weci2i

You win the internet

The same thing happened to me in 2019. I fought hard for a while and then gave up. I thought maybe I could drum up some public support (and work my way to a facebook connection who could restore it) by blogging about it and posting here...but nobody cared.

I used to do this exact same trick with Sub7. Good times.

Seeing this thread and so many familiar stories makes me feel right at home. Sub7 was my RAT of choice. My brother and friends weren't very technical, but I taught them to use Sub7 so they could spread the exe around to their friends and we could all have some fun. We were all heavy ICQ users at the time. It wasn't long before we discovered the ICQ send file box had a size limit on the file name field. So you could, say, call the exe "pic-of-me-nude.jpg .exe" with so many spaces in the file name before the .exe part disappeared that most of our male friends would accept it from a "random female" and run it without any hesitation. Needless to say, we opened a lot of CD ROMS and listened in on many chats.

My parents in PA received a mail in ballot for my grandfather. He has been dead over 7 years. Not only is he dead, he never lived with my parents at their address. I keep checking the status of his mail in ballot online to ensure that he hasn’t voted.

I’m in PA - Lancaster county voter here. My experience matches yours with the scantron. We had no digital option this election, though we did in the last. Two people worked the books at our polling place.

Was this inspired by Windows RG (https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/winrg) ?

It is obviously way more impressive but I’m surprised nobody else has mentioned it.

No problem. I was just trying to give a little context for why I was stalking the guy. In trying to avoid looking like a creeper I see how it just came off as petty. Neither was my intent. I appreciate the check.

Facebook absolutely did this. A couple years ago I had a junior dev under me that management would not allow me to fire. And it’s so much worse than just the person searching. His feed recommended my close connections to him just because I watched his page.

He spent 75% of most days working for personal clients outside our company. The remainder of his days were spent pimping his projects on Facebook to build his personal brand. He was not a rock star programmer. His work was beyond subpar and he needed extra time, not less. We weren’t connected but I stalked his profile for time stamps and evidence. He lived at least 1.5 hours outside my locations except for the office.

One day he overheard me and another coworker discussing Facebook oddities and he interrupted, “Facebook keeps recommending (insert my wife’s name) as a connection.” He did not know my wife’s name and they had never been in proximity of one another.

It's funny that you mention this. I was just explaining to a young coworker how we basically had social networking in the 90's. My friends and I (even nontechnical kids) all maintained Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod pages. We'd load them up with free scripts for counters, guestbooks, and cheesy popup messages. Then we'd all link around to each others' pages and follow each other with web rings.

You are probably onto something with this train of thought. I had an Angelfire website when I was 17 in the 90's. All my friends were blown away by my terrible design and color choices because they weren't on the web. Putting something accessible by the entire world out there seemed like magic to them. The web in general felt much more magical then.

It mirrors my experience as well.

I will admit that Firefox has gone through periods where the UI is just plain butt ugly, kind of like the current iteration (sorry Mozilla guys, I'm just not a fan). That has always been easy enough to remedy. When Firefox still had real themes, you could make it seamlessly fit most UIs or even mock Chrome, if that was your thing. At least you can still modify userchrome.css. The Australis era UI was pretty nice. It's a shame they left it behind to compete with Chrome looks.

I always found the XUL plugin ecosystem to be significantly more robust than Chrome offerings. They are kind of on par now that they're both using WebExtensions.

I keep Chrome around for testing and other things that only want to work on Chrome now. For example, Google drive never seems to want to download my files when I'm using Firefox. They just redirect to a blank white tab. On the Mac, Chrome does this annoying thing when you hit Cmd+Q to quit. It tells you that you have to hold Cmd+Q for a period of time instead. I move quickly on the keyboard and that pattern breaks my flow. I know you can change the setting, which I have done, but it's totally different from nearly every other app on my system.

That was never my experience in practical, day to day usage. I feel like an odd man out though. I see many posters here talking about terrible performance on Mac. I've been running Firefox on MacBook Pros since 2007. I don't know what you guys are doing...but I can't replicate the poor performance.

I was around then. I don’t remember Chrome ever actually feeling faster. Maybe it was my system, maybe it was just me, but I’ve never understood the “faster” argument. The Chrome is “faster” argument is eerily reminiscent to Sega’s “blast processing” propaganda from the 90’s.

What Chrome did do better than Firefox was pay to put advertisements everywhere. I remember feeling dumbfounded that we needed Chrome Browser ads on TV to sway people away from IE. Strange, strange times.

I probably can’t supply data that would convince you liberal speech is favored over conservative speech. However, within the past month my personal Facebook account was curiously disabled within an hour of typing the word “Christian” in a comment. I would not identify as conservative or liberal. I certainly can’t prove that merely using this word was what triggered the permaban, but Facebook absolutely would not reinstate my account, even after I supplied a valid driver’s license as proof of my identity.

This is a timely thread in my life. Thank you starting it. I do a number of the things mentioned here already. A couple quick questions for some with experience:

1. What are some good resources to get into meditation? I’ve tried several times and I feel like I keep starting in the wrong place with overgeneralized information. I don’t think I know anyone in real life that does it either.

2. How do you deal with some anxieties that might be brought on by age? I find my mind wandering to existential things I’ve never cared about before more and more frequently as I age. I haven’t found a great way to deal with it yet.

All things already mentioned in the comments here aside, it’s somewhat personally infuriating to see headlines like this. Facebook recently disabled my account because they can’t make sense of who I am (I wrote about it and posted here earlier). I don’t know what’s going on with their algorithms but they whacked my very legit account while allowing unfiltered political news. Seems the priorities are all out of order.

I'm a lone developer in a marketing agency. I manage hundreds of WordPress sites. Some are my own work, many are not. As someone who has inherited more than his fair share of compromised sites, thank YOU! WordFence is the immediate fix for 99% of the hacks I see. It stops malicious activity in its tracks until I can patch the issues. There are simply no other plugins even close to the quality of WordFence.