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TWeaK

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TWeaK ,

Didn’t they like stop paying the actors or something and then cheap out with the costumes?

TWeaK , (edited )

Yeah I suspect this was filmed at the original version, from memory they toured around a bit and then cheaped out and fucked it all up. Like, the new Shrek costume was really bad and just looked like a green man had been shopping at the Gap.

Edit: according to the video linked in the comment below, it first ran in 2008 and was really good. Then, in 2024 they revived it, and it was bad. Really bad. For starters, the revival was anti-union and didn’t hire any union workers.

TWeaK ,

Yep that sounds like the story!

TWeaK ,

Hell the US came and joined Israel’s side in a war after the IDF sank the USS Liberty.

TWeaK ,

/me Laughs in Windows 10.

TWeaK ,

I’m sure I’ll be there with you soon enough.

TWeaK ,

What are your plans when end of life /support comes to Windows ten?

Switch to Linux and run virtual machines when I need to use Windows.

Right now I don’t quite have the drive to do it, but an end to support for Windows 10 would push me over the edge. I just can’t stand Windows 11, not even because of all the bullshit but just the way it mandates the UI structure - last time I tried it my dealbreaker was that you can’t just have it always display all taskbar icons, you have to manually force each one to show. If a new icon comes up, it will be hidden.

TWeaK ,

My experience is limited, but not no experience. In any case, it’s not like Windows 10 will be immediately unusable when support ends.

TWeaK ,

If the US only awarded actual damages like most of the rest of the world, instead of inflated punitive damages, then this would pretty much be a non-issue. Rightsholders in the US see targeting copyright infringement as a source of income, not a necessary indemnity.

TWeaK ,

Wait, spiderman has a pizza theme??

Lol, so it does. Technically not a Spiderman tune, but the Accelerando is probably unique to Spoiderman.

Also I swear part of that tune was ripped off and used in Mario 7 Stars, in one of the cloud areas maybe.

Family confirms death of Israeli-American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin (apnews.com)

The family of Israeli-American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin announced the young man’s death early Sunday, ending a relentless campaign by his parents to rescue him that included meetings with world leaders and an address to the Democratic convention last month....

TWeaK ,

So we can reasonably assume they were alive until the IDF ramped things up in both Gaza and the West Bank.

TWeaK ,

We can also safely assume they had a very happy life until hammas decided to kidnap them on OCT 7.

Absolutely. However they were kept alive until recently. What happened recently? Israel stepped up its assault. This is a strong correlation.

Does the IDF expect Hamas to just hand over hostages when they come in? If Israel were sincere about their desire to rescue hostages they would be acting differently.

TWeaK ,

The Nazis didn’t have prisoner release on the negotiating table. I’m not saying Hamas’ terms were right, but the IDF hardly exhausted all options, or even most options, before they went “oh boy here I go killing again”.

Also, the IDF previously killed hostages that were topless waiving white, such is their bloodlust.

TWeaK ,

Yeah pretty much.

I mean I’d just draw back to three things:

  • Ben Gvir was closely involved in the Israeli far right group that assassinated the Israeli Prime Minister in the 90s.
  • Netanyahu previously said that people should give Hamas money, as this would be the best way for Israel to take control of Gaza and the West Bank (and apparently now their eyes are on Lebanon next).
  • For some reason Netanyahu left a skeleton crew on the border, sacrificing guards in the towers, relying on an early warning system with an obvious single point of failure (sole reliance on the cellphone network), on the 50th anniversary of the last Yom Kippur war. Anyone with half a brain would realise that such a calendar date is a time for heightened security, not relaxed. And this is the man who campaigned for office on his ability to provide security for Israel.
TWeaK ,

No one’s getting banned here lol. Also deaddit happened because of admin, lemmy still has every opportunity to pack up shop and create new communities (with blackjack and hookers).

TWeaK ,

I mean, you are trying to be pedantic lol but it’s justified in this instance.

TWeaK ,

I wonder if he’s levelled out now that he’s finally old enough to drink?

DuckDuckGo starting to give more "personal" search results

Been slowly running into more results from DDG that seem to have some “personal parameter” or difference in search results. I had a search saved from some months ago, went to check it for some references and got new hits involving local organizations that had nothing to do with the search. Opening up a private browser I see...

