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Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by creaothceann
Posted by sureanem
(Also, I love that there's a Wikipedia article named 2018 Samsung fat-finger error)


Fun fact: also happens to computers

Oh wow, that's a whole new level of aggravating edge case. "computer fucked something up somewhere lol, also it's probably invisible"

I wonder if you could do that for emails. Register some big corporate domains, then just log whatever it receives and sell it on the black market. And because it's a bit flip, no logs anywhere. You should even be able to get an SSL certificate for it. And I can't see why it would be illegal, even though it's somewhat morally dubious.

It's also an interesting DoS vector, like that one time when the Chinese did the same to GitHub.

He's not right in that "big names now buy up all their bit flipped domains" - of the top 100 domains (according to cisco, so by dns resolutions; 37 second-level domains) there are 528 unregistered bit-flipped ones. Even more if you would start to play around with the TLDs as well. For "small" names (think stuff like internal corporate domains, which are usually really long), I don't even think it's a feasible idea. Are they going to pay $1k/domain/year to fix a "theoretical" vulnerability? No pointy-haired manager in their right mind would allow that.

Well, I suppose that's an application for gTLDs. Until someone registers .cmazon, that is. Then we're all they're fucked.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-04-28, 12:52 in I still HATE smartdevices
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by tomman
- Now you're ready to let this thing smell the rotten stench of the wide open Internet. Let it join your WiFi, logon with your Google credentials, and proceed to install updates and reinstall your apps. Google Play will be extremely stubborn when it comes to update preloaded Google crap, so it may need a helping hand...
- Once all updates are done, use Apps2SD to merge all updates to stock apps back to the system partition, in order to free some space on the already critical internal storage partition. Be prepared to do this every now and then each time Google Play Services gets an update (because you can't disable automatic updates for this one). Don't rush, do it on stages, and leave the heavyweight ones (Google Play Store / Google Play Services) for last. It may help clearing data for those prior to the merge (whatever data Google uses there will be downloaded again anyway, so don't worry). Reboot several times just to be on the safe side

What about the FOSS Google Play re-implementations? I think they should be much less bloated. There is (was?) a version of the Play Store as well, and I can't remember having any trouble with it except that you couldn't install paid apps (which I wasn't going to do anyway). The GCM stuff worked fine, although some apps complained. Usually, "you don't have Play Services installed" warning, hit OK, everything works as usual.
- This leaves us with the final challenge: reactivating WhatsApp on a device where you're not supposed to run WhatsApp (i.e. a tablet without a cell modem). This part is simple: they will send you a SMS to whatever phone number you've used to register. Except that this is Soviet Venezuela, and your cellphones have been without signal since the last blackout! Have fun~~~ [insert sinister laughter here]

Can you switch phone numbers to something more reliable, like to VoIP?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-04-28, 16:25 in I still HATE smartdevices
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by tomman
1) I don't care about non-Google Play replacements/app stores. This tablet only uses the Google search app, Chrome and Whatsapp. $MOM is NOT INTERESTED into learning replacements, so neither I.

To me, they were entirely seamless replacements. You could still download Google Play-hosted applications and use them, but you didn't have to have a Google account or install Google Play Services. But yeah, it might be pointless if you're not limited by storage.

To be clear, I'm talking about stuff like microG and Yalp Store, not poor imitations like {whatever Amazon's Android devices use}.

Posted by tomman
2) Ever been here, really? If you were, you would learn that VoIP is NOT AN OPTION, just like everything else.

No, I mean you could switch over WhatsApp's registered phone number to a VoIP number, not that you should use it for any actual communications. I've used VoIP to register accounts before, and it worked fine, except for some services like Google who didn't accept it. Maybe WhatsApp is one of them. In that case, you could try to copy over the app's internal data wholesale and pray it doesn't complain.

the way of working for those devices is not compatible with 3rd-world shitholes

This is the case no matter where you live in the world (unless you live in Africa (maybe) or Dubai). I live in a first world country, and I haven't seen or heard of anyone using them for anything productive, save perhaps for social media influencers, prostitutes, and the like. It's neat to be able to Google stuff while you're outside, and you get a slightly nicer keyboard to type on, but that's about it. I guess you can read books on them, but a proper reading tablet (e.g. Kindle) or real book is much nicer and cheaper.

