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TORFdot0

@TORFdot0@lemmy.world

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TORFdot0 ,

If you self-host all the same services you have the same exposure level if root on your hosting machine is compromised. I suppose it depends on how confident you feel in how agile you can patch if a vulnerability becomes known in postfix for example. I wouldn’t consider self hosting something that reduces your cybersecurity risk typically

Linus Tech Tips (LTT) release investigation results on former accusations (x.com)

There were a series of accusations about our company last August from a former employee. Immediately following these accusations, LMG hired Roper Greyell - a large Vancouver-based law firm specializing in labor and employment law, to conduct a third-party investigation. Their website describes them as “one of the largest...

TORFdot0 ,

Who would be paying for an investigation if not LMG? Firms don’t hire auditors/investigators to give them a rosy report. They want the truth so they can adjust their processes so they don’t spend more money on regulatory actions/fines.

If the report is bad they just don’t release it to the public. But a third party audit lying to a firm to make them look good does not provide value. The company isn’t biased just because they are being paid by LMG, that’s just not how it works. LMG could just say they investigated themselves and found no wrong doing if that was their objective.

Saying that you don’t believe the report because the company investigating it was paid for by PMG shows that you are biased more than they are.

TORFdot0 ,

The alternative of everyone living in communist bloc apartments built by the lowest bidder sounds so good.

TORFdot0 ,

Paying with credentials that can’t easily be spoofed means a meteoric amount of money saved for payment processors from fraud due to insecure payment methods

TORFdot0 ,

Depending on the implementation it can be unreliable. More modern methods use 3D scans which can’t be fooled by a photo.

TORFdot0 ,

Facebook is 100% shitposts. Most of my friends on it have aged out of posting every little thing and so it’s mostly shitposts and soft core porn disguised as short form videos on the Facebook feed and not any of my friends that I actually wanted to follow when I made my account in the 00s.

I really want to delete my account but I still have to use it to organize class reunions and alumni events for my old high school. I’m going to try to float the idea that we move to a mailing list instead. I’d rather buy a domain and maintain a website for that than continue using Facebook for free

TORFdot0 ,

Yes but now it will be useless and make stuff up instead of just saying “Something went wrong” or “I don’t understand” to every request

EA wants to place in-game ads in its full-price AAA games, again (www.techspot.com)

EA has tried this before, with predictable results. In 2020, EA Sports UFC 4 included full-screen ads for the Amazon Prime series The Boys that would appear during 'Replay' moments. These were absent from the game when it launched, with EA introducing the ads about a month later, thereby preventing them from being highlighted in...

TORFdot0 ,

You can’t really sell ads on a per impression basis with just product placement. They want the ad sales to be recurring revenue.

TORFdot0 ,

I mean you can send your Mac snip to preview and mark it up that way

TORFdot0 ,

I’ve never had issues with a return but I’ve had so many problems with items being damaged, having misleading listings, or being sent the wrong item that I refuse to order from Amazon anymore

TORFdot0 ,

The camera is too important for me to give up my smart phone, and I don’t want to carry a separate device just for taking photos/video.

Maybe if the came out with a feature phone that had a camera on par with a smartphone and supported syncing to google photos or immich or synology then I’d consider it.

TORFdot0 ,

That’s exactly what the article is about. It basically points out that mm-nintendo.com domain is owned by MarkMonitor the brand reputation firm that also owns a bunch of mm-{brand name}.com domains. And basically points out that while it does look like it seems like a scam domain, it really isn’t

TORFdot0 ,

This is more of a privacy failure than a security failure. I don't see how purchasing services via an alias could be considered security

TORFdot0 ,

"Security by obscurity" is very much an end user "i don't need to harden my server/accounts because nobody would bother hacking me" attitude and is really is "dumb as fuck"

But KYC is just expanded due diligence before providing services, thats why I thought it as privacy issue as to why someone would be against it as opposed to it security wise.

I still don't see how you've gotten from that to "nationally enforced security by obscurity" though

TORFdot0 ,

I think we fundamentally disagree on these ideas, and that’s ok.

“Implementing systems that are not vulnerable to attack” is an impossible task. And passing KYC legislation doesn’t preclude anyone from hardening their system and I didn’t read any signs that the government plans to leave any of its systems unhardened.

TORFdot0 ,

It was obvious that Reddit wasn’t changing course at all. Especially with how they handled communication with Christian Selig and other 3rd party devs.

