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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Yup. The risk of someone breaking into your house and stealing your post-it note is vastly different from someone guessing your password, and the risk changes again when it’s a post-it note on your work computer monitor.

    One of the best things you can do with your critical passwords is put them on a piece of paper with no other identifying information and then put that piece of paper in your wallet. Adults in modern society are usually quite good at keeping track of and securing little sheets of paper.

    I’m paranoid, so I put mine on an encrypted NFC card that I printed to look like an expired gift card to a store that went out of business. It’s got what I need to bootstrap the recovery process if I loose all my MFA tokens (I keep another copy in a small waterproof box with things like my car title. It’s labeled “important documents: do not lose” and kept unlocked so any would be thief feels inclined to open it and see it’s worthless to them rather than taking the box to figure that out somewhere else. The home copy is important because there’s vaguely plausible scenarios where I lose both my phone and wallet at the same time. )

    Stealing my laptop and getting my stuff is a significantly larger risk than me leaving my computer on and unattended without locking the screen.

    Passkeys are a good trend because they’re just about the only security enhancement in recent memory that increases security and usability at the same time.


  • And you still manage to miss the point entirely.

    Your party is awash in the blood of Gaza’s children.

    There’s no American political party that isn’t by the standards of “supporting Israel or didn’t stop them is complicity in genocide”.

    your voters continue to support the leaders that make this holocaust possible.

    What leaders would those be? Which Democrat in charge of the Senate, house, executive branch or judicial branch is responsible in your eyes? Has having the Democrats hold next to no political power done anything to help?

    When your time comes, I wonder how you’ll feel when others point and laugh?

    And here’s the biggest misunderstanding of all: you’re entirely misunderstanding why people don’t have sympathy because you’re mad at Democrats. If Democrats overwhelming voted for and supported the genocide of Democrats people would be justifiably unsympathetic when they got what exactly what they voted for. That’s the key part you don’t seem to get. Person wants X to happen. People tell them X will be bad for them. They vote for X. X happens. Person is unhappy X happened. No one feels sympathy for them that X happened.

    It’s hard to feel sorry for someone getting precisely what they asked for.




  • It’s a shockingly common source of data leaks. There are some versions with more subtlety, like actually redacting the text but a copy of it remains in the file for version tracking, as a separate layer, or things like that.

    PDF is derived from printer control tools, and has a lot of features built in that add flexibility for office document purposes, but can be surprising for people not expecting it.
    If you’re working as a team to redact documents you might deliberately use something reversible so that the person checking your work can 1) see what you redacted 2) unredact if they think you shouldn’t have.
    Sometimes people also just don’t know there’s actual reaction tools built in.

    The part that I’m more surprised by is that whatever process they have for releasing documents didn’t involve passing it through a system of some sort that automatically fixed that sort of thing.



  • It’s really not. The people who invented the term “artificial intelligence” both meant something different than you’re thinking the term means and also thought human level intelligence was far simpler to model than it turned out to be.

    You’re thinking of intelligence as compared to a human, and they were thinking of intelligence as compared to a wood chipper. The computers of the time executed much more mechanical tasks, like moving text into place on a printer layout.
    They aimed to intelligence, where intelligence was understood as tasks that were more than just rote computation but responded to the environment they executed in. Text layout by knowing how to do line breaks and change font sizes. Parsing word context to know if something is a typo.
    These tasks require something more than rote mechanical action. They’re far from human intelligence, and entirely lacking in the introspective or adaptive qualities that we associate with humans, but they’re still responsive.

    Using AI only to refer to human intelligence is the missuse of the term by writers and television producers.

    The people who coined the terms would have found it quaint to say something isn’t intelligence because it consists of math and fancy scripting. Their efforts were predicated on the assumption that human intelligence was nothing more than math, and programming in general is an extremely abstract form of math.