They are the fast food of electronics. Sure, you might theoretically be able to construct a balanced diet from only the "dishes" sold at McDonalds, but it'd be extremely clunky and realistically you would just end up eating junk food and falling ill rather quickly.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-04-29, 01:01 in Building Dolphin on Debian Stable: problems!
Stirrer of Shit
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You could always try building with clang, it supposedly has slightly clearer error messages.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by http://beets.io/blog/sqlite-nightmare.html
Assume SQLite Sleeps Whole Seconds

If you use SQLite, you currently need to assume that some users will have a copy compiled without usleep support. If you’re using multiple threads, this means that, even under light contention, some transactions will take longer than five seconds. Either turn the timeout parameter up or otherwise account for this inevitability.

I haven’t seen this particular quirk documented elsewhere, but it should be common knowledge among SQLite users.

The mystery meat dynamic libraries strike again.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Stirrer of Shit
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Yeah, but at least it will be your weird configuration. With the system libraries, all bets are off.


There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-04-29, 17:04 in Building Dolphin on Debian Stable: problems!
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by tomman
I guess I've just found something I hate more than smartdevices: C.

Ah well, I suppose all paths eventually lead to the same outcome: "update your distro, buddy~".

That's C++'s infamous template vomit, C has nothing to do with this.

I guess your options are downloading a statically linked GCC/clang (doesn't exist), downloading and unpacking a newer release's version of GCC/clang and praying there aren't any new dependencies (good luck), or biting the bullet and compiling one. Buildroot should make things smoother, in theory. I used it for something (musl?) and it worked fine.

And you've checked all the spooky stuff (memtest, corrupted compiler, corrupted source files) that "shouldn't happen"?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-04-30, 15:28 in Blackouts
Stirrer of Shit
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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics/venezuelas-guaido-urges-troops-to-rise-mass-protests-planned-idUSKCN1S60ZQ
https://www.apnews.com/1b271ef1f15940f394343dd2027a23e2
Is it happening?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-05-04, 18:28 in Mozilla, *sigh*
Stirrer of Shit
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Man, what fucking clowns. I was just going to head on here to complain about it. Thanks for the rundown.

Mandatory code signing for add-ons was a mistake, and it will have disastrous consequences in the future. Not allowing you to disable it in the regular builds is just straight up evil. Sure am glad I use ESR, so I'll keep that enabled for the next time they screw it up. Rumor has it it was due to their hiring policies.

Why would you use Seamonkey? All I know is that it integrates some stuff I don't want (like an email client), has bad extension support, and is poorly updated. But I know you use it, so what are the upsides?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-05-04, 22:15 in Mozilla, *sigh*
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by tomman

1) I DO use the email and IRC (ChatZilla) client, hence they're stuff I do want/need. I'll grant you that the HTML editor is pure garbage, but since it isn't based off Electron, no Javascript boys would want to touch it.
2) Not their fault. Seamonkey supports XUL-based addons, now deemed as "legacy junk" by Mozilla hipsters. Support for WebExtensions is in the works, apparently (not that I want them in first place, but they're pretty much forced to, given the shared Gecko base)
3) Absolutely not their fault. If only they had more manpower...

Yeah, I'm not saying it's their fault. But it seems like a poor tradeoff - just switching which browser I use accomplishes nothing, but I lose support for many extensions and I still am using a bloated and dodgy browser.

I just use roundcube or outlook online, never understood mail clients unless you're paranoid. (in which case, don't use email)


- SANE UI. You know, OS/WM-provided title bar, menu bar, shared toolbar+address/search bar, bookmarks bar, tabs, client area, status bar. Just like good ol' Firefox 3.6, definitely something you can't have past FF29/56.

The title bar is native, and the menu bar at least looks the part except upon closer inspection. My system theme is uglier than Firefox', so it doesn't make much of a difference.

What do you mean by "toolbar+address/search bar"? You can put icons to the right of your search/address bar in Firefox too. Do you mean like Chrome? You could do that, although I don't see why you would.


- Not ruled by a bunch of art school dropout hipsters that believe that I should not have choice on my settings because "it's for my own good"

It is still this though, just indirectly. They are still skijoring behind Mozilla's "technology". If they make breaking and big changes, they either have to choose to use inferior tech or get with the program.

