theneverfox

theneverfox , 10 months ago

This is alarming…

One of the things companies have started doing lately is signaling “we could do bankrupt”, then jumping ahead a stage on enshittification

theneverfox , 10 months ago

Nah, the default is anarchy. Like a group of friends, you come up with implicit roles, and there might be a louder voice but no one gives orders

theneverfox , 10 months ago

Oh, don’t forget kosa, it has bipartisan support

They want to hold sites responsible for children accessing NSFW content on them. Which means ID of some kind

It would also apply to user posted content

theneverfox , 10 months ago

The concept is fine, but even the best known implementation is impossible without putting an unacceptable level of trust in one group.

This should be parental controls - make websites declare a rating, then let the owners lock down devices

Nothing is going to be absolute, but we have to prioritize freedom or soon our Internet will look like China’s. They’ve already been talking about banning vpns and kosa would make you tie ID to anywhere you can post - all social media is considered possible adult content by default

theneverfox , 10 months ago

Because all those things make it possible to release independently, it’s still not easy. Marketing and getting exposure is hard, it’s a totally different skill. With a publisher, you don’t have to worry about any of that - you might even get funding up front.

Personally, I still think it’s worth doing - I’m in that position, and although I’m having a lot of trouble getting off the ground, at least I’m free to follow my visions

But I get why people would do it. A slice of a big pie is worth more than all of a tiny one.

It’s also stressful if it’s not in your skillset - I’ve started using chat gpt to rewrite my announcements and such. Before I’d stress trying to put them together and focused on being clear and honest, but no one was reading them. I find it worse than public speaking, at least when I get on stage I’m too busy to feel self conscious.

The stuff I come up with using chat-gpt is a bit cringe, but at least people read them - sadly corpo speak draws people in

theneverfox , 10 months ago

Librewolf has been pretty cool since I started using it as a sidearm with less than 600 ff tabs, how does mullvad compare?

theneverfox , 10 months ago

Librewolf has been pretty cool since I started using it as a sidearm with less than 600 ff tabs, how does mullvad compare?

theneverfox , 10 months ago

And?

I loved Google. They did a lot of great things for the world, they were the driving force behind all sorts of technology, and were champions of the web, upgradable electronics, and helping individual devs get their side projects off the ground.

Years went by, and now i hesitate to use chrome even though their debugger is the best, am looking at degoogling my phone and watching Linux phones with interest, and I recently realized I trust Microsoft more than them. I even use Bing before I go to Google these days - their search isn’t much better anymore, and Bing more than makes up the difference

You can’t give corporations or billionaires points for the past - they’re always going to go bad eventually. Giving them loyalty is like drinking tap water that used to be good but now is making your hair fall out - maybe it was good before, maybe it’ll be good again, but for tomorrow you should probably look at other options

theneverfox , 10 months ago

That’s not really fair, it’s a big investment, and new cars are wasteful. Also, Musk wasn’t like this so openly before he started meeting with Trump in the white house.

Not that long ago he was a dickhead hype man for electric cars and reusable rockets. As billionaires go, that’s close to as good as it gets

A new one, post Twitter takeover? Fair.

theneverfox , 10 months ago

It’s very simple. There are all sorts of long term rationalizations tossed around, like future tax revenue or making more disadvantaged people who are more likely to vote Republican.

It’s a whole lot simpler than all that though.

It’s a distraction.

Think about it this way - do they seem like they give the slightest shit about the long-term? Minimum, this would take a decade before it does much for them.

But by fighting over this issue, which will have a profoundly terrible effect on a lot of people, we don’t talk much about how inequality skyrocketed during COVID. We don’t talk about ranked choice voting, we don’t talk about UBI, we don’t talk about the fact the Internet is being locked down or talk about how we could reform the system to be better.

They fight over issues like this, and they’re free to do whatever they want economically. And sure, it’s a popular idea for the rich - a pregnancy through delivery costs like 12-20k, it makes you less able to change jobs or move, it makes you consume stuff you would never have needed otherwise, and a population decline is going to make all of your profit projections fall in the long term. I’m sure it brings in donations

At it’s core, it’s because it’s making careers for a certain type of politician and a blank check on every other issue for sitting congressmen

theneverfox , 10 months ago

Yeah, they pushed it in chrome very soon after the proposal made the rounds

It’s pretty telling seeing as it happened so fast it must’ve predated the proposal. The proposal was super vague - if you take it (and their statements) at face value, this was a nebulous idea with none of the details ironed out.

