PhilipTheBucket
@PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au
- Comment on As governments around the world are set to make the Internet more restrictive and privacy-invading, we need a solution 2 hours ago:
Seriously. The reason CSAM merchants and drug dealers use Tor is because it actually protects their privacy successfully. Whereas, if you're using a VPN or whatever cobbled-together solution, the feds just have a hearty laugh about it, send a subpoena by email or use some automated system that's even more streamlined, and then come and find you.
Tor is not bulletproof; they regularly run operations where they take down some big illegal thing on the dark web. But they have to do an operation for it, and if there were any solution that was any better, that thing would be even more infested with illegal material than "the dark web" is. That's just how it works. And listening to the newspapers when they tell you that it's a sign you need to stay away from those actually-effective solutions because "terrorism!" or whatever is a pretty foolish idea.
- Comment on As governments around the world are set to make the Internet more restrictive and privacy-invading, we need a solution 4 hours ago:
Tor is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers. I2P is scattered in implementation and cannot handle high load.
Physical bluetooth mesh networks or other technology is an example. Maybe even a new version of dial-up.
These are incompatible statements lol
Tor is fine, I'm looking at this on Tor Browser right now. I would say the jank level is about 20%. Quokk.au, actually, for some weird reason has significant problems with it (significant slowness and sometimes refuses to load a page). I actually have no idea what's going on with that, but it and I think one other site are the only Fedi sites that have any kind of problem at all. Almost all news sites and things work fine. The jank level is definitely not 0, but it's overblown.
I actually do agree about needing to set up a better architecture overall. Tor is an extremely special-purpose architecture for one thing only (bulletproof privacy and firewall traversal even against extremely aggressive government attempts to defeat both), which is honestly a pretty fantastic start, but there's a lot more that goes into "the internet" than just slapping a slightly janky but super-safe VPN over the front of it.
The main point is: Hey! Don't badmouth Tor, it's good (and the jank level of starting from scratch instead will be super high for any forseeable future.)
- Comment on Oh My God, TAKE IT DOWN Kills Parody 6 hours ago:
I have a feeling they're going to be fine moneywise whatever happens. Their personal safety is probably fine. Maybe not, but probably they don't have to worry too much.
It's still courage that they're doing it.
- Comment on Oh My God, TAKE IT DOWN Kills Parody 6 hours ago:
Jesus Christ, I didn't know that. That's worse.
I highly recommend watching the Joe Rogan interview with David Miscavige's dad, it's just wild and weird.
Also, where's Shelley? Where did she go?
- Comment on Oh My God, TAKE IT DOWN Kills Parody 8 hours ago:
Matt and Trey really don't give a fuck. They tried to show Muhammed in multiple cartoons, and when the network vociferously shouted them down about it (because it might get them killed or their offices attacked), they snuck him in anyway in multiple places and just didn't tell anyone. When one of the foundational members of their cast didn't want them to trash Scientology, they trashed it ten times harder and told him not to let the door hit him on the ass on the way out. They made out with each other for a long time in "Baseketball."
However valuable or not you feel like their message / their humor is, they are among the very few voices in mainstream media who are simply unafraid and doing their own thing, completely without reservation.
- Submitted 8 hours ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 0 comments
- Comment on Can no longer access my old instance (lemmings.world) because I'm from the UK. I made several communities there. Is there any way I can mod them again or do I move them to this instance? 2 days ago:
The UK enacted age verification, the instance said fuck that. So, more or less, the UK's fault.
- Comment on Can no longer access my old instance (lemmings.world) because I'm from the UK. I made several communities there. Is there any way I can mod them again or do I move them to this instance? 2 days ago:
https://www.torproject.org/download/
Probably a good idea for things other than Lemmy, too, the way that things are going.
- Submitted 4 days ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 4 comments
- Comment on Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database 1 week ago:
He actually did have a backup, because the company is only normal-stupid and not deliberate-stupid, they had a DB checkpoint he could roll back to.
The LLM, of course, went with the path of least resistance once it started down the "oh no I fucked up" completion prompt, and claimed they had no such checkpoint.
Don't use LLM for fact things, kids.
- Comment on Orphaned RSS feeds 1 week ago:
The sh.itjust.works one was only active for a short time and stopped getting posts months ago, I mean maybe it is fine to do a sticky post transition but I feel like it's a little different from a non-RSS community where you'll have people showing up wanting to post or getting confused when they can't find something that used to be there or etc.