- No hidden experiments, no secret advertising (Looking Glass, the whole Mr. Robot stunt), no shoehorned "pref updates" (Normandy), nothing that gets in your way. You only get a web browser (plus some extra tools you're free to ignore, I doubt the ~100MiB from your SeaMonkey folder are going to bloat your HDD/SSD too much, considering your glorified IM clients can easily take triple that space)

ESR doesn't have this problem either, or I've disabled it.

- Not a product by Moonchild Productions, where they have grown up to the status of "Mozilla-lite" ("'your browser you way', except when we say the contrary!").

I'm very happy with Seamonkey. I don't need support for the "latest and greatest" in the clusterfuck of the "living standard" that is HTML5/JS (dear god, who in the hell decided it was a good idea to not have stable versions of anything anymore!?). I'm well aware of the limitations of the project (mostly caused by Mozilla, who would be happy to kill the project for good and have done their hardest to ensure it so). Still, behind the scenes there IS progress, but they can only do so much considering there are next to no active devs willing to contribute with the project, and the Gecko codebase is no walk in the park for any coder out there.

It's a virtuous choice, but I wouldn't think it's a good one. I mean, if I'd want to prove a point I could just use Brave, but if I only want a good browser there's no good reason not to use Firefox, unfortunately. I disabled extension signing, so that problem is solved. It's like using Trisquel or whatever. Sure, proprietary software is bad, but all I do by using their kook distros is shoot myself in the foot. (Also, FSF doesn't consider Debian Free software because they don't buy into their racket they happen to keep the bad blobs on the same servers as the free and pure software and also there are naughty words in the wiki)

Living standard is also, as much as I hate to admit it, a perfectly sane move. Now that all devices are always* online, there is no reason to stick with the archaic notion of updates. It is far superior, from the perspective of the developer, to be able to run testing and push updates without having to bother with obtaining the end user's "consent". And because W3C in practice answers to Mozilla/Google (where Mozilla is dependent on Google) and not the other way around, and because they are the only browser manufacturers of note, the only need for a standard is to document how Firefox/Chrome works, so that people can make inferences without having to reverse-engineer either browser, and also so that they have something to check their implementation against.

(Always, in the same sense that the divisor in a division is never zero, or a null pointer dereference never happens)

Remember that Mozilla answers to Google and that any claimed opposition is a lie. Mozilla doesn't want any new competitors because they'd primarily threaten them, and they believe themselves to have a duty to strive to hold a position of monopoly (which, incidentally, is not even wrong). And Google doesn't want it because Mozilla does their bidding, they have almost complete control over them, and they need them kept alive for legal reasons. So neither party has any interest in simplifying the standard or their code because it would threaten their position. If only their respective insiders can comprehend the code, the risk for forks is significantly decreased.

I can't recall any practical difference between Firefox 56 and 60, nor did I know what version I had prior to opening the About box. For most people, updates are just a nuisance and they are grateful they have been dispensed with. Most people don't even use computers.

The only hope for the future of the web (lol, who am I kidding) is that Mozilla shoot themselves in the foot by accidentally making their browser too simple, so that they again fall victim to the downsides of open source.

But it doesn't matter, because if that happens Google will just get Youtube to start using Firefox's undocumented APIs (making it de facto unusable for anyone else) and/or start requiring DRM for all videos, which only Real Browser Makers™ get to implement.

Perhaps glorious China will save us from Silicon Valley and bring about a peaceful Psycho-Pass style civilization where everyone uses proper software, like Windows XP and IE6. We're going to have all this surveillance anyway, so it might as well be used for something useful instead.

Posted by https://www.tomsguide.com/us/huawei-vs-samsung-vs-apple,news-29995.html

Six consecutive quarters. That’s how long the smartphone market has been in decline so far. And market leaders like Apple and Samsung are really feeling the pain. But not Huawei.

On a tear in China but also coming on strong in Europe, Huawei saw 50 percent growth in smartphone sales in Q1 year over year, while Apple plummeted 30 percent, according to IDC. Samsung didn’t struggle as much, but shipments were still down 8 percent, and that was before the Galaxy Fold debacle.

The scary part? Huawei phones aren’t even sold officially in the U.S. This is largely due to security concerns and reported links between Huawei and the Chinese government. Huawei has denied those claims and is suing the U.S. government. And yet Huawei is thriving anyway.



