Looks like I’ll finally get a reason to cut off another website I hate using, but never found the willpower to get rid off.

Good

This is actually a great question, in the context of the Fediverse.

Usually, every social network or forum has in their ELUA that anything you post is theirs, and you can’t do anything about i.e Reddit using your data to train AIs.

Hlwever, here, we’re on private instances of regular people. We can make our own rules, can’t we? If an instance would say that anything you post is copyrighted by the author, i.e by CC, would it be enforcable if someone would decide to scrape (or repost) the content for profit?

But a paid licence will affect users that are all right abd for whom you’re doing it.

I understand that using something with a risk of loosong access because you’ve upset the developer is something that will turn away a lot of people, but then again, I’d say that “don’t be a dick” is a pretty reasonable requirement. The only issue I see that it’s a pretty vague definiton, but maybe just limiting it to profanities and insult towards the contributors is something more concrete, which would be easy to fulfill and also enforce.

I wonder, is it possible to create a license that would allow you to simply ban people who are being a dick about something from using it? Sure, it may turn away some people, since there’s always a risk of abuse, but it’s your work and as far as I know, you are the one who sets the terms.

If I’m not mistaken, most of the FOSS licenses (or maybe even laws?) guarantee you that you would be able to use the software even if the project later decides to change to proprietary license. But I assume you can simply specify in a licence “Everyone can use it, expect X.Y.Z”.

Would that be legal? Sure, it would probably be pretty hard to enforce, but in some cases it could make for a pretty satisfactory (and petty, of course) C&D letters, for people that really deserve it. You insult the devs of a software your company depends on, demanding something while being a dick about it? Well, fuck you, no library for you and your company.

I do feel kind of simillarly betrayed. Watch Dogs were my forst point of reference into what hacker subcultures look like, and it has shaped a large part of my life - next month i’s going to be 5 years I’ve worked as a Red Teamer in a cybersec company. I’m also mostly a poser, and the aesthetics simply makes it way more fun - making art that’s tied into what you do is great, assuming you dont take it too seriously, of course. Not that I do it, but the way Watch Dogs portraied it, it was fun.

Is it neccessary? Of course not. Is it a shame there aren’t many hackerspaces with cool street art, and hacktivists making over the top manifests ajd cool streetart around our town? A little bit.

Shit, it placed my own question into Cybersecurity right under this one. Now i dont know how to feel about it.

Forgive my ignorance, but I was always wondering why is it such a faux pau to show support to Palestine? From how I understand it, and that may be wrong, hence the question, the regular Palestinian people are occupied not only by Israel on the outside, but also by a terrorist group, HAMAS, at home. Which is basically a dictatorship, thats not afraid to openly use terror tactics. It’s a lose-lose situation, and the only thing you can do is hope youre not going to be one of the 1/100 that dies to a random strike.

When there are innocent people in a situation like that, the least we can do is show them some support.

Or do majority of people in Palestine actually support HAMAS and the war? I feel like in missing something, because the backslash to people who show an ounce of support for Palestine is massive, and I don’t really get why. I just want regular people who aren’t terrorists to live at peace :(

You actually don’t need a Youtube Account, unless you are a paying subscriber to some creators!

Check out FreeTube, it’s a desktop app similar to NewPipe on Android, that allows you to subscribe to creators while still not requiring an account, and without ads.

As for Android, I don’t know what phone you have, but if you’re ever buying a new one, I highly recommend just getting a (paradoxically) Google Pixel and installing GrapheneOS. An older Pixel is OK, just check which versions are still supported and for how long on the Graphene website. And the installation is super easy, and can actually be done in a browser without any issues, and takes like 15 minutes.

I’ve recently switched to Graphene and it’s amazing. I have a separate profile for apps that refuse to work without Google Services, so they are contained, and additionally Graphene sandboxes the google play services, so they can’t do anything you won’t let them, in contrast to any other Android phone where Google Services can basically do whatever they want without any way to limit it.

I also run Mullvad VPN on my phone all the time, but I don’t think that it’s neccessary.

Exactly! AdNauseam is my inspiration, unfortunately I dont use it right now because it doesnt work with my setup, due to Mullavad in combination with PiHole being too good at their job, so it cant really click on the adds even if it wanted to.

It would ideally require a solution that uses its own DNS server, so you can keep on using PiHole, and prefferably avoids living in your browser so you can keep it locked down for privacy.

One of the projects I have in mind is to explore some kind of “offensive privacy”, where the focus would not be on not being trackable, but on your computer spewing random bullshit and behavior into the algorithm to confuse it, and have it learning on behavior that’s not really true, but only generated. This will enable you to kind of fight back and if done by enough users even reduce the effectivness of ML algorithms, since they would be learning bullshit. Unfortunately, the scale required to effectively affect the learning process of ML models would be enormous, so it’s not really feasible, but I think it’s still better than just “staying hidden”.

With the advances in AI, creating a tool like that, that would simulate several random user behaviors on your IP/fingerprint, shouldn’t really be that hard.

And as an added bonus - if it clicks on adverts, it’s costing someone money. Fuck corporations.

The biggest problem i have with my data being collected, analyzed and used is in the fact that it will almost certainly be used to teach a ML model about how to better manipulate with people like me - the people that are privacy conscious and are trying as much as possible to reduce their fingerprint.

That data is invaluable, and if there does exist a way how to target even people like that, which there probably does since we’re only humans after all, the ML model will eventually figure it out. And they have literally billions of people to experiment and learn on.

Now, we already know from a few leaked studies made by Facebook that they cab already pretty well manipulate people into mostly whatever they choose. Take a hypothetical situation where you get a crazy out-of-touch billionaire, who decides to buy a large social network company, and then decides “Hey, I really want this candidate to win. Tune up the algorithms!”.

