• 12 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • If you run a whitelist firewall, you never see CAPTCHA’s. The vast majority on the internet have nothing to do with the website you’re visiting. When the website cannot redirect you to the CAPTCHA host site, it just continues on to the intended destination. The only way I ever see a CAPTCHA is if it is hosted on the same server as the site I am trying to visit, and that is very nearly never. I bet the vast majority of them are actually some advertiser collecting more data to mine in addition to whatever fingerprinting they can collect. Ads only work by opening a hidden frame that is basically another browser tab where you then visit the ad server’s website. This is no different than visiting them in a browser tab. They can access everything available to fingerprint. If you’re using anything Google controls that means they know everything about you down to how dirty your underwear is right now. /s÷2










  • I have an HP laser printer from like 1992, before they turned to US=Privateers; rest-of-the-world=criminal pirates. HP died as a company when they spun off Agilent/Keysight as test equipment and continued the branding for contract manufactured consumer garbage. HP does not make anything. They market, place stickers on what others manufacture, and create ponzi scheme-like extortion scams, as the shriveled shell of a dying husk disconnected completely from their now long irrelevant past.


  • While it is outside of the scope of most people’s abilities, the bios is on a flash chip that can be removed, read, and disassembled. I’m no expert here by any stretch. That said, my usual check with software is to simply check for http in strings. Even with a binary like a bios ROM, I can pass it through the $ strings command to look for any addresses. No matter what kind of malicious nonsense the software is doing, it has very low value unless it can dial out.

    My lack of a complete understanding in this area is why I use a whitelist firewall for most of my devices. It is also the ultimate ad and tracker blocker as I only visit the places I chose to access. I don’t conform to the lowest developer’s ethics and will simply stop using any site or service that fails to be direct and transparent.

    The thing is, even most whitelist firewalls are inadequate. They only filter incoming packets. That is really an inadequate model in most cases now, especially with local large language models where it is impossible to verify their capabilities. My reason for all thus bla bla bla is to say, a whitelist on a trusted 3rd party device is a PITA but an effective low barrier way to prevent any bad actor from communicating with the questionable device. It still leaves you open to a potential situation where the device could be sending a packet stream to the outside world over something like UDP.

    Otherwise, the main thing I would be concerned with, if it is a UEFI device, are the UEFI secure boot keys. Whomever holds these keys has a lower ring access than the operating system kernel. Anything happening in kernel or user space is effectively under their control.

    Anyways, the main way to monitor and check the device is a trusted 3rd party router that blocks any unauthorized connections. This can be challenging to setup with something like OpenWRT. There is a forked OpenWRT device running a version that makes a lot of this easier called PC WRT. That can make a whitelist fw a little easier than sorting out NF Tables and scripting a whitelist firewall.



  • Most cases have ridiculous nonsense for cooling though. Laptops usually have considerable thermal engineering, but kinda set the threshold of real hardware requirements.

    I was just given an old “gaming rig” someone didn’t want that had water cooling, 9 fans, a cobweb of LED wiring, and the most obese ABS panels attached to the sheet metal case… The thing works fine even when overclocked with no fans except the one built into the power supply and GPU. Only the one in the GPU cycles on enough to be audible… This guy had a freaking harrier jet taking off in the room beside him for a decade.



  • Amazon’s pricing I not deterministic. You were likely tracked and information collected to know this was a key item for you. Amazon will market loss leaders to you in an attempt to get you to default to buying on Amazon.

    As a former Buyer for a chain of retail stores, the loss leader is effective marketing. I sell you a popular item at or below my typical cost because statistically, a large percentage of customers are making a special trip to my store to buy that product and will make additional purchases at margin. On the wholesale Buying side, these are tools to get past bulk buying tier discounts for seasonal ordering with smaller scale retail.

    Amazon is using a convoluted front end system of overlapping product categories and a supposed multi seller listings (despite collectivized logistics and warehousing) on the website you see. This is how they perform price fixing where you do not see honest or straight forward determinism. When you repurchase that same item later without making comparisons, the seller will shuffle so that a higher price is presented.

    If you have a well isolated network where device history for social media and internet browsing is totally partitioned from e-commerce you’ll likely see even more of the scam. If you see anyone online show the search results and pricing on Amazon, then try to replicate those search results and product price on a device that is totally partitioned from your viewing of the item/price elsewhere, you’re likely to find it is not possible. If you then go back to the original device and do the same, you’ll magically find the same product and lower price. It is a scam market. This is why they are collecting and paying for all that data about you. We are in an age when automated individual targeting and manipulation is possible and happening. This is why data mining stalkerware is insidious. Scam markets are only the tip of the iceberg and what can be uncovered if you go looking for it. Anyone that has done database or logistics management should have major red flags flying when looking at how Amazon’s website is setup. The front end is absolutely untenable garbage for effective logistics. The only reason it is convoluted and search results are terrible is because it is a price fixing scam. The logistical efficiency proves that there is no connection between the front and back end of the site.


