Zak
@Zak@lemmy.world
- Comment on Europe’s GDPR privacy law is headed for red tape bonfire within ‘weeks’ 1 day ago:
A problem is that some sites that don’t need cookie banners use them anyway due to a poor understanding of the law and excess of caution.
- Comment on Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution. 4 days ago:
And I think we’d all agree a sophomore dating a college student would be pretty imbalanced.
I was a college student at 17, but I think you had a larger age difference in mind. I do think we can all agree there should be laws against adults sexually exploiting teenagers.
- Comment on Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution. 4 days ago:
Yes, though legally that’s a bit of a grey area. It’s only really entrapment if law enforcement or informants entice the offender to commit a crime they weren’t predisposed to commit. I imagine it would be an uphill battle to convince a judge or jury of that when it comes to meeting minors for sex.
The decoys were careful so that it would never even be a question.
- Comment on The fediverse has a bullying problem 4 days ago:
There’s a significant distinction between servers that are actively malicious as you’re describing and servers that aren’t fully compatible with certain features, or that are simply buggy.
Lemmy, for example modifies posts federated from other platforms to fit its format constraints. One of them is that a post from Mastodon with multiple images attached will only show one image on Lemmy. Mastodon does it too: inline images from a Lemmy post don’t show on vanilla Mastodon.
I’ll note that Lemmy’s version numbers all start with 0. So do Piixelfed’s. That implies the software is unfinished and unstable.
- Comment on Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution. 4 days ago:
I remember looking up the people To Catch A Predator worked with and reading some of their chat logs. The decoy was always very upfront in giving an age unambiguously below the age of consent in their jurisdiction, and never initiated conversation about sex or suggested meeting in person.
Of course, the decoy would always agree to do so if the offender asked, but the criminal conduct was unambiguously criminal, and unambiguously the offender’s idea. What we see in this article appears to abandon that sort of rigor to manufacture more opportunities to confront someone.
- Comment on Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral: With the rise of loosely moderated social media platforms, a fringe vigilante movement is experiencing a dangerous evolution. 4 days ago:
We’ve decided, as a society, that humans cannot consent until 18.
Older criminal laws were based on that idea, usually called “statutory rape”. Modern laws about sexual abuse of children usually ignore the concept of consent entirely to allow for more nuance.
One example of nuance is exceptions for people close in age so that non-abusive relationships between teenagers don’t suddenly become crimes when someone has a birthday. Another is that consent is often a factor in the severity of the penalty.
- Comment on lightweight blog ? 5 days ago:
Federation doesn’t inherently require large amounts of memory. Fundamentally, it’s a matter of selecting a list of unique servers (likely tens, maybe hundreds) from a larger set of followers (likely hundreds, maybe thousands) and sending an HTTP request to each when there’s a new post. There’s a speed/size tradeoff for how many to send in parallel, but it’s not a resource-intensive operation.
Growth beyond a few tens of megabytes was a bug in Writefreely, which is a likely-suitable option several comments here recommended.
- Comment on lightweight blog ? 5 days ago:
I’d put it farther removed from the technical side than that; dreadbeef is thinking like a manager. OP might be better off paying a third party $3/month to handle the details and host a heavyweight, full-featured blog for them, but that’s not what they asked for.
This is selfhosted, which I think implies a desire to self-host things even if it might seem a wiser use of resources to do something else.
- Comment on lightweight blog ? 6 days ago:
I’m thinking like a programmer about what a basic blog has to do and the computing resources necessary to accomplish it. Software that needs more than a few tens of megabytes to accomplish that is not lightweight regardless of its merits.
This comment seems to be arguing that one should not demand blog software be lightweight because there’s inexpensive hosting for something heavyweight. That’s a fine position to take, I guess, but OP did ask for lightweight options.
- Comment on In the latest Windows 11 preview build, Microsoft removed the “bypassnro” command, which let users skip signing into a Microsoft Account when installing Windows. 6 days ago:
I’m sure there’s a way around it for institutional customers.
- Comment on lightweight blog ? 6 days ago:
It wants a gigabyte of RAM. Maybe that passes for lightweight in 2025, but given the fundamental things a blog has to do, I’d probably put the cutoff at less than a tenth that amount.
- Comment on The fediverse has a bullying problem 1 week ago:
Some people have privacy expectations that are not realistic in an unencrypted, federated, heterogeneous environment run by hobbyist volunteers in their spare time.
It you have something private and sensitive to share with a small audience, make a group chat on Signal. Don’t invite any reporters.
- Comment on Grandmother gets X-rated message after Apple AI fail. 3 weeks ago:
And people wonder why I have no interest in getting a newer phone with an AI thing on it.