And the ML models will get a clear goal, that has been already proven to just work pretty well at influencing user behavior. And any data you give them, it helps the model to fine tune into influencing people like you . Which would also be really hard to prove, because ML models are by definition black boxes that are really hard to reverse engineer, and proving that it was trained to do this is AFAIK almost impossible.

I don’t want no part in that. Thankfully, all the large social networks have CEOs that are reasonable and would never try something like that, right?

And one more thing - you may not think that data about your behavior are of interest to anyone right now. But look at China and their Social Credit. And imagine how would have I.e holocaust turned out, if the government had access to all the data, opinions and profiles of people that are being collected now.

Oh, you mentioned you sympathize with the Jews three years ago in a private message? Well, let’s hope the country you live in never ends up in a situation where that could be a huge problem for you or your family.

So, every time any site is offering a “personalized, curated list” for you (I.e the google search result, or YouTube recommended videos), assume you are potentionally being manipulated, and avoid the site altogether- because there’s no other way how to prevent it. The ML model knows that you know, and is already trying to figure out how to manipulate people that are taking care not to be. And if there is a way, it will figure it out with some success.

I’ve recently switched to Kagi and it has been an amazing experience so far. I definitely recommend that to anyone who can spare the 5-10$ a month. I like their business model, and the way I can customise results to I.e always ignore reddit posts, while still maintaining privacy because they are not in the ads business (yet?).

And the results are usually pretty on spot, while also avoiding the major ai/spam blog posts by default.

Isn’t that SCP-953? Good luck.

Thanks for this. It never occurred to me to look into St. Nicolas, even though it’s my name, and he’s way more awesome than I though.

A patron of prostitues, hell yeah. I guess that explains my Mark of Slaneesh scarification.

It depends on what kind of services you are hosting, but for general my general use (having a NAS accessible for rare file-sharing, Nextcloud, Home Assistant and git), Cloudflare Tunnel is amazing. The only drawback is that their ToS does not allow file streaming or larger ongoing data transfers, so technically even my usage is against it due to file-sharing, but I only need to share like one small file every month tops, so I haven’t run into issues yet.

It’s also nice that you can set up traffic filtering to be pretty restricted, so your servers can be both publicly accessible, and also safe - i.e I just geoblock traffic from outside my country, since I never need to use it from there (and can easily change it when I do). And it’s also pretty quick to set up!

I disagree. I’ve been/am working on several pretty large projects in Unity (some of them sold hundreds of thousands copies), and especially once you start porting to consoles, the experience goes to shit. Their support is vague, documentation is plainly wrong in some places - I’ve once spent few days figuring out how to use a documented and explained feature, only to find out later that there’s a closed few years old bug on their issue tracker that it’s actually not supported, and the documentation only does not explains it very well. (The feature was multiple hits per single Raycast in jobs, here are the docs. According to the bug resolution, only one hit per ray is supported, and the docs only don’t explain it very well. The docs are still the same.)

You also inevitably run into issues that you simply don’t have in other engines - it’s closed source. You have no idea how is something implemented, or whether something isn’t working because you are doing it wrong, or if it’s Unity bug/fault. In Unreal, if something doesn’t work, you can always just check the engine code, and either fix it yourself, or better understand why it’s not working. If you need to slightly modify some engine behavior, you’re out of luck with Unity - you have to resort to ugly hacks that sometimes work, but usually at a cost. In Unreal, you just modify the engine code and be done with it.

Trusting Unity with any feature is also a gamble. Have you started developing a multiplayer game on Unet? Tough, we don’t want to support that anymore. But, we will create a better multiplayer system, just wait for it! Then they removed Unet, and the new networking relacement is widely regarded as pretty much unusable - or at lest it was last time I checked. Thankfully, there are a few amazing open source networking addons.

In general, while Unity is an ok-ish game engine for smaller hobby projects (but for that, Godot is better), it’s really an awful and frustrating experience once your project size grows and you need to build bigger games, or if you start porting your games to consoles.

And it’s also really apparent from the way they communicate and threat you company that they don’t give a fuck and only want your money.

Exactly. To me, this explanation sounds like they’ll just magically estimate the numbers without really being able to prove it. And that sucks.

However, we can be sure that developers will have their own analytics, that are probably way more accurate and they know exactly how many people have played or installed their game. And I’m betting that this number will be a lot smaller than the Unity “estimation”, and people will get even more angry.

Someone will most likely create a fork to remove this or an option to disable it will probably be baked into about:config.

But that’s the issue - if WEI passes, EVERY webpage will be able to use DRM. So, just like you have to switch to Chromium for DRMed media content, you will now have to switch for every website that has decided to implement it. So, your bank (because google is pushing it as a security feature), Youtube, Gmail… Just like you are not able to play DRM media, you won’t be able to visit DRMed websites without WEI API supported. It’s not something you turn off.

Add-ons are a pretty huge security risk, though. Someone was just posting an article about how tempting it is to sell out with your extension, and how many offers you actually get.

And I’ve already been burned once, and it’s not pretty. Also nothing you can do against this.

The best solution is actually not Firefox, but Mullvad. No need for extensions, based on Tor Browser and can be bundled with a VPN that’s full of other people using the same browser - so you have exactly the same fingerprint, and they can’t tell you apart. Not by extensions, not by IP.

Unfortunately, if you have properly set up Firefox, i.e with arkenfox user.js or by using Librewolf, it doesn’t work :/ It still blocks adds without issues, but it’s not visiting them.

Or if you’re running PiHole - same issue. Is there a way how to make PiHole actually go though all those clicks? I guess it would be hard to figure out what’s an ad and what’s telemetry.