And then like a week later, they push this update that would lock people out of sites? No way in hell they didn’t test the crap out of this.

Nah, this is definitely being done in bad faith.

theneverfox , 10 months ago

I hate that you’re getting downvoted for this, understanding the other sides argument is how you can evaluate the truth. It’s important especially when the issue is clear cut like this

The argument John Deere made in this case is basically “we have to put DRM in [blocking repairs from anyone not licensed by us] because of EPA regulations on emissions”. The EPA rules clearly state all the necessary emissions information for motor vehicles be made available; one of their arguments on all sorts of regulations has long been “tractors aren’t motor vehicles”. This is a legalese argument to be sure though.

More broadly, their argument has been: we need this control, otherwise users or repairmen might do something improper and make our equipment unsafe. They’ve also argued this might unfairly expose them to liability

Of course, the counter argument is: yeah, that’s how everything has always worked. If they deliver you a faulty product based on negligence, it’s on them. If you or your mechanic modify your car, plane, computer, etc. dangerously and it explodes, it’s not the manufacturers fault.

What it really comes down to is rent seeking. Selling a product with a limited need means you have a limited market. It’s what happened to instapot - they made a solid, reliable product, they dominated the market for pressure cookers. Then they went bankrupt because their income started to crash as the people who wanted one and didn’t have one dwindled. (I’d say job well done, they made a good product and now it’s everywhere, now they should downsize to the point where they reach equilibrium with current demands)

100 years ago, pretty much all markets were growing as 3rd world countries industrialized… Now there’s basically nowhere on Earth willing or able to become new consumers. Companies don’t care about cash - they care about cash flows.

If you can’t make a way better tractor every few years, you either need to make them not last for long so they keep coming back for replacements or repairs, or you try to turn ownership of their products into a service

theneverfox , 10 months ago

We don’t have time for that.

The way I see it, we have 3 main paths

We cut everything we’re doing, go local and human powered, and adapt to conditions as they change.

Super-intelligence and/or full automation (whichever comes first, we soon get both). It makes capitalism pointless, it lets us expand into space scaling geometrically, and it tells us exactly how we can change things here to maximize habitability

We keep doing what we’re doing until the “just in time” supply chains we use to minimize costs collapse. Either the US military’s plans for this are good and we minimize loss of life, or we starve. Industries collapse immediately, and maybe we lose the ability to produce higher technology - at the very least it won’t be nearly as common. Hopefully we can still work on AI and robotics or there’s no real way out of it

Path 1 is probably not happening. Path 2 and 3 are just a race between the next revolution in technology and the climate. It’s looking pretty close right now - so doing anything to tip the scales, however slightly, is a great idea

theneverfox , 10 months ago

There’s something no one seems to be talking about

this isn’t limited to your browser

It runs at the highest ring of security on your processor. It could mean it locks you to OEM Android, iOS, or Windows. It could be extended to look at your app list, dns settings, potentially even tell if the device is using a vpn

it could be paired with kosa to use biometrics to verify identity

And it would be shocking if cloudflare didn’t implement this - it would save them a ton of processing. It’s likely it would be a default setting - this would apply to large swaths of the Internet, not just Google services

theneverfox , 10 months ago

I think people often underestimate the animal mind

It’s not like they have discrete thoughts in words, but animals form friendships even across species in the wild. It’s not abnormal for one animal to partner up with another - with an imbalance in size/strength the smaller one often will scout out prey and the larger one will give them scraps. Sometimes equals will share territory and even raise kittens/cubs together, taking turns babysitting.

With less abundant food, that’s certainly got to be more rare now, but we’ve seen it happen, even captured it at length on video

Cats are going to have all sorts of ideas about our relationship, from a parent to a big predator friend to a giant clueless kitten. Or, maybe just another predator sharing space, or sometimes they totally discard their instincts and live by human rules

It’s not so dissimilar from what we’d think if an alien took us as a pet and we didn’t try to put a label on it - every relationship is unique

theneverfox , 10 months ago

It’s actually kind of interesting - cats have culture. I’m sure there’s a generic competent too, but cats apparently get their social skills crammed into them by their mother in a crash course when they’re weaning. It’s apparently very slow and difficult to change after that period. They’ve studied certain marker behaviors the way they study how language branch out, and they estimate it takes upwards of a dozen generations for a line of cats to fully adapt to the local “dialect”

