ridgered4

I remember Biden going on TV and blaming high YoY inflation on the Ukraine war when it had been going for about 2 weeks. Before that a lot of transitory smoke was being blown up everyone's backside.

I often see the narrative on here that consumer VPN providers are almost useless for privacy due to other fingerprinting methods, which I've never really bought.

> * Some 42% of Amazon reviews are fake. Amazon are suing Facebook for ‘failing to tackle fake review factories’

Why is it Facebook's job to make sure Amazon's reviews aren't fake? I guess I don't understand the pipeline for fake reviews or something.

We just use shutterfly for color printing. Every once and awhile my wife buys another shitty photo printer that ends up in the trash in 6 months or so. I told she's on her own with those things, I have a brother laser for the necessities and my loathsome printer repair days are behind me.

My main beef with my brother laser is that if it runs out of paper it keeps the drum heater going seemly forever on the assumption that you are going to quickly replace the paper and finish the print job. My wife likes to print out a bunch of recipes and then not get them until a day later so I often find the equivalent of a toaster being left running for half a day sucking power when I come home.

Can't wait for the "Select the non-deformed hands" captchas.

It is really frustrating to me that discord seems to have taken over half of the use cases that forums used to fill. Reddit stole most of the other half, but every time I look into discord I cannot understand the popularity and people's willingness to push past all of the privacy and access friction it introduces.

I already live in a pay to win world so the idea of unwinding in one seems insane to me.

My biggest beef is when this is added in an update after I bought a game that didn't have it.

Is Steam UI terrible? It seems a little slower than I'd like, particularly initial load but otherwise it seems fine to me. And most software I use is so slow now it certainly doesn't stand out and has probably moved to the upper grade just by not getting worse over the years.

The other day some one mentioned any of these surveys consistently have about a 5% troll rate.

The 77% belief in angels is bizarre though. Like I believe in the possibility of aliens, the universe is quite large. Although I think all spacecraft sightings are almost certainly just mundane stuff from spy planes to weather balloons, etc. I even believe in the possibility of ghosts being real, more likely some strange phenomenon we can't explain that we might misidentify as ghosts. But angels?

One man's angel is another man's ghost or alien though I guess.

I've noticed one service I log in to sometimes gives me a single captcha, sometimes no captcha at all and sometimes just throws me in a tar pit. I think it has to do with the endpoint, even within the same country. But it is bizarre.

More chickens in fewer hen houses.

I had a Zenith from the 1980s that I eventually had to just throw out as I didn't really have space for it and the 20" size had been obsolete for some tie. The thing wouldn't die. It actually had a better picture than some later TVs I'd owned before I inherited it from my parents. I still have mixed feelings about letting it go.

Secure erase depends upon the drive firmware correctly implementing the function. The only study I've seen that actually tested this found about half of drives did not do it properly! But that was from 10 years ago now.

I once used secure erase on a nvme SSD and found some of the partition table was still present when going to reformat, even though the operation indicated success. I eventually tracked it down to the drive being mistakenly mounted at the time of the secure erase. So there is your other failure mode, making sure you and your software utilities also perform the secure erase correctly.

The problem around here seems to mostly be there is no housing at all for slog-worthy workers. You can con them into taking out crazy college loans they'll never pay off and an individual can remain in denial about astronomical healthcare and nonexistent retirement prospects during their day to day, but workers have yet to develop the ability to teleport to and from work so that no housing needs to be built near these poorly paying jobs.

I actually think we should just divest all security tasks from cellular providers. They are clearly bad at it and I don't think they ever really pretended it was a core competency. Reforming them would take far longer than just switching to the available alternatives, and probably would not work as they would just lobby any regulations down to be toothless.

SMS allows you to collect phone numbers which are quite good at identifying users for tracking and ad targeting though. And since most large tech companies are advertising companies (in whole or in part) it is no surprise they chose this as a second factor. Even if you try to avoid using SMS for 2FA they'll try to collect the number for account verification or recovery, with regular nags or lately go straight to extorting it out of you to continue to access purchased services or software.

Always seems bizarre to me I can ride an ATV around or even a motorcycle on the highway, but a cheap 1980s style Honda CRV is apparently to unsafe to sell anymore because it doesn't meet crash test standards.

One technique would be to place unchanging bait files that you pre-check before allowing the backup to proceed.

This always seems obvious to me with F2P games. They create more and more complicated measures to detect cheats, but when it cost nothing (except an SMS service now I guess) to spin up a new account you aren't getting anywhere.

The old business model of just charging a lot of money up front for the game seems like it wouldn't have this problem to the same extent. You just ban their key and they're out $20-60. But that business model is less popular now I guess.

My state's DMV sells personal data to private companies.

Most email services now demand SMS verification to sign up for them now as well.

Reddit still doesn't require an email to create accounts, even if it now heavily implies it does. Just click next without entering one.

True, but the email required to enable it (arguably) is.

Reddit is far from the worst offender in this area. I should have specified my opinion as a more general one.

I've seen a number of pieces about privacy problems with Windows 11 but they've struck me as kind of odd. To me, Windows 10 was an awful privacy nightmare and Windows 11 is just more of the same. They're going to turn the screws on TPM requirements and press even harder on Microsoft accounts, but fundamentally it just seems like a continuation of the path things were already on.

It is fine to remind everyone of what is going on, but this war was lost 8 years ago.

Yeah, but every crisis is an opportunity and this is an opportunity to scare people into coughing up PII that advertisers love so much.

> In a world like this, where the need is reduced to actually go to a website, what's the incentive for maintaining a website that no one visits?

I guess to get the bots to tell your lies.

And thanks to automatic updates, the deal can be turned sour on you at any time. For security reasons!

Well, AI comedy can't anyway. I guess there's a niche left for the humans after all.

There was a tongue in cheek post on here a couple weeks ago where a user suggested in the future we'll prove we're human by peppering racial sluts into all of our communications.

Judging by the Twitter and Facebook cases I've learned the purpose of asking for this phone number for security purposes is actually for advertising.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/05/...

https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/yes-facebook-is-using-your...