Thanks for this. I didn’t know about the details, and there are probably mor... but this gyrovague person is clearly being a privileged trouble. Their “boringly straightforward curiosity” is an admittance of their shallow thinking. When you are pointed out that you’re hurting someone in some respect that you weren’t intentional about, you should stop, sit down, and reconsider everything in that respect.
You may end up deciding to continue inflicting harm, intentionally so this time---that is a perfectly valid course to take. But you cannot anymore remain unintentional about it.
> When you are pointed out that you’re hurting someone in some respect that you weren’t intentional about, you should stop, sit down, and reconsider everything in that respect.
> You may end up deciding to continue inflicting harm, intentionally so this time---that is a perfectly valid course to take. But you cannot anymore remain unintentional about it.
To be clear, are you talking about the harm of commanding a botnet (which includes you and me) to attack an investigative journalist for investigatively journaling?
It seems like a non-question, but I’ll bite: No. I’m talking about the harm the investigative journalist is doing to the anonymous operator of archive.today by compromising their anonymity and promoting this. You can’t “investigatively journal” to someone’s detriment and say “I was just doing my job ;)”. You can say “I was just curious” (which is “I was unaware” in disguise), but now you are pointed out and are aware, so you must just decide.
And the decision seems to be intentionally do the harm and be insincere about it. Personally, my primary annoyance is with the latter, that they are being insincere about it.
> You can’t “investigatively journal” to someone’s detriment and say “I was just doing my job ;)”.
That description seems to encompass most useful investigative journalism, so I'm not sure it is a useful distinction that an investigation is unpalatable to someone (usually the investigatee).
Suppose we ignore that for a moment, though: it does not justify attacking the investigative journalist, nor does it justify surreptitiously using my computer as part of a botnet to do so.
> it does not justify attacking the investigative journalist
1. Person A hits Person B.
2. Person B hits Person A in return.
Is it ok that Person B hit Person A? I don’t know. I don’t think so. People would unanimously agree, however, that Person A making the first hit makes Person B’s hit more understandable, and that Person A is relatively more to blame here.
So, yeah, I agree: the attack from archivist isn’t justified by the attack from the journalist. It is, however, made more understandable by it.
As for what counts as attack: I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call DDoS to a blog an “attack”. It’s more like a protest. And I think the users of the service would in general not mind taking part in that effortless protest against the actor that is being hostile against the service’s continued operation.
Sadly, it backlashed quite a bit, it appears. People took the words “DDoS” and “botnet” as something much more serious than what they actually entail in this situation, probably because they sound very obscure and vile.
Every link inside the mail is hosted on t.notificationmail.microsoft.com. The sender is Microsoft@notificationmail.microsoft.com and appears to pass DKIM validation.
This just won’t work. If RSS becomes popular, there will be discovery platforms with “algorithm”s. It will be the same thing, just the discovery and content separated.
RSS appears good now only because it’s not popular enough for LLMs to meddle with. I don’t use RSS, so I don’t really mind, but those who use RSS are making disservice to its _purity_ by trying to popularize it.
RSS is just one element of the ecosystem - the input.
I envision that the filtering mechanism CAN use any rules - hand-written, heuristics, old-school machine learning, LLMs. Just with a key difference - you are the one controlling it. No hidden tricks to make you "engaged" (read: addicted) or "sold".
If you feel it is too much politics, you reduce it. If too little - add. If you want less clickbaits and intellectual fast food, you filter it. Etc, etc.
About that, I was sad to see that TDMRep [1] doesn't provide a way to signal reservation for RSS feed, so it has to be done at the HTTP level, otherwise the same content delivered in RSS feed can be legitimately scrapped and mined even if the author opted-out using an HTML meta tag on the website.
Having a single platform own both the content and syndication is the model that got us in this sorry state.
RSS allows content and algorithms to remain independent. E.g. I fully take advantage of RSS for my blog recommendation platform that has no relationship with the recommended sites.
> If RSS becomes popular, there will be discovery platforms with “algorithm”s.
So? If plain RSS exists, then you can still consume it the way you want.
I'd like to remind that when RSS was really popular we had "planet" aggregators everywhere, where someone interested in particular topic bundled posts from multiple people.