It’s not just that cats are standoffish and hard to understand, it’s that western cats are in particular. In Japan, they’re far more “extroverted”, they’re far more likely to approach humans and perform “cute” behaviors like big kitty eyes and “cute” juvenile sounding meows for attention

It makes you think - up until like the 70s, people would just kill cats for fun, cheap fur, or because they annoyed them. A lot of older people have stories about watching someone drown kittens

English has a ton of words and idioms relating to killing cats in the context of it once being a relatable behavior

In Japan, they have idioms like “[I’m so busy] I’m in no position to turn down a cats help”. Eastern cultures also generally see their presence as lucky, say they can see and protect against spirits, and Japan has a spirit called a bakeneko which is a two tailed cat who has lived 100 years, and is now a powerful trickster that sometimes will curse someone with fatal levels of bad luck.

It kind of makes sense - they were largely seafaring and have all sorts of annoying critters around, whereas in Europe and America they were brought on the ships to defend the food, but once they got there they became an invasive species inland, where they’re far less valued

It makes sense they’d be more standoffish - they want to be around because they’re adapted human settlements. They’re definitely social animals, but maybe their fickleness is a way to remind people that they can do some damage if their cornered

Anyways, I saw a documentary about the trainability of cats and thought it was interesting… I’m definitely more of a dog person, but it made me think - out of about a dozen cats I’ve spent a significant time around, 4 were assholes and 2 I formed a deep bond with.

It made me want to add a couple cats to the dog and local wildlife I’d adopt if I ever manage to afford a place in the boonies

theneverfox , 10 months ago

That’s not how I use it at all. I don’t use it for things I can’t do, because it can’t either.

I use it for things I could easily do, but don’t want to, or when I don’t know enough about a topic to ask.

For example, I had it build me JSON of the top 100 Lemmy instances.

I also was having trouble customizing a markup renderer - it didn’t know how to do it, it couldn’t find anything on my situation, but I asked it how it would do it in a few different common libraries.

I still had to figure it out myself with some trial and error, but instead of spending a day diving into how parsing, tokization, and rendering work, it showed me what a solution might look like, and defined some terms for me in context.

Knowing what it looked like, I could guess what the library creator was thinking with the undocumented custom extension I saw in their code, and I quickly got traction

theneverfox , 10 months ago

I don’t think it caused the inflation spike - the assumption that inflation is linked to wages assumes an economic system very different from ours

We don’t have the capitalism of Adam Smith. Under such a system, we’d expect prices to go back down. That is based around competition, which we barely have anymore. We now have high barriers to entry due to hostile takeovers through the stock market, shutdown of competitors through outsized influence over regulators, suppliers, and financers. It’s all the hallmarks of monopolies through outright collusion or unspoken understanding that competition would kill both parties stock price for the duration of the conflict.

The payments are long over and the money mostly went to companies - this isn’t traditional inflation, this is a lack of competition. Some people are terming our current system as feudal capitalism, because it’s closer to rent extraction than a free market

theneverfox , 10 months ago

I don’t think it’s a narrow scope at all, it just shouldn’t infringe on the territory of users

Launch alerts, RSS feeds, version releases, a of interesting communities could be based around bot posts.

Not reposts for sure though, and if we’re going to do stuff like pipedbot I’d prefer it be summoned. But in general it’d be fun if we made them weird and creative, but they should be doing things only bots can do

theneverfox , 10 months ago

My theory has always been that these are higher dimensional shapes passing through a 3d membrane. The erratic darting around makes more sense in that context… It’s like if you drop a chain into the water, just looking at where it hits the surface it would seem like 2-4 orbs jumping around with incredible speed, but in reality it’s not moving in relationship to the surface, so it wouldn’t have water resistance except as it falls through the 2d slice

I mean I’d love for these to be aliens, but darting around impossibly is a very strange way to communicate… This also tends to happen around certain regions more than others. That makes sense to me, depending on the hyper geometry I think you’d expect to see

Hell, maybe it is higher dimensional aliens playing with us like we play with fish sometimes, just dropping things in the water and watching us get all excited

theneverfox , 10 months ago

That would be amazing

theneverfox , 10 months ago

More than that.