TWeaK ,

DuckDuckGo is also feeding your search terms into AI development now. I’ve tried it again recently but prefer Ecosia, at least Ecosia lets me more easily get to Google Maps when I want to, rather than trying to push Apple Maps.

TWeaK , (edited )

If I understand DDG correctly, they use Microsoft Bing as their backend for search results. So while they may be branded DDG, the results are in fact out of DDG’a control. It also means we are more subject to Microsoft’s privacy policy than we are to DDG’s.

This is exactly right. DDG is basically a front end that’s supposed to strip out identifying information and then submit your request to Microsoft. [Edit:] Apparently they have expanded from this, according to their Wikipedia page. [/E]

However, after seeing TV ads for DDG not that long ago I kind of lost what faith I had left in them. As a rule of thumb, I’ve never trusted products and services advertised on TV - TV advertising is expensive, and the business expects to make that expense back and then some from their customers.

TWeaK , (edited )

The page you link to talks about the search results that come at the top of the page, eg a Wikipedia or Trip Advisor result. The actual search itself comes from Bing, and it’s more than likely that the top page banner also is processed via Bing.

Edit: However, the Wikipedia page does provide more detail, which proves you right and my assumption wrong:

DuckDuckGo’s results are a compilation of “over 400” sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results.

TWeaK ,

Not that I’m aware of. Your best bet is to save the post and come back later, or if you’re in a browser leave the tab open in the background.

TWeaK ,

Ah I wasn’t aware of that shortcut, one of the main reasons DDG wasn’t working for me was because I thought I could only do !g and then go to the Google page, and Google had been making it more difficult to go from the main search page to Maps.

TWeaK ,

Law isn’t defined just by legislation, it is also defined by case law. A judge’s ruling on a previous case makes that ruling law.

Now, I’m not saying this ruling is appropriate - I simply don’t know enough about how it came to be. But if Brazil made laws about social media companies and then a judge made a ruling based on that law requiring social media companies have a representative, then that absolutely is valid law.

To draw an example, the EU never made a law about cookie splash screens. The EU made GDPR law (well, strictly speaking they made a directive, then member states make laws that must meet or exceed that directive), and then a judge interpreted that law and made it a requirement to have cookie splash screens. I would personally argue that the judge was trying to shove a square peg through a round hole there, when really he should have identified that data collection is in fact a secondary transaction hidden in the fine print (rather than an exchange of data for access to the service, this isn’t how the deal is presented to the user; the service is offered free of charge but the fine print says your data is surrendered free of charge), and he should have made it such that users get paid for the data that’s being collected. However, the judge’s ruling stands as law now.

TWeaK ,

They have at least moved away from the twitter.com URL, up until then it was hard to argue that it wasn’t still Twitter. However, until they come up with a new name for “tweets” I think the original name should still stand.

TWeaK ,

Yes and no. It only really applies to Twitter/X and Twitter clones. You wouldn’t call a Facebook post a tweet, no matter how short, nor would you call a reddit or lemmy post/comment that.

And even then, Mastadon has its own term, toots, and BlueSky calls them skeets.

Until Twitter comes up with a new name in line with their new branding, I think the business should still be referred to as Twitter. But the business should go bankrupt before that happens, hopefully, the lenders need to call in their debts already.

TWeaK ,

It looks like you haven’t really digested anything of the conversation here before you came in to reply with corrections.

Not everywhere.

Previous rulings are a precedent in Common Law systems like the US, UK, Canada, or Australia.

Only Supreme Court rulings become a precedent in Civil Law systems like the EU, Russia,most of the rest of America.

Sure, but we’re talking about Brazil. You haven’t established whether Brazil is common or civil law. Also, we’re talking about a Supreme Court ruling.

Not all of the EU is civil law. Ireland and Cyprus both use common law systems.

While common law countries often have roots connected with the UK and are very similar, civil law countries are far more varied. Many civil law countries are distinctly different and arguably should be a separate class of legal structure - even ones with French roots (perhaps the most prominent civil law country).

Ultimately, though, the differences between civil and common law structures are almost entirely technical in nature. The end result is largely the same - in a common law country, case law can continue to be challenged until a Supreme Court ruling, and as such it isn’t really proper case law until such a ruling, just like in civil law countries.

guides.library.harvard.edu/law/brazil

Brazil is, in fact, a civil law country. However, they do follow case law from Supreme Court, which would make this ruling about requiring a representative valid case law. Which is what I said to OP.

