Hurvitz [they/them]

I don’t see why degradation of the individual physical floppies is a concern, since they can be imaged and written onto new(er) floppies, or the system retrofitted to read the same data from a different medium, but I can see where a more modern system would provide a lot of advantages. It doesn’t really sound like anyone in this article knows the nitty gritty details that well, though the bit about the loop cable is good.

The SFMTA is looking to upgrade to “modern technologies, such as fiber optic or Wi-Fi,” Roccaforte said.

PLEASE do not use wifi to run your trains lmao

Objection to the use of my personal checkout history may seem like a small thing, but it essentializes how oppressive political regimes oppress. I had a friend who lived in the former Soviet Union who explained to me that the most private thing about you is what you read

I mean sure, I don’t want to be spied on for profit. But jfc she just haaaaad to sneak a jab at the USSR in there. It’s like its contractual for these people, any criticism of US capitalism has to include an “imagine how much worse it would be in bad country” segment

Does it bug anyone else when they say “World’s richest billionaires”? Like yeah no shit captain redundancy, there’s a word for them though, it’s “people”. They’re just people. This billionaire identity building/mythmaking language has got to stop. Plus its just a way to not normalize gender neutral language/a drop in replacement for “world’s richest men” that is technically gender neutral but carries an implication…

This is all true, but there’s more to worry about than just feds. Similar deanonymization attacks can be leveraged by fascists and liberals who want to harass our users. Not compelling google to reveal IPs, sure, but linking to a malicious domain (and obscuring the link destination with markdown), or to a targeted social media post and seeing who interacts, or a bunch of other vectors.

No reason to make attackers jobs easier, but also true that even the most careful of us should not feel a false sense of security

Not sure what multi account containers buys in this context, I think the default behavior of firefox mostly mitigates the 3rd party tracking that used to be rampant. Maybe I’m just not thinking though. They’d still get your IP, and the fact that you clicked on a link shared by x other person?

I guess it would open links posted on hexbear in the hexbear container, on which you won’t be logged into the other site? But iirc common practice for sites you do have a sign in for is to auto-open them into their own container so you’d have to be configuring it pretty paranoid-ly.

Attempting to work around and mitigate these issues at the site level is probably a good idea, because people individually will not all be so careful. But it has to be done in as like, convenient a way as possible, otherwise it’ll just piss users off

yeah, but this approach can be generalized to any service that you are logged in to really. VPN helps but really you just can’t open signed-in tabs of links from untrusted sources

Yeah… I’m with you, people are not taking the risks of a lot of things seriously. Rule changes aren’t a bad idea, especially since they don’t require dev effort that we don’t have, but as much as possible we should probably automate enforcement, it will make it more effective/consistent.

Its all wasted effort, until it’s not, and then it’ll be too late.

Automod tools do exist now but we would have to put in some dev effort to get the features we want, and it may not scale super well to our large instance size. And its hard to keep up with all the major sites let alone small obscure sites or straight up honeypots. You can’t really beat careless user behavior, but you can certainly improve things.

its gonna be really tough to balance usability and sufficient safety/paranoia here IMO. I think the current approach is mostly “people can choose their own risk level” and giving people tools like invidious links, etc.

click the link icon in the OP (they aren’t super obvious ik)

But here’s the gist:

In a just-unsealed case from Kentucky reviewed by Forbes, undercover cops sought to identify the individual behind the online moniker “elonmuskwhm,” who they suspect of buying bitcoin for cash, potentially running afoul of money laundering laws and rules around unlicensed money transmitting. In conversations with the user in early January, undercover agents sent links of YouTube tutorials for mapping via drones and augmented reality software, then asked Google for information on who had viewed the videos, which collectively have been watched over 30,000 times.

The court orders show the government telling Google to provide the names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity for all Google account users who accessed the YouTube videos between January 1 and January 8, 2023. The government also wanted the IP addresses of non-Google account owners who viewed the videos. The cops argued, “There is reason to believe that these records would be relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation, including by providing identification information about the perpetrators.”