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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • If I worked for Starlink in Brazil, I’d be on a plane visiting friends outside the country right now. I’m sure an order to arrest EVERYONE who works for Starlink is being drafted right now.

    If Starlink is connected to any infrastructure inside Brazil, I suspect that’s about to go dark. What the Brazilian authorities need is access to Starlink’s internal admin network that controls EVERYTHING. Because Melon Husk is to stupid to pipeline infrastructure for each country. I’ll bet it’s all shared at some level. I doubt local IT person would risk jail for them and their families or “extended renditioning” to extract access to those networks to shut them down.






  • Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don’t get much from my choices. It still did a pretty good job of showing me stuff I was interested in watching.

    Then on Oct 1, they threw up a “You’re using an Ad Blocker” overlay on videos. I’d use my trusty Overlay Remover plugin to remove the annoying javascript graphic and watch what I wanted. I didn’t have to click the X to dismiss the obnoxious page.

    Last week, they started placing a timer with the X so you had to wait 5 seconds for the X to appear so you could dismiss blocking graphic.

    Today, there was a new graphic. It allowed you to view three videos before you had to turn off your Ad Blocker. I viewed a video 3 times just to see what happens.

    Now all I see is this: “Ad Blockers violate Youtube’s Terms of Service”

    Google has out and out made it a violation of their ToS to have an ad blocker to view Youtube. Or you can pay them $$$.

    I ban such sites from my systems by replacing their DNS name in my hosts file routed to 127.0.0.1 which means I can’t view the site. I have quite a few banned sites now.



  • It’s been well documented that Amazon does this with eBooks all the time. A publisher pulled a copy of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE from Amazon over a contract dispute in the earlier days of the Kindle. So Amazon reached out and delete that copy from all Amazon customers who bought it through the Amazon Store.

    Students who were annotating it for class lost all their notes. Amazon refunded the cost of the eBook. But those notes are toast.

    It’s what prompts me to copy non-DRM’ed files to my Kindle and read them without Amazon having a record of purchase. It won’t stop them from logging in remotely and wiping the device, but I have backups and programs to convert them to non-Kindle format for another eReader.


  • They already did this with Youtube. I turned of Youtube history because I didn’t want anyone being able to track what I watch. All of a sudden, Youtube’s home page for my account was blank with a message that said “Turn on history if you want to see recommendations”. I sat with that for a couple days, going to Youtube to check out channels I’d subscribed to. It wasn’t the same. When I got to Youtube for some distraction, I want to discover something different from my usual stuff. So I delete my history weekly as part of “routine maintainence”.