joshcodes
@joshcodes@programming.dev
- Comment on Can someone explain Australian parties to me? 3 days ago:
I’ll preface this by saying I’m not as informed as some so if I get something wrong, apologies.
We don’t have first past the post.
Australia has federal, state and local government elections. This election was federal. Each state is subdivided into large federal regions, and we vote on representatives for our area (green ballot and lowe house). We also vote on which party we want to see in control (white ballot and upper house).
The green ballot is just counted up, and the person with the most votes wins. The white ballot is harder to explain, but basically you need a majority of seats to take government and have to win 76 seats. There’s a transfer system you can read about on wikipedia.
Idk about Albonese being a cunt but every politician in Australia is considered a bit of a dickhead. We don’t worship them here. So we vote out the biggest dickhead (Peter Dutton) most of the time (some could be lovely but most people are aware how many do very little and earn $400k salaries).
Dutton ran a campaign on nuclear power and other things I won’t go into. Nuclear power has 0 infrastructure in Australia so we’d be starting from scratch. It would take 15 years to begin powering Australia. We will have a crisis in 5 years due to population growth. This is extremely easy to point out as stupid, and hard to argue against, especially when half the country already has solar power on their roofs. They also told everyone they’d make fuel cheaper and buy more military equipment even though we have a deal to get military equipment from the US and UK. It’d be nice to have but stupid to run on it.
They didn’t have many other policies that made it to me, but I largely block ads so you could go read more about it online.
Conversely, Albonese ran on things like healthcare, the housing crisis and affordable living. Things people actually care about given the times.
Parties:
- Labor is pro union, and commonly quite centred with a slight lean left. They won the election in a landslide.
- the coalition is two parties, they’re supposed to be centred-right and conservative but they were going off the deep end and going with America/trump style politics. They ran a bad campaign is what I can say with stat’s to back me up.
- greens party is very progressive, sometimes a little to aggressive with that stance.
- there’s the trumpet of patriots who were meant to be Aus MAGA and are just annoying.
- there’s one nation who are basically racists who want white Australia to be strongly enforced again.
- independents will vote with whatever they think is right, but will often align with one party more than the others. They can win seats in government and work with all parties as they want.
TL;DR Most people would probably say the liberals ran a bad campaign, hence they lost badly. Albo is likely a cunt but he’s better than the guy we voted out who wanted to force the country to go with nuclear power, which would start producing energy 10 years after we had a shortage. At least Albo is going to do things with healthcare and affordable living. And if he fails, we’ll vote him out and get someone who will because we aren’t a cult.
- Comment on Your Phone Isn’t Eavesdropping on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That) 6 days ago:
Yep sorry, I said a dumb thing.
My point is probably more to do with the marketing around VPNs than anything else. As you very nicely put, there are a thousand ways to track someone without having their IP address. VPNs don’t cover all bases but the marketing teams talk about them like they do.
Amazon can still sell your info to data brokers without having your home ip address: they have your email, name, delivery address and search history as a start.
- Comment on Your Phone Isn’t Eavesdropping on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That) 6 days ago:
I am not OP, I just decided to reply.
- Comment on Your Phone Isn’t Eavesdropping on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That) 1 week ago:
Oooo close. It’s a shit algorithm that favours the company that paid the most for the spot. So people rely on paying for a good spot to get promoted on the most minor fucking chance of someone buying their shitty item. I heard someone say the average best item you search for is found 17th place.
They’re scamming the buyer and the seller and profiting off of being terrible for everyone.
- Comment on Your Phone Isn’t Eavesdropping on You to Show You Ads (It’s Worse Than That) 1 week ago:
There are definitely some VPN providers to worry about.
VPNs are a security tool but they don’t protect people as much as they think. They hide DNS traffic your ISP would have received, so that your ISP can’t tell everyone which cuckold or affair site you access (except you probably forgot to turn the VPN on one time or another so…)
Your ISP can still see IP addresses you connect to, they forward all your traffic. Good opsec is a nightmare. Ad blocking does more for less cost than getting a VPN will ever do (except for certain human rights circumstances but I’d wager they’re actually going to be careful).