  • From me specifically? When I was first disabled, I still used most corporate social media and stalkerware. In an isolated environment like I’ve been stuck in for a long time, it became clear that the user retention through suggested content manipulation algorithms and notifications were not able to compensate for someone in my condition and availability. What had always seemed like minor manipulative annoyances, became obvious manipulative annoyances. I started to see how the interruptions had altered my behavior. There were some interests I sought out on my own, but many pointless and frivolous distractions and things or projects I bought into because I felt like I had found or discovered something on the internet. Over the years of isolation, I can more clearly see the pattern of what was really my interests and what was suggested to me in manipulative contexts. One of the prime ways it happens is when I’m frustrated with something I’m working on and getting no where. Suddenly I get a seemingly unrelated suggestion or start getting what seem like random notifications. Those seem to target my emotional state specifically in a targeted way to tended to push me into new things or areas I didn’t really expect or want to pursue prior.

    I could write off that kind of thing. I became alarmed most around 2018 when Dave Jones showed some search results on YT and was talking about them. I could not reproduce his search or even find the reference at all. A week or so later, it came up. I had it happen again a couple of months later. No matter what or how I searched I could not find the correct results. It is because google was being paid to funnel me into another website some imbeciles thought was related to my search results but the website in question is a garbage third party referral linking middleman. When they showed up in my search results, I couldn’t find anything I was looking for. They were quite literally paying so that I could not find what I needed. It wasn’t ads placement. It the top 20 pages of google, the results were simply not present at all for what I was looking for. In this situation, I could empirically check and see what was happening. Any company that can do such a thing with what I can see should never be trusted with what I cannot see. That type of manipulation is world changing and extremely dangerous. There are only two relevant web crawlers by size, Microsoft and Google. Every search provider goes through these two crawlers either directly or indirectly. When google failed to work, so did DDG, Bing, and most of the rest. At the time, Yandex still worked.

    Since I have offline independent AI running, I’ve been able to test this a bit further. If I start searching for certain niche products in a search engine I will get steered in bad manipulative directions. I do not fit the typical mold for the scope of experience and information I know about going back over two decades ago. When I search for something commercial and industry niche specific, I’ve seen many times when relevant products and information are obfuscated as I am steered to consumer land garbage due to what I shouldn’t know. These are situations where I may have forgotten some brand name, but when searching for all of its relevant properties and use cases, the things never come up in search results. I can chat about the product with a decent AI for a few sentences and it gives me the answer. After I plug that into search results, suddenly I start seeing all kinds of related products in other places popping up like it is some kind of organic thing. It isn’t limited to search results either, it was YT, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and even reddit I noticed similar anomalies. If this kind of connection works in one direction, it must work in both directions, meaning my information bubble is influenced directly by all corporate platforms. It makes me question what interests and ideas are truly my own. I primarily find it deeply offensive that, as a citizen, any corporate shit can cause me to question my informed reality in such a way. Any stranger that asks you to trust them, is nothing more than a thief and con. They are an irresponsible gatekeeper. That is the prima issue.


  • I would agree more if the thing was a product purchased and operated by the establishment, but these things are always run by a third party and their interests and affiliations have no oversight or accountability. What happens when there is an abortion clinic with one of these present. What happens when the controlling company is in KKK christo-jihad hell where women have no rights like Florida, Texas, or Alabama? What about when the police execute someone at random, who loses that recording? No one knows any of these factors or should need to when they wish to walk into a store. This device is stealing your right to autonomy and citizenship as a result.


  • It is not like I fail to understand the use case. My issue is that data mining me is stealing from me. It is taking a part of my digital entity to manipulate me. It is digital slavery. To be okay with such a thing is to enslave one’s self; it is to fail at a fundamental understand of the three pillars of democracy and the role of freedom of information and the press. Forfeiting your right to ownership over your digital self undermines the entire democratic system of governance and is an enormous sociopolitical regression to the backwardness of feudalism.

    No ancient citizen of a democracy wanted feudalism. These things do not have a parade to welcome them, a coup, or a changing of the guard. This change is a killer in your sleep and a small amount of poison added to each of your meals. Every little concession is a forfeit of future people’s rights. This is that poison. I will go hungry. Enjoy your meal, I respect your right to eat it; after you’ve been warned of its contents. I reserve my right to speak of the poison to any that will listen.