RSS exists but those authors who don't publish through it probably wouldn't care about it either. Like, if by magic, RSS became popular as a technology, they would publish through it, but then there would be demand for discoverability and algo feeds would win the engagement race and then RSS is in the background and th platform would naturally decide to just focus on the algo and drop RSS and the regular users wouldn't care and authors would only care what regular users care about. Except for the tiny techie bubble.
It's not a technical problem. Less effort will always be more popular and drown out more effort in the mainstream.
Imagine if you could order completely free McDonald's food to your doorstep anytime and could also choose to cook your meals at home. Guess what portion of people would choose which option.
You don't need "that technology to become popular" to make it even more popular. It already was popular enough and it already worked.
Your whole comment makes no sense to me. Completely confusing.
Who are you arguing with? Why RSS has to compete with anything? Why do you even refer to it as "technology" - it's a text file people used to edit by hand in notepad. And maybe automate that with a script in their html editor.
It was popular, it's a fact. It was and is included in multiple blogging platforms. It was used by techies. It was used by non-techies. Learning curve was non existent and it was trivial to use on both ends.
What created friction was: killing the biggest RSS reader service that was free for all and killing very good support in browsers.
It used to be trivial - every browser was showing an orange button if site had rss. You could click it. You could add the feed to browser bookmark bar. It would display feed as nice bookmarks, downloading it live. This is what we lost - and we lost it because big companies wanted us to be entrenched in their socials. The rest was literally trivial.
Blogs kinda dwindled in importance as a whole. Substack brought it back to a degree, through email distribution, which is a more familiar technology to regular people compared to RSS. But even Substack is becoming more of an algo feed based social site nowadays.
You are talking about bookmarks and stuff but that's not how regular people use the internet. They open a handful of social media apps and scroll whatever is shown to them.
I am more optimistic, good blogs will continue being there, and crap ones are no new invention or menace, be it LLM slop or Markov chain SEO babble content of 10 years ago.
> They should just have no DM feature at all, then; make all messages publicly visible.
This makes no sense.
I can discuss something in a bar which is not a very private conversation, I wouldn't care if someone else hear what I'm saying. But I also don't want someone to record it and post it on the internet to be seen by the whole world.
In a bar you're not speaking directly into a microphone that is permanently saving everything you say for later instant access by every government and advertising agency that wants to prosecute you or invade your privacy to sell you something
You didn't mention the fact that my mom cannot access the recording of my microphone.
That's what ThoAppelsin is proposing.
It should be fairly implicit that if you are using a free product from a private company you are the products.
However it's definitely not implicit that every I do on the platform will get publicly known by everyone else. If it does I would probably not use it and find alternatives.
I suppose they mean that apps should brand their non e2ee chat features as private or personal, which is what users take as the default assumption when interacting in one to one chat.
Isn't that something we asked for? We keep asking for parents to parent their children instead of getting age verification laws, and that is what that looks like.
I fail to see the link between private conversations/DM and E2EE.
To quote a comment I made some time ago:
- You can call your service e2e encrypted even if every client has the same key bundled into the binary, and rotate it from time to time when it's reversed.
- You can call your service e2e encrypted even if you have a server that stores and pushes client keys. That is how you could access your message history on multiple devices.
- You can call your service e2e encrypted and just retrieve or push client keys at will whenever you get a government request.
E2EE only prevents naive middlemen from reading your messages.
Fundamentally actual E2EE is complicated problem. And probably not very user friendly. It is full of technical trade-offs. And mistakes are very common. Or they lead to situations that people do not want. Like if you lost your phone or it break how do you get history back... What if you also forgot password? Or it was stored in local manager...
It is phrase that sounds good. But actually doing it effectively in way that average user understand and can use system with it with minimal effort is very hard.
You could have reasonable legal system where privacy is guaranteed. But you do not need end to end encryption for that to be thing. It really is orthogonal issue.
Sure, however kids these days often can't socialize irl - should kids be isolated from friends because they're unable to have any private conversations at all?
During times in which I was unable to socialize irl (eg school holidays), and unable to talk to my friends online, I can confirm that the isolation was not good for my mental health.
Nice way to hint that you are definitely being sarcastic, because cmd+something+3 surely and clearly is no way intuitive, contrary to the use of dedicated Print Screen key on Windows.
