those since they’re not gouging you on the ink swindles.

2. project the digital image onto real photo paper in a darkroom & develop it with chemicals. I think Walmart has a machine that does that, in effect, and you pay per photo for their service.

Bill Gates is throwing his resources into the #warOnCash (effectively, war on privacy) via his involvement with the betterthancashalliance.org scumbags.

I’ve heard all the charity expenditure is 100% tax avoidance strategy & not a dime more, unlike William Buffet who gets credit for donating more than tax optimums & also getting other billionaires to give more (just a rumor… that bit is beyond me).

And IIRC, license plates only need to be censored if bad behavior is demonstrated. Notice that the car to the left which was correctly parked has an exposed license plate.

What baffles me is that the plate number is only meaningful to law enforcement. The public does not get access to the records associated with a plate number. I see no reason to hide the info from law enforcement. The evidence may be too low of a standard to be usable, but so be it.

I would love to have that option. When I’m writing a letter in protest of something and want my outrage to have full impact, what better medium than writing the letter in blood?

1. Wasteful cleaning: printers spray the ink to clean the heads. Some printers are coded to be extremely liberal in the ink that gets wasted in this manner. E.g. cleaning the heads daily whether you use it or not. So the excessive waste effectively means you pay more for what you actually get to use. Yes, it’s deliberate. It’s not like the mfr really wants you to have sparkling clean heads.

2. Expiry: some printers assume a cartridge will only last X long regardless of your actual consumption. Like the drugs industry, the expiry date is set to maximize profits. Cartridges self destruct or get rejected past expiry. They want you throwing out good product to buy more. I think the PR excuse they use is to say it serves as a way of detecting when the ink is out, however sloppy.

3. Consumption metering shenanigans: like (3) above, the printer falsely reports an empty cartridge. But in this case it emits a laser or some kind of IR beam through the cartridge and when the beam reaches the detector, the cartridge is regarded as depleted. They place this beam high enough that ink still remains below the beam. IIRC, Brother inkjets did this.. or maybe it was just their fax machines.

3.1 (sloppy math) Instead of detecting how much ink is in the cartridge, the printer keeps track of how much was dispensed. But IIRC the math doesn’t work out so it ends up overcounting the amount dispensed which yields another trick to falsely treating a non-empty cartridge as empty.

1. Anti-competition: some cartridges have chips in them which talk to the printer so the printer knows if the ink is approved (i.e. has the same brand as the printer). This suppresses competition to give monopolistic pricing.

4.1. (DMCA) ^ the chips were quickly hacked by competitors. So printer makers introduced encryption mechanisms, which were also defeated. IIRC, the printer makers abused (or attempted to abuse) the DMCA by claiming their tech safeguards were bypassed to violate their “intellectual property” rights. (I think)

4.2. (Disloyalty punishments) printers connect to the cloud to self-update their firmware. Some of these updates introduced firmware that logs whether non-OEM ink was used and printer self-destructs on a certain date when the logs report a disloyal customer. Funnily enough, the company who did this tried to argue that the move was to “protect” the printer from bad ink, as if they’re looking after the customer’s best interest.

I’m sure I’m missing some of the tricks.. that’s just off the top of my head.

HP has mastered these shenanigans the best. I think no ink is costlier than HP after you account for all the tricks & traps. I kind of see it as bad-on-bad. HP has been an evil company for a long time even if you disregard the printer industry. HP supports Israel’s gaza blockade and oppression of the Palestinians. Note as well HP has been caught sending customers data about what they print back to HP.

So people should be boycotting HP /anyway/.

It’s more about ethics than security. I’m an ethical consumer, which means I will not patronize unethical companies. Feeding data to Google is as good as feeding money to Google. Google is part of the fossil fuel industry (they are in partnership with Totaal oil and use AI to help Totaal find places to drill for oil). My objection to Google collecting data on me is less about cyberattack and more about not supporting a harmful force in the world.

I’m also ethically opposed closed-source software because I think it misplaces power. The worst kind of misplacement of power is to give it to tech giants who abuse their power and use it against consumers.

I’m also ethically opposed to software designs that make phones disposable and force the disposal of perfectly good hardware. I’ll buy a smartphone after that problem is fixed. #RightToRepair is still insufficient. There needs to be a rule that the moment a phone maker decides to stop supporting a device, they must do whatever necessary to ensure the platform (kernel + drivers + gui) are FOSS at that point of dropped support. I’ll wait for it. I can hold out as long as needed.

