2023 Reddit Refugee
On Decentralization:
“We no longer have choice. We no longer have voice. And what is left when you have no choice and no voice? Exit.” - Andreas Antonopoulos
Trump: “And uh, what’s your name again?”
Mark: “It’s Mark.”
“… Shark?”
“No, Mr. Trump. Mark. Mark, with an M.”
“Got it, Shark. So listen, you’re my good friend, Shark NATO. And we’re gonna get these supplies, even if Crooked Joe couldn’t get this war done like he promised he would.”
Meanwhile, Nintendo in their rebellious youth:
Note: mario didn’t exist at the time, but i got this image from a news site that added it to censor the woman’s breasts.
Never heard of this ad since i was a kid at the time and not Dutch. Here it is.
Wow.
https://www.polygon.com/2017/4/5/15190396/sony-psp-ad-white-is-coming-pepsi-kendall-jenner
In American English, the article “an” is used for a vowel sound to separate the words so they don’t blend together when speaking.
Normally, “a” always precedes a consonant, while “an” precedes a vowel. But “an” also precedes vowel sounds - i.e., the sound of the letter of the beginning of a word.
Hour starts with a consonant, but is pronounced with a vowel sound at the beginning. Thus, it is not “a hour” and rather “an hour”.
In the case of the example from the meme, id argue that either article works:
My take - I like “an ‘I’m…’” best. Both in text and verbal form. Others may disagree as far as verbally said; however, grammatically in written form this is how it should be.
Edit: Fixed the inevitable autocorrects from typing this on mobile.
Fun fact - the voice actor that played the young boy in Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego also voiced Lloyd Irving in Tales of Symphonia. He also voiced Robin in Teen Titans.
Still sounds gross. While the developer might have opted in to selling your processing power to scrape websites, I doubt the users of each extension opted in.
Response from the developer:
" Users who want to support a free software product or creator can decide to opt-in to share their bandwidth. … Developers can decide to offer them additional features and content or simply use the money to keep the products free and available."
On User Consent:
“Our approach is always opt-out by default. I’ll write more below on how we are going about enforcing it now as part of a stricter approach to maintaining a transparent ecosystem. We provide default opt-in/out hosted pages to simplify asking consent and have left this page where users can see all the plugins to which they have opted-in and manage their settings with no developer as an intermediary: mellow.tel/user-control.”
In other words, users are opted-out by default. They can also go to that web site, and when they click the link, the page checks which extensions are installed in the browser and whether or not you opted in.
On Opt-In Enforcement:
Ars Technica article states there are “no checks to determine if a real user knows what they are approving or to determine if the developer just opts all users in on their behalf”.
“We do have a page where users can go and see if they are opted-in or have been opted in without their knowledge from the developer: mellow.tel/user-control. But you are right and we should do more. We have started enforcing the opt-in policy from today (by simply checking each integration and not sending requests to those that don’t show an opt-in) and will be doubling down on that in the coming days. Each new websocket request from an unknown integration will be quarantined and we won’t allow requests to go through until we have controlled the integration is compliant and is asking users to opt-in + is leaving an opt-out option clearly visible. We will also start enforcing routine checks on our Mellowtel integrations to create a transparent environment.”
In other words, the Mellow.tel developer has it set to always opt-out by default. However, developers of extensions may just opt-in the users without consent - which, I agree with you is gross. It’s possible those developers don’t explain the full implications. Now, the Mellow.tel developer is putting in remediations to ensure that the opt-in policy is enforced, and users will have more exposure to knowing whether or not this is happening. Meaning, they’re going to try to enforce default opt-out (as they stated this was always their policy), and make it easier for users to know they get opted in.
On Personally Identifiable Information and Monetisation:
The developers basically claims everything is anonymized. And the way they make money is, if you opt-in, you share “a fraction of your bandwidth” when browsing the web, fetching from a server, etc. They don’t collect or sell your user data because they aren’t advertising, and their business model is not advertising.
“all [Response data] is completely anonymous, it doesn’t point back to any user, and isn’t stored except the minimum time to at on it… Location - The only information used is country level (e.g., US, ES, DE), [and] it isn’t associated with any Personally-Identifiable-Information (PII) at all.”
So my conclusion - I care about my privacy. I don’t like being opted into things without my consent. According to this developer’s response, they never did. They’re trying to come up with a model to help the web stay free. Who knows if this will be viable or not. Developers of extensions can leverage this stuff, and in the past, some of those developers may have opted users in without their consent (or without full transparency or understanding of how this was happening). Even if a user was “opted in”, it doesn’t appear to be a significant impact to privacy as they have their source code published, processing happens locally on the user’s device, and the data that gets process is not transmitted, sold, or even have any identifiers. In fact, the data they claim is quite sparse to the extent that it’s limited to bandwidth allotment, country, and simple “keep alive” checks (heartbeat). Now I don’t have any association with this company, know this developer, nor do I have any stakes at all in this. This just caught my attention and I Had to read and learn more about it, and assess whether or not it affects my privacy threat model (it doesn’t for me, simply because none of the extensions I use have this thing).