There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-05-04, 23:37 in Mozilla, *sigh*
Stirrer of Shit
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WHAT THE FUCK?!
Tor Browser just keeps on running as usual. On first run, you get a warning that some extensions have been disabled, but this goes away. Then you're just casually browsing without NoScript.

And this doesn't warrant a hard update? "THERE IS A CRITICAL BUG IN UPSTREAM FIREFOX DISABLING NOSCRIPT, YOU MUST UPDATE"? Instead, they just trust technologically incompetent journalists and whatnot to go to Reddit or someplace to find a fix?

Disgusting. I am in lack of words.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-05-04, 23:47 in Mozilla, *sigh*
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by tomman
I'll stick to Seamonkey, thanks.

When the next week version of The Internet breaks on it, I'll just ignore those websites.

I can't stand webmail. At. All. Been using mail clients since I got online for the first time, 18 years ago (if I had understood the importance of making backups back then, maybe my mailboxes would been old enough to drink liquor and buy rifles and porn). And with GMail, I can have the best of both worlds: Google reads my email cloud backups AND local backups. As a bonus, I don't get to deal with their Javascript bullshittery.

That's a reasonable position, provided you can avoid it.

Mail clients seem kind of neat, not having to open a program to get your mail. But the configuration isn't worth it IMO, as well as not being able to use a throwaway account etc.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-05-04, 23:52 in I have yet to have never seen it all. (revision 1)
Stirrer of Shit
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I don't get it. Wikipedia tells us Photoshop came out in February 19, 1988; 30 years ago. And it hasn't caused a worldwide cataclysm, despite enabling people to doctor images with their computer. Before that, people did it by hand.


An NSDAP newspaper in 1932 allegedly doctored a few photos of Adolf Hitler cheering the outbreak of WWI so well that modern scholarship today hasn't been able to definitively prove they were forgeries, other than by circumstantial evidence (he wouldn't have had that mustache in 1914 when the image was taken, no negatives have been found, he can't be found in other people's photos of the same crowd, Mein Kampf doesn't mention it)


There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-05-05, 16:17 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
Stirrer of Shit
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People rarely believe detached pictures without context, so why would they for videos? Even an audio recording of the head of NASA in 1969 saying "The moon landings? Yeah, totally fake." would be a bombshell if it were proven to be legitimate, and having a pretty video wouldn't do much to make it more believable.

And to make this five-second video would require a very good voice impersonator, which arguably is harder than finding someone with enough Photoshop skills to draw the supposed studio the moon landing video would have been recorded in. And with a very good voice impersonator, you could just make an audio recording, apply a quick EQ, and claim it's an "intercepted phone call". Allegedly, some Russian prank call enthusiasts did just that. Or lipsync it to an existing video, like Mr. Robot did.

I mean, I've heard the same thing about how an adversary could forge a video of, say, the Prime Minister of a country they just invaded telling people to surrender, and then distribute it. But a nation-state adversary could do that already, even if the technology isn't conveniently packaged in an app for them to use. So the 'target audience' of this technology isn't entirely clear to me. Random shitposters? Pornography enthusiasts?

Even if you had unlimited amounts of perfectly faked material, you'd still need to distribute it somehow. A fresh Facebook page just posting unsourced videos wouldn't be too credible. And a Facebook page with a good reputation would quite quickly lose it by posting such material. Possibly you could post it on online forums as events are developing, but it's not much more effective than "we haven't confirmed the perpetrator belongs to group X, so let's not speculate until we have the facts" or just a good ol' inspect element screenshot, or a 404 link to a news website with a 'plausible' URL and a made-up quote.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/05/science/aliens-found-on-mars.html

Even without any photoshop/deepfake/etc, you could just take a speech of someone and splice it to give the impression that they're saying something entirely different. Then you could give a link in the description to the original speech on a .gov website. That's a far greater threat, since you can provide a source which passes cursory inspection, and one which has actually happened. And when called out on it, you can claim you were just editing out an irrelevant tangent or something like that. Here's another one, done by an actual nation-state actor: recording analysis. And also this movie from 1997.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-05-05, 17:23 in Mozilla, *sigh* (revision 1)
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by Screwtape
> What do you mean by "toolbar+address/search bar"?

"toolbar+address/search bar" is not the feature, the feature is that tomman wants the toolbar to appear above the tab-strip instead of below it.

Seems pretty minor to me, but people like what they're used to, I guess.

Right, that makes sense.