I came here during the blackout and deleted all my content on my account. The last day Apollo worked was the last day I used Reddit and I was a Reddittor since 3/10/2011

If there was better mod organization we could have better translations for the non tech and piracy related communities but I’m overall happy how we ended up.

TORFdot0 ,

It took me months to delete all my content, as the API tools I was using (power delete suite) can’t access subs that are still dark. It took a bunch of manual deletions, additional scans with the tools and occasional googling of my username but I think I’ve got it all now.

I came to Reddit initially for the human conversation. The fediverse will benefit in that it’s never going to be a commercial product and so the human conversation will be the number one priority. Even as corporate entities like meta try to join, users can just tune them out by blocking threads.net on their account, or switching to instances that have defed from them.

TORFdot0 ,

If the prompt includes “Taylor swift” or an image of her. Then it doesn’t matter if the AI slightly changed it, it used her likeness to generate the image and so she should have rights to the image and the ability to claim damages.

The same thing should apply to using deepfake porn AIs to make non consensual nudes of private person, or heck manually creating nonconsensual deepfake nudes should also fall under the same definition

TORFdot0 ,

My AirPods are still going strong after getting them in 2018. 🤷‍♂️ obviously doesn’t discount the stories for those who they didn’t work for. I also had to do a warranty exchange on them after a week from my original pair because they just randomly unpaired and wouldn’t pair to any device any more so that points to some QC issues for sure

TORFdot0 ,

Maybe the people who lose their job when they go under. That being said we shouldn’t prop up a bad business just because people might lose their livelihood

TORFdot0 ,

I’d agree with that logic if YouTube kept up their end of the bargain and actually vetted their ad buyers. Instead they show ads for fake stimulus scams, fake news, and blatant malware.

I manage a large network and ads are blocked at the edge of the network. Not using an adblocker is a security risk that is not acceptable for my company. I pay for YouTube premium because it’s in my means and I get value from the subscription but I don’t blame anyone who takes the same approach

TORFdot0 ,

We also deploy a browser extension via GPO/Intune to catch those and protect endpoints when they are off net.

I actually wasn’t in favor of that but the rest of team was so after risk assessing it, we determined that trusting a vendor with the permission to rewrite webpages was less of a risk than drive-by malware or phishing/redirection from a malicious ad

TORFdot0 ,

Isn’t depicting Muhammad offensive to Muslims? That part makes sense at least.

Fake Photos, Real Harm: AOC and the Fight Against AI Porn (www.rollingstone.com)

In 2023, more deepfake abuse videos were shared than in every other year in history combined, according to an analysis by independent researcher Genevieve Oh. What used to take skillful, tech-savvy experts hours to Photoshop can now be whipped up at a moment’s notice with the help of an app. Some deepfake websites even offer...

TORFdot0 ,

And they could counter sue you for distributing it to them and you’d probably lose

TORFdot0 ,

Is it sad the first thing i noticed is she has 6 fingers on her right hand?

TORFdot0 ,

Good news, in my opinion. I don't think users see the value in of AI and so maybe sites will go back to catering to organic results instead.

Just kidding Google will just make the non-AI search experience so bad that people are forced to sign up for their AI subscription

TORFdot0 OP ,

In the last few months there has been the highly visible changes that include adding the generative AI search experience but you are right. Google search has been getting more and more useless as time has gone on

TORFdot0 ,

Why it is true that you’ll graze non-butcher animals on the leftover stalks and such, we absolutely finish beef and pork on grain and a big portion of the grain harvest is for animal feed.

Facebook snooped on users' Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal (techcrunch.com)

Meta tried to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors, including Snapchat and later Amazon and YouTube, by analyzing the network traffic of how its users were interacting with Meta’s competitors. Given these apps’ use of encryption, Facebook needed to develop special technology to get around it....

TORFdot0 ,

Certainly they weren’t planning on actually planning on finding a way to get people to install a VPN to decrypt their traffic just to use Facebook, right?

That’s why they paid teenagers to use the VPN so they could get some “guerrilla market research”.

Even in 2013 apps didn’t have the permission access to install a device level VPN without some unspecified exploit. 0 chance Facebook would literally hack people’s phones, right?

Right?

TORFdot0 ,

Encourage your other non-tech friends and colleagues to join a Lemmy instance then. The fediverse hasn’t gotten big enough and normal people haven’t really gotten to the level of technical literacy yet to be able to come here organically yet

We are here because we are nerds that already care about FOSS.

TORFdot0 ,

My guess is that their update won’t be approved unless they drop support for old OS versions

TORFdot0 ,

Is this an among us meme?