  • Right now browser usage patterns are shifting because people are trying new things. Most of those new things are AI integration. If those new things prove popular or have staying power remains to be seen.
    Firefox , in my estimation, is looking to leverage their existing reputation for privacy focus while also adding new technologies that people seem at least interested in trying.
    A larger user base means that people will pay more for ads, which if they maintain their user control and privacy standards users are less likely to disable on the default landing screen.

    It’s why they keep getting flac for working on privacy preserving advertising technology: they want you to use Firefox because they don’t stop you from disabling the bullshit, and they hope to do the bullshit in a way that makes you not mind leaving it on.

    All the AI stuff was mentioned in the same context as discussion about how they need to seek money in ways that aren’t simply being paid by Google.





  • Oh, I entirely agree with the severity and the “they are not supposed to do that”-ness of it. It’s far from right.
    I’m just saying that there’s nothing in the law or constitution that says they can’t.

    In this case they’d just say something about the government having an overriding interest in financial management, and without direct evidence that funding was pulled as retaliation the claim doesn’t pass the threshold for consideration.
    The court has used related reasoning to say that removal of books is speech by the government, and so you have no recourse when the government censors information in libraries.
    Or “ice needs to be racist to do their job, and that’s more important than equal protection under the law”.

    It’s a fucked situation, but it’s not new, and it’s not illegal.



  • For a slightly less dramatic description: the person who’s been in charge of Firefox is now the CEO of Mozilla. In an interview they detailed their vision which includes trying to get money in more ways than just making Google the default search engine, all of which involve growing the user base. He said that ignoring changes in technology doesn’t benefit users or the Internet, and alluded to some previously announced features that are in progress for Firefox, including on device AI tools for things like alttext generation and translation, and upcoming features like an AI browsing window which has more integration with an AI including ones that aren’t on the device depending on what the user selects.
    He reiterated that user control of data and privacy remains their biggest selling point, so that has to remain the focus of whatever path they take.


  • Contrary to popular belief, the US isn’t actually unusually litigious. European countries are just as litigious and Germany, Sweden and Austria all have higher numbers.

    The reason we have more “nonsense” lawsuits is because we have a culture that says caveat emptor is a sound defense and negligence on one parties side is equally the fault of the injured party.
    “Why didn’t you look at your food before biting the metal fillings? It’s your responsibility to make sure what you eat is safe” and “you walked on my icy sidewalk, you slipped, and now you want me to pay for your ambulance? I should have put down salt, but you should have known better than to walk there” are both reasonable statements to a lot of Americans. Hell, we have special derogatory terms for lawyers that work with individuals who have been non-criminally injured by someone else.

    On paper, paying the other parties legal fees if you lose sounds good, but what it does it keep individuals who can’t afford to pay legal someone else’s fees to withold valid legal complaints. In an ideal world they would proceed because they were right, but we live in a world where sometimes the person in the right looses, or they reasonably thought they were and were wrong. Due diligence or actual correctness is no assurance of justice, so a lawsuit is a gamble and a more expensive one if you also have to pay the other parties costs, and if they’re a business which has lawyers on staff they might not even view a crippling legal cost as an increased expense.
    On the other side that business just tells their lawyer to file the paperwork, they’re already paying for the legal consult so they’re advised going in if it’s a good idea, and if they lose they’re out a few weeks of lawyer salary.

    Lawsuits are a mark of people using societies tools to resolve disputes. There being more in places with higher trust in social institutions makes sense. People are willing to use the system and they trust it’ll deliver justice.
    The US is up there because people need to use lawsuits to make up for our lack in social safety nets, and our preposterous number of businesses are constantly using them to settle disputes.

    We should eliminate the court fees entirely and provide the trial lawyer equivalent of a public defender.
    A bolt in your oatmeal is a good reason to sue, and if you can’t afford a lawyer to help you pay to get your tooth put back in it doesn’t seem unreasonable for society to give you access to someone to help you find a path to remunerations.