• 0 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle

  • For anyone on this thread who doesn’t know who Ken Klip is, please check out his free Substack (and subscribe if you can). I wasn’t on Twitter very long (maybe 1.5 years before Elmong took over) but one of the people I value that I ran into on that platform is Ken Klippenstein and I’ve been following him since. He’s amazing at filing thousands of FOIA requests and doing the digging into them that no mainstream journalist does anymore. He also recently quit The Intercept because they were enshittifying far more than he was comfortable with, which for a writer is a huge thing to leave the umbrella of a company like that and a paycheck behind. Writers going out on their own in this climate is the only way we’ll stay even remotely unfucked in the post-information (or misinformation) age.

    Klip fuckin rules. Please give him some due.


  • There are quite a few high profile (in the media anyhow) cases where nutjobs get off on starting fires, yeah. But the really dark shit starts to happen when (ahem) alternative media sources start to imply that all arsonists are paid state actors and/or sexually aroused political players doing all the arson.

    It’s usually insurance-related. Or accidental. Nothing that sexy in the vast majority of them.

    My favorite was last year during the very real wildfire issues affecting western canada where the flat-earthers kept posting video of actual forestry worker helicopters torching brush piles (something they actually do, during the off-season, to clean up tinder piles) and conflating it with “treaudeauh-paid ANTIFA super-soldiers out to bring in 15 minute cities and permanent state control by burning society to the ground” or whatever the hell. The absurdity of it all kinda turned me on in the other direction, ngl.






  • You’ll find that with any major VPN. The IP addresses they use to proxy your traffic eventually get flagged and blocked by lots of major players. Which is why VPN companies cycle through them quite often. As others have said, you’ll either need to switch servers (and thus ips) or figure out another path.

    I don’t use mull but most have a way to exclude a given url or site from the tunnel if you need it. i.e. the site will work for you but it’s coming from your own IP and unencrypted.






  • idk, I’ve seen all the hype around hexbear users being obnoxious around Lemmy (including our own instance debating blocking the instance, followed by several of their members brigading the thread true to form)… but I’ve explored the communities on the instance itself and even subscribed to some of them like mutual aid, gaming etc, and those that I’m watching are actually just normal people doing normal things if more left than some other similar groups. In my experience it isn’t “all” hexbear users, because that would be a dumb generalization.

    There are some assholes on that instance to be sure. Show me one that this isn’t true of. I’m glad our instance didn’t block them because I now get to decide for myself. I block communities and/or users if they’re a problem for me. I think that’s a good way.


  • I’m a little late in my reply but I believe they stopped SMS support because it’s pretty expensive in the long run. Signal took off over lockdowns like a lot of platforms, and SMS texts cost quite a bit (at scale) to route and process. My anecdotal evidence (take it or leave it) is that I worked at a fairly major ecomm tech company around that same time who discontinued 2FA verification via SMS in regions like India (etc) because collectively it was costing the company millions to use that route for that purpose.

    They actually offloaded the 2FA flows to free (for the user anyhow) services such as Google Authenticator and Authy etc etc (which those companies now have to spend the money on each SMS interaction and/or server costs, not the one I was working for.

    Ultimately I think Signal did it because it was costing them a lot of money with not a lot of benefit as more people adopted the platform.



  • Not a boomer and I don’t hate squirrels but one day I walked out onto the porch to have my morning coffee and a smoke and the fattest fuckin squirrel I’ve ever seen in my life was sitting there at eye level in the bird feeder staring back at me too satiated (or smug, I couldn’t tell) to move after having eaten all the feed for several days straight. I was refilling it daily which is unusual but I never thought I’d meet the culprit in this way.

    It’s a thing.