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Zak

@ Zak @lemmy.world

Posts
7
Comments
858
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Samsung bans smart TV apps that share users' internet connections with strangers

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  • You have experienced the problem and you do it anyway?

    Services that do region blocking also tend to block public VPNs. Breaking the internet like this is bad, and you should feel bad for doing it.

  • Mastodon.world cancels famous German author Kazim's posts - now he left Mastodon completely

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  • That's his version of events that he's showing to his audience. People who get banned from things often share a harmless-looking excerpt when that's not really what got them banned.

    It would be good to have the whole context before reaching a conclusion.

  • Student Teacher Sent a Private Snapchat Complaining About Her Workday. An Hour Later, Police Pulled Up to Her School.

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  • The statute is constructed in an unusual way because it doesn't require that the threat is transmitted to someone who believes it. It says:

    (a) A person commits disorderly conduct when he or she knowingly:

    ...

    (3.5) Transmits or causes to be transmitted in any manner a threat of destruction of a school building or school property, or a threat of violence, death, or bodily harm directed against persons at a school, school function, or school event, whether or not school is in session;

    Laws against transmitting threats are usually written in a manner that excludes jokes sent to friends who understand that they are jokes.

    Also, use Signal. Signal will not call the cops when you send dumb jokes to your friends. There are no good reasons for most people to not use Signal.

  • Mastodon.world cancels famous German author Kazim's posts - now he left Mastodon completely

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  • This post says who he is and that he got banned from mastodon.world, but it does not say what he posted there before getting banned.

    The .world network is not known, in general for having unconventional rules or heavy-handed moderation. Without more information, I have to assume he posted something that would get him banned a lot of other places too.

  • Samsung bans smart TV apps that share users' internet connections with strangers

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  • Blocking all traffic from regions of the world that you have no intention of servicing is a very valid cybersecurity layer.

    I pretty regularly run into things that block access or make me complete captchas while I'm traveling. I may not be in a region you intend to service, but I'm (possibly) from a region you intend to service. Airplanes are a thing.

    Buying access to a residential proxy to deal with that situation would be an extreme step for most people, but as a cybersecurity practice, it's problematic.

  • Walmart self-checkout mistake destroys Olympic athlete's career

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  • I understand the rationale behind punishing an attempt at theft if that's what actually happened, otherwise a would-be thief has no incentive not to try. It's critical to be right before doing that.

    The drug charges are just fucked. Drug possession should not be a crime.

  • Kaine says US boat strikes likely killed people 'not involved in narcotrafficking': 'Murder victims' - ABC News

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  • The "civilized" qualifier was intentional.

  • Kaine says US boat strikes likely killed people 'not involved in narcotrafficking': 'Murder victims' - ABC News

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  • It's murder even if someone is likely involved in drug trafficking. Nobody involved has been tried or convicted, and the penalty for drug trafficking is not death in any civilized country.

  • I just used ddg to search for something and the first result was for a page that 404's, how is that possible?

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    1. Stale index: the link and summary DDG has stored no longer matches the site's content because the site changed it. The index will get updated eventually. This is the most likely explanation.
    2. Selective content: the site dynamically chose to serve you different content than it serves to DDG's crawler or other visitors. It might, for example think that you're a bot and want you to go away.

  • Flock Surveillance Cameras Are Actually Horrible for Fighting Crime, FBI Data Shows

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  • Absolutely. 500mW+ lasers can injure human eyes in a fraction of a second, even from a reflection, similar to how they can destroy a camera sensor.

    They're not particularly hard to get online in the USA though.

  • Flock Surveillance Cameras Are Actually Horrible for Fighting Crime, FBI Data Shows

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  • Sure would be a shame if someone pointed lasers into them.

  • People with touchscreen laptops, how often do you use the touchscreen features?

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  • I have a tablet that mostly gets used as a laptop and I rarely touch the screen when I have a keyboard/trackpad attached.

  • What is the best laptop you can get for under 650€?

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  • "Best overall" is nonsensical in this context. Here are some things people care about:

    • Size class - a 17" laptop isn't better or worse than a 12" laptop. They're for different use cases.
    • Thickness class - thicker tends to make it better at computer stuff and battery life, thinner is thinner
    • Screen color quality and accuracy - important to some, not to others
    • Touchscreen - yes, no, indifferent?
    • Screen aspect ratio - most are 16:9, some are taller
    • Screen resolution - most are at least FHD, but you can probably find something worse. Do you want better?
    • Upgradeability - can you get to the SSD? Can you put a DIMM in it after you win the lottery?
    • Keyboard feel and layout - some of us are more picky than others
    • Power supply - does it need to run from USB-PD?
    • "OS is not important", but you probably have one in mind and may need to consider compatibility
    • Does GPU performance matter? It's 2026 and GPUs aren't just for gaming anymore
    • Does CPU performance matter?
    • How much RAM and storage is required?

    I like my Thinkpad P14s III 6850u, but being a good fit for my needs doesn't mean it's the "best" or that it would be suitable for your sister.

  • PSA: The Tesseract frontend includes a hardcoded hidden instance blacklist with all leftist and trans-friendly instances.

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  • Opt-in denylists with pre-populated categories would be a reasonable feature. A frontend author trying to trick users into thinking there's a technical issue with servers the author doesn't like is presumptuous and disrespectful of the user.

    People did similar stuff with Mastodon clients when the far-right microblog service Gab migrated its backend to a Mastodon fork and I didn't like that either.

  • How did browsers make money before they sold user's data?

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  • They didn't, mostly. There have always been traffic deals, but otherwise:

    • Netscape: initially charged money for the browser, but free later.
    • Internet Explorer: initially charged money, bundled with Windows later. Not intended to be profitable directly, but to prevent the web from making the desktop OS where Microsoft had a near-monopoly irrelevant.
    • Opera: built-in banner ad, pay for ad-free.
    • Mozilla Suite, later pivoting to Firefox: initially nonprofit.
    • Safari: bundled with Apple operating systems, but also offered for Windows for a few years. Safari was never meant to make money directly, but to give Apple more control over the web experience, and probably to keep the web from competing with native apps too effectively on iOS.
    • Chrome: never intended to make money directly. I'm not sure the initial plan was to spy on users either; Google was a different company in 2008. Instead, I think Google really wanted a browser to make the web the application platform Microsoft feared, and found the existing options lacking.

  • US House to vote on bill to make daylight saving time permanent

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  • Let businesses change their hours instead of making people change clocks.

    Most businesses in the USA can change their hours , but the hours that make sense for them depend on schedules they don't control.

  • Why can't comments be fully deleted on Lemmy?

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  • I think it's best we just maintain some recency bias when it comes to how harshly we judge people for their past internet behavior. If you were an asshole ten years ago and haven't acted that way recently, I'll just assume you were 12. We were all 12 once.

  • Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay

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  • I tried pointing a text classifier at a subreddit's comments 15+ years ago. It would be surprising if we weren't seeing widespread use of automated moderation by now.

    Interestingly, a sentence starting with "you are" ended up being one of the most damning features a comment could have with regard to civility.

  • Removed

    Student Pilot Forced To Land Plane Alone

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  • Flight instructors jump out of planes to their deaths all the time? I hope you'll forgive my request for some citations.