The EU at its top level creates “Directives”

This is exactly what I said.

The EU made GDPR law (well, strictly speaking they made a directive, then member states make laws that must meet or exceed that directive)

The EU made a directive, this directive led to GDPR laws made by member states. However I was apparently mistaken, it wasn’t an EU Tribunal court case that led to cookie splash screens through case law, it was Recital 66 (lol Order 66), essentially a 2009 modification to the 2002 ePrivacy Directive, followed by roundtable discussions that heavily favoured the advertising industry over civil interest groups leading to its formal implementation into the directive in 2012.

linkedin.com/…/truth-behind-cookie-banners-alexan…

To summarise:

  • What I said at the start was right - Brazil’s Supreme Court ruling requiring social media companies to have representatives is valid case law.
  • My example of cookie splash screens wasn’t ideal, but you did not give the right reasoning, or any reasoning - it was a poor analogy because it wasn’t a judge’s rulinig that modified the law but legal discussions that were prompted by public interest groups.

Like I say, it really feels like you didn’t read very far before you made your reply. Your comment reads more as a statement of tangentially related things you know with a thin veil disguising it as a correction. If you’d just made those statements without the veil, or if you’d followed through with the corrections and actually explained what was wrong, I don’t think I would have found your reply so objectionable (although I may also have woken up on the wrong side of the bed to your comment, sorry about that).

But then, I also wouldn’t have looked into the specifics of Brazilian law or the full origins of cookie splash screens, so thanks for the motivation lol.

TWeaK ,

Because of enshittification lol

TWeaK ,

I dunno, allegedly people actually vote for a man named “Trump”.

TWeaK ,

I said you came in to correct me but didn’t actually deliver any corrections. You just talked about the things you know.

I didn’t say the same thing you said, I provided the correction that you left out.

TWeaK ,

Thanks, yet another reason why my example was a bit off hah.

TWeaK ,

Maybe, other articles seem to have more recent photos where he doesn’t look so crazy fat.

TWeaK ,

Booo, someone already stole my username :(

TWeaK ,

They also froze assets from Starlink.

Meanwhile Starlink’s direct to cell capability is only growing. If your phone has 4G, Starlink knows where it is.

TWeaK ,

I think he leaves that kind of plagiarism to his old friend Peter Thiel, who seems to have an obsession with Lord of the Rings villains.

TWeaK ,

Well the US has a pretty strong affiliation with SpaceX, given that they permit all their launches. Also, I can’t imagine the US would get away with launching similar technology themselves as exclusively military satellites - other nations would object.

TWeaK ,

If your phone can talk with a cell tower, the tower can work out how far away you are. With 3 or more towers they can determine your location by triangulation. When your phone talks with a cell tower, it identifies itself, including by providing your device’s unique IMEI.

Starlink is effectively a bunch of moving towers in space. If 3 or more Starlink satellites can talk to your phone, then they can also determine your position. It’s basically the same principle as GPS, except at a much lower altitude and over 4G/LTE bands, and the satellite receives signal back from your phone whereas with GPS it’s one way from the satellite to your device.

TWeaK ,

Fair correction, Palantir is only used by villains, it isn’t evil in and of itself. However I’m pretty sure Thiel also had something called The Eye of Sauron - maybe a product made by Palantir.

TWeaK ,

Starlink is a mobile internet platform by SpaceX. They currently have somewhere around 6,300 satellites up in low earth orbit, in complex shells covering most of the globe. These satellites aren’t permanent, they’re so low that they do experience some mild atmospheric drag, which causes them to eventually fall into the atmosphere and burn up. However SpaceX frequently launches more.

Over the last year or so SpaceX have been developing direct-to-cell capability, using 4G/LTE. This means you will be able to send and receive calls, texts and data over Starlink, direct from your mobile phone. This is only possible because of the low altitude of Starlink - conventional satellites are much higher up, and while they can send signals to your phone (eg GPS) they’re too far away for your phone to reach back.

However, the flip side of this is that Starlink is effectively operating mobile phone masts up in space, globally. A network carrier on land already has the ability to triangulate your position using cell towers - they ping your phone from multiple towers, with this they can determine distance, and with 3 or more they can triangulate with increasing precision. This is kind of acceptable, because it’s only the country you’re in (or near to) that will be able to identify and locate you. However with SpaceX you have an American business that’s effectively able to identify (through unique identifiers such as IMEI) and locate you via your phone almost anywhere in the world using their satellite constellation.

