• 9 Posts
  • 227 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2020

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  • Wow, I feel like the most upvoted solutions here don’t work, and meanwhile some obvious and widely known alternatives are being completely overlooked.

    ❌ Inspect Element - many modern sites don’t even include the full article in the paywalled html, so this wouldn’t work. Also sitting there and mousing over elements and deleting them one by one, is tedious, it’s easy to accidentally delete an element that encloses the content you intended to keep, or to drive yourself crazy trying to figure out how elements are nested.

    ❌ Ublock Zapper - a similar to the above, won’t work on stub articles, and just janky because you’re manually zapping things

    ❌ Disabled JavaScript - Similar to the above, same problem because many articles are stubs anyway. And the HTML layers that block your view don’t have to be done with JavaScript.

    ❌ Rapid copy and paste of the article to notepad or rapidly printing the screen - similar problem to the above, lots of places just post the stub of an article, and besides nobody should live their life this way rapidly trying to print screen or copy everything. If you’re trying to do a quick copy you’re going to grab all kinds of gobbledygunk from the page and probably have to manually filter it out.

    ❌ Reader Mode - Your browsers reader mode will be hit and miss because, again, many sites post stub articles, and it’s possible the pay wall stuff will just get formatted into the reader mode along with an incomplete article.

    Archive.is - works!

    ✅ Pocket and Instapaper - amazingly, nobody has mentioned these even though they’re probably the longest running (dating back to 2007-2008), possibly most widely known, and most consistent solutions that still work to this day. They keep their own local caches of articles, so it’s not depending on the full content being visible on the page.

    ✅ Other dedicated extensions - Dedicated browser extensions seem to work, but be careful what you’re signing yourself up for.

    🤷‍♀️ Brave - It works, but, it’s a Chromium supported browser, so ultimately Google controls the destiny and can drive Chromium to incorporate fundamental frameworks supporting DRM and pushing their preferred web standards.



  • I don’t even think that’s true. In this context it’s just an informal turn of phrase, basically being used as an analogy or a metaphor, and we’re supposed to interpret these things charitably and in good faith.

    With that in mind there’s no reason at all why it can’t be understood as similar, even to the point of directly invoking the idea of superpositions, given that it’s just an analogy. There’s nothing worth litigating or correcting here, and any supposed misunderstanding is something that can be cleared up just by choosing to exercise more charity in the interpretation.


  • abbenm@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhy is online privacy so important?
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    4 days ago

    SSRN is a kind of vast warehouse of academic papers, and one of the most excited cited and well-read ones is called “I’ve got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of privacy.”

    The essence of the idea is that privacy is about more than just hiding bad things. It’s about how imbalances in access to information can be used to manipulate you. Seemingly innocuous bits of information can be combined to reveal important things. And there are often subtle and invisible harms that are systematic in nature, enabling surveillance state institutions to use them to exercise greater amounts of control in anti-democratic ways, and it can create chilling effects on behavior and free speech.

    https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565



  • Probably my 2008 Suzuki Reno. It’s coolant system was made of such brittle crumbly plastic that it would crack and leak out all the coolant, and I didn’t realize this at first I didn’t know to look for it, so I get off the highway after driving 20 miles just in time for huge plumes of white smoke to be coming out of the front of my car.

    I got it fixed only for it to crack again and leak again. And it became this nightmare of whack a mole where I’m constantly adding coolant, constantly checking my temperature gauge, constantly bringing it in to be fixed.

    And then the whole engine died on the highway and I had to pull over while driving to my new job.


  • Not when they use the conjunction “so”. If they’d used “and”, then sure - there could be any number of reasons. Using “so” as a conjunction like that in the sentence gives it an equivalent definition of “therefore"

    You’re technically correct in your narrow focus on the conjunction “so,” but you are missing the bigger picture. Yes, “so” generally functions as a logical connector like “therefore,” meaning that the first statement is directly causing the second. Their sentence could be read as “Vivaldi is closed source, therefore it’s harder for users to investigate,” which isn’t a comprehensive or precise statement on its own.

    But that’s a pretty pedantic take. The point that they were making doesn’t rely on an exacting technical breakdown of the closed-source nature of Vivaldi. Rather, they’re making a general observation that closed-source projects tend to be harder to investigate. With that in mind, the use of “so” is informal and reflects a broad conclusion that aligns with general knowledge about open vs. closed-source software. Closed source inherently implies limitations on access, which, while not exhaustive in this single sentence, still holds weight in the general sense.



  • Trump outperformed polling in both of the last elections, and the polls are much closer now, so if he even just outperforms the same amount as before he wins.

    I think the polls have tried to correct for this, and I also believe Kamala has huge and sophisticated ground game operation aimed at turnout while Trump’s team seems completely disorganized. So I wonder if that advantage in operational sophistication counts for anything.


  • Right, and it’s possible that what’s really happened outdistances what’s publicly known.

    I still like to believe that our systems are resilient against such shenanigans, that Georgia Court just threw out some sketchy b******* that Trump affiliated election officials were trying to pull. Literally every Trump court case fell on its face last time around.

    But I’m a lot more worried now. When the history of this election’s written, something we never thought of is going to turn out to be one of the most important events in history.

    I’m not saying this will literally happen, but this is kind of what I think: some random election clerk in North Carolina is allowed to trigger a freeze on the counting of votes based on their ‘reasonable suspicion’, and after recounts and delays, it starts trending Kamala’s way, so they never complete the account. The Supreme Court invents some new legal doctrine that says we can’t allow the paralysis of one state to prevent the determination of a winner, the court throws it to the House of Representatives, the house holds the vote open for 16 hours until Trump wins, with God knows what violence and rallies and stuff happening outside.



  • I don’t love Peter Theil by any means, and his association with any project is, to my mind, enough to completely discredit it.

    But I get a little worried when it starts turning into references to the bilderberg group, and whatever that link is to NCIO.ca is just completely nuts, low evidence jumping to conclusions.

    He certainly has crazy ideas that I want no part of, but I think it crosses the line into conspiratorial to suggest he was instructed by Germany to act as a foreign agent to sabotage the global economy.


  • Please show me where you explained that Vivaldi’s source code is harder to investigate because “users need to download a 2 GB repo” or a “tarball dump”.

    I can see why you think this is not entirely implied. But I also don’t think that it’s incumbent on them to have laid it out with such specificity. You can read this reference to closed source in the most charitable way as alluding to the whole motley of things that render closed source projects less accessible.

    It takes a little squinting, sure, but the internet is a better place when we read things charitably, and I don’t think such fine grain differences rise to the level of straight up misinformation.

    I mean, there are some real whoppers around here on Lemmy. There’s no shortage of crazy people saying crazy things, I just don’t think this rises to that level.