ShadowPouncer

Every now and then, I try to browser without an ad blocker.

That generally lasts until I encounter something that’s bad enough that I don’t really have a choice, and then I turn it back on.

The page needs to actually function. It needs to be possible to click on something and actually be clicking on the thing that you’re intending to.

And it can not have stuff that blinks in a manner that causes a segment of the population (which includes me at times, but not 100% of the time) significant neurological problems.

That last one has been the driving force behind stuff getting reenabled a fair bit.

Oh, and if it’s ads on video content, they need to be at least vaguely reasonable in regards to interruptions and length. Youtube is way past that at this point.

On the contrary, Russia using nuclear weapons would do a great deal.

It would ensure that every sane nation on the planet start working to remove the very real threat of Russia using nuclear weapons in other settings.

Depending on exactly how it was taken, that could pretty easily mean almost anything from a long range, decade long effort by most of the world to slowly strangle Russia with sanctions, without any exceptions, to an immediate set of strikes on every single known Russian location with nuclear weapons.

And make no mistake, ‘known location’ is going to include a lot of places that are only ‘known’ at whatever the equivalent is for various countries of top secret, code word classified material, known only to a very small select few.

It would definitely include every single Russian nuclear submarine that any country on earth has a lock on.

It’s pretty much impossible to say how likely that immediate strike would be under those conditions, in large part because the world at large has no idea how much of Russia’s nuclear arsenal has been located with enough precision to carry out such an attack, let alone how much is believed to be known with such precision.

I really, really hope that we don’t go there, because that would be the kickoff for World War 3, without any question.

The only question would be how many Russian nuclear weapons would get launched before their launch platforms were eliminated.

Practically speaking, I sure as hell wouldn’t bet on the number being 0. But others very well might.

I definitely wouldn’t bet on it being anywhere close to the number of weapons that Russia claims to have ready to launch. Intelligence and strike capabilities are far better than that. Even assuming that every single launch platform actually works the way it’s supposed to.

But Russia doing something that even had the potential to lead to a world wide nuclear exchange would most definitely result in actions far greater than anything we have seen so far.

Alright, now, who wants to come up with a ‘good enough’ generative AI tool to generate fake irises on a smartphone screen, and what do you think would be necessary (if anything) to convince the orb-shaped device that it’s a real iris?

That is the goal of this project, right?

I would argue that we are, as a planetary civilization, almost past the point where a war of that sort is even possible.

On the other hand, if China were to ever shun NK, I would bet that their government would likely collapse in less than a decade.

Sadly, China has a ton of reasons to want to prevent that, one of the bigger ones being the border with NK where many, many refugees would try to cross into China.

I could however see, someday, China agreeing to a massive backroom deal on a scale that would be unprecedented:

China abruptly works to ensure a complete collapse of the NK government, without any NK nuclear weapons either coming into play or any NK nuclear weapons going missing (except to China itself, if it wants them).

And SK along with a good chunk of the Western world agrees to immediately conduct one of the largest humanitarian missions in history, to ensure that nobody is fleeing NK into China unless they have tons of assets and they want to avoid repercussions for their actions.

There are, sadly, a lot of reasons why China wouldn’t want the western powers capable of pulling that off to have control of territory that close to China though.

SK would be their safest bet, but SK doesn’t have the resources to pull of that kind of a humanitarian effort.

And the chances that someone like the US wouldn’t take the chance to plop a military base in what is currently NK seems awfully slim.

Yep.

The only big complication with doing stuff that way is that if you get enough attention, abruptly people start looking at your stuff a lot harder.

And then you get shredded, and lose all credibility for the rest of your career.

Claiming to have discovered something absolutely ground breaking, that everyone in the field would want to replicate almost immediately, is exactly the kind of thing that would sink someone doing this.

But then again, people are idiots sometimes.

Yes and no.

I suspect that Reddit is going to lose a fair number of chargebacks, because the credit card association rules are often a bit more strict.

And the Supreme Court is supposed to be a court of law.

Sadly, as they have decided to move away from that, the least the executive can do is ensure that the law is being correctly applied in cases where it favors the people.

