mvilain

joined 2 years ago
[–] mvilain 11 points 1 month ago

Back in 2009, a High School Vice Principle watched via a student's webcam on their school supplied laptop at night as the kid snacked on Mike & Ike candies IN HIS BEDROOM. She summoned him to her office to accuse him of taking drugs. This got her sued along with the school district who configured the school's laptops to allow for the spying. Sadly, the FBI said there wasn't enough to prove criminal intent.

I won't let that stuff on my system for any reason. I took a qualification test as part of job interview with the camera covered. Guess dodged a bullett and didn't get the job?

https://time.com/7275031/spy-high-true-story-prime-video/

[–] mvilain 2 points 2 months ago

I have the same concern about Apple and Google. I've diversified my usage of their services to have alternatives and regular backups that don't use either so I can recover.

[–] mvilain 1 points 5 months ago

How come these "quiet academics" don't have fatal booby traps that kills the SWAT team and blow up the house when invading the home when they've bugged out?

You'd think with so many movies having this scenario that it would be more common.

[–] mvilain 1 points 6 months ago

Shortly after I moved from x/shitter to Mastodon and migrated as many followers that said they were moving as well, I subscribed to an art-focused mastondon instance. It was absolutely lovely to see impressionist paintings and other great art from museums in my daily feed. Then the site closed down. The admin running it decided he'd had enough.

I still found art, but now it's local artists posting their work. It's lovely, but in a different way. AND I can buy copies of the art if I want. So, I guess change is inevitable. In the real world, I'm sorta glad the Cheesecake Factory and Roundtable Pizza places closed leaving places for local restaurants to take their place.

Why do I hate Cheesecake Factory so much?

Their food is terrible. And the portions are so small.

[yes, that's a Woody Allen joke]

[–] mvilain 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

For this same reason (free to use but not free to run), I contribute to Jerry's efforts AND to my local mastodon instance. Thanks for all you do Jerry. And your security podcast. And your pics of your orchids.

[–] mvilain 4 points 7 months ago

ntpd. The internet wouldn't run without it.

[–] mvilain 1 points 8 months ago

I had Reader Mode installed but by the time I saw this posting, Chrome and Brave had already disabled it.

[–] mvilain 2 points 8 months ago

The old AT&T router I had came with a pretty obscure SSID password on a label printed on the side of it. The admin password was also a mix of punctuation and mixed case alphanumerics. I saw a neighbor's router and it's SSID password was different. So if these were being machine generated and set, that means there's some sort of service access and port into the router from AT&T's side.

Comcast Business Router, however came with a fixed username and password which I had to change when I set it up. I can't imagine a non-techie person going through this step.

[–] mvilain 2 points 10 months ago

I stopped checking out LWN because they're paywalled. There are many other sites that fill in what they offer, so why bother?

[–] mvilain 1 points 11 months ago

As you can tell by my wild supposition about doxing cops, I also read and write fanfiction.

[–] mvilain 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Just think how great it would be to be wearing these glasses when a bad cop does an illegal stop on you. Theoretically, you'd know the size of their socks and underwear by the time you signed the ticket. It would make it so much easier to fight it in court.

 

Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don't get much from my choices. It still did a pretty good job of showing me stuff I was interested in watching.

Then on Oct 1, they threw up a "You're using an Ad Blocker" overlay on videos. I'd use my trusty Overlay Remover plugin to remove the annoying javascript graphic and watch what I wanted. I didn't have to click the X to dismiss the obnoxious page.

Last week, they started placing a timer with the X so you had to wait 5 seconds for the X to appear so you could dismiss blocking graphic.

Today, there was a new graphic. It allowed you to view three videos before you had to turn off your Ad Blocker. I viewed a video 3 times just to see what happens.

Now all I see is this.

Google has out and out made it a violation of their ToS to have an ad blocker to view Youtube. Or you can pay them $$$.

I ban such sites from my systems by replacing their DNS name in my hosts file routed to 127.0.0.1 which means I can't view the site. I have quite a few banned sites now.

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