boatswain
@boatswain@infosec.pub
- Comment on Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant? 1 month ago:
What about just giving transparency to what the ranking is and letting people control it? Analogous to “sort by new/best/top” bit ideally with more knobs to tweak and a bunch of preset options?
- Comment on Kagi silently removed all references to Google's index from their website 1 month ago:
- Comment on Kagi silently removed all references to Google's index from their website 1 month ago:
Sure but given that their previous language explicitly mentions Google why remove that unless they’re trying to make people think that maybe they didn’t use Google. It’s a shady change, from a company whose CEO is already doing somewhat unhinged things.
- Comment on Kagi silently removed all references to Google's index from their website 1 month ago:
The issue is that they’re using it but no longer being explicit about that use.
- Comment on Cory Doctorow on Search Engine Enshittification 2 months ago:
Interesting, thanks! I’ve only vaguely followed crypto stuff, so not really too familiar with how it gets used day-to-day
- Comment on Cory Doctorow on Search Engine Enshittification 2 months ago:
Gotcha, thanks! So you can just swap Monero for Bitcoin without going through KYC stuff?
- Comment on Cory Doctorow on Search Engine Enshittification 2 months ago:
How do you use a public ledger for privacy? Are you just using Monero or something?
- Comment on This was the first result on Google 3 months ago:
The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.
- Comment on A 7,000-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That’s Bad News for All of Us. 3 months ago:
Why is it a terrible idea?
- Comment on US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users 3 months ago:
I mean, the domestic businesses are the ones who own Congress and are using it to get rid of a competitor.
- Comment on Are there any genuine benefits to AI? 4 months ago:
I think we’re saying the same thing there: LLMs are great at spewing out a ton of content, which makes them a great tool for brainstorming. The content they create is not necessarily trustworthy or even good, but it can be great fuel for the creative process.
- Comment on Are there any genuine benefits to AI? 4 months ago:
You’re confusing brainstorming with content generation. LLMs are great for brainstorming: they can quickly churn out dozens of ideas for my D&D campaign, which I then look through, discard the garbage, keep the good bits of, and riff off of before incorporating into my campaign. If I just used everything it suggested blindly, yeah, nightmare fuel. For brainstorming though, it’s fantastic.
- Comment on Why don't we have one timezone covering the whole earth? 4 months ago:
I’m a proponent of this myself. I think the big barrier to just using UTC everywhere is with the clock as a symbol: right now if you’re watching a movie or a TV show and see someone’s alarm going off at 6:00, you know “oh, they’re a pretty early riser.” If everyone used UTC, that time could be local noon, or the person could be late for work, out any number of other things.
That also applies to when people move to a new place; if I’m used to having lunch at 20:00 UTC and then move across the country, suddenly lunch is at 17:00 UTC. Symbols are really important to people, so I think these are both problematic. Meetings would be easier, but offline life would be harder.
- Comment on Passkeys might really kill passwords 4 months ago:
Does KeePass support passkeys?
- Comment on First game you played 4 months ago:
- Comment on Researcher uncovers one of the biggest password dumps in recent history 5 months ago:
KeePass doesn’t store your stuff in the cloud; it’s all local storage. You can sync your encrypted KeePass DB in a number of different ways; personally, I go for SyncThing, but you can use Box or whatever.
- Comment on The Self-Checkout Nightmare May Finally Be Ending 5 months ago:
That’s great once we’ve got a UBI or can ditch capitalism entirely, but until then it just means fewer jobs for those that need them.
- Comment on "Trust and Safety" departments exist to protect the company, not users. 6 months ago:
FYI “comprised of” is not a thing; you mean “composed of”. The correct way to use “comprise,” if you’re interested, is like “the United States comprises fifty states”. Technically you should mention DC and the various US territories etc as well, since comprise should indicate all of the parts.
- Comment on OpenAI's reported 'superintelligence' breakthrough is so big it nearly destroyed the company, and ChatGPT 7 months ago:
self replicating the propaganda?
You can’t self-replicate anything other than yourself. You replicate things; we use “self-replicating” because it’s shorthand for “thing that replicates itself.”
- Comment on Let's confuse Americans! 7 months ago:
That’s Canada
- Comment on [deleted] 7 months ago:
Yup; we are not the target audience, I guess
- Comment on [deleted] 7 months ago:
My largely uninformed opinion has always been that it’s about monetization: you don’t make the kind of money off ads on a blog that you can off a popular YouTube site. That, of course, is all Google’s decision. Presumably advertisers are willing to pay a lot more for video ad placement than for banner ads or something.
- Comment on ‘People have no idea’: How smart devices spy on us and reveal information about our homes 8 months ago:
The difference is the part immediately after you stopped quoting:
They don’t understand how horrible the loss of privacy is…
What OP is saying here is that people know abstractly that smart devices are not privacy friendly, but they don’t understand how big a deal that actually can be.
- Comment on Welcome to Mozilla’s first-ever Annual Consumer Creep-O-Meter 8 months ago:
Oh interesting; I wonder if the quiz just chooses a random assortment of a big list of tools?
- Comment on Welcome to Mozilla’s first-ever Annual Consumer Creep-O-Meter 8 months ago:
Oh. That’s not clear at all; I don’t even remember seeing a reference to a tool.
- Comment on Welcome to Mozilla’s first-ever Annual Consumer Creep-O-Meter 8 months ago:
Seems like a weird and random assortment of items. Why was Google Hangouts mentioned, but not Gmail? What about Discord, Slack, etc? Or smart TVs? Almost felt more like guerrilla advertising for a few niche products.
- Comment on Spotify re-invented the radio 8 months ago:
Nah, it’s better than radio because now they can track you and sell your data, including everything they get from your phone, to the highest bidder.
- Comment on (Please see comments)Alternatives to Signal if they exit EU due to ending E2EE 8 months ago:
VeilidChat is not out yet, but development seems to be moving quickly; it’s one to keep an eye on
- Comment on Firefox will have a built-in ‘fake reviews detector’ — Amazon is in trouble 8 months ago:
The question you’re responding to isn’t about the mobile app for Firefox; it’s about the mobile app for Amazon. Apparently lots of other people misread that too, so at least you’re in good company.
- Comment on Kroger introducing AI at self checkout to lower both accidental and organized crime theft. 8 months ago:
Nope, they have a ton of stores with lots of different names: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroger#chains
I suspect that if you see their branded products, you’re in one of their stores.