W.r.t. paranoia, street wise people and those with some infosec background always seem “paranoid” to normal people. And to us, normal people are cavalier because they needlessly share information without applying the rule of least privilege. Privilege should only be granted on an as-needed basis and that includes access to information. It’s unreasonable for banks to snoop on people arbitrarily without a warrant. It’s not just that the banks abuse the info, but the overcollection exposes everyone to exfiltration by criminals. That’s not fiction - it has happened. (Captial One via Amazon contractor, Equifax, several other banks including a bank breach I recently detected but have not reported yet). I have already been the victim of multiple data breaches even with some diligence to not be completely reckless.

Trusting banks with sensitive info is the least of the problems I describe & possibly not a show-stopper in itself. But taking everything together I remain baffled at the zombie masses endorsing & supporting all of it. A basic information security class should perhaps become part of the mandatory secondary school cirriculums at this point.

Here’s the heart of the not-so-obvious problem:

Websites treat the Google crawler like a 1st class citizen. Paywalls give Google unpaid junk-free access. Then Google search results direct people to a website that treats humans differently (worse). So Google users are led to sites they cannot access. The heart of the problem is access inequality. Google effectively serves to refer people to sites that are not publicly accessible.

I do not want to see search results I cannot access. Google cache was the equalizer that neutralizes that problem. Now that problem is back in our face.

First time I’ve seen this bot. I would be interested in learning how to cross-post from #kbin to #Lemmy in a way that preserves the original username the way this bot did. Is that possible without 3rd party tools? I can login to a Lemmy instance and then crosspost any Kbin thread to a Lemmy community, but then the author becomes myself, not the original Kbin author.

#askFedi

If you search, you’ll learn several privacy-abusing ways to do that via enshitified exclusive walled gardens which share the site you’re asking about with US tech giants and treat users of VPNs, Tor, and CGNAT with hostility.

• ❌https://downdetector.com/ ← avoid (Cloudflare)
• ❌https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ ← avoid (Cloudflare); I think #downforeveryoneorjustme was one of the 1st of this kind but then it got greedy and became exclusive
• 🤷https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/ ← meh (inclusive of everyone for the moment, but uses CF DNS so could spontaneously proxy through CF; broken on lynx because 1st party js req’d)
• ✓#downinspector ← decent, lesser of evils (CF-free & always inclusive of everyone, but does not work on lynx and requires JS; it pushes CF JS but still works if you only run 1st party js)

I only listed 2 bad ones (the 1st two) but when you search the first dozen results are shit. What could be more shitty than being directed to CAPTCHAs and other exclusive bullshit in the course of trying to troubleshoot a problem?

Also, the community we’re in here is “nostupidquestions”.

There’s also an onion one but I lost track of it.

I print a lot. As far as I’m concerned, #email is dead. It was killed by MS & Google. Probably 99+% of the world still does not use PGP. Web forms? No, they’re also dead to me because I refuse to solve most #CAPTCHAs & most certainly will not solve a Google #reCAPTCHA. Message centers? Also dead to me because a good number of them are snooped on by Cloudflare, or they proactively block Tor.

Even if a web form or message center is non-Cloudflare & open to Tor users, most of them demand too much info. They always make email address a required field. They’re not getting an email address from me if their MX server is Outlook or Gmail.

Hence why I’ve gone back to the paper letter, apart from the few recipients who still have a fax number.

The Halloween papers

It’s still irrelevant, no? I thought Bill Gates no longer had any role at Microsoft.

In addition to its first amendment argument, Tesla also said that the California DMV is violating its rights to have a jury trial, under the US Constitution's 7th Amendment and Article I, Section 16 of California's Constitution, both of which cover rights to trial by a jury.

Yikes. What does a jury of Tesla’s peers look like? Representatives from 12 other giant corporations?

Bingo. When I read that part of the article, I felt insulted. People see the web getting increasingly enshitified and less accessible. The increased need for cached pages has justified the existence of 12ft.io.

~40% of my web access is now dependant on archive.org and 12ft.io.

So yes, Google is obviously bullshitting. Clearly there is a real reason for nixing cached pages and Google is concealing that reason.

From the article:

"was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it." (emphasis added)

Bullshit! The web gets increasingly enshitified and content is less accessible every day.

For now, you can still build your own cache links even without the button, just by going to "https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:" plus a website URL, or by typing "cache:" plus a URL into Google Search.

You can also use 12ft.io.