- Submitted 1 week ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 12 comments
- Submitted 1 week ago to main@sh.itjust.works | 2 comments
- Comment on What the Internet Was Like in 1998 1 week ago:
My ISP got all excited about the WWW and was incessantly emailing us encouraging this pretty arcane process that you would have to do in order to get Winsock on your computer and install Mosaic and all. When I looked into what it actually was, I was just confused and put off by it. I have usenet and ftp. What the fuck are you trying to sell me on? Fonts and graphics? On the internet? This looks stupid, I don't want it.
I eventually had a job where there was a computer in my office that could do WWW. Literally all I can remember about it was the Rome lab snowball cam where you could look at a real-time image of their office and try to hit people with solid white circles ("snowballs") that would get dynamically added to the image. I still was not impressed. In hindsight, I think I was onto something.
- Comment on What the Internet Was Like in 1998 1 week ago:
This was exactly what I watched that educated me about it, it is fascinating. The whole documentary is a masterclass in telling the story by just laying out what happened, not really editorializing but just letting the bad guys hang themselves by explaining their take on it and then juxtaposed against some other events and information.
- Comment on What the Internet Was Like in 1998 1 week ago:
I wrote up a whole little historical essay about how in Woodstock '99, when some assholes decided to run a music festival that was an exploitative cash-grab that ultimately was sloppily put together, disappointing, and endangered the safety of the participants, all the kids recognized what the game was, and tore the venue apart with their bare hands and burned it all to the ground. They threw batteries at the MTV "VJ"s, they smashed up the cash machines and vendor tents and took back their money, and then they lit a match.
So yeah it was a different time. Right around that time was the end of the vigor generation and their replacement by the tech job generation (which then birthed the Doordasher no health insurance generation because they weren't vigorous or well-organized enough to fight back real effectively.)
- Comment on What the Internet Was Like in 1998 1 week ago:
It's a little bit of a nitpick, but "Mozilla" didn't exactly rise from the ashes of Netscape. They tried to open source Netscape, but among other issues the code was horrible, and when they started discussing getting serious about open sourcing it, someone had some kind of bright idea of making this all-encompassing UI framework based on XML, and piping every app through this horrible omni-UI layer because it was going to be the future, with a perfect utopian web browser called Mozilla as the central crown in the kingdom's highest tower, and it was always a janky and glacially slow pile of ass that, year after year, continuing just barely working but not really. Linux users of the day generally had some experiences with it and then switched to one of the even-less-complete options available like Galeon or Konqueror, which brought their own maturity issues to the table, but at least they weren't Mozilla.
Eventually, after investing years of effort and millions of dollars into this pile, the Mozilla foundation eventually decided with great fanfare to invent the idea of just making a web browser. They called it
PhoenixFirebirdFirefox (Iceweasel), and it used normal UI technologies and came alongside some other separated normal-UI apps like Thunderbird. And if you ask them about Mozilla itself, they react like Germans when you ask them where their granddad was during the war years. - Submitted 1 week ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 11 comments
- Comment on Inside China's Mini PC Production: How Tiny Computers Are Made 1 week ago:
Think of all the stuff they are breathing...
- Comment on Meta used AI to concoct low-carbon concrete it poured for a datacenter floor 1 week ago:
There are dozens of us not on Lemmy...
(quokk.au is using Piefed)
- Comment on Meta used AI to concoct low-carbon concrete it poured for a datacenter floor 1 week ago:
I only noticed because it sent me notifications for it. I guess it is just one weird moderator though, for some reason I thought it was more of a db0 official thing but it looks like it is not.
- Comment on Meta used AI to concoct low-carbon concrete it poured for a datacenter floor 1 week ago:
Do you think that would be productive? I have some kind of strong hunch that it's one of your admins.
I think people are just weird sometimes.
- Comment on Meta used AI to concoct low-carbon concrete it poured for a datacenter floor 1 week ago:
Update: I've just been banned from some of the db0 Stable Diffusion communities for being an "anti-AI troll," I think for posting this story?
db0 I love you guys but you do weird stuff sometimes
- Submitted 1 week ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 12 comments
- Holographic precision, super-resolution vision: Scientists reveal hidden world of vital cellular structuresphys.org ↗Submitted 1 week ago to [deleted] | 0 comments
- Comment on Reddit’s UK users must now prove they’re 18 to view many types of content 2 weeks ago:
I think this might be a massive gift to people who want the internet to remain free and unrestricted.
The more people you drive into the underground, the less well you'll be able to regulate. Usually, it's a cautionary tale about carelessly over-strict regulation. But, I guess it can also be an uplifting tale about carelessly over-strict regulation, depending on what you're trying to regulate. Lord knows, we need to be teaching people how to dodge around local internet restrictions and monitoring right now.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to technology@lemmy.zip | 0 comments