adespoton
@adespoton@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Why are people so rude on Reddit compared to the Fediverse? 3 hours ago:
Reddit is big enough that it’s a microcosm of humanity. The Fediverse hasn’t reached that level yet.
When I was on Reddit, most of the subreddits I hung out on were small, supportive, and friendly. A few I monitored weren’t — on purpose, so I could see what was going on in other places.
Funny thing is, for the most part, I’ve found matches for all those subreddits on Lemmy communities— although I had to browse through a bunch of hosting services to build up the same level of diversity.
- Comment on Internet Archive Faces Copyright Lawsuit Over 'Myspace Dragon Hoard' 4 hours ago:
Jason definitely isn’t fully innocent here on the grounds stated, but if the songs were delisted when DMCA was used, that’s no different than taking an unauthorized copy off of YouTube; IA shouldn’t be held liable unless the infringement was willful.
Also, the song and extra data was obviously imaged from MySpace before 2011, so any collector would be unaware that the license had changed after the fact.
- Comment on The 49MB Web Page 4 hours ago:
You say “after all, the Internet that shaped me no longer exists.”
In a way, that’s true, but the reality is that most of it is still there; it’s just dwarfed by what came after.
I can still log on to mume.org and play on a Middle Earth-based MUD. I can still connect to IRC.
FirstClass BBSes, Hermes BBSes, Hotline servers and trackers, a plethora of self-hosted HTTP1.0 compliant sites, Gopher servers, FTP sites, and more.
The only real victim that I can think of is Usenet; AIM servers are back again, as are ICQ servers, shoutcast servers and battle.net servers.
Dialup is gone, but people have built TCP wrappers so all the old dialup stuff can be used over the Internet. You can even run the operating systems and software packages just the way they were in 1979 (or the year of your choice).
The callenge is finding all that when your phone and computer do all they can to direct you to Instagram, Tiktok and Temu, and system defaults use add on technology that has only existed for a decade max.
- Comment on If a US bank only insures your money up to 250k does that mean I have to visit four different back to have a million dollars insured? 1 day ago:
Most people who put more than 250k in a single bank in a single account type won’t be using the bank’s insurance for protection.
- Comment on The 49MB Web Page 1 day ago:
I have to admit, I hadn’t realized it had got this bad. How did this get normalized?
I browse with most scripts disabled, and have since JS was first introduced to the browser. What I’ve observed is that some pages contain NO actual content, or just the first paragraph, when I load them. I read what’s provided and move on. If the site is hostile to me reading their content they worked so hard to get in front of me, I’m not going to do any extra work to find out what it is.
- Comment on Is LM Studio's GUI safe despite being closed source? 3 days ago:
Unless that’s backed up by a wireshark session demonstrating no data sent, or a reversing analysis that shows a lack of capability in the software, the policy is just words.
- Comment on System76 tries to talk Colorado down over OS age checks 5 days ago:
Computers used to work this way.
You could even ship the computer with the USB stick pre-installed.
And this wouldn’t be impossible with Apple hardware; it has a bootloader built in that can boot from any functional and signed OS; could be Apple supplied, or something like Asahi. Or, with such a rule in place, they may also be required to not get in the way of installing other OSes and have to fully document the boot process and driver registration process, preventing signature-based lockdown completely.
- Comment on System76 tries to talk Colorado down over OS age checks 5 days ago:
Motorized scooters and eBikes all have OSes too — as do most modern traffic lights, speed and red light cameras, baby monitors, alarm systems, heart rate monitors, “smart” anything, televisions, household appliances, chair lifts, city water management systems, and pretty much all other actively managed infrastructure.
Your average car has at least three separate operating systems in it — usually a LOT more.
- Comment on 'Consider a system with no DRAM' replaced by a 'recycling fiber loop': John Carmack envisages bold future to avoid AI-driven RAM crisis 1 week ago:
Fibre is just strands of extruded glass; one of the most common substances on earth.
Sure beats the blood minerals needed for memory, and to scale up, you just extrude longer strands.
- Comment on People who grew up with Vietnam and the Cold War, is Iran going to be the new vietnam or just a semi cool war? 1 week ago:
Totally different. This is a multi-way religious war with Sunnis and Shias taking sides, and then Jews and Christians piling in. And on top of that is oil and nuclear weapons.
