For those wondering about the upswing here:

If the age verification movement goes unchecked, it’s possible that you could be forced to tie your government ID to much of your online activity, Gillmor says. Some civil rights groups fear it could usher in a new era of state and corporate surveillance that would transform our online behaviour.

“This is the canary in the coalmine, it isn’t just about porn,” says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. Greer says age verification laws are a thinly veiled ploy to impose censorship across the web. A host of campaigners warn that these measures could be used to limit access not just to pornography, but to art, literature and basic facts about sex education and LGBTQ+ life.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

Corporate culture is a malicious bad actor.

Corporate culture, from management books to magazine ads to magic quadrants is all about profits over people, short term over stability, and massaging statistics over building a trustworthy reputation.

All of it is fully orchestrated from the top down to make the richest folks richer right now at the expense of everything else. All of it. From open floor plans to unlimited PTO to perverting every decent plan whether it be agile or ITIL or whatever, every idea it lays its hands on turns into a shell of itself with only one goal.

Until we fix that problem, the enshittification, the golden parachutes, and the passing around of horrible execs who prove time and time again they should not be in charge of anything will continue as part of the game where we sacrifice human beings on the Altar of Record Quarterly Profits.

When did they start bundling candy crush? Xp? Or 7? That was when the enshittification started.

Not due to that app itself, and it was a slow start and it took a while, but that was when stuff started being “pushed” instead of merely “present”, like, say pinball or solitaire.

Aside from one (seemingly very out of place at the time) early mention that the author used Bitcoin, there was no hint of it being pro-bitcoin until the very, very end.

I found it to be a very worthwhile article right up until that point and even slightly intriguing from an academic perspective after that point.

I despise the endless blind parroting of the typical cryptobro refrains elsewhere on the Internet when crypto is brought up and I still liked the article, so I wouldn’t write it off just because one guy with a cryptohammer inevitably sees the very real SMTP problem as a cryptonail in the end. It’s natural when you have a “solution in search of a problem” situation like we do with crypto (and block chain, and for that matter SharePoint. People with knowledge of a thing often try to use it to solve problems it probably wasn’t meant for.)

No, that’s GOOD news.

Learning is a good thing.

Fascinating stuff.

Thank you 😊

It’s fucking “'til” not “tell”.

'til is short for “until”.

Please stop saying “Let’s wait tell later to do that”.

I think you mis-spelled “biased”.

:)

`4

Safe deposit box?

Everyone who has one, I hope.

It’s called a Bitcoin “wallet”, too. If someone else is holding yours, it’s not your money.

But they’re almost all using it STUPIDLY, aren’t they?

How many people who purport to have Bitcoin actually hold their own private key?

(strike)Frank from IT(/strike)the cleaning crew

I jest, but I’ve seen more facilities maintenance teams cause power issues than IT teams.

It’s aready possible to flash a phone ROM in two clicks

That’s precisely the kind of access that a web browser should NEVER, EVER have.

If you think 2 stage download keylogger apps getting into app stores is bad, wait until it can be done with a banner ad. Or by viewing a comment on a post.

Thank you for your service to this thread.

I re-read your post with a little more understanding once I’d seen the discord.

Multiverse is apparently a mod.

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/arcanum-multiverse-edition.114150/

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=760410053

That link apparently expired or something, but I tracked down another that seems to work.

https://discord.gg/KT7sRzY

My guess is you’re looking for this:

http://terra-arcanum.com/drog/uap.html

Or possibly this:

https://www.nexusmods.com/arcanumofsteamworksandmagickobscura/mods/4

“WebUSB is a JavaScript application programming interface specification for securely providing access to USB devices from web applications”

Holy Hannah, NO!!!

Might as well allow a website to direct write to your hard drive unprompted again.

Does noone see how BAD this stuff is?

Stop creating attack vectors with glowing neon signs on them.

This is also why there’s such a a prevalence of flashing warning banners, fake pseudobluescreens, and other scary shit disguised in chrome notifications.

The notifications in chrome are as close to on by default as you can get and with the right code snippets you can make it look like the FBI locked down your workstation and you need to call them.

Firefox should start hardening against this behavior now because popularity gets targeted even more specifically.

Make it an end user safety feature.

Force every notification to have

“This is a notification from a website that you elected to receive by allowing notifications. You can disable these notifications here”

with a link to the setting on the frame of of every one, no fullscreen allowed, no flashing, double-check and prohibit the words FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, IRS, Social Security, Microsoft, etc.

I’ve clicked on ads “plenty of times” on purpose.

Probably a half dozen a year at one point.

There was a period of time where some sites I visited hit the sweet spot of only using advertisers that were moderately relevant to the content or to similar interests that people who would be perusing that content might have.

If the ads are for things I might be interested in, I’ll click.

It’s utterly shocking that with as much as most service providers and companies actually know about the average person that we’ve so thoroughly failed to target ads at people.

Couple that with ads being an occasional attack vector because nobody properly vets shit anymore and it’s not worth it to whitelist most sites in my adblocker unless I’m REALLY interested in supporting them.

I avoid YouTube and that sort of stuff like the plague unless I need to repair an appliance or a car or something, so outside of text ads, the only ads I regularly see anymore are the occasional totally irrelevant commercial on a streaming service.

Once upon a time Hulu let you PICK what kind of ads you wanted to see, which was the tiniest of baby steps in the right direction.

We had the potential to drill down, do the hard work, and provide relevant, interesting, and specific ads, and the corporate fuckis at the top chose greed.

I almost feel bad for people who work in advertising.

A few of them.

Maybe.

What do you use now?

I work in IT and between the Advent of “agile” methodologies meaning lots of documentation is out of date as soon as it’s approved for release and AI results more likely to be invented instead of regurgitated from forum posts, it’s getting progressively more difficult to find relevant answers to weird one-off questions than it used to be. This would be less of a problem if everything was open source and we could just look at the code but most of the vendors corporate America uses don’t ascribe to that set of values, because “Mah intellectual properties” and stuff.

Couple that with tech sector cuts and outsourcing of vendor support and things are getting hairy in ways AI can’t do anything about.

What’s the discord address?