He’s dispelling the myth of the billionaire businessman. He could show up quite a lot in all sorts of history books

theneverfox , 10 months ago

Why did this let me instantly do a British accent?

theneverfox , 10 months ago

Forced to implement is the wrong term - they were tasked with designing it. They can’t just swap one person out for another - losing the lead dev or designer would be delay or kill the effort

They could’ve pushed back - software ethics is a required course for very good reason - but it’s easy to never ask if you should do something and skip straight to how. It gets easier to skip that piece every time, and the company isn’t going to respect it - we need outside pressure so they can point to us and say “this will have repercussions”

They don’t deserve death threats, but trashing everything they push on GitHub is fair. Measured steady pressure - save the most extreme stuff for upper management and shareholders

For the engineers you have to make them understand they did bad and they should feel bad, they need to feel that their peers have lost respect for them, not that this is the public lashing out

theneverfox , 10 months ago

You’re right, they can only try. They can express concerns, they can interpret goals a little differently to minimize harm, they can stretch the truth and make the project seem less feasible. None of that is going to do much if management is driving this through - loudly resigning in protest is the last move, and unless you have a big name it’s not going to do much.

But you’re wrong that I’m coming at this as a consumer - I’m a dev and I’ve been put in this situation before (although our work wasn’t public).

You’re also wrong on the googler front - most of them aren’t making that much, better than they’d make most other places, but not life changing amounts

When you talk to a googler, there’s a pride, and buried under that usually an insecurity. They got into the bleeding edge of tech… Or so they thought.

Last Thanksgiving I was talking to someone who worked for them, and once the conversation got technical I could see it in his eyes. I happened to be well versed in the topic, and so I started asking questions about his approach. And as much as I tried to hide it (he is family) he must’ve seen the disappointment on my face… He just deflated. He knew deep down what he was doing wasn’t actually that cool or special - it’s just a lie that he hears constantly

Working at a company like Google, you’re constantly being told you’re doing important work that could change the world. There’s pride and status there. They’ve crafted a bubble where everyone reinforces that belief, that “what we’re doing is good and important”

When you step outside that bubble and realize the technical community doesn’t respect you, personally, not because of Google but because of your own actions? That pokes a person right in the place they put their self-worth

theneverfox , 10 months ago

Here’s the thing - I want to work. I love it - I create solutions to problems. It’s who I am, and when I have nothing else to do I wander around turning scraps into something useful. I became a programmer because I could create without worries about wasting materials.

What I hate is being exploited like a resource - 40 hours a week is a lot. It’s enough I use every free moment just getting my energy back. I have no time to work on my own projects or properly socialize - I just get worn down until I burn out and can’t wake up in the morning.

I’m also very aware of the impact of my actions, and nearly every possible job involves draining the world of something to make money for someone who has plenty.

I don’t care if other people get to coast because of my work, I just want to solve hard problems in a way that adds to the world.

I do care when I’m used as a pawn in the game of capitalism - But meet my basic and I’d spend my time creating

theneverfox , 10 months ago

I’m with you there, but that seems like a reason to fight

This would very likely be added to cloudflare by default (it would lower their costs), and that would put a solid chunk of the Internet behind the blackwall

theneverfox , 10 months ago

When I made my first app, KitKat had just come out, and Google was one of the better companies out there.

Man, things have gone a long way down some rough paths

theneverfox , 11 months ago

I mean, underpaid IT aside, do they need to be better than the students?

We like to organize school like there’s rules, you follow them, and if you do better it must be because you are better.

But thats not how the world works, and it’s not how technology works - it’s all about understanding the system and looking for loopholes

Is it better to enforce absolute control though? It teaches you nothing but how to be a good cog in the machine.

Teaching you that the rules aren’t absolute, but requires skill and legwork gives you a mindset to actually succeed in our warped little resource allocation game. Instead you should teach them to consider the effects - if they crash the network, make school suck for everyone for a few days.

But as to your original point, you still need an admin who can at least manage the network, and they should be given the funds to pay for that

theneverfox , 10 months ago

Being woke is looking at the system critically. It’s not taking what you’re told at face value, it’s examining your own beliefs and the beliefs of society about the system

It’s pretty ironic the way most are using the word

theneverfox , 10 months ago

Those are SJWs, who are generally not very woke. They embody the (false) stated morality of the system, which is very un-woke

A woke person would recognize the system is built to turn us against each other, and not play into it

theneverfox , 11 months ago

Exactly!