Cached links were great if the website was down or quickly changed, but they also gave some insight over the years about how the "Google Bot" web crawler views the web. … A lot of Google Bot details are shrouded in secrecy to hide from SEO spammers, but you could learn a lot by investigating what cached pages look like.

Okay, so there’s a more plausible theory about the real reason for this move. Google may be trying to increase the secrecy of how its crawler functions.

The pages aren't necessarily rendered like how you would expect.

More importantly, they don’t render the way authors expect. And that’s a fucking good thing! It’s how caching helps give us some escape from enshification. From the 12ft.io faq:

“Prepend 12ft.io/ to the URL webpage, and we'll try our best to remove the popups, ads, and other visual distractions.”

It also circumvents #paywalls. No doubt there must be legal pressure on Google from angry website owners who want to force their content to come with garbage.

The death of cached sites will mean the Internet Archive has a larger burden of archiving and tracking changes on the world's webpages.

The possibly good news is that Google’s role shrinks a bit. Any Google shrinkage is a good outcome overall. But there is a concerning relationship between archive.org and Cloudflare. I depend heavily on archive.org largely because Cloudflare has broken ~25% of the web. The day #InternetArchive becomes Cloudflared itself, we’re fucked.

We need several non-profits to archive the web in parallel redundancy with archive.org.

I would hope it can be done without collateral damage. I spoof my own number (in fact as a self-defense maneuver) and wouldn’t want to lose that option. I subscribe to a voicemail-only number which I give to countless untrusted entities (e.g. banks). Then to make outbound calls to businesses, I use a numberless voip line that spoofs the voicemail number.

It’s like saying “you’re a bad company. . .but damn do I like your product and will consume it anyway!” it doesn’t make much sense, logically or morally.

Sony is a dispensible broker/manager who no one likely assigns credit to for a work. I didn’t even know who Sony pimped -- just had to look it up. The Karate Kid, Spider-man, Pink Floyd.. Do you really think that when someone experiences those works, they walk away saying “what a great job Sony did”?

I don’t praise Sony for the quality of the works they market any more than I would credit a movie theater for a great movie that I experience. Roger Waters will create his works whether Sony is involved or not.

You also seem to be implying they have good metrics on black market activity and useful feedback from that. This is likely insignificant compared to rating platforms like Netflix and the copious metrics Netflix collects.

Can you explain further why grabbing an unlicensed work helps Sony? Are you assuming the consumer would recommend the work to others who then go buy it legitimately?

If it becomes a trend to shoplift Sony headphones, the merchant takes a hit and has to decide whether to spend more money on security, or to simply quit selling Sony headphones due to reduced profitability. I don’t see how that helps Sony. I don’t shoplift myself but if I did I would target brands I most object to.

Not sure what Grafana is but I can’t even visit the site because they block Tor (403). Gotta love how easy it is to see-and-avoid some privacy-hostile venues. If you were using Tor you might not have wasted 1 minute with that site.

According to my notes, the only dirt I found on #Brother printers was yellow tracking dots. You can likely avoid the #trackingDots by getting a non-color Brother, but then you’re still feeding a company that was caught doing that. So IMO Oki is the best option. But note that Oki is not sold in the US anymore.

/cc @fossilesque @MetaCubed

I’m a bit baffled that #Amazon would give up the opportunity to scan faces. If you have a married couple with joint card account, Amazon wouldn’t know which one of them made the purchase without cameras.

Doesn’t this also mean they need a human to monitor for people who don’t scan their payment card?

Is that link tor-hostile? I just get a blank page (which is expected since I have images disabled). But then I ran:
torsocks curl -I https://midwest.social/pictrs/image/4f02113b-f999-4992-bb9c-93ecc9470bd8.png
to get the image size, and got zero:

HTTP/2 405
server: nginx
date: Sun, 08 Oct 2023 12:43:23 GMT
content-length: 0
vary: Origin, Access-Control-Request-Method, Access-Control-Request-Headers
allow: GET
access-control-expose-headers: allow

Not sure where you are or what that amounts to but In the US I would consider double the median income middle class or upper middle class, still far from rich.

I think of “rich” as someone who can quit working right now and be able to live comfortably on their savings for the rest of their life. If they still need to work, that’s below the “rich” line.

I kinda like Chris Rock’s definition as well.. something like: “you can lose rich if you pick up a drug habit… but if you’re wealthy, you can’t lose wealth.. you can afford to do cocaine for the rest of your life if you’re wealthy”.