> Mozilla doesn't want any new competitors because they'd primarily threaten them, and they believe themselves to have a duty to strive to hold a position of monopoly (which, incidentally, is not even wrong).

[citation needed]

Pretty sure when Chrome first appeared on the scene, Mozilla welcomed the competition, even though Firefox was still fighting against IE at the time. Mozilla specifically does *not* strive to hold a position of monopoly, although I guess you could argue they strive to hold a position of... oligopoly?

Mozilla considers themselves to be good (virtuous, moral), not only in the sense of making good browsers but also as a wider social mission (spreading open source, etc). So if Mozilla would have a monopoly (or, say, 80% control), they could for instance force projects like DRM to be dead on arrival. Thus, they, like any other organization in that position, do (and have the moral duty to) strive to obtain a position of monopoly, while vigorously claiming they don't, in order to easier obtain said monopoly.

As for the new entrants only being issues for them: Firefox' users are more concerned about freedom and such, while Chrome's just use it and will keep on doing so until it starts to have actual issues. So if a new browser emerges that's superior to both, Mozilla's user base would switch over in far greater numbers.


> The only hope for the future of the web (lol, who am I kidding) is that Mozilla shoot themselves in the foot by accidentally making their browser too simple, so that they again fall victim to the downsides of open source.

I think you're confusing two ideas - if Mozilla makes their browser *UI* too simple, so that people are inspired to create forks with a more flexible UI, that doesn't make the browser *engine* simple, and the browser engine is where most of the engineering effort goes. If Mozilla made their browser engine too simple, it wouldn't render websites correctly, or at least not efficiently and correctly.

Yes, I'm talking about the code only. Oxidization. Not only in LOC, but also stuff like modularity: how tightly coupled is the engine to the UI?

If forks were easy to make, then people would make them whenever they have some minor gripe with Firefox. But due to the immense complexity of it, they end up just being rebrands with some config setting flipped, because anything else is too much effort. (unless they are run by insane and devoted people, like Terry Davis, and those projects aren't a threat because the maintainer can not build up a community of developers, making it a one-man job)

So Mozilla, having as goal to protect their own, has a vested interest in making sure the standards they follow are as complicated as possible, to make sure forks keep not posing a threat, and Google wants to protect Firefox from death because they control Mozilla, because Mozilla are pliable, and because Google needs a competitor due to antitrust legislation. Who this competitor is is completely irrelevant, but they would rather have Mozilla than Microsoft or Apple as the latter two might cause actual threats to their position of power due to vertical integration, having more money, and being willing to spend disproportionate amounts of money to secure the seat as #1.

The only way Mozilla can save themselves from this situation and get at least a shot at becoming #1 again is to drastically cut their budget, start implementing ad blocker by default (opt-out, but including anti-anti-adblock and the like, and possibly even blocking of "please disable adblock" messages), and other "ugly tricks" (that Google are already doing) like website-specific hacks to make YouTube and other common sites run faster. The means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybody because the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on.

Of course, Mozilla would never do this because they are controlled by Google and because they might even believe, as you suggested, that the means justify the ends. At any rate they seem conflict-averse (and according to the former Mozilla VP, incompetent), and as such would have no interest in improving things if it were to cause any conflict, and would rather just watch the slow decline of the web, look out for their own, and constantly point out that the choices they made were the virtuous ones.

I think that if one is interested in fostering competition in the browser market, the best choice would be to go with Brave, not because it is technologically any different, but because it at least attempts to secure new sources of funding for itself and is not too tightly bound to either project. That it's utter garbage doesn't matter so much, since it at some point in the future might improve and because Brendan Eich is CEO of it.

Posted by tomman

As for sites nagging me about "YOUR BROWSER IS A DINOSAUR!!!", I tend to ignore them. GitHub still works fine (you can dismiss their warning, which for some reason has a IE icon). Google search box is somewhat broken, but I pay no attention to that too as long as search works fine (I usually use the tiny search box on my browser toolbar anyway). The rest of the sites I use on a daily fashion? (Danbooru, Pixiv, Slashdot, banks) They all work fine.

What about spoofing UA?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-05-06, 11:43 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Yeah, but among the in-group. Joe Q. Public doesn't give one shit that there was some error message and a bit more ads for a few hours, and he'd have been using Chrome anyway.

