That’s how communism always ends up. When you hand over majority of the power to the state, it won’t be keen on giving it back.

That’s like saying the US is not capitalist because we don’t have a true free market and better products/services don’t always rise to the top.

These simply aren’t things that can practically happen, just like the workers owning the means of production.

Mastodon is a piece of software. I don’t see anyone saying “phpBB” or “WordPress” has a massive child abuse material problem.

Has anyone in the history ever said “Not a good look for phpBB”? No. Why? Because it would make no sense whatsoever.

I feel kind of a loss for words because how obvious it should be. It’s like saying “paper is being used for illegal material. Not a good look for paper.”

What is the solution to someone hosting illegal material on an nginx server? You report it to the authorities. You want to automate it? Go ahead and crawl the web for illegal material and generate automated reports. Though you’ll probably be the first to end up in prison.

Yeah, I really don’t know what widely used language is worse than Javascript besides php (which is hardly used in new projects).

Nope. Use it very often, though mostly usually with typescript.

Raw Javascript becomes a massive hindrance in any project past half a dozen files and 1000 lines.

Typescript makes it a lot more usable.

It is an overused joke, but it doesn’t make it any less true.

Being easy to understand is one of the primary goals of any programming languages.

The problem with Javascript is that it isn’t easy to understand. Javascript is easy to write.

That’s why it’s easy for novices to pick up and why it ends up being spaghetti code. It’s very unrestrictive and allows writing very poor code that works based on assumptions and breaks when the assumptions aren’t met.

It made sense at the time because it was just a scripting language for some minor website things, and you didn’t want your site to crash if your script ran into a problem.

Now it’s being used to write full fledged applications and it’s past design choices are still haunting it.

get your credit card stolen.

Let’s see… I don’t provide my credit card to anyone when pirating. The only way they are getting my credit card is breaking into my house. (no, mkv files can’t have viruses).

But I do need to provide my credit card info to HBO, which they store, on their likely poorly secured servers.

The number of credit cards stones from data leaks very likely exceeds the number of them stolen because someone got duped when trying to pirate.

Pretty sure HBO was willing go to for multiple more seasons (why would they not?), but Dumb and