TWeaK ,

Starlink direct-to-cell uses LTE, aka 4G. Starlink satellites with direct-to-cell capabilities are effectively mobile phone masts in space that travel all over the globe.

TWeaK ,

Your phone talks back to the satellite to establish a connection, and during this exchange your phone will provide its unique IMEI, as well as you SIM card details and phone number.

TWeaK ,

Lmao they release aluminum oxides when they burn up, it’s basically antipersperant in the upper atmosphere.

Ironically though, it will make us all sweat more.

TWeaK , (edited )

If they didn’t have the range for that you wouldn’t be able to connect with them to send calls, text, or data. Those are all two way communication and requires the satellite to be within range of your device.

Now, there’s something to be said for the current level of coverage of direct-to-cell capable satellites. If they don’t have many up there then it will be harder to triangulate - however they also move quite quickly through their orbits, so if they make multiple measurements they can get a good idea with just one satellite, and again the accuracy will only go up when more satellites are in range.

One article I read last July said they only had 103 satellites with that capability up, with plans to launch a further 300 this year (out of a total constellation of 6,200). However I’ve read other sources from last year about much higher numbers. I suspect the 103 refers to a newer version of direct-to-cell capable satellites that will form the commercial implementation.

As for the range of the signal from the satellite, it absolutely can reach your device. GPS is an awful lot higher, and with satellites in general you don’t have to worry about people being nearby to the radiation source (like you do with phones or even towers). There isn’t a risk of location or identification with a one way signal from a satellite, though, however if your device were to do something in response to the signal that could be an issue (eg [ab]using the emergency alert system or some sort of novel exploit).

Suffice it all to say, we’re entering an age where there is the potential for a lot of shit to happen, stuff that hasn’t really even been explored in SciFi or spy movies. In the late 90s we had Enemy of the State, which touched on satellites being used for stuff, but as far as I’m aware no fiction has explored using the satellites for two-way communication with our devices. People think of satellites being 600,000km away, not merely ~500km.

TWeaK ,

I’ve already put a lot more effort in the discussion than you have. Is it too much for you to just search for it yourself?

direct.starlink.com

TWeaK ,

No worries, your comment was at least a little more than just a hollow “source?”, as you stated what you were unsure about, so I gave an explanation of why the connection would be feasible.

It also isn’t really my job to prove my comment, this isn’t a place where people write academic papers that must be cited, it’s casual internet conversation. We’re all on an equal playing field. You have just as much of an obligation to disprove my comment as I have to prove it.

If I give detailed reasoning, that’s a form of evidence, and you should at least provide counter-reasoning instead of just disregarding it because I haven’t spoonfed you a source. Not that it seems like you completely disregarded it, but you did latch onto the fact that I didn’t do a search on your behalf.

Appologies if I’m still coming off as a little hostile, it isn’t personal, this is just something that really bugs me about online chat - when someone puts effort in and then others dismiss it without putting any effort in themselves.

The service has been tested in late 2023 and proven working, at least while the satellites are overhead (at the time there were fewer that had the capability). Starlink also have partnerships with various telecoms companies in countries over the world - the technology will essentially relay from ground based towers on their network to the user via the satellites. They also have no issue turning the system off when they need to as satellites pass over territories, as they have demonstrated over various warzones. However, such a facility could easily be configured to turn on, and even without an agreement from a telecoms company there’s no reason they couldn’t be run unauthorised, like a Stingray phone tracker. This is the issue I’m raising, one that I don’t think anyone else is really talking about yet.

Here’s an article from 2 days ago that shows the service is already operational for emergency calls in the US: econotimes.com/Starlinks-Direct-to-Cell-to-Launch… That was the first result in the news banner in a search for “Starlink direct to cell”. Like I say, it really isn’t hard to find the information you’re looking for.

TWeaK ,

It’s one of the OG ones, ass-car: xkcd.com/37/

TWeaK ,

I hate this phrase because it assumes that copyright infringement was at one point the same as stealing - it never was.

Stealing is a crime, where you take with the intent to deprive. Copyright infringement is a civil offense where the original owner loses nothing.

TWeaK ,

Rule 1 and 2 are often swapped across different instances.

TWeaK ,

We could call that the Chomsky fallacy.

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