Those do not obviate the use cases I have in mind. Secure drops are useful tools for specific whistle blowing scenarios. But they are not a one-size-fits-all tool.
I routinely use framadrop and then transmit the links to regulators or whoever I am targeting to act on a report. But what if the target audience is not a specific journalist or regulator but rather the entire general public? The general public does not have access to reports submitted to the Guardian’s dropbox or NYTimes’ dropbox. Those are exclusive channels of communication just for their own journalists. The report then only gets acted on or exposed if the story can compete with the sensationalisation level of other stories they are handling. If I’m exposing privacy abuses, the general public does not give a shit about privacy for the most part. So only highly scandelous privacy offenses can meet the profitable publication standards of Guardian and nytimes. The reports also cannot be so intense as to be on par with Wikileaks. There is a limited intensity range.
The fedi offers some unique reach to special interest groups like this one without the intensity range limitation.
NYtimes is also a paywall. So even if the story gets published it still ends up a place of reduced access.
They are great tools for some specific jobs but cannot wholly replace direct anonymous publication. Though I must admit I often overlook going to journalists. I should use those drop boxes more often.
(edit) from the guardian page:
Once you launch the Tor browser, copy and paste the URL xp44cagis447k3lpb4wwhcqukix6cgqokbuys24vmxmbzmaq2gjvc2yd.onion or theguardian.securedrop.tor.onion into the Tor address bar.
That theguardian.securedrop.tor.onion
URL caught my attention. I did not know about onion names until now. Shame it’s only for secure drops.
That story is focused on #CloudSTRIKE but the bigger more remarkable demon here is #CloudFLARE.
This story demonstrates Cloudflare acting as a proxy bully of their own customer, on behalf of CloudStrike by pushing a frivilous #DMCA take-down demand. CF took the spineless route as it sees CloudStrike as having more muscle than their customer. After CF joins the Goliath side of the David vs. Goliath battle, CF ignores Senk’s responses and keeps proxying threats.
Senk bounced from Cloudflare and went to a provider who has his back. #ArsTechnica publishes Cloudflare’s conduct. As embarrassment hits Cloudflare and David (Senk) starts winning against Goliath (CloudStrike), CF changes their tune. Suddenly they are on Senk’s side, saying “come back, we’ll protect you – we promise we didn’t get your messages”. LOL. Senk should do a parody site for Cloudflare too.
Senk’s mistake: leaving CF. He should have waited until CF actually booted him. Then that would have more thoroughly exposed CF’s shitty actions. Senk gave CF an easy out.
Interesting to note how a human on the side of civil rights who advocates decentralisation was treated with hostility by Cloudflare. Yet CF is fine with sheltering actual criminals.
Customers should take several proactive steps to protect their personal information and reduce potential risks: Be Wary of Phishing Attempts
Customers should rethink their stupid ass decision to use AT&T in the first place since it has been known for over a decade that AT&T is the most privacy abusive of all US telecoms, most notably their role in project Fairview (archive for clearnet users and wikipedia).
AT&T customers don’t give a shit about privacy. But I do have some sympathy for all the non-AT&T people who communicated with AT&T pawns.
BTW, the OP’s link avoids reclaimthenet’s shitty popup if proxied through 12ft.io:
https://12ft.io/https://reclaimthenet.org/nearly-all-at
Not sure it matters since the text is in the OP anyway… guess if someone wants to share it around.
Folks, FedEx has always been on the extreme right. Some basic facts:
I have been boycotting FedEx for over a decade. Certainly being pro-surveillance is fitting with their history and should not be a surprise to anyone who is aware of this background.
The only moral inconsistency is that FedEx has a reputation for not snooping on your packages and seems to be favored by people shipping contraband. But to find the consistency it’s just about the bottom line. They make no money by ratting out their customers who break the law. But installing a surveillance system on their trucks is probably yielding revenue for FedEx.
what happened here? Looks like you tried summons an autotldr bot, but it did not do its job, correct? That’s kind of a shame. Indeed theregister.com is an exclusive website and direct links to it should not be shared. A privacy-respecting infrastructure would block such links or replace them with archive.org variants.
I’m not on a good enough connection to watch videos but when I read “How the Religion called Atheism…” I know it cannot be coming from any sort of credible source. Atheism is absence of religion, not a religion in itself. It includes both agnostics and gnostics (both those who are convinced there is no god and those who are unconvinced either way). So I don’t suppose it’s worth it to note the URL and try to fetch the video when I have a good connection.
This is a double-edged sword. In the US, banking is really optional. You can live an unbanked life in the US and get paid in cash, if you want. And you can force creditors to accept your cash payment on debts. That’s an important freedom.