For my background - I’m a software engineer for a SaaS provider. My company processes observability telemetry, and we assist customers to instrument agents in their environments (server, machines, clusters, DB, and end-user devices like browsers and mobile devices) to collect metrics to enable observability of their platform, and generate automatic application topology. Also a suite of tools to examine metrics and dynamic baselines, health rules for baseline deviations or other anomalies, analytics, user queries, complete business transaction view, incident remediation, etc. However, I have no background whatsoever in security. So I can’t comment on the security point because I don’t have a cyber security background. I’m only going off what the developer said, and it made sense to me. But I’d defer to a person with cyber security expertise to comment here.
Edit: Added some additional context, fixed some spelling.
Nice, thanks for discovering that. I wasn’t aware there was a rip off version of it.
These extensions use MellowTel-js. After this article from ArsTechnica went live, the developer responded in full detail and transparency.
If you’re a Dark Reader user (as that’s one of the most widely used extensions), definitely read MellowTel’s response on how their technology works. It made me realize the Ars article was not fully vetted.
https://www.mellowtel.com/blog/responding-to-ars-technica-and-mellow-drama-article
Edit: Dark Reader on this list is actually a knock off version just for Edge browser only - it’s not the widely used Dark Reader that’s on multiple browser engines. See another user’s comment that replied to me.
TIL that I’m a 13 year old girl.
Thoughts and prayers for the next CEO to not get Grok-blocked.
Thankfully, Linda Yaccarino’s Golden Parachute worked perfectly fine.
Amazon drivers just got a substantial upgrade from Bezos.
My boyfriend. But you wouldn’t know him. He goes to a different social media space.
Yep, this exactly. They can never clock out at the end of the day. It isn’t 8 hours of work and you’re done. You’re having to constantly try to innovate. Make tons of content, spend so much time editing, constant filming, constant planning. And if you deviate in your schedule, or upload some content that isn’t interesting, the algorithm punishes you and you may even get people that unsubscribe.
Must be hell when you can’t afford to take a vacation from that content creator life. Can never really “switch off”. Plus the fact that less than 1% actually make it big, and it’s mostly based on luck plus years and years of determination.
When trees are on the verge of extinction, they’ll grow exactly one tree, lock it behind security, and charge us money to see it.
Got it, thanks for that distinction. It’s been years since I last looked into this stuff. Makes sense for a dormant wallet.
If a wallet is not dormant in this scenario, then active users could just migrate their wallet to another wallet and then they’ll be good to go.
I hear this a lot but I don’t put any confidence behind it. This argument suggests that one day we’ll be able to brute force into lost wallets when we can break the encryption. Who knows how far in the future that will be.
But if I recall correctly, Bitcoin’s protocol is consensus driven. If there is an imminent threat of quantum computing, the developers could just improve the code base to resist it. Or fork the protocol to one that is resistant (Bitcoin 2). Then it’s up to 51% of the Bitcoin node operators to adopt the protocol. As soon as 51% of them upgrades, you immediately stop the threat.
I think the only reason Bitcoin is around is for two reasons: speculation, or the persons that actually believe it’s decentralised hard money free from control. I’d like to believe that there are a ton of people out there that run the BTC nodes to keep it decentralised. If there is an update that will resist quantum computing, I’m sure they’ll be eager to immediately upgrade their nodes and secure the network and those wallets. At least that’s how I believe it works, it’s been years since I first began researching it.
As an aside, Bitcoin isn’t for me because I hate the environment impact. I hope one day it will become green, because it’s never going to go away. But I don’t blame the people that believe in it. In a world where the rich own everything and control the rules, these people are trying to opt out I guess - use a form of money that can’t be easily controlled or censored. Granted it’s all based on speculation, and whenever we run out of Bitcoin is probably when the system will become useless. Spending is discouraged when you run out of coins, so I don’t know how the Bitcoiners defend that argument. So definitely not for me.
Edit, on mobile so fixed some typos and clarified the 51% attack.
Feeling cute. Thought I’d post a song I like. 🥰 Should sound good as ambient background music for anyone that needs to sharpen their blades. A reminder to keep your kitchen knives sharp, because a dull knife is a dangerous knife.
Fucking cowards, all of them.
Currently playing The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Game seems okay overall. I’m still in the early parts of the game and I’m waiting for it to hook me.
She was an extremely active user here, despite being a busy Academy Award nominated actress. I assume she’s busy filming her next movie, or maybe in talks to do Barbie 2.
Such a shame because she was actively involved in the Fediverse. We need more Academy Award nominated character actors and actresses to join. Then this place would really take off.
@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world, not sure if you’re still filming out of the country but drop a line here if you can take a break from your busy schedule!