Iran has been kept destabilized by the rest of the world for the past 50 years because it brings stability to the rest of the region. KSA, UAE, Oman and Qatar are all quite happy to have Iran playing defense, as is Pakistan (traditional Persian lands and culture overlap most of the current national boundaries).
The main players in the Middle East have been fighting for the last 3,000 or so years, and it hasn’t been a cold fight. The US is traditionally willing to pour just enough weaponry into the area to keep things off balance.
- Comment on If I was a college athlete instead of accepting money out right. If I created a charity where they could "donate", and keep all the money? Is this illegal or illegal how so? 1 week ago:
That’s the way; study political science in university and set up a PAC towards your election for some far off date. Have anyone interested donate to the PAC, and then spend years trying to get elected after you graduate, using those funds for your campaign — many different types of activities can count as campaigning.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Android phones don’t have a BIOS for the same reason that Macs don’t have a BIOS and Raspberry Pis don’t have a BIOS — they run on the ARM architecture, not the Intel-compatible PC architecture.
As such, the bootloader system is compliant with a totally different reference system; ARM (Acorn Reference Machine) has been around almost as long as the IBM PC compatible architecture.
As for the “why are phones more locked down” bit, it’s because they’re supposed to be appliances, not general computing platforms. You want your phone to always work, so if you receive a phone call, text or email, it’s likely going to work.
Although the real answer is that if you buy a computer, you own the computer and get to decide what goes on it (well, unless it’s locked down to Windows or macOS). Phones contain bits that are owned by your carrier, bits that are owned by the manufacturer, bits that are owned by the software developer. And each of those groups doesn’t want anyone else messing with their private software.
- Comment on What to do with an old iPhone that I no longer use? 1 week ago:
Remember that old phones with no SIM are still able to call 911. You can use them as emergency call boxes.
- Comment on Apple introduces Macbook Neo - cheaper Macbooks starting at $599 1 week ago:
This is the “let’s get the budget computer crowd using iCloud services” solution.
They can afford to sell at a loss if needed, because the onboard storage is just low enough to make NOT subscribing to cloud services painful after 6-8 months.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
I have to admit I’m pretty ignorant in low-end laptops.
Business class laptops tend to be able to charge at 100W over USB-C, but often have a dedicated charging port as well (Magsafe for Apple, rectangular charge port for Lenovo, for example).
For any laptop that draws 100W or less, I believe they’re required to charge over USB-C in the EU. Barrel jack is cheaper though, so they can shave a couple of dollars off the price by using it, which could lead to significant profits in increased sales, since most of the competition is using the same basic parts.
- Comment on Leave big tech behind! How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple – and more 2 weeks ago:
Why doesn’t it mention the Fediverse at all???
Seems like they’re advocating using a Fairphone running e/OS, Ecosia as the search engine, LibreWolf as the browser, LibreOffice as the office package, and W for social media?
- Comment on Until further notice: archive.today/archive.is/archive.ph/... is banned from this community for apparently being a Russian DDOS tool - Lemmy.World 3 weeks ago:
The idea is to verify the archival copy’s URL, not to verify the original content. So yes, a server could push different content to the archiver than to people, or vary by region, or an AitM could modify the content as it goes out to the archiver. But adding the sha256 in the URL query parameter means that if someone publishes a link to an archive copy online, anyone else using the link can know they’re looking at the same content the other person was referencing.
If the archive content changes, that URL will be invalid; if someone uses a fake hash, the URL will be invalid (which is why MD5 wouldn’t be appropriate).
The beauty of this technique is that query parameters are generally ignored if unsupported by the web server, so any archival service could start using this technique today, and all it would require is a browser extension to validate the parameter.
Link it to something like Web of Trust, and you’ve solved the separate issue you described.
In fact, this is a feature WoT could add to their extension today, and it would “Just Work”. For that matter, Archive.org could add it to their extension today, too.