My personal tip is use DNS over HTTPS/TLS where possible, and don’t use Cloudflare or Google. Ad an ad blocker and it’s far easier to setup and way more cost effective than VPN.
- Comment on Any opinions on Cozystack? 1 week ago:
I’ve got no experience with it but at first glance it seems like a very positive direction for the project:
Collaborate, not Compete
We are proud of our community and closely interact with projects around it. If we build a platform feature that can be useful in an upstream project, we prefer to contribute it to that project, rather than keep it in the platform.
You don’t hear that often enough these days, everyone seems to be siloing information.
- Comment on From $30 parmigianas to $15 pints, can Australia still afford the pub? 2 weeks ago:
Parma sounds like a phrase uttered by the absolutely deranged. Even the children here know it’s parmy
- Comment on woag 3 weeks ago:
I lost the game
- Comment on I had no idea y cunt was this powerful 3 weeks ago:
Steve Hughes did a pretty good bit on this - “Go play with your girly tits you Gaylord, I’m going to fuck a man.”
- Comment on Why is my server using all my Swap but I have RAM to spare? 4 weeks ago:
Counter point, set the ‘swappiness’ lower than the default 60. I’ve set mine to 30 and the system boots a lot faster. You could research and consider 10-20.
- Comment on How to harden against SSH brute-forcing? 4 weeks ago:
100% agree, that is a “totally for fun” exercise
- Comment on How to harden against SSH brute-forcing? 4 weeks ago:
For added funs run an SSH tarpit to fuck with the attackers, something like endlessh.
- Comment on Russia-aligned hackers are targeting Signal users with device-linking QR codes 2 months ago:
Reliance on security by obscurity is unacceptable, except when the obscurity method is the oceans entire fucking surface area.
- Comment on Meta fined $102 million for storing passwords in plain text 7 months ago:
Hey mate, so this comment is just not productive. I’m going to be a little hyperbolic here: if everyone alive is being advertised to then your “unrelated ways companies making suckers out of their customers” comment isn’t correct or honest. It’s the norm, everyones going through it is totally related.
I talked about companies that lock you into their ecosystems and force you to have a stake in their business model. They do this for two reasons: you make money and they want it, and if you spend your money elsewhere they don’t get it. Name one phone manufacturer that isn’t stealing your data. Name one social media app that isn’t spyware. Name one online store, review site or fucking cooking blog that isn’t loaded with ad trackers and cursor monitoring shit that tells you to subscribe as soon as you go to close the tab.
Sure some smaller examples exist (I love lemmy, this place is awesome), sure I can download a free open source os, or just install an:
Adblocker User agent spoofer Anti track-sender Set my browser to stop allowing targeted ads or download a privacy browser
but everyone is still stuck using the other products in some capacity just the same. I’m happy for you if you fall outside this, seriously. However, most people do not. We are stuck and it’s because we got prayed upon. So yeah, everyone is the product. Always. No exceptions.
- Comment on Meta fined $102 million for storing passwords in plain text 7 months ago:
Mate. Everyone is the product. Everyone’s attention is being paid for. Every service is collecting your data. Everyone wants your screen time and is happy to pay for it.
“If it’s free you are the product” has been drilled into us to accept the bullshit of Facebook, Google and the rest. Get it in your head now: you are the product, always. Unconditionally. No exceptions.
- Comment on Meta fined $102 million for storing passwords in plain text 7 months ago:
This just doesn’t hold up in 2024. BMW charge you 60k for a vehicle and chuck a subscription on top. Apple, Google and Samsung charge between hundreds and thousands for their phones and advertise with their own agencies. Amazon forces paying customers to wade through bullshit products to finally buy the one they want, customers who bought prime and who didn’t.
Everyone is the product even if you pay. Stop saying this please.