• 2 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • It’s easy to avoid buying things from Amazon

    I mean… Yes but also no.

    Amazon have gone to crap in recent years and has become a more upmarket Wish or Temu. Much of their storefront is full of Chinese knock-off brands these days.

    What Amazon does offer is somewhat reliable next (and sometimes same) day delivery. The only way you can get something faster is by travelling to a brick & mortar shop and buying in person.

    As for AWS, aren’t we forgetting that Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, even Alibaba and Huawei have their own cloud solutions?


  • I’m in the first camp. Instagram is flooded with spam accounts posting links to illicit Telegram channels where actual CSAM is being distributed. The owner of Telegram was also arrested recently for failing to safeguard his platform from such highly illegal activity. Children having easy and often unrestricted access to social media is probably the reason why things have gotten so bad.

    Every major social network should be asking for ID verification, but there should be strict safeguards on how that information is used and stored, with hefty fines for failures to safeguard.


  • Gab tried to pull the same thing with their Dissenter plugin. It was such a bad idea that Mozilla and Google banded together to remove the extensions from their stores for ToS violations.

    Now imagine what a nightmare it would be to moderate the ability to comment on anything online with actual standards and decency.


  • So imagine you’re on PornHub and then out of nowhere, Clippy shows up and says “hmmm looks like you need some help pleasuring yourself”, then starts flicking through similar nude pictures and videos to what you’ve been looking at before. The idle animation of the AI assistant even changes to Clippy morphing into the shape of a penis and shagging a rolled up piece of lined paper is if it were a fleshlight. You can’t tell if Microsoft are mocking you for being a coomer, nor can you tell whether to find Clippy’s sexual deviancy funny or creepy.

    Somehow that hypothetical dystopia of Clippy watching you masturbate is only slightly worse than what Microsoft plan to do with Recall. If the mere thought of a machine learning AI taking screenshots of your desktop every few seconds and learning from your computer usage habits isn’t absolutely fucking terrifying… Then imagine that these are likely being uploaded to a server for the perusal of advertisers, intelligence agencies and any hackers skilled enough to break into Microsoft’s servers.

    Even if it was stored locally, all it takes is one dodgy web link for you to inadvertently send all your Recall data to a hacker and have it ransomed.



  • He could alternatively go to…

    Stackoverflow or Superuser, where the answer will be “use the search bar you imbecile, locked.”

    Quora, where every question is blatant rage bait like “my 14 year old son got a B in his test. I took away his PS5 and chained him in the basement as punishment but his grades aren’t improving. How can I make him better at math?”

    Yahoo Answers which is dead, and was basically Quora before Quora was a thing.

    Or Reddit, where you can’t even post on 95% of subs without hitting a minimum karma threshold and where some basement dwelling mod will likely ban you for breaking hidden rule #263, then modmail mute you for 28 days without reply if you try to appeal.

    I think any Q&A site is absolute dog water now.



  • Clbull@lemmy.worldtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlPlease, do not use Brave.
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    1 year ago

    Newsflash: everything that isn’t free and entirely open source is generally spyware these days.

    It’s amazing how we pilloried RealPlayer and burned its parent company to the fucking ground over two decades ago for far less egregious transgressions than what we now let Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc get away with.