More are more I’ve been thinking - he watches anime, he thinks current social media is incredibly dangerous, and (while he was always a dick in private) he only really showed the current Musk after meeting Trump.

We know musk watches anime - it’s like the zero requiem. First, he becomes a folk hero, a billionaire putting his weight behind important tech for humanity. Then he meets Trump - maybe he realized how dark our prognosis as a species is.

He starts driving away his left-leaning futurist and techy core with bigotry and being a dick. He backs out of a plan to buy Twitter, violates his parole, and makes a big show about trying to get out of it… But what did he actually do besides complain it’s full of bots, then give up?

He walks in with a kitchen sink, drives away anyone who can afford to leave or might resist a stupid order, and settles in.

For months, about every two weeks he’s been doing something to wean users off Twitter, while making a big show of some increasingly obviously dumb ideas. Like seriously, his business is ads - it makes so little sense that he limit users to such low limits - even subscribers could eat through that easily

He lies through his teeth and says it’s working, he’s almost breaking even, that users and advertisers come crawling back… Exactly what u/spez and every other social media guy desperately want to believe - the only thing standing between them and profit is telling their users to suck it

Now he finally admits they’re in terrible shape, making his last fanboys look like idiots, and making himself look not only erratic and out of touch, but like a bad businessman.

To totally parallel the requiem, he needs to topple all the billionaires before staging his death - leaving the world in shape to rebuild, and very wary of the dangers of wealth inequality.

Or at least make us actually unite and change the laws and economic system.

Or maybe he’s just having a midlife crisis, hates Twitter, and is just burning money for the hell of it. And the attention.

theneverfox , 11 months ago

Um… It’s literally happening right now. They told our grandparents “it’ll be your grandchildren who will really suffer”

We’re the grandchildren. Food and water shortages, people dying from the heat, floods, pandemics. All of it is happening in first world countries. The US, Europe, China… Last year, this year, next year

We’re past the “slowly gets worse” phase. We fucked around for that. We’re starting the “find out” phase

theneverfox , 11 months ago

Try what exactly?

theneverfox , 11 months ago

I opened it earlier to test the URL replacement script in my app, and didn’t have the settings saved

I seriously can’t believe he got drunk a day and a half ago, announced it, and did it first thing Monday morning. I saw a screenshot earlier and thought it was a joke. It doesn’t match at all… The lines are all weird, did he just like grab an unused logo from an old project and demand they have it up within the hour?

theneverfox , 11 months ago

You’re doing Lemmy wrong, and it’s not your fault. People keep saying “instance doesn’t matter” - sure, you can interact with anything all over the main lemmyverse, but the best experience is to find a home server with a community that feels right. Subscriptions and the sorting will get there, but right now ALL (or maybe even local) is a way better experience

Here’s the servers I checked out:

Lemmy.world

What I signed up on. The most people, the most content, civil community. Moderation is there, but you mostly feel it by the sense of civility. They keep getting targeted and they’re experiencing a lot of hiccups, but they’re the biggest source of content right now. Feels to me at this point

(Sh.itjust.works)[sh.itjust.works/signup] About as close as you can get to freedom of speech while keeping out the aggressive bigots. I think one of their rules is along the lines of you can drop n-bombs or argue for whatever you want, but not use slurs against actual people. That says a lot… But they’re great for shitposts and are experimenting with democracy at !agora

(Beehaw.org)[beehaw.org/signup] I’d describe it as a safe space. Heavy moderation and curation of content. Those kinds of places feel uncomfortable and tense to me so I find it hard to give it a fair review. Not my thing, but they claim to be closest to Reddit… I’d give lemmy.world that title, but it was a big site and I was constantly searching out the medium sized subs.

