its not surveillace !! its just a plant !! 😜

https://universe-inside-you.com/eltanin-antenna/

*gg

Shadow alignment

since bots are better at solving captchas and humanoid services exist that solve them, the only ones negatively affected by captchas are regular legitimate users. the bad guys use bots or services and are done. regular users have to endure while no security is added, and for the influx i guess it is much more like with the better lock on the front door: if your lock is a bit better than that of your neigbhour, theirs might be force-opened more likely than yours. it might help you, but its not a real but only relative and also very subjective feeling of 'security".

beeing slower than the wolves also isn’t as bad as long as you are not the slowest in your group (some people say)… so doing a bit more than others always is a good choice (just better don’t put that bar too low like using crowdsnakeoil for anything)

Only rate limiting is the effective option.

i doubt that. you could maybe ratelimit per IP and the abusers will change their IP whenever needed. if you ratelimit the whole service over all users in the world, then your service dies as quickly into uselessness as effective your ratelimiter is. if you ratelimit actions of logged in users, then your ratelimiting is limited by your ability to identify fake or duplicate accounts, where captchas are not helpful at all.

at the same expense of bots. they might be cheap, but i doubt that anyway, bots don’t need sleep.

i was answering about that wording (that captchas were “not” about bots but about “stopping automated requests”) and that automated requests “are” bots instead.

call centers are neither bots nor automated requests (the opposite IS their advantage) and thus have no relation to what i was specifically saying in reply to that post that suggested automated requests and bots would be different things in this context.

i wasn’t talking about effectiveness of captchas either or if bots should be banned or not, only about bots beeing automated requests (and vice versa) from the perspective of the platform stopping bots. and that trying to use different words for things, (claiming like “X isn’t X, it is really U!”* or automated requests aren’t bots) does not change the reality of the thing itself.

*) unrelated to any (a-)social media platform

[…] reCAPTCHA […] isn’t to detect bots. It is more of stopping automated requests […]

which is bots. bots do automated requests and every automated request doer can also be called a bot (i.e. web crawlers are called bots too and -if kind- also respect robots.txt which has “bots” in its name for this very reason and bots is the shortcut for robots) use of different words does not change reality behind it, but may add a fact of someone trying something on the other.

i think it should not be too difficult to compete with m$ security, that is at least true for the state of the last 30 years or maybe more.

But something like a non-profit organisation - or a bunch of them- that make self-hosting for essential services (like email, messenger, video calls) a charm could be a big win for billions of peoples.

i am sure that only affects the data YOU can ever access, but never the data already stored for later abuse ;-)

better do not hate, just make them irrelevant for yourself.

NOT hating is good for health and not depend on abusers is good for you too ;-)

one does not become dependent on tech giants without a critical loss at some day, no matter whats the “reason” for it and they tend to do weird stuff within or without laws…

For others or for a new start and how to avoid such in the future (maybe “migrate” your relatives to secure services “before” you get ripped off):

• get your own domain like somestupidtext.info make sure the toplevel (.info .com .net or whatever) has laws that let you effecticely reclaim your domain if one of the providers block something or fail to do their job. also make sure you do not fall into only-first-year-very-cheap traps for domain prices. maybe check that the toplevel domain is not one regulary found to be used by spammers and thus maybe blocked by some providers.
• use one company only for DNS related things, maybe name.com, but there are plenty others and lots of generic hosting providers also provide dns-only hosting.
• get some provider to host email for your domain or run your own emailserver and set mx records to that mailserver.
• configure and change valueable services to your email addresses under your domain
• make sure you have a local(!) copy of all your emails that automatically updates itself, if you can, at least daily, offlineimap checked in into a git repo could do a good job
• if one provider sucks, change it and leave the rest as is.
• the setup alone already shows the provider, that only gov (of that toplevel domain) can effectively block you, as when the email provider tries to block you, you find a new one and change MX records (and obviously cancel and stop paying the blocking one), if the DNS provider tries to block you, you get a new provider and transfer the domain to it, if that fails a lawyer could help) also the small providers have usually no way to know what you do on another account at another company, only if you put your whole life into the hands of the few known big evil ones, you are that vulnerable to the chaos they produce.

also setting up recovery addresses (if possible) is a good idea, like when one email is unusable for whatever reason, the provider already has a known email address from you to start a recovery process, of course that second email address MUST be out of reach of the provider of the first one, that is, if you have somemailprovider.com address and one at microshits, then microshit buys somemailprovider.com, you have to change everything from that somemailprovider.com to a new one just to stay secure. due to this, your own domain with a connected email service of a random hosting provider comes in handy as you would not have to change all the email adresses but only that random email provider. also if skype/zoom etc does not work for you, there are plenty of other ways to do video talks on the internet. i prefer to be independent for same reasons even though i haven’t been blocked yet, i just saw the signs of possible approaching evil because of the shitflow big evil tech produces all the time just to flush their believers view of what would be possible down the drain and choosed independence ahead of losses. following signs like leaving companies with red flags (like just too big, like already robbed their users, like give a shit on their users security, like give a shit on their bugs and blame users while their own big-tech-company-network is pwned by someone unknown for month and such) a more privacy aligned messenger that supports videocalls would be for example matrix, there are multiple clients to choose from and lots of providers to choose from (also self hosting or becoming a provider is possible while for talking to each other it is NOT necessary to use the same provider, but again self-hosting of course is most-secure) one cannot do things securely without knowing a bit about what it is. to learn more about dns, email, matrix or other topics the internet is full of informations, sometimes wikipedia is very helpful and linux user groups exist for talking about stuff and helping each other. the type of support is different and -as i see it - much more efficient, but different, there is no one to do it for you (or you get into the very same dependency trap again) but you are encouraged to learn what it takes to do so and do it yourself.

