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abbenm

@lemmy.ml

abbenm 4 points a day ago

I think a handful of research examples. For instance, I used to work at a non-profit that does donor-based fundraising that apparently had an account compromised, and the bad actor just sat and waited until the right time.

Then, when a donor asked for details about how to contribute, that was when the attacker sent an email from the compromised account with instructions to wire to some outside account we had never heard of. It was caught right away and nothing bad happened but it was still too close for comfort.

I don't believe in the fatalistic assumption that it's impossible to communicate about. It happens to real people after all. But I think you have to be specific and have specific action steps in mind.

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abbenm 61 points 2 years ago

I'm absolutely okay with vilifying people asking for sources on the historical existence of snow.

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abbenm 38 points 2 years ago

I've noticed the same thing you have, but I suspect it has a different explanation. I think it's more an echo chamber thing. People have said variations of this for a while now in HN comment threads, on reddit and here. And there's a snowball effect from more people saying it.

But there's been a throughline of bizarrely apathetic and insubstantial low effort comments. That's the one thing that has tied them together, which is why I think they are echo-chambery. Just for one example: one guy just never read a 990 before (a standard nonprofit form), and read Mozilla's and thought it was a conspiracy, and wrote an anti-Mozilla blog post. And then someone linked to that on Lemmy and said it was shady finances. Tons of upvotes.

But I'm convinced that no one reads through these links, including the people posting them. Because it takes two seconds to realize they are nonsense. But it doesn't stop them from getting upvoted.

So my theory is echo chamber.

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abbenm 31 points 3 years ago

NewPipe is a killer app I would say, with nearly Youtube Red level functionality in something that's free and OSS. A bit afield from privacy, but you do get to access youtube stuff without logging in.

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abbenm 31 points 3 years ago

Pretty sure this meme originates from an actual, specific Twitter exchange. Which became so legendary that people just repeated it secondhand, and now the secondhand repetition of it is getting screenshotted and posted.

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abbenm 30 points 3 years ago

they don’t vote anyone into any office, as “being the official candidate for party X” is not an government office. So the judge used A14 on an issue where it does not apply to in the first place

The political primary process still falls under electoral law, and state law can be brought to bear on questions of how the primary process is administered. Even the dissenting justices in this case appear to agree that finding of insurrection can trigger the enforcement of Colorado State law to remove someone from the ballot.

So having participated in an insurrection absolutely can be a factor that's pertinent to legal decisions about his eligibility, and in fact it's that very connection that seems to be the entire point of Colorado's state level law disqualifying insurrectionists from electoral office.

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abbenm 28 points 3 years ago

It's comments like this that make me glad Lemmy has a star that lets you favorite them. Thank you very much.

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abbenm 25 points 3 years ago

I love the implication that reading books is bad

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abbenm 24 points 3 years ago

for being such a meanie

Lol. You mean literally engaging in insurrection? This is exactly what internet hippo was talking about in their now famous tweet:

New right wing thing is describing crimes as generically as possible to pretend like they're not crimes. Someone gets convicted of conspiracy and they start yelling "Wow so it's illegal to make plans with friends now"

I'd love to see a whole chart of how various crimes get described in a generic way. Describing insurrection as being a meanie probably something that should be printed in framed and hung up in a Hall of Fame honoring greatest all time excuses for federal crimes.

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abbenm 22 points 3 years ago

Perfectly stated! The moralizing story kind of serves as cover, as a complete blank check to excuse practically any behavior of the lender, without any limiting principle.

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abbenm 21 points 3 years ago

There's so many levels on which it is deeply concerning. One is just on the face value. They actually did storm the capital, the security forces in place seemed ambivalent or perhaps actually complicit to some degree. Nevertheless, numerous people were injured or died.

And then there's everything about the precedent it sets for next time, the excuses and defenses being made of it, and the ways in which those sympathetic to it may prepare to execute on the same idea again in the future, perhaps learning from prior lessons, and perhaps confident that they won't face any legal exposure.

It's a horrifying idea to have been allowed to take root in the form of real physical actions, which are then carried forward in culture to set the stage for future actions.

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abbenm 21 points 2 years ago

Oof. I want to cheer this project on as much as anybody, but there's no two ways around it, those terms have every appearance of being extreme and expansive. Just to copy it here for others to see:

When you post Contributions, you grant us a license (including use of your name, trademarks, and logos): By posting any Contributions, you grant us an unrestricted, unlimited, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, fully-paid, worldwide right, and license to: use, copy, reproduce, distribute, sell, resell, publish, broadcast, retitle, store, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part), and exploit your Contributions (including, without limitation, your image, name, and voice) for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, your Contributions, and to sublicense the licenses granted in this section. Our use and distribution may occur in any media formats and through any media channels.

This license includes our use of your name, company name, and franchise name, as applicable, and any of the trademarks, service marks, trade names, logos, and personal and commercial images you provide.

https://loops.video/legal/terms-of-service

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abbenm 19 points 2 years ago

Wow, I feel like the most upvoted solutions here don't work, and meanwhile some obvious and widely known alternatives are being completely overlooked.