- Comment on Cloudflare blocking Pale Moon and other browsers with smaller user bases 4 weeks ago:
That’s good in theory, but a site behind Cloudflare won’t necessarily notice that a legitimate user got blocked. If you want them to care, you’ll have to find a way to contact them. For more impact, tell them which competitor you spent money with instead.
- Comment on Least terrible domain registrars 4 weeks ago:
Total Webhosting Solutions
- Comment on Least terrible domain registrars 4 weeks ago:
I’ve been with Porkbun since Gandi got acquired. No complaints.
- Comment on Why can't we go back to small phones? 4 weeks ago:
That phone isn’t actually small. It has a small screen, but it’s 25mm thick and weighs 300g.
- Comment on Mozilla is already revising its new Firefox terms to clarify how it handles user data 4 weeks ago:
Great, but a web browser still does not need terms of service. There’s no ongoing relationship between the user and the creator of the browser, at least, there shouldn’t be unless the user signs up for additional optional services.
It’s great if Mozilla wants to offer some optional services users can opt in to, and those services probably need terms. I use Firefox Sync, though I’ve started to reconsider that given the recent fuss. The browser itself? I’ll move to a fork first, and stop recommending Firefox to others.
- Comment on Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian says AI should moderate social media 4 weeks ago:
It already does, though not in the individualized manner he’s describing.
I don’t think that’s entirely a bad thing. Its current form, where priority one is keeping advertisers happy is a bad thing, but I’m going to guess everyone reading this has a machine learning algorithm of some sort keeping most of the spam out of their email.
BlueSky’s labelers are a step toward the individualized approach. I like them; one of the first things I did there is filter out what one labeler flags as AI-generated images.
- Comment on Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic 5 weeks ago:
Depending on how the requirement to accept the ToS is implemented, a config file might be able to disable it and any features that depend on it.
- Comment on Amazon Restricted Vaginal Health Products for Being ‘Potentially Embarrassing’ 5 weeks ago:
The product is a vaginal dialator, which has evidence supporting its use in treatment of several medical conditions. The distinction from a dildo has more to do with intended use than form.
The magnets are just woo.
- Comment on France is about to pass the worst surveillance law in the EU. 5 weeks ago:
I don’t think the current proposal in France sanctions individuals for using E2EE; it sanctions service providers for providing it.
- Comment on France is about to pass the worst surveillance law in the EU. 5 weeks ago:
But then what’s stopping someone in France from sideloading the app and using a VPN?
The need for a phone number and SMS verification to create an account. Signal should do something about that.
There are ways around that, but the goal isn’t to stop everyone from using E2EE; it’s to make E2EE non-mainstream.
- Comment on Former Apple designer Sir Jony Ive has said he feels “responsible” for the “not so positive consequences” of the iPhone. 5 weeks ago:
Facebook was a mostly-harmless multimedia blog site before smartphones. Both its addiction algorithm and being in everyone’s pocket contribute to its current harms, but both would have happened even if Apple hadn’t made a phone.
Smartphones resembling what we have now would have come out of a likely Windows/Android rivalry. They might even still have headphone jacks.
- Comment on ‘The tyranny of apps’: those without smartphones are unfairly penalised, say campaigners 5 weeks ago:
Any time I’m required to use an app for something that could be a website, I leave the app a one star review.
- Comment on ‘The tyranny of apps’: those without smartphones are unfairly penalised, say campaigners 5 weeks ago:
Contributing to that Kinderficker changes my opinion of Publix.
- Comment on I spent the last year working on the Fediverse. Here's what I've learned. 1 month ago:
It doesn’t exist, and some people get really mad whenever someone tries to make one.
- Comment on Is making user interaction between instances easier even possible in current state of fediverse and the protocol? 1 month ago:
Seems to me the solution to this is registering protocol handlers for URLs, which Mastodon tried and gave up on because they weren’t happy with how web browsers handled it.
- Comment on Public Firehose Project Shutters After Backlash 1 month ago:
There’s a small, but extremely loud segment of the Mastodon userbase that seems to view presenting public posts in any manner that’s different from how a vanilla Mastodon server does as an invasion of their privacy. There have also been a few projects that raised reasonable concerns about privacy and moderation, but this page doesn’t seem to make a distinction.
It appears to contain misinformation about FediFirehose, which ran client side and just showed the output of a public relay.
- Comment on Everyone knows your location 1 month ago:
Preferring websites to apps when possible makes this approach more effective. If you use apps with ads in them, they will likely get sensitive information as described in the article.
System wide ad blocking helps more. Private DNS is the easiest way; Mullvad provides a free option.