example prices from a random dns provider: .de 10€ / year .eu 16€ / year

random mail provider imap email 100GB storage 3 € /month

that is having more control over your email than when using big tech, may cost you more or less 4€ per month (and maybe the learning time to set everything up). for matrix server one might use managed services, looking around i found etke.cc with 5€ as a base minimum when you provide your own VPS for it, but with many other options too. maybe the free hosting announced by element.io where i did not look into yet is an option too. i prefer my own domains and servers, but just using separate hosting companies for dns, email and matrix gives a whole lot more control while still beeing a simple and adjustable setup. while matrix does not lock you in into one instance from the beginning (i can chat/call from/to my own account/server to any other account on other servers while beeing able to try this out using a multi-account-client that connects to all acvounts/servers at the same time) they now have bridges so one can use the same client to chat with others on telegram or whatsapp (and others) too, so this is rather the opposite of vendor lock-in. while a matrix hoster could still block your account in error and if you did not use your own domain for your matrix account at the hoster, you could connect to your friends again from another account at another hoster as you would still have their matrix adresses stored in your client. however to securely use matrix one should read about its security mechanisms and what backup keys are and why one should validate new connections.

if you had the loss, at least take advantage of the message/lesson: big tech is too powerful and thus insecure. maybe do three steps in parallel: choose and migrate to smaller providers, more providers each for different things, if one f**ks up, everything else stays in place, thus less stressful on problems. second step in parallel: get yourself into DIY your digital life. every little step into independence is a step more powerful while removing the very same power from big tech to attack the stability of your digital life. third step in parallel: share your problem including the possible solutions, which you choosed and how it went to those you think might take advantage of that information ;-)

its amazing how good services can be if some just skip the corporation-obligatory adding of enshittification. i remember an article about a downloadable (but not very legal) DVD with an installer for a (worthless but very popular) OS that included heaps of expensive industry software and the installer was point-klick what you want and then all is done in background and fully usable once done. reading that article it seemed to be a better installer than ever produced by any company for any product.

however as that payed streaming service seemingly leaves huge amount of bank records and ran for such a long time, i guess it would have been easy to stop their customers from paying them. it rather might seem that the real intentions of content corporations might not truely be what they officially claim. maybe we learn in 25 years that the content corporations really were behind such services, maybe like “better get money from ALL markets!” or such.

great, thanks. i’ll try it out as i have some spare resources on my server.

🤔 maybe there is a lack of distributed fediversed search engine instances where:

1. everyone can host a search engine for their very own pages
2. everyone can crawl other pages and provide (maybe with permissions) the crawled data to other search engines (as compressed snapshots, api …) or provide a search engine by themselves for all.
3. such search engines can be ranked or marked with “has anti features xyz” and put into followable ‘collections’ per topics.
4. possibility to add 3rd party rankings and filters, so that one can use only a subset of a search engine list that was pieced together by someone you know or trust, reduced by rankings or filters published by another one you somehow trust to limit the items in the first list.

then: “for software development i use linuz personal ‘devel’ collection, this way i don’t have to manually click through big G’s gigabytes of SpaMalAds they always only frustrate you with and i am not distracted with dyo stuff when searching for server administration things like ‘puppet stages howto’. for my home projects i use my friends ‘home of DYO’ collection, i get more results than i need but get new ideas as well without seeing work stuff when looking up how to build a puppet stage for my little one. 👨‍👧 for kids its awesome, our school provides a collection including specialized search instances that fit learning, while that collection is also peer reviewed by a company that spezialized to ensure it does to not contain search engine instances that also index any unfitting content pages.”

oh btw: no i do not have any info about duckduckgo status unfortunately, i stepped over it by myself today 🤷‍♀️

which part of “except as a punishment” was actually unclear in those laws that currently still “protect” slavery since how many centuries now? did you already ask your gov how many are enslaved due to this slavery protection law today? do you know how many are today tortured because slaves still do not have any laws protecting them? tell me which laws you think would protect slaves today from torture? could they call a lawyer? by which law if they dont have rights? this “don’t have rights” was a huge part of slavery, right? so tell me, as this law clearly states the possibility of slaves, which laws would protect them? how could you tell if there are no other mentionings in any other law? i guess you just can’t, because this law protects slavery but no law protects the victims of it.

so if you did not ask your government yet about the total numbers (which could be 0 of course as you claim), on what “knowledge” are your believes based on then? pls let me know!

i remember news about children put into cages at the southern border, i remember that originally a five digit number of families was in the news, later on claims, that those kids were sexually abused instead of beeing taken care for, they tried to find them but only got a low 4 digit number of them back. what would you say happened to those at “unknown locations”? i do see a “possible” direct link to the slavery-protection by law you seem to believe would actually “prohibit” it.

Just having this exception in the laws degrades the credibility of the whole country. Why not get rid of this shit then?

And thus if you were right that slavery does not happen any more (wow cool, a real step towards civilisation) then it should also not be of any problem of any kind to remove that exception from the laws right today before sunset, right? who would even hesitate?? if there are none who currently “profit” from that law, or who are already planning to profit from it by creating false evidences of “crimes” sufficient to apply this laws to innocent ones in front of some of those “secret courts”, if none of such exists, why not just remove this exemption then and if only to really have more civilized law afterwards ???

IMHO “abolish slavery” needs to be on that list, so this list could have any meaning at all.

eh… is there a reason why “abolish slavery” happens to NOT be on that list? i’ld put it right on top!