(Lemmy.nsfw)[Lemmynsfw.com/signup] A stable server that will show you plenty of sfw content, and the community is welcoming. And of course, there’s the obvious…

(Blahaj.zone)[lemmy.blahaj.zone/signup] The flip side of why I go to sh.itjust.works, lots of queer shitposts. I like the memes, I like the people, not so sure about the admin… She’s been stirring up a lot of drama the last few days. Maybe there’s more to it, I’ve mostly just seen her posts that look a bit power-trippy from a distance. I’ve also been waiting for that to happen to see how we as a community handle it, so

(pawbs.social)[pawbs.social/signup] This is my main home server now. A while back I came to realize furries are always big early adopters of every new tech, they’re super welcoming, and they don’t care if you’re not a furry so long as you don’t care that they are. I like the art anyways so it doesn’t bother me. A lot of tech stuff too. They are most definitely furries though, and you’ll see OwOs and all that comes with that. They’re very chill, until someone isn’t, so if you can’t handle that you’re going to have a bad time

(Lemmy.ml)[Lemmy.ml/signup] The original devs instance. They’re going through some stuff with their domain and definitely anticapitalist, but after digging for evidence and talking to them they’re far from extremists, but the constant stream of people heading over to there to pick a fight, the site was on edge when I went there a few weeks ago. A good place if you’re into good faith debate on economic and governmental systems

lemmygrad.ml was a more extreme version (literally someone came in to start a fight in every thread i saw) they’re understandably pretty wary. Their ideas are out there, but they’re definitely not pro genocide and don’t worship Stalin (at least as a whole).

Lemmy.ml I wouldn’t pick until they get their domain issue shaken out, but I included them because after an afternoon trying to get to the bottom of it (the only proof of anything I found was a mastodon post about someone very vague about what was said and ending with “unfortunately the conversation was deleted”), so it seems to me they’ve been getting misrepresented. I’m very open to more concrete details though

(Dbzer0.com)[lemmy.dbzer0.com/signup] They sail the high seas. Less content, but what was there was pretty interesting if you’re into tech, security, or digital rights

Those are the sites I remember off the top of my head after exploring around, there’s >2k instances (although about 100 were populated by users when I went through the data dump a few weeks back)

If you’re on Android, I’m doing bug fixes before launching my app very soon, and iPhone build is coming once I can get one to test on. I pushed back the launch to pack on features, I’ve got keyword filtering, you can explore servers without changing accounts, it saves your place, hides read posts, it offers URL replacement (I accidentally went to Twitter for possibly the last time today and YouTube yesterday, the logo change was worth it but nitter is less jarring).

You can interact with Lemmy links, collapse comments, post with a control bar that doesn’t float around, save drafts, and it’s all in a dark material-design style (but with way less cards). There’s still a lot to be done, but after bug fixes and optimization v2 will be focused around combing feeds and accounts to get just the right mix. Eventually I’ve got eyes on pixelfed and maybe even things like friendica - the beauty of the fediverse is how amazing a foundation it is to build on

For today, there’s still occasional bugs and jank, but at this point I can say it’s pretty stable when the servers cooperate. I’ll be covering for more and more of it through the client as time goes on, but for the last 2 weeks I’ve been using it exclusively. My friend convinced me I need to wrap it up and put it out there and get feedback, so

Check out !flemmy if you’re interested, I just posted some screenshots (it will get prettier, but hopefully it’s good enough to not be distracting)

theneverfox , 10 months ago

Ugh… Thanks for the catch, that’s one less bug making it to the beta.

The frustrating thing is I specifically remember looking this up when I was writing the function, because it was weird to me that images were the opposite order

My renderer handled both though, so I might not have noticed for a while

theneverfox , 10 months ago

I’ve never really used it (I’m not very into micro blogging), as someone else said Lemmy is to Reddit as mastodon is to what Twitter used to be

It’s a more complex system of federation than Lemmy, my understanding is that Lemmy is more tightly federated, but mastodon has additional mechanisms to spread posts through the network.

I might get more into microblogging when I add kbin support I might get into it - I’ve found learning enough about something to write code for it often ends with an appreciation for the thing. If that happens I’ll do a similar server experience post somewhere

theneverfox , 10 months ago

I’m glad you got something out of it, there’s all sorts of resources for finding servers, but very few have more than the server description on them

I like reviews, because while your interests may differ from the person, you get a read on them and through that on what they’re reviewing

Maybe one of these days I’ll make a community for this, if we standardize the format we could use it to do reviews on individual servers - it would be a great way to help people trying to pick a server

theneverfox , 11 months ago

Solid wordplay, good delivery, 10/10

theneverfox , 11 months ago

It stands for digital rights management, and basically it’s anything that attempts to manage how you use your hardware.

For example, Keurigs that use the qr code to tell the size of the pod are an example of DRM - they attempt to keep you from using 3rd party pods (I think they walked this back).

