• 2 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 27th, 2023

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  • maybe there was a mixup of individual datapoints and individual persons.

    lets see if that could fit.

    as far as i read things in this thread, the whole security is based on exactly these datapoints: Full Name, Date of Birth and SSN (three datapoints) plus username and password for 3 sites (six datapoints) makes 3+6= 9 datapoints per person.

    2.9 billion (us) should be 2.900.000.000 (correct me if i’m wrong, but where i live one “billion” is actually “1.000.000.000.000” thus a “bit” more)

    divided by 9 those 2.9billion would be ~ 320 million.

    on wikipedia they say the us had 331 million people in 2020…

    that would fit like an ass on a bucket! lol just to mention that.

    have a nice day!


  • What’s the alternative to ads, though? Not everyone wants to (or can afford to) pay for every site they use.

    its not about paying for the site a user uses, its about paying those who run the site (and less to pay for someone only “managing” the site by doing actually nothing)

    maybe these could be alternatives:

    • patreon
    • flattr
    • micropayment in general
    • donations (somafm runs on donations)
    • link to shopping platforms (musicians on somafm mostly have links to the songs on amazon that you see while playing the song for free)
    • communities, like FSF, local groups
    • some small payed supporter part (like lwn.net) while the important stuff that makes the win-win of the site is free to use
    • maybe the list from this page can help too: https://kinsta.com/de/blog/patreon-alternativen/ Kickstarter Indiegogo Podia Sellfy Buy Me a Coffee Memberful Hypage Ko-fi Substack Kajabi Gumroad WooCommerce Mighty Networks MemberPress Uscreen

    maybe even a combination of multiple of those *whoa!!! mindblow!!! could be a good choice to allow usersvto choose how to contribute.

    so really only choosing to offer exactly one option that also puts all users at a real risk of real attacks where they can get ripped off of all or lots of their real money and data for the sake if earning 0.003 ¢ per each putting them at high risk is not really what should be done, or do you personally profit from their users high risk and are thus completely okay with it? hope not.

    if you have to earn money with your project or whatever, why not offer several options to choose from? why only one? and while we’re at it, offering an ad-free “membership” for 400 times the price of what they would earn by the same visitor with ads like they try here sometimes, does not make any platform look good, but the opposite.

    there are many platforms that i would pay for monthly and i would spend much more money alltogether than now on that if their price would not be artificially pushed into astronomically heights per service…

    there is one project where i do donate each month a little bit via recurring bank transfer since years. my transfer says the name of the project and “donation” thats pretty easy to setup for both sides, but too complicated for those who pay designers money so they can place the ad layers on top of the 400 other layers of spypixels and navigation controls… really ? lol*

    if those you are talking about cannot afford to have a bank account for some reason, i guess they also cannot receive the revenue of ads on their webpages ;+)

    saying there are no alternatives to ads is rather a candidate for the lamest excuse award ;-)


  • its not just ads and malware, and its not only about beeing sorry for them. ads are also manipulating how people think. not only the obvious things like “that product is good”, but also that products in general would help (with problems you didn’t have). and the format itself of ads (even without considering its contents) already has a changing effects on the minds of those who watch it. i am thinking of some parts of neil postmans thoughts about television back then and i guess there is plenty of possibilities to make a realistic conspiracy theory out of it why exactly the most poisonous parts of television are replicated to the internet with massive force even though everyone ignores ads in the net. i like theories

    unfortunately, feeling sorry for them does not help society to stability. 😥



  • ok, not sure, but…

    • its billionaires…
    • they tried to put additional sand there to “protect” their luxury vacation homes they had literally “build on sand” and damage wildlife while they go, but were stopped by a court ruling
    • now one of them accusing another of “stealing sand” and sues him to put “the stolen sand back”, so he can be forced by court to put sand there. and maybe more than he ever “stole”.
    • it sounds like only lies is what they have
    • its only billionaires, nothing good comes from them.

    maybe the court should rule that he has to put sand there personally by his own hands (no tech other than a bucket is allowed) that he has to carry without machinery, cars or anything from at least 5km away until his neigbour is fine with the situation. if the neighbour is fine quite quickly, the court should fine that neighbour due to abusing the court with false claims. if not, that sandy billionaire still can fine his neigbour to help him. maybe…

    but anyway that situation stinks.




  • Only rate limiting is the effective option.

    i doubt that. you could maybe ratelimit per IP and the abusers will change their IP whenever needed. if you ratelimit the whole service over all users in the world, then your service dies as quickly into uselessness as effective your ratelimiter is. if you ratelimit actions of logged in users, then your ratelimiting is limited by your ability to identify fake or duplicate accounts, where captchas are not helpful at all.

    at the same expense of bots. they might be cheap, but i doubt that anyway, bots don’t need sleep.

    i was answering about that wording (that captchas were “not” about bots but about “stopping automated requests”) and that automated requests “are” bots instead.

    call centers are neither bots nor automated requests (the opposite IS their advantage) and thus have no relation to what i was specifically saying in reply to that post that suggested automated requests and bots would be different things in this context.

    i wasn’t talking about effectiveness of captchas either or if bots should be banned or not, only about bots beeing automated requests (and vice versa) from the perspective of the platform stopping bots. and that trying to use different words for things, (claiming like “X isn’t X, it is really U!”* or automated requests aren’t bots) does not change the reality of the thing itself.

    *) unrelated to any (a-)social media platform





  • you could donate one and at the same time claim (somewhere really anonymously in the internet) that you want to destroy that tape with that player for protection. They then might actually ‘want’ to investigate

    1. the tape
    2. the player

    (3. possibly also you)

    after doing 1 and 2 they then actually have the technology AND the hardware to play that stupid tape.

    if they do 3. and ask you who you want to protect, you can truthfully say “law fulfillment”

    always think outside the box AND around the corner ;-)

    hope that helps



  • i started to create separate email aliases for every newsletter, account and contact like >10years ago. i still have some few aliases that i shared with friends so these are spread more wide. some of these aliases turned out to be useful as in the platform i created it for lost my data, i got some phishing mail and told the platform admins about their data loss, i then just stopped spam by changing that one single email alias. that happened i think four times.

    this year i wanted to get rid of old domains and had to go through all of the aliases there, which turned out to be >400, that was a lot of work, but my setup turned out to be quite a good documentation about what accounts i’ve set up during that period. some accounts were for platforms that do not exist any more, many for platforms that changed owner (mostly without notice) while some accounts turned out to be stuck like i cannot even delete them, because if i try, that platform freezes the account for “weird looking actions” looks like they just do not want to follow the laws.

    overall i think of maybe improving usability by platforms, (free)email providers and also newsletter senders, then creating some specs and try writing RFC style definitions and write a proof-of-concept to make “handshake” and email addresschanges possible and easy for endusers in large scale while achieving the same level of filterless spam protection that i have now.

    when i find the time to do it.