❌ Inspect Element - many modern sites don't even include the full article in the paywalled html, so this wouldn't work. Also sitting there and mousing over elements and deleting them one by one, is tedious, it's easy to accidentally delete an element that encloses the content you intended to keep, or to drive yourself crazy trying to figure out how elements are nested.

❌ Ublock Zapper - a similar to the above, won't work on stub articles, and just janky because you're manually zapping things

❌ Disabled JavaScript - Similar to the above, same problem because many articles are stubs anyway. And the HTML layers that block your view don't have to be done with JavaScript.

❌ Rapid copy and paste of the article to notepad or rapidly printing the screen - similar problem to the above, lots of places just post the stub of an article, and besides nobody should live their life this way rapidly trying to print screen or copy everything. If you're trying to do a quick copy you're going to grab all kinds of gobbledygunk from the page and probably have to manually filter it out.

❌ Reader Mode - Your browsers reader mode will be hit and miss because, again, many sites post stub articles, and it's possible the pay wall stuff will just get formatted into the reader mode along with an incomplete article.

✅ Archive.is - works!

✅ Pocket and Instapaper - amazingly, nobody has mentioned these even though they're probably the longest running (dating back to 2007-2008), possibly most widely known, and most consistent solutions that still work to this day. They keep their own local caches of articles, so it's not depending on the full content being visible on the page.

✅ Other dedicated extensions - Dedicated browser extensions seem to work, but be careful what you're signing yourself up for.

🤷‍♀️ Brave - It works, but, it's a Chromium supported browser, so ultimately Google controls the destiny and can drive Chromium to incorporate fundamental frameworks supporting DRM and pushing their preferred web standards.

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abbenm 19 points 2 years ago

I bet they saw the source and said "oh, yes, thank you for the source, I have updated my opinion based on this new information."

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abbenm 19 points 3 years ago

other than limiting exhaust, or is that it?

Gee, when you say it like that, it makes extinction-level events sound not so bad! It is That Bad, so that would be the most direct answer.

The important thing to note is that even though some electricity is generated from fossil fuels, EVs eliminate the path-dependency that ties transportation to fossil fuels.

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abbenm 19 points 2 years ago

As the other commenter noted, this is kind of a nonsensical article. I am not by any means a fan of Mozilla's decision on Ublock, it seems egregious and indefensible. But the convoluted logic of making Manifest V3 about Mozilla is completely emptyhanded, and there's no rhyme, reason, logic, or precedent suggesting we should make anything of their absence of a statement.

Also, this is especially nuts because Mozilla HAS in fact criticized Manifest V3! They just happened not to have done so within a particular randomly selected window of time.

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abbenm 18 points 3 years ago

Firefox is better than most, no double there, but at the same time they do have some shady finances

So I went ahead and read that article and goodness gracious, does anybody actually read these links??? Because that link is a complete nothingburger. It's a blog post from someone who never read a 990 before (standard nonprofit disclosure form) who thinks every other line of is proof of a scandal. But it's not, it's just a big word salad that is too long to read, so nobody will bother.

The most significant charge is (1) that the CEO makes too much and (2) the author doesn't like that they contract out work to consultants who think diversity is good. And everything after that is LESS significant.

Every point made, so far as I can tell:

  • Have assets worth $1.1 billion as of 2021
  • Mozilla spent less on "expenses" from 2021 relative to 2020
  • Revenue went up over the same time
  • A lot of revenue was from royalties (e.g. agreements for default search)
  • They disagree with the wording on a donate form about whether Mozilla "relies" on individual donations
  • The CEO made $5.6MM
  • They pulled out one expense, which appears to have been training/education relating to social justice topics
  • They pull out a few more individual expenses and weren't sure what they were.

This isn't secret documents being handed to Deep Throat in a dark parking lot. There's no smoking gun, no smoke, just a PDF with ordinary tables of expenses and revenue, and consultants who did diversity training. If that's shady then, get ready to be mad about every non-profit ever.

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abbenm 17 points 3 years ago

It can be both - a terrible amoral system that concentrates wealth to the point that major world events are driven by wildcard personalities of rich idiots. And then, the rich idiots themselves.

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abbenm 17 points 2 years ago

Choking is the most terrifying and most unfair imo. I have a lot of siblings and every single one of them has had a choking scare.

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abbenm 16 points 2 years ago

SSRN is a kind of vast warehouse of academic papers, and one of the most excited cited and well-read ones is called "I've got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of privacy."

The essence of the idea is that privacy is about more than just hiding bad things. It's about how imbalances in access to information can be used to manipulate you. Seemingly innocuous bits of information can be combined to reveal important things. And there are often subtle and invisible harms that are systematic in nature, enabling surveillance state institutions to use them to exercise greater amounts of control in anti-democratic ways, and it can create chilling effects on behavior and free speech.

https://papers.ssrn.com/...

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