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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I have been using the same web browser, in terms of ideology, codebase and heritage, since the release of NCSA Mosaic.

    That was 32 years ago. And holy f**ck, that dates me.

    Sure, I dabbled around with others. There was the original Opera, back when Netscape cratered and the only other real option was IE. Opera’s tab behaviours made me install Tab Mix Plus for FF, and I still find that extension to be the second-most critically important extension FF has, right after UBlock Origin.

    And lately I took a shine to Vivaldi, but I have been weaning myself off of it once I realized that the Manifest v2 shutdown was unavoidable for it as well.

    And the only reason why I even have Chromium is as a sandbox for any Google services I access and as a “naked” web browser for those websites who implement malware and spyware in the name of “website security”. Which, of course, also means a majority of websites that are “protected” by CloudFlare’s incredibly hostile anti-user practices.

    And of course, I also run forks, such as Librewolf and others, also with the appropriate anti-malware and anti-spyware add-ins. It can be useful having multiple web browsers up at once.

    But my main will always be Firefox.




  • Apple is the least bad + most functional option out there.

    Nothing else will go further in being least bad, unless you are willing to completely sacrifice functionality and usability.

    Apple at least walks the walk of protecting user privacy because they aren’t dependent on non-hardware, non-app-store revenue (as in, selling user’s data). Google is absolutely dependent on revenue from selling user data because their hardware and App Store revenue is almost insignificant in comparison.






  • Sometimes criminals also shoot back at the police that come after them with guns.

    In the heat of the moment, the only difference between a vigilante and a cop is the level of training, the assigned equipment, and the choice for the cop to follow well-established procedural rules. It’s only when you zoom out do you see the legal system supporting the cop. But when zoomed in and examining the individual incidents, nothing says the cop can’t come away with added lead, either.


  • Vigelanty justice only works when target deserved like the dead CEO, otherwise it just crime.

    You clearly see the world in black-and-white, when it really is made up of shades of grey.

    Which means that since you haven’t already gotten the point, all the crayons and construction paper in the world isn’t going to help.


  • rekabis@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 months ago

    The point I was making… Is that the article brought a red herring fact that has nothing to do with anything

    Why did they bring it up?

    It was not a red herring in the least, and it struck to the very core of my own criticisms: while some vigilantes may be very stringent about their own investigations and targets, others may not.

    In this example, these vigilantes artificially engineered a target where none was likely to ever exist. They drew the target in using the profile of a perfectly legal 18yo woman, but then turned around and claimed that the target was actually chasing the profile of an 17yo - and illegally young - girl, when he was in fact not doing so.

    This was a very clear situation of entrapment by false pretenses.



  • rekabis@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 months ago

    I don’t have a problem with actual pedophiles that are caught in these dragnets.

    My problem arises from the lack of rigorous and well-documented investigation into the target before shite starts popping off. As the article pointed out, there is nothing wrong with a 22yo dating an 18yo. And the problem here is a sense of vindictiveness trying to manufacture targets where not all targets are guilty of pedophilia.

    So: you want to take a pipe wrench to warm over a pedophile? Make sure there is oodles of evidence that clearly and unambiguously makes the person a pedophile, and sure as shite I will look the other way. But the problem is that there is no self-reinforcing framework in place within the vigilante system to ensure and enforce this threshold of evidence. And without this system, innocent people are going to get hurt or killed.




  • In that way it’s become adversarial.

    Back in the 2000s, I was able to say that while a fundamental install took only about a half hour to set up, usability tweaks and a full fleshing out of functionality took another 4-8 hours depending on what the user was going to use the machine for.

    I just did a Win11 24h2 install. It took nearly 24 working hours before I considered it even minimally functional for my needs. Cycling through Win10Privacy two or three times was particularly frustrating. Registry work alone took me a good 8-10 hours of trying stuff a step at a time and then rebooting to see how it worked.

    At this point, the only reason why I am still running with a Windows rig is for those half-dozen programs that don’t have appropriate non-Windows variants. It’s why I’m also running a Mac Mini and an OpenSUSE tower through the same 4-port, 6-head KVM.