In Europe, where banking is treated as a public service that all people are entitled to, they have created a system where you must use a bank. They have banned cash payment for wages. So you have a right to a bank acct but then you are forced to use it.
#warOnCash #forcedBanking
You’ve misunderstood the problem if you fail to see that ruling in favor of one party necessarily violates the rights of the other party. The decision was a compromise on which party’s rights carry more weight to prevail over the rights of the other party. Both parties had rights worthy of defending.
Of course I have biases, but the bias does not reflect in my thesis (which is the opposite of what you realize). In particular, just because I find the bakers to be bigots does not mean I expect them to lose in court. I still actually believe the bigoted bakers rightfully won the case (thus, this does not prove your point, which is that you think there should have been no court case). The court case was not about whether they are bigots. It’s about whether an artist should be forced to produce art that favorably expresses people/ideas they hate against their 1st amendment rights also amid their right to choose who to do business with.
So the court was right to rule in favor of the bakers. But your claim that there should not have been a court case at all remains unsupported. The case had merit. The rights of people in a protected group (sexual orientation) were discriminated against and so they were rightfully given a forum to have their legitimate complaint heard.
IMO, it’s a fucked up extreme bias that brings you to consider the case frivolous, as if one side of the debate did not have enough merit to even warrant a court case.
They were still fined a lot of money
No they weren’t. Read the first line of your own referenced article. The fine was dropped. And the original payment came from other people’s crowd-funded donations toward the case anyway, which was returned.
Also, precedence matters and court ranking matters. Lower courts in certain regions can have all kinds of bizarre judgments but higher courts take precedence. The Oregon Court of Appeals is not representative of the US. The US Supreme Court is. The Bank of America case would be in a federal court as many states are involved.
And spent a considerable amount of time and energy defending themselves for no damn reason
So you not only misunderstood the outcome, but you object to rights of one party being tried against rights of another party in court? Bizarre to have sympathy for bigots being dragged through the court system, despite getting off the hook.
The Oregon Court of Appeals is a lower court than the US Supreme Court. The Bank of America case is federal.
Love the irony and hypocrisy. What self-respecting conservative promotes regulation, particularly that would take control away from a business on who they do business with?
There’s also quite a bit of hypocrisy from a privacy standpoint. It’s the conservatives to don’t value privacy and take the “if you have nothing to hide…” line of reasoning. When a giant corporation voluntarily shares sensitive information about customers, it’s always the right-leaning corporations who do that; ALEC members.
Funnily enough, I boycott Bank of America for supporting conservative values (private prisons, xenophobia, fossil fuel investment, privacy-disrespect):
https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/usa_banks.md
while the conservatives want to cancel Bank of America for essentially for being conservative. Apparently it’s not conservative enough for BofA to apply conservative values uniformly, as opposed to giving conservative individuals preferential treatment.
How bizarre. I boycott #JPMorgan/Chase in part because they heavily invest in fossil fuels (among countless other evils):
https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/usa_banks.md
And according to your linked article, the state of Texas is boycotting JPMorgan/Chase for not investing in fossil fuel. How confusing. Maybe the state of Texas should read the Banking on Climate Chaos paper.
The supreme court makes no exceptions for gay wedding cakes:
I’ve been out of the loop on games for a while but ReactOS may be worth a look.
The 1st ½ of your comment sounds accurate. But…
And also in Foss there are highly opinionated software where the devs completely ignore users, ban them from GitHub when they post issues,
Right, but to be clear non-free s/w is worse - you can’t even reach the devs, generally, and there is no public bug tracker. FOSS is an improvement in this regard because at least there is a reasonable nuclear option (forking). The nuclear option for non-free software is writing it yourself from scratch.
That all sounds accurate enough to me… but thought I should comment on this:
However - in larger enterprises there’s so much more, you get the whole SDL maturity thing going - money is invested into raising the quality of the whole development lifecycle and you get things like code reviews, architects, product planning, external security testing etc. Things that cost time, money and resources.
It should be mentioned that many see testing as a cost, but in fact testing is a cost savings. In most situations, you only spend some money on testing in order to dodge a bigger cost: customers getting burnt in a costly way that backfires on the supplier. Apart from safety-critical products, this is the only business justification to test. Yet when budgets get tightened, one of the first cuts many companies make is testing – which is foolish assuming they are doing testing right (in a way that saves money by catching bugs early).
Since the common/general case with FOSS projects is there is no income that’s attached to a quality expectation (thus testing generates no cost savings) - the users are part of the QA process as free labor, in effect :)
Linux won’t be viable for blind people unless major distros have full time accessibility folks, and refuse to accept inaccessible packages and patches.
Sure, but you need to read what I quoted. I purely addressed the flawed claim that better code comes from those paid to write it. The opposite is true. It’s unclear to what extent that bias has influenced @noahcarver@rblind.com’s thesis. Though I have no notable issues with anything else @noahcarver@rblind.com wrote (much of which is beyond my expertise w.r.t accessibility).