As best as I’ve been able to tell, it was a mixture of:

An increasingly narrow social circle of people willing and able to disagree with him.

An increasingly large social circle of people willing to tell him what he wants to hear, and willing to try and shape his world view.

And drugs.

He has sadly reached the stage where he is unwilling to have anyone around him who will openly disagree with him. Doing so is a firing offense.

He has absolutely reached the point wealth wise where it is impossible to make new friends who you can trust to not have a motive in every interaction with you.

And he has, without question, become someone that decent people from his past likely wouldn’t want to be around.

I’m not sure that it’s going to be possible for someone in his current position to reform without losing the vast majority of his fortune first. And even then, I’m not nearly as optimistic as I could be.

The big cost to doing it yourself is maintenance.

There is, for a lot of people, a fairly large amount of value in never having to worry about hardware dying. If it does, that’s someone else’s problem, and it will be fixed, as far as you are concerned, rapidly and without any interaction with you.

How much any given person values that is going to vary wildly, but it means that you don’t risk having stuff go down at a moment when you can’t do anything about it. Maybe you’re on vacation, and you don’t have any hands that can do anything. Maybe you’re sick, or just extremely busy that week.

You’re not wrong that this comes at a fairly substantial monetary cost, but it is wrong to say that this isn’t, in many cases, a cost that people are more than willing to pay in exchange for the benefit.

You make a great point about GDPR requirements.

But I don’t think that the full export would be very practical as an account migration tactic. There’s no value uploading previously made posts/comments/toots to the new instance, because it can’t do anything with them.

That’s like saying that only using high security locks with various security pins in them to protect your house is a bad idea, and you should throw in some secured with padlocks too just to change things up.

And if some of them are shitty masterlocks, well, you’re changing things up.

That’s really not how security works.

Yes, pass phrases can have large amounts of entropy attached. But unless you are picking your pass phrases truly randomly, with a large dictionary, and using unique pass phrases per site, and the sites are not silently truncating the password input (such as bcrypt which truncates to 72 bytes), you are not actually getting that large amount of entropy.

Where as a 16 character password that randomly uses the ASCII printable range, excluding spaces, gives you 93^16 possible combinations. That’s 31313180170800116587336013460801 passwords.

Or, very roughly, 104.6 bits of entropy. (104.6265409777285022441578006899739 bits of entropy if you want to be downright absurd about it.)

Knowing that you’re doing that simply doesn’t help the attacker in any meaningful way.

Bumping that to 20 characters gives you over 130 bits of entropy, or 2342388736625917052139104541473924426001 possible combinations.

This is quite simply not a viable attack surface.

Where as saying ‘use pass phrases for some things’ means that it is quite likely that some of your pass phrases are going to be much less secure than this.

But let’s give the same numbers for properly generated random passphrases.

The xkcdpass utility can help us here.

Even picking entirely randomly, out of a large word list of 7227 words, a 6 word pass phrase only gives roughly 76 bits of entropy.

Going up to 8 words gives us roughly 102 bits of entropy, that helps a ton… Except that some of those passphrases are going to be longer than 72 bytes. So you’re almost certainly losing bits of entropy.

That best case still gives you fewer bits of entropy than a 20 character randomly generated password. Unless you’re trying to memorize your password, there are no benefits to alternating between randomly generated passwords with good generation settings and passphrases.

And if you’re trying to memorize your passwords, you are definitely doing it wrong.

I think that it matters a great deal.

One side wants entire groups to not exist. We have seen that play out, time after time after time. We have seen that carried to the point of concentration camps, and the systematic extermination of entire groups of people.

We know where that road ends, and it ends is more blood than anyone should have the slightest desire to ever see spilled in their lifetime.

The other side might not be perfect, but it isn’t out to exterminate people.

That’s not a small difference. It’s not a subtle difference. It’s the difference between one side thinking that the holocaust didn’t go far enough, didn’t succeed enough, and the other side seeing it as an absolutely horrific event, something so horrible that it should never be allowed to happen again.

And make no mistake, when the far right is literally copying propaganda from the Nazis, and they are, they damn well know what they are doing.

