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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • I’d think it would be obvious that a country wouldn’t want to depend on a foreign country’s proprietary product when an open source alternative exists. Even if it’s not spying, what if the US forced Microsoft to put some kill switch on their products? Even if it doesn’t affect your most secure systems because of air gap, it could still cripple enough to cause huge problems.

    There’s simply no reason to take the risk.

    If I was running a government, I would strongly desire proof that all of my government software is doing only what I want it to. That means not only do I have access to the source code, but I also need it to be simple enough that my government teams can actually audit all of it.

    Obviously, that’s not going to be feasible in every situation. There might be proprietary software that is protected from competition via IP laws, and some software is so necessarily complex that it would be really hard to audit completely, but overall, I find it shocking that any foreign government would run a Microsoft product when a feature comparable open source alternative exists.




  • When asked about Musk and Huffman’s correspondence, Reddit spokesperson Gina Antonini sent the following statement: “We take any report of Reddit policy violations seriously, whether on Reddit directly or through other public or private means. We will evaluate content reported to us and take action if violating.”

    There was a famous reddit user called Unidan who I think was a scientist that studied animals. His account was eventually banned for Terms of Service violations due to his having an account that posted comments, and several other accounts that were just used for voting. He used the other accounts to give his comments an initial voting boost, which was a policy violation, and was therefore permanently banned.

    Anyways, I occasionally noticed a strange voting pattern on Reddit. I’d have one comment that had not gotten any votes or replies for hours after I wrote it, and then all of a sudden, somebody would reply to argue, and their reply would more-or-less instantly have several upvotes, and simultaneously, my comment would have a similar number of downvotes.

    This person was obviously using multiple accounts, violating the Terms of Service just like Unidan, so I went to report them, only to find out that there was literally no way for me to report them. The report button didn’t have any fitting option, nor was it guaranteed to go to a reddit admin who could actually look at who voted for what. Mods can’t see comment votes. There was a separate webpage you could go to to contact the admins, but again, there was no category for it, and no way to make a report that didn’t fit those categories.

    From that experience, it didn’t feel like they would “take any report of Reddit policy violations seriously.” How could they take the report seriously when they wouldn’t even take the report in the first place? Now I see I was supposed to directly contact Reddit CEO Steve Huffman through private messaging.









  • logicbomb@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldCory Doctorow gets scammed
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    1 year ago

    Another thing is that I feel like the era of the private phone number has passed. I see the use case for phone numbers for businesses, but people just don’t use them very much anymore otherwise.

    Like, we don’t memorize them. We don’t dial them. They’re just entries in our contacts.

    At this point, we could create an alternative way of contacting private phones. Something based on whitelisting instead of blacklisting. Something that can be easily shared but not easily guessed. Something that would be easy to trace who called you.

    All of these phone scams rely on the idea that a stranger can just up and contact you without any effort. It’s ridiculous. If we got rid of that, we’d save people from untold billions of dollars of scams almost instantly.





  • This is kind of an intentional cognitive dissonance for Twitch due to its having a conflict of interests.

    On the one hand, it wants to tell viewers and advertisers that it cracks down on adult only content.

    But on the other hand, the more adult content they let through, the more money they make.

    It would be very easy to either make an age restricted section where adult stuff would be allowed, or to completely banish streamers who are the modern equivalent of burlesque. But one is bad PR and the other is bad for revenue.



  • Every part of your comment has something factually wrong or fallacious.

    I don’t get feedback just because you read it.

    My reading the part I am giving feedback on is a prerequisite for actually giving feedback. I am obviously a person who graciously responded to your request, not somebody that you somehow ordered to give feedback. I don’t know what you think you gain from viewing it this way.

    I’m thankful for feedback but my sentence was accurate.

    I didn’t say it was inaccurate, but that it didn’t tell people why to read the article. You didn’t ask me to tell you inaccuracies. You asked for “feedback”. You also don’t seem to be thankful, because if you were thankful, you’d simply accept the feedback instead of throwing up straw-man arguments.

    I don’t benefit if you read it.

    You have exactly repeated your previous statement that I already proved wrong.

    I will offer you one last piece of feedback. Just stop arguing. You can never look gracious pursuing an argument where you ask for advice and then argue with people who took time out of their day to help you.

    Upvotes and downvotes don’t determine whether people are factually right, but they do help you gauge what people think when they read your comments, and what I’m seeing is that you’re not ingratiating yourself to the people who you are asking to read your article. Even if you could win this argument, and you can’t, you wouldn’t want to, because you’d look bad in doing so. When you ask for feedback, and feedback is given, just graciously accept it. If it’s bad feedback, then just ignore it.