Among technology enthusiasts, they might have a slight edge, but hardly anyone has any actual fondness for them, at least not after the events of 2014. It's more of a "lesser of two evils" type situation, and Firefox probably has a few good years left until they go the way of Netscape.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-05-06, 12:25 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Posted by KoiMaxx
Yeah, this is kind of my concern. People can usually make out something is fake if it's well outside the general perception of an entity. However, if the faker is smart enough to make something very close to the truth, albeit ultimately inaccurate, people will then have a harder time separating fact from fiction. On top of that, the human mind is very easy to distract -- get something sensational or controversial they can get fixated on, and it's easy to manipulate them into believing something, or missing something very important. Like how many passes you can count in this video.

But with good sleight of hand they could pass off just a text quote as perfectly legitimate. And without it, not even a 4K video would be taken as proof.

It's possible the low-information dregs would get hoodwinked into staying home/showing up by something like this, but mostly everyone else would simply refuse to consume any content published by their adversary, unless it was already filtered and analyzed by one of their own. And said low-information dregs do no longer need to worry about it, as our gracious benefactors have kindly decided to stem the tide of fake news in accordance with their role as good corporate citizens.

Posted by Screwtape
The point is, videos provide their own context. If your video of some random guy saying "The moon landings were totally faked" isn't convincing enough, you can add a chevron bar across the bottom saying "Walter P. Kirkudbright, NASA Chief Scientist", have him standing next to somebody more recognisable who *was* around in that era like a TV news anchor... the options are much wider than a single static image would allow.

Right, context isn't the right word here. Source, more like it. Sure, you could post a plausible fake of CNN (in fact, this requires no deepfake at all, only paying some guy a few dollars and minor editing), but to get anywhere sustainable you would need to find "sources" to shore up your argument. It doesn't have to be a good one, and probably your chevron would be enough, but it would also be enough if you just had a picture.
relevant xkcd

Same principle as these images you see with text on the bottom like "Source: CDS". There's nothing you could do with these deepfakes that you couldn't do with good ol' MS Paint. You can just take a picture of some fellow, open the text tool, type in
"The moon landings? Yeah, totally fake."
–Walter P. Kirkudbright, NASA Chief Scientist
Source: Inside the Moon Landing Program, Steve Jones (1983, Louisiana State University Press)


If they already believed the moon landing didn't happened, it will just be taken as further proof. And if they did believe it happened, they would either ignore it or scrutinize it until they found some flaw, whether real or imagined, that allowed them to dismiss it.
Posted by Screwtape
And as for people believing pretty videos, Captain Disillusion has been debunking viral videos on YouTube for a decade, and that's just goofy magic tricks and fake products done with prosumer software like Adobe AfterEffects, nothing requiring a fancy machine-learning setup.

Nothing of note. The Osama bin Laden corpse Photoshop is the only one I remember that sparked any serious discussion.

Posted by Screwtape
Nobody's saying that deceit was never previously possible, or even that undetectable deceit was never previously possible. The issue is that plausible deceit is getting a whole lot cheaper, and when a technology that used to be useful-but-expensive becomes useful-and-cheap, you always get flocks of inventive and creative people coming up with new and surprising uses for it.

IOW, porn. For anything else, deceit was already dirt cheap, or in practice free. A Facebook page produces very little if any original content but rather just reposts it from elsewhere, which seems to imply that the limiting factor would be something else than the volume of the firehose (e.g. how fast you can make accounts/how fast they can ban them).

The forged phone calls I posted earlier probably weren't so expensive to make (provided you had the material to cut from), but they were extremely effective. Splicing a speech is even cheaper and more effective. Why isn't it more common? Because there's no need for it.

It does have an application I can see for disinformation in the heat of the moment, but a well-prepared adversary (countries usually know which countries they're going to invade well in advance) would have both the time and resources to do it the old-fashioned way.

Maybe you could argue e.g. terrorist attacks would be unplanned for, but I don't think so. I mean, the country varies, but the motives, perpetrator, means, etc almost always are the same. So if you wished to forge "evidence" of, say, people of religious group X cheering terrorist attacks in country Y, it would be sufficient to prepare it for common values of X (who, presumably, would be those you wanted to agitate against) and keep Y sufficiently oblique (e.g. only vague references to historical injustices done by the broader victim region/people). Then you could just release it whenever things go kaboom the next time, which they inevitably will.