Based on the comment, I think that what is wanted is a little different than what people are assuming.

First, it sounds like there is a desire to implement enough of the Mastodon API that various mobile Mastodon clients can connect to kbin.social and interact with that side of things. I have no idea how difficult this would be, but I suspect that it would be an interesting undertaking.

And second, unrelated, but it came up in the comments, and I think it would be an excellent idea, there is definitely a desire to implement a Mastodon-like way to export and import enough of your account information to easily migrate to another instance.

In my opinion, there needs to be an option that can both import and export a fully Mastodon compatible format, so that people can migrate from Mastodon to kbin, and can migrate back from kbin to Mastodon, at least for stuff where that makes sense.

At the same time, I am unsure if that format would be sufficient for everything required to migrate from one instance of kbin to another, or between kbin and lemmy.

And given that last point, it should come as no surprise that I think that if another format is needed, or even an extension to the existing format, that should really be coordinated with Lemmy, so that it is easier to move around the entire ecosystem.

The really really sad thing is, Reddit could have done a half decent job and made a fair bit of money, but they decided on stupidity instead.

Sure, it would have upset some people a bit, but… Not by anywhere close to the same degree.

Alright, we’re sorry, but use of the API is going to have to start costing money for some kinds of uses.

First off, people that just want to scrape everything get the following access, and a much higher rate limit, but it’s going to cost $x.

Moderator tools will always be free, but the API will require that the tool be associated with a moderator, and it will only permit access to subs that the user is a moderator for.

Community bots will generally be free, subject to the following restrictions.

And 3rd party clients will be charged a minimal amount, calculated to be roughly equal to what we are making from similar users on the official clients, to make up for lost ad revenue. Alternate options involving profit sharing may be viable, contact X for details.

By accepting the API agreement, you agree that use of the wrong class of API usage (for example, using the community bot or 3rd party client classes for data scraping) will be billed, retroactively, at $X * 10.

There. That’s really not that hard. And people would have been much less upset at that, at least as long as the fees were actually as described, and not based on, say, how much they would like to make per user.

You’d probably want a free tier for 3rd party clients for users of specific account types. If the user is paying for Reddit Premium, maybe 3rd party clients don’t get charged for API usage for that user account. Or if the user is a moderator for a given subreddit, API usage for that user on that subreddit is also free. With an API that the client can use to check the status of such things. If they were smart, they would also have a process for users with disabilities to have their accounts exempted from fees. That last one is hard, because you need a verification process, but it would get them a lot of good will.

Again… This shouldn’t be hard. And it would have turned into a viable revenue stream!

Hell, flatly disclose that the 3rd party cost is 30% more than the average cost of using the standard client, to support the effort required to maintain the API. (Largely bullshit, but it makes those users more valuable than those that use the official client, while not being expensive enough to make it impossible for anyone to offer a 3rd party client at an even remotely sane cost.)

Yes, this would have very sadly been the end of free 3rd party clients… But I for one would have been… Okay with paying a small amount per month/year through the app store for a client that didn’t suck.

Instead, Reddit decided that committing suicide was the better path forward.

I use + addresses for stuff.

Well, since I run my own mail server, I tend to use _ instead of + as the separator, simply because more places will consider it a valid address.

But it’s amazing how useful it is to include the name of whoever you’re giving the email address to in the email address. It lets you keep getting email for stuff like password recovery. And when an address is leaked, not only can you block that one, but you also get to know who leaked it.

Which is awesome for knowing which businesses to never use again.

Don’t do this.

Just use a good, random, password generator with decent settings.

Varying away from that just to ‘change the kind of password’ is only going to reduce your security.

You want as many random bits of information as possible in the password. That’s it.

If there are not already people running fediverse nodes that exist specifically to harvest potentially ‘interesting’ data, there will be.

You edited it? That’s maybe interesting. You deleted it? Same deal, maybe interesting.

It looks like an email address? Definitely might be interesting. A phone number? Yep.

An address? Definitely could be interesting.

If you posted it, assume that it will always be available to the exact people that you don’t want to see it.