TORFdot0 ,

As I understand it, all DMPs of this type are subject to the vulnerability and so intel (and the newest m3) selectively disable it during cryptographic operations

TORFdot0 ,

In case you were wondering the Republicans on the FCC both dissent claiming that the FCC has no jurisdiction to ban lying because people being marketed too aren't cable subscribers yet and therefore outside of the FCC's purview. What a load of horse-hockey. Their next argument will be that the FCC has no right to regulate cable at all because the consumer hasn't been screwed until they give the cable company their money at which point it's too late.

As much of a free-market-enjoyer that I am, this is what you get when you vote Republican (or stay home).

TORFdot0 ,

Then you have the failed “Business Plot” of the 30’s meant to overthrow FDR

TORFdot0 ,

I can't trust the output of an LLM but at least you can ask it to cite its sources so you can get the page that helped it come to that conclusion

TORFdot0 ,

That’s a really good use case that I will need to start using. In a use case such as that where paid ads make the search engines unreliable, the LLM is at least going to be on the same footing if not better.

TORFdot0 ,

You create a new account on a new instance and then you export your subscriptions and settings from your old Lemmy server to your new ones, you lose your comment history but that doesn’t really matter on Lemmy like your post history does on Masto

TORFdot0 ,

Even if you aren’t against federating with threads on principle part of the challenge is going to be able to keep up with moderating their entire user base en-masse and being able to afford the cost of federating content from so many users at once.

It’s a burden I doubt a lot of smaller instances can handle.

TORFdot0 ,

There is a 3rd argument which I think is a bit more valid in "I value the service I receive in exchange for my personal data"

Using the internet without an adblocker, noscript, and whatever else is really nasty. But even if you aren't on these platforms, marketers are still building profiles on you. Honestly we need data privacy legislation and some real talk about marketing and the costs of using the internet as a society.

TORFdot0 ,

But I don’t use those services; they still keep my data.

Exactly why we need data privacy laws. Sadly there are "profiles" out there for all of us, whether you chose to be tracked or not. Personally I think that any kind of sharing of personal data with marketers should be illegal nor should it be legal for any entity to purchase personal data without a signed consent form from the person in question.

That'd probably end "free" services and our credit score system in the United States but honestly that kind of data collection is equivalent to stalking and unethical.

TORFdot0 ,

It doesn’t matter how many locks you have if you give the scammers the keys. And so many people give up the keys

anders , to Memes
@anders@rytter.me avatar

Brute force protection

@memes

TORFdot0 ,

If they had the password right the first try, that isn't a brute force attack, thats a credential leak.

TORFdot0 ,

It’s not bad parenting if cultural norms have shifted in a way to not participate in it would cause you kid to suffer more anxiety and depression from being ostracized from it

Amazon's Hidden Chatbot Recommends Nazi Books and Lies About Amazon Working Conditions (www.404media.co)

An Amazon chatbot that’s supposed to surface useful information from customer reviews of specific products will also recommend a variety of racist books, lie about working conditions at Amazon, and write a cover letter for a job application with entirely made up work experience when asked, 404 Media has found.

TORFdot0 ,

How to you curate training data to remove biases without introducing bias? That’s the key problem here. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be opposed to trading one bias for another. At least the initial bias is based on reality.

TORFdot0 ,

Well put. I think tackling the bias will always be a challenge. It’s not that we shouldn’t, but how is the question.

I don’t know if any of the big public LLMs are trying to trim biases from their training data or are just trying to ad-hoc tackle it by injecting modifiers into the prompts.

That’s the biggest problem I have personally with LLMs is that they are untrustworthy and often give incorrect or blatantly false information.

Sometimes it can be frustrating when I run across the “I can’t do that because of ethics” on benign prompts that I felt like it shouldn’t have but I don’t think it’s been that big a deal.

When we talk about political conservatives being opposed to biased LLMs, it’s mostly because it won’t tell them that their harmful beliefs are correct

Is the Fediverse truly decentralized? Not exactly. (blog.benjojo.co.uk)

The author examined the distribution of instances in the fediverse. Given that many instances are hidden behind CDNs like Cloudflare or Fastly, the author employed ActivityPub's functionality to discover the actual hosting locations of servers. More than half (51%) of the fediverse is hosted within a single hosting company. The...

TORFdot0 ,

Those companies don't own your backups and can't stop you from moving your instance somewhere else. And if you don't have a backup then it doesn't matter if you are running your instance in a datacenter you built yourself because you can inadvertently wipe the contents with a mere click

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