It’s also a great example of how it’s more an annoyance that makes the product worse than anything else - you could tape an “official” pod wrapper to the top and it will work with any pod. It also makes it less sanitary and if the wrapper shifts it introduces extra steps between you and your coffee, which should be a criminal offense

It’s next to impossible to fully control a device in someone else’s hands. YouTube videos use DRM, but you can find plenty of ways to download them in an open format anyways.

The exception is when they call out to a remote server - a lot of video games do this (unfortunately even single player games do this a lot now). They might check for ownership before you start the game, but lately they’ve been drilling holes in the security of your computer so they can make sure you haven’t modified it (even for single player games!), which should also be criminal.

This is much harder to crack, but it can still be done.

Then you get to DRM that runs on both sides, which is what this proposal is. They basically want a 3rd party “attester” to verify that your browser is “legit” (what they mean by that is kept pretty vague). Then, when you access a site, the site checks your request, confirms with the attester that your browser is “legit” and will run their code on your machine as written, and if the attester doesn’t give the all clear they send you an error page instead of the site you asked for.

So let’s go through some of the concerns I have after reading through the proposal:

• Many sites decide Firefox, as the only major browser not based off Google’s browser engine, isn’t “legit”. Already, some sites block Firefox, so this is very likely
• Anyone can set up an attester, but sites can decide which they trust. The attester has a lot of access to data which can positively identify you, but they’re only supposed to send a bit of it. If Facebook decides they only trust their own attester, they’re probably not going to pass up collecting as much data as they can. That could include everything from the phone you have, the apps you have installed. Facebook doesn’t need to know where I bank, but if their attester becomes standard, they might get that info even if I never use a Facebook product. Or, all attesters might decide to sell data as their business model
• The only privacy considerations seem to be “we had privacy advocates in the group that drafted this proposal”. If this is true, I’m not sure who they were, because privacy didn’t come up too often

There’s zero reason for this to exist, except to lock down our devices. This benefits corporations - it offers absolutely nothing to users. There’s no way it could ever offer anything to users. .

All it does is let websites block users based on vaguely defined criteria - it’s a proposal so the details are vague, but the most generous reading would be that they could restrict you based on browser, the least generous reading means everyone could tell you to uninstall a competitor’s app before you can use theirs (and selling every scrap of information about you imaginable)

theneverfox , 11 months ago

They want everything to run in TEE on the TPM, which has device specific keys signed by the manufacturer and can’t be accessed through normal means

Best case scenario is someone learns to spoof it, but that’s not easy. Possible, but unlikely to be packaged for personal use, since it’d be the kind of exploit you could sell to the right group for a 6 or 7 figure payout - and that’s doing it officially and above board. Plus, if you did share it, you’d want to keep your identity hidden, the manufacturer would probably try to silence you with legal action

Hopefully, the EU challenges them if they try to move forward, someone brought up a law on the books in Germany that makes it illegal to use an automated system to make the decision to deny someone access to a system

theneverfox , 11 months ago

The better question is: how are they going to decide what/how to revert?

theneverfox , 11 months ago

If we build to act like Reddit and keep consolidating as we grow, you’re right

But I think as we grow, we need to add in mechanisms to decentralize. When communities or servers get too big, it’d be nice if we had a way to split them, divide up the users and mods, and migrate them seamlessly.

Right now I think fomo would kill this, but if we had a way to manage federation of multis so everyone can see the top posts of both while still seeing more of the lower ranked local content, I think we could get the best of all worlds

Imagine this - with some clever statistics, we can look at your upvotes (and maybe comments), then put you with that share your take on the topic. Or let communities split on an issue divide before things get nasty

If you like the memes, you get put with the memers, but still see the hottest news and interact with the full community on those posts, and vice versa. And if you really want to be in both, you could do so without doubling up content.

I’ve had this idea percolating through the back of my mind since I learned how Lemmy worked, when things stabilize a bit more I might take a crack at it

theneverfox , 11 months ago

Did… Did it work?

theneverfox , 11 months ago

Someone recently made me realize that movie is set in a better timeline than ours

See, they have a problem and find the smartest person in the world. Then, even though they think his idea is crazy, they listen to him

theneverfox , 11 months ago

IDK, but registrars are generally shitty and exploitative. I’d be surprised if they volunteered that info