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clowd

237 karma · joined June 22, 2016

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clowd··on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok block democratic hashtags
While we're talking about stuff that didn't happen, I'm sure glad the Steelers are headed to the Super Bowl.
clowd··on YouTube putting scammy ad about "double your Bitcoin" on Bitcoin University vid
They're putting these crappy ads e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e.

The quality of ads on YouTube has fallen to somewhere beneath the sewer, just as YouTube has launched a scorched-earth campaign against adblockers. Scams, celebrity impersonation, AI-generated nonsense, AI-generated nonsense promoting AI nonsense generators. YouTube's ad inventory is a vast wasteland of festering, unmoderated dreck.

clowd··on X sues Media Matters to silence moderation criticism
...towards reality. The "free speech absolutist" guy got his little feelings hurt again.
clowd··on I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times
> “If you want to build something people will use, don’t build anything,” he said. “Build an ad and see if people click it. Then only build something once it gets a lot of clicks.”

Well no wonder your Google ads keep getting banned.

clowd··on Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
There's no indication that Trump is a multi-billionaire but the rest of your comment is spot on.
clowd··on Reddit banned Reddiw's (alternative API) subreddit and author's Reddit account
And not a true one, either.

I don't know what the hell Reddit is doing the past couple of weeks but they seem determined to completely destroy themselves, and quickly.

clowd··on FBI Whistleblower Testifies about Retaliation
O'Boyle isn't a whistleblower; he's an insubordinate employee who refused to do his job and was improperly distributing information about investigations.
clowd··on Reddit's proposed API changes and the continued existence of RedReader
Will this not be subject to the same limitations reddit is imposing on RedReader and others? I guess I don't know enough about how they distinguish a "third-party app" versus a website hooking into their API.
clowd··on Tell HN: Cloudflare verification is breaking the internet
> If people use Firefox, they're probably a privacy wonk LARPing an imagined threat model, and are using a shitty cheap VPN used by countless attackers

What kind of nonsense is this? Firefox is a mainstream browser used by millions of people every day. Maybe you're confusing it with Tor?

clowd··on Tell HN: Cloudflare verification is breaking the internet
If Cloudflare has decided that Firefox is a "non-mainstream browser" and is applying a penalty to its users, then Cloudflare is the problem.
clowd··on Tell HN: Cloudflare verification is breaking the internet
Yes, this is annoying as hell. It's gotten to the point where I just close out of a site when I see that interstitial come up.
clowd··on PayPal has restricted our account after we invoiced a key containing “ALEP”
Is your assertion that it's unconstitutional for the US government to regulate interstate commerce?
clowd··on 9-year-old girl wanted to save her goat from slaughter. Then came the warrant
Are you saying that the SacBee article is misrepresenting something to "manipulate" people? What does it purport to be true that's not true?

The only problem GPT is fit to solve is an empty hard drive you'd like to have filled with random, useless garbage. But I don't understand how GPT is germane to this goat escapade in the first place.

clowd··on PayPal has restricted our account after we invoiced a key containing “ALEP”
Complying with US federal law does not equate to acting as an agent of the US government, no matter how many times this trope may be repeated.
clowd··on PayPal has restricted our account after we invoiced a key containing “ALEP”
The government hasn't created a list of no-no words, they've created a list of entities with whom US Persons cannot conduct financial transactions. I don't know what "ALEP" is but you can be sure it refers to some organization designated by the Office of Foreign Asset Control. PayPal's crappy system is PayPal's crappy system; their implementation wasn't directed by USG.
clowd··on “I’m selling data of 400M Twitter users that was scraped via a vulnerability”
Slight correction: alleging Donald Trump's government was doing unconstitutional acts.

Which we know they did, in spades, in other contexts; but I've seen no evidence in the "Twitter files" to indicate anything illegal was going on in this context. The government briefed Twitter that they expected disinformation campaigns and to be on the lookout for them. The government also flagged a bunch of tweets as "hey, these are sus and might violate your rules, you ought to take a look" like anyone else can do.

Whatever Musk and Taibbi are trying to cook up, they seem to have forgotten who was running the federal government at the time. It wasn't Joe Biden or tHe LiBeRaLs. The whole thing is stupid.

clowd··on DALL-E Mini – Generate images from a text prompt
That one errors out with "Too much traffic" and this one doesn't.
clowd··on Who's Attacking My Server?
httpd is the one service I don't use fail2ban for, preferring a DIY solution instead.

I created an Apache config file with rewrite conditions to catch a bunch of "exploity" URI parts, abusive user-agent strings, referer spam targets, etc. This is loaded at the server level from httpd.conf, so I don't have to touch any vhosts and it's only parsed once when the service starts. Matching requests are rewritten to a script which drops the offender's IP and the ban reason into a file, and emits a terse "go away" message to the client. A separate daemonized process picks up those entries and adds them to an ipset in the firewall.

I went this route because fail2ban isn't always part of my deployment on a web server, but PHP is. Apache provides all of the matching capability to detect abuse from within itself, and the pair of PHP scripts are sufficient to act on those detections.

clowd··on I wrote Task Manager and I just remembered something (2020)
> There should be nothing that TaskMgr can't kill

Except Defender/Malware Protection...

clowd··on Twitter Permanently Suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Account
I don't think "everyone else" has been banned from Facebook; aside from Trump, I can't think of any other American elected official they've banned. Gab and Parler both work fine in a web browser.
clowd··on Twitter Permanently Suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Account
The pragmatic answer is: because the law says so.