- Comment on Until further notice: archive.today/archive.is/archive.ph/... is banned from this community for apparently being a Russian DDOS tool - Lemmy.World 3 weeks ago:
Only works for archived pages though, because for any regular page, a large portion of the page will be dynamically generated; hashing the HTML will only say the framework hasn’t changed.
- Comment on Until further notice: archive.today/archive.is/archive.ph/... is banned from this community for apparently being a Russian DDOS tool - Lemmy.World 3 weeks ago:
He only modified archived pages in response to a dox attempt?
And the thing is, the discovery of the modified pages revealed that it wasn’t even the first time he’d modified pages. And he used a real person’s identity to try and shift blame.
Irrespective of the doxxing allegations, if he’s done all this multiple times already, it means the page archives can’t be trusted AND there’s no guarantee that anything archived with the service will be available tomorrow.
Seems like we need to switch to URLs that contain the SHA256 of the page they’re linking to, so we can tell if anything has changed since the link was created.
- Comment on Westerners, what's your impression on the Chinese Diaspora? And what does the people around your area of residence think of the Chinese Diaspora? 3 weeks ago:
What exactly do we consider the Diaspora to be? First generation?
Because there are people living in my area whose ancestors came from China 200 years ago.
- Comment on systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success 3 weeks ago:
It uses a completely different paradigm of process chaining and management than POSIX and the underlying Unix architecture.
That’s not to say it’s bad, just a different design. It’s actually very similar to what Apple did with OS X.
On the plus side, it’s much easier to understand from a security model perspective, but it breaks some of the underlying assumptions about how scheduling and running processes works on Linux.
So: more elegant in itself, but an ugly wart on the overall systems architecture design.
- Comment on Is there a program to speed up the process between my external harddrive and USB? If used to run super fast now it seems to slow down. Hopefully something I can use offline. Thx 3 weeks ago:
Along with the other advice, it’s worth noting that “USB” ports can have different specs; make sure you’re plugged into one that supports USB 3.1 or higher.
Also, USB is CPU-bound; if the CPU is busy doing other things, peripheral communication slows down.
- Comment on Audio cable measurements are driving me crazy — why don’t they null?!? 4 weeks ago:
Here’s a simple answer: cables going from analog input devices to DSPs, mixers, etc. need proper shielding and should be as short as possible, with low-resistance connectors. Otherwise, EM radiation can be picked up and interfere with the signal.
Anything traveling digitally? It just needs to arrive at the destination in a timely manner; your cable would have to be really bad to have any influence.
Cables out to analog speakers? As long as you have a decent signal, these can use the crappiest connections and unshielded cables — the worst thing they’ll do is provide interference for OTHER cables they’re near. Just adjust your EQ until the speakers provide the response you’re looking for.
- Comment on 2026-01-14: The Day the telnet Died 4 weeks ago:
These days, not really, except that netcat has wider capabilities and so often triggers security alarms when used.
- Comment on 2026-01-14: The Day the telnet Died 4 weeks ago:
I used to send messages by hand over SMTP using a telnet client.
- Comment on 2026-01-14: The Day the telnet Died 4 weeks ago:
But telnet is just a bidirectional TCP connection. You can run any terminal emulation you want over it, and run it on any port you want.
The telnetd service on the other hand… that has no reason to still be internet-facing.
- Comment on Is ironing clothes significantly less common now? 4 weeks ago:
Funny thing is: I switched from cheap T shirts to dress shirts after I bought one good quality one for a job interview.
They’re don’t get hot in the heat, wick away moisture, keep you warm when it’s cold, don’t shrink or wrinkle, last a good 10 years of heavy use and look professional no matter who you’re with.
I don’t know why my parents’ generation ever abandoned them.
- Comment on Is ironing clothes significantly less common now? 4 weeks ago:
I wear a dress shirt to work every day. They’re all no-iron; they don’t wrinkle and are wearable out of the dryer.
Textiles have come a long way in the past 50 years.
- Comment on India and US release a framework for an interim trade agreement 5 weeks ago:
A concept of an agreement on trade.
- Comment on Consumer hardware is no longer a priority for manufacturers 5 weeks ago:
At what point can AI companies play the “too big to fail” card though, like the banks?
Bubble bursts, and the government uses our taxes to bail out the companies. Again.