• 0 Posts
  • 46 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: August 26th, 2023
  • badgermurphy@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Vivaldi CEO explains his anti-AI stance: most users don’t want AI in the browserEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    I mean, much of it meets all the criteria to be called malware, so it is “walking like a duck” and “quacking like a duck”.

    All that bloat is typically cross-marketing agreements made with the makers of those apps to subsidize the phone’s cost without user consent. The part that I find weird is that there have been almost no marketing trials from major players testing the waters to see how much of a market there is for the same products that are not subsidized in this way, available at “full price”. Maybe they’re afraid that would draw too much attention to how atrocious the existing offerings are by comparison. It might put the privacy discussion more into the public discourse, which could be bad for their “business model”.

  • badgermurphy@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.world•size is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.English
    8·
    4 days ago

    I dont think it is likely to deteriorate in the same way. The mainstream service algorithms reward engagement and make no value judgments about the type of engagement. Since its easier to get engagement by spouting bombastic false claims and unsupportable opinions, that is the bulk of what you see.

    Lemmy barely rewards engagement, if at all, so the perverse incentive to be a jerk on purpose is simply just not there. Surely, drawing a broader audience will shift discussion toward humanity’s lowest common denominator, but it doesn’t actively encourage that particular bad behavior, at least.

  • badgermurphy@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Running web sites makes me not want to - Lowkey PartyEnglish
    3·
    6 days ago

    I dont believe it is that easy to tell if an IP is coming from a data center, unfortunately. To some extent you can tell its location with the geolocation database, but that is not authoritative and can be wrong or even contain intentional falsehoods. You can also see what is adjacent to it and make guesses that way, but that is often inconclusive due to common tunneling protocols like MPLS.

    I believe the only remotely accurate way to tell if a connection is a bot is to use modules that detect bot behavior and redirect what it detects. Some users have even made infinitely recursive “traps” for bots that do not respect their robots.text file, which make their web page seem infinite so it scrapes forever over these fake pages that are less work to host than they are for the bot to parse through.

    It is a very tough problem with few easy solutions. It will likely result in an arms race much like ads and ad blockers, hackers and firewalls, etc. It has so far, anyway.

  • badgermurphy@lemmy.worldtoNews@lemmy.world•The $10 trick hiding Flock cameras from city councils
    1·
    11 days ago

    So, they’re misappropriating funds toward ends that their constituents explicitly rejected, and intentionally making an end run around organizational policy. This sounds like an open and shut case for immediate termination with cause, as well as likely grounds for a civil suit and maybe even criminal charges.

    The malfeasance is not surprising, but a lack of disciplinary action and termination are, since inaction is tacit acceptance and a bad look for elected officials. I don’t think even the police union would take that “wrongful termination” case.