Just to point for the unfamiliar, the "hotkey" defaults for screen shotting are user configurable on macOS, in System Preferences/Keyboard/Shortcuts. In fact, shortcuts can be changed not only for all actions, but also menu items in any/all programs can be remapped to desired key combos, or indeed added for menu items with default hotkeys. This is actually staggeringly powerful, and frequently overlooked.
Many professors in our department have a MBP, and their LaTeX presentations look bad, just because macOS is bad. I notice it every single time, and sometimes (without me even saying, I just tolerate it, don't make a sound) they themselves do, too, asking themselves whether they've grown that so old or something.
I only have the leftovers of my girlfriend, 2015 MBA, as a macOS device. The PDFs look like crap on Preview and many other ".app"s I have tried. SumatraPDF running on Wine works properly though. Yeah, I'd say Preview simply does not work properly at this point. Shame, but also fun to watch from the Windows's side.
I am clearly blaming Gmail for discontinuing IMAP support, which seems to me clearly as a foul practice of abusing dominance over the market via introduction of non-standard ways, while also halting support for the standards. They would perish if they were to do this as a small company, and make benefit out of it by "pushing" their products as a bundle, just because a sizeable amount of people are dependent on their services.
I have things still happily using IMAP, in fact gmail on my iPhone is still showing IMAP-like folders, further more the gmail help still shows the IMAP configuration procedure[1].
I've got another thing to become suspicious about, which again involves VPN.
I live in Turkey, I use VPN (on AWS at Ohio) not to circumvent anything else than the imposed restrictions of my own country, and not some other countries' or companies'. Along with countless others, Wikipedia and Imgur are some well-known websites that are made unaccessible from Turkey. With Windows 10's VPN client, you don't even recognize that you are on VPN. The overhead is so low (relative to the basic internet speeds), that I don't even notice that VPN is on most of the time. I usually open it when I want to visit some Wikipedia page, and turn it back off after recognizing delay/lag on the games I'm playing online. Not even videos load recognizably slower, not on my VPN on AWS at least.
I wanted to give both the anime and the Microsoft Store's video section a try, and did nothing more than just opening the Microsoft Store, finding the content, getting it for free and watching the first episode. My guess is that this might have been the problem.
If this really is the case, then I could not possibly know I was fooling Microsoft Store:
- I did not and still do not know if the content was not available, free or paid, from Turkey. There were no indications of the content being unavailable to Turkey on the Store page.
- Microsoft Store did not ask me if I am from Ohio, I never said I was from Ohio. I regularly use VPN for personal reasons, unrelated to this matter. I did not use VPN to make Microsoft Store think that I am from Ohio. Microsoft Store itself may have falsely assumed that I am from Ohio, and granted me the right to watch a content for free. It is Microsoft Store's fault for immediately assuming my location from the way I connect to the Internet.
If my guesses are true, then Microsoft's Microsoft Store is the culprit for being overly presumptuous about my location, not asking me for approval, hence not putting me responsible, and giving me free access to some content as a result. I may not be put responsible for Microsoft's presumptions that I haven't approved.
> I wanted to give both the anime and the Microsoft Store's video section a try, and did nothing more than just opening the Microsoft Store, finding the content, getting it for free and watching the first episode. My guess is that this might have been the problem.
I agree. It's very likely that, by using a US VPN, you circumvented geo-restriction in the Microsoft Store. You could test that by creating another Microsoft account, under a fake name, using a commercial VPN service with a non-US exit. Then try to get the Dragon Ball Z episode from Microsoft Store. If you need help, feel free to email me.
It is my personal over-10-years-old account. I merely bought a university package that is for sale on Microsoft, using this account after getting registered to my university.
I would still see if I could get the university involved. A request from a university will get more attention than from an individual, since a) Microsoft wants to be responsive to education b) they are selling anywhere from several hundred to several thousand of licenses (depending on your university's size).
No, I have graduated by the end of last Spring semester. I purchased the product while I still was a student last year. I will become Master's student once again in within two months.
You may end up deciding to continue inflicting harm, intentionally so this time---that is a perfectly valid course to take. But you cannot anymore remain unintentional about it.
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