I think it's way overrated, anyway. On par with the AI generates millions of fake news stories hysteria. How are you going to get them out, when all the opposition is banned anyway?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-05-06, 18:42 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/making-sense-of-modern-pornography/amp
Jesus, what an amazing article they use as source. I can hardly tell if it's satire or not. Are these people completely detached from reality?



There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-05-07, 13:10 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Posted by Screwtape
Making something happen is harder than stopping something from happening. Making something happen requires everything to go right, but preventing something only requires one thing to go wrong. Mozilla would need monopoly-tier power to enforce good things, but preventing bad things like DRM requires much less power.

For example, one of the reasons for Chrome's success is that at the time it was introduced, Firefox had already achieved comfortable market share and Mozilla had started diverting resources to their wider social mission instead of putting everything into improving the browser. Looking at browser market share in 2008 on Wikipedia, when Chrome was introduced in 2008 Firefox had around 25-30% market share, and peaked in 2009 at around 30-35%. So apparently Mozilla was perfectly happy with a *way* lower market share than monopoly control.

But in retrospect, you'd agree it was a mistake to divert resources, yeah?
Mozilla clearly didn't have enough power to prevent DRM now, for instance. So it'd have been a much better idea to cut the ballast when the going got tough.

Man, if Mozilla were happy to collect a Google paycheck and watch the slow decline of the Web, we'd all still be using SeaMonkey on the few sites that weren't entirely rendered by ActiveX controls. Heck, just look at how often and repeatedly Mozilla's tried to find *some* non-Google-based way to finance themselves without getting screamed at by the Slashdot crowd.

That depends on when it happened. I believe they're more or less doing that now, or at least working at a severely reduced rate compared to what they could.
I don't think they need to find alternative funding sources. They earn half a billion a year. If they'd slim down their organization, they could save the excess and be independent in just a few years. Naive calculation. They spent about $200 million on actual development, for context. That's assuming no income at all as well.

Also, Mozilla has rejected alternative funding sources. They started blocking cryptominers by default, which raises the question, why still allow ads? With cryptominers, there's no tracking or Google, just you, your CPU, and some incredibly shady company in Germany that at least doesn't track you. No website can get suspended from Monero mining, while websites can and do get suspended from AdSense due to pornographic content, political reasons, quarrels with Google, etc. This goes for the really sleazy ad providers too (e.g. the ones that the likes of The Pirate Bay use)

The only answer I can come up with is that Google threatened them into cutting their competition out. I mean, they could at least cut a deal with whatever other ad providers that aren't Google there are (Yandex?) to allow them but block Google, ostensibly due to privacy reasons. Mozilla has about one card up its sleeve here, and this is that they aren't vertically integrated and so have less burdens in the way of antitrust law to deal with. They ought to exploit this, rather than just sit on their hands and do nothing.
Because Brave is based on Chromium, pretty much anything that works in Chrome will work fine in Brave, and Brave automatically picks up any compatibility changes Chrome makes. That's not exactly *competition* in the browser market.

Brave *is* very interesting for competition in the *website* market, since it's one of the few funding models that's distinctly different from advertising. But it doesn't help the browser market any more than Dell buying CPUs from Intel helps competition in the CPU market.

It does. Sure, right now Brave is just a Chrome reskin. But they have no loyalty to them. If Chrome starts acting up, they should be able to swap out the parts, at least in theory. If they gained significant enough market share, they could start to develop a real browser.

Posted by Screwtape
If I'm reading this Wikipedia page correctly, the "profit" in "non-profit" means "money extracted from the organisation and paid to investors", it doesn't mean "income in excess of expenses". For example, if/when the for-profit Mozilla Corporation makes money, it pays the excess as dividends to its investor/shareholder, the Mozilla Foundation. If/when the Mozilla Foundation makes money, it's not allowed to give the money away, it has to be spent to advance the Foundation's cause.

Yes, with the minor caveat that they can still pay their employees however much they want.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-05-07, 13:14 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Posted by CaptainJistuce

"An important philosophy of Linux at Microsoft is that all changes go upstream. "
There you go. Microsoft's ultimate plan to destroy Linux is to do it FROM THE INSIDE.

In all seriousness,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

1) Windows integrates Linux subsystem
2) Microsoft adds in a few 'special' features that 'enhance performance'
3) Remove the 'legacy' options
4) Go to step 2

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
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