And to be clear, “better code” strictly refers to quality, not accessibility. Accessibility is a design factor.
But that code you write at home is probably not accessible.
That’s right. But then neither is the commercial code I worked on. That would be outside of my domain. I do backends for the most part. The rare UI work I did was for a tiny user base of internal developers within the org and accessibility was not part of the requirements. I worked on a UI for external users briefly but again no requirements for accessibility (which would be very unlikely for that particular product).
In any case, this sidetrack is irrelevant to what you replied to. It’s important to correct bogus claims that being paid to write code is conducive to quality. Some right-wingers I know never miss the opportunity to use the phrase “good enough for government work” because they want to push the mentality that capitalism promotes superior quality. It’s a widespread misconception that needs correction whenever it manifests.
Paying someone to write accessible code should theoretically work on both free software and non-free software. AFAICT the reason non-free software would accommodate blind users is that the market share is large enough to justify the profit-driven bottom line and those users are forced to pay for it (as all users are). In the FOSS domain, payments (“bounties”) are optional. Has this been tried? If not, then you’re relying on blind FOSS developers to suit their own needs in a way that benefits all blind users.
and that someone who is paid to write accessible software is generally going to produce and maintain better code.
In my day job I’m paid to write code. Then I go home write code I was not paid for. My best work is done without pay.
Commercial software development
When I have to satisfy an employer, they don’t want quality code. They want fast code. They want band-aid fixes. The corporate structure is very short-sighted. I was once back-roomed by a manager and lectured for “gold plating”. That means I was producing code that was higher quality than what management perceives as the economic sweet spot. I was also caught once fixing bugs as I spotted them when I happened to have a piece of code checked out in Clearcase. I was told I was “cheating the company out of profits” because they prefer if the bug goes through a documentation procedure so the customer can ultimately be made to pay separately for the bug fix. Nevermind the fact that my time was already compensated by the customer anyway - but they can get more money if there’s a bigger paper trail involving more staff. So when you say you get what you pay for, that’s what you pay for – busy work (aka working hard not smart). They also want “consistent quality”. So if one module is higher quality than another, there is pressure to lower the quality of the better module because improving the style or design pattern of the lower quality piece is “gold plating”. When I make full use of the language constructs (as intended by the language designers), I am often forced by an employer to use more basic constructs. Employers are worried that junior engineers or early senior engineers who might have to maintain my code will encounter language constructs that are less common and it will slow them down to have to look up the syntax they encounter. Employers under-estimate the value of developers learning on the job. So I am often forced avoid using the more advanced constructs to accommodate some subset of perceived lowest common denominator. E.g. if I were to use an array in bash, an employer might object because some bash maintainers may not be familiar with an array.
Non-commercial software development
Free software developers have zero schedule pressure. They are not forced to haphazardly rush some sloppy work into an integration in order to meet some deadline that was promised to a customer by a manager who was pressured to give an overly optimistic timeline. #FOSS devs are free to gold plate all they want. And because it’s a labor of love and not labor for a paycheck, FOSS devs naturally take more pride in their work. I’m often not proud of the commercial software I was forced to write by a corporation fixated on the bottom line. When I’m consistently pressured to write poor quality code for a profit-driven project, I hit a breaking point and leave the company. I’ve left 3 employers for this reason.
Commercial software from a user PoV
Whenever I encounter a bug in commercial software, there is almost never a publicly accessible bug tracker and it’s rare that the vendor has the slightest interest in passing along my bug report to the devs. The devs are unreachable by design (cost). I’m just one user so my UX is unimportant. Obviously when I cannot even communicate a bug to a commercial vendor, I am wholly at the mercy of their testers eventually rediscovering the bug I found, which is unlikely when there are complex circumstances.
Non-commercial software from a user PoV
Almost every FOSS app has a bug tracker, forum, or IRC channel where bugs can be reported and treated. I once wrote a feature request whereby the unpaid FOSS developer implemented my feature request and sent me a patch the same day I reported it. It was the best service I ever encountered and certainly impossible in the COTS software world for anyone who is not a multi-millionaire.
Self hosting would mean I could control account creation and make many burner accounts. But there are issues with that:
I think it complicates the problem and then each author has to deal with the same. If it’s solved at the fedi API level, then the existing infrastructure is ready to work.
(edit) I recall hearing about a fedi client application that operates in a serverless way. I don’t recall the name of it and know little about how it works, but it is claimed to not depend on account creation on a server and it somehow has some immunity to federation politics. Maybe that thing could work but I would have to find it again. It’s never talked about and I wonder why that is… maybe it does not work as advertised.