The technical answer is: Verizon can't hear what you're saying to your mom, so they don't know/care the content.

The social answer is: ultimately there's no real difference between the two. If you use your Verizon phone to make harassing calls to your mom and she reports those calls to Verizon, or if you do something else that violates your agreement with Verizon, they too have the right to terminate your service:

"We can, without notice, limit, suspend or end your Service or any agreement with you for any good cause, including, but not limited to: (1) if you: (a) breach this agreement or violate our prohibited usage policies..."

Now, because you pay Verizon, and Verizon likes money, they may be more inclined to tolerate certain behavior as long as you pay your bill on time. That's their choice, though.

clowd··on Twitter Permanently Suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Account
Every member of Congress is provided with their own website, a subdomain of either house.gov or senate.gov, for the entirety of their term. If your representative neglects that website and chooses to communicate through a private outlet instead, that's something to complain to your representative about.
clowd··on Twitter Permanently Suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Account
> It's like getting banned from radio in the 1940s and saying, "Who cares? There's still newsletters and speaking engagements."

It's more like getting banned from one radio station in the 1940s and going "Who cares? She can still go on a bunch of other radio stations, and most people are capable of tuning in, if they want to."

She's on Facebook. She's on Gab. She's on Parler. She's on Gettr. She went on a cross-country tour last year. She appears on TV and will probably get even more TV appearances out of this. Anyone who wants to hear whatever she's saying has their choice of outlets from which to do so.

clowd··on Report to Congress: Robocalls and Transmission of Misleading Caller ID
The Do Not Call registry is for mobile numbers too. The problems with the registry are twofold:

- The robocallers DGAF. Many of them are already doing something illegal to start with. The only entities who really seem to be concerned with downloading the registry and scrubbing their call lists are big legitimate corps. Rachel from Cardholder Services just wants to dial as many numbers as possible and isn't going to comply with the law.

- Reporting violations is an effort in futility! A couple years ago I decided to report an idiot who was calling multiple times a day. The form asked for a bunch of information about the call, I filled all of it out, and several weeks later I got a reply from the FTC through postal mail with a dozen printed pages (including my complaint rendered onto their internal paperwork) saying sorry, they didn't have enough information to act.

I get 10+ robocalls a day, I'm not spending my time filling out a form that goes nowhere. It's unfortunate, but the registry has no teeth.

clowd··on Ask HN: How did my LastPass master password get leaked?
I wouldn't go so far as useless, but they frequently exhibit significant inaccuracy, no matter which vendor/service you use. It's not unusual for me to query 7 APIs and be told the user is in 7 different cities spanning 5 states. At least there's usually a quorum at the country level. Given the market ($$$) for IPv4, this feels like it's only getting worse as more blocks of IPs are being sold, leased, transferred, even between continents/RIRs and the geo providers are always a few steps behind.

For the IP posted above, I have 3 providers claiming it's in Sao Paulo, 3 who says it's in Joburg (this is as accurate as anyone's going to get right now) and one says it's in Chicago! If I'm trying to do something with these results programmatically, I don't have a majority or a plurality to pick as a "winner" and I have to try weighting specific providers, which is a whole new mess.

Anyway, there's a good idea brewing in RFC8805 but it'd require pretty much every AS to play along.

clowd··on Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support
Twitter, though, at least has moderators, and makes an effort to remove threatening content from its service. The speed and efficacy of Twitter's abuse team is a topic for debate, but they have (and enforce) policy.

Parler famously had no such policy, that's why it was so attractive to the insurrectionists. The CEO, even after January 6th, went on record that he didn't feel it was Parler's responsibility to moderate user-generated content at all. Whatever last-minute olive branch they tried extending to AWS regarding a potential future volunteer moderator system obviously wasn't sufficient for Amazon.

clowd··on Gmail having issues
In practice, no, it's more nuanced than that. Any mailing list operated through any remotely legitimate ESP will require subscriptions to be confirmed/acknowledged up front before any delivery is attempted to a recipient. If the confirmation step fails, i.e. the "check your email and click a link to verify you really signed up" email bounces, or nobody ever clicks the link, the list owner isn't generally going to be penalized for that.

If you want revenge for modal popups, your best bet is to create a bunch of throwaway email accounts, subscribe to the mailing list from them, and start reporting the individual messages as spam when they arrive. Flag them as junk at the mailbox provider (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) and use the links in the List-Unsubscribe headers to flag them at the ESP's end, too.

clowd··on Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records
Well, that's poor planning on the user's part. In this case the OP stated he registered using a gmail address.
clowd··on Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained
Next time you encounter someone who claims they don't care about privacy, ask whether or not they close the bathroom door (or the stall in a public restroom) when they're taking a shit. And if they say yes, ask them why? What's going on in there isn't any big secret. It's not like they're in there plotting a terrorist attack. What are they hiding behind that door?

It turns out most people _do_ care about privacy. You just have to frame it in relatable terms.

I don't want anyone else watching me take a dump because that's private, and it's not any of their business. Likewise, I don't want other people knowing what articles I read on the internet, or what music I listen to, or reading the contents of my business plan, or scoping out my dick pics, or any of a thousand other things, because those things are also private and they aren't anyone else's business unless I choose to share them.

Restrooms have doors, and most people close them for privacy. Data has a privacy door, too, and it's called encryption.

clowd··on Many packages suddenly disappeared
Yeah, there have been multiple typo-squatting incidents.

http://blog.npmjs.org/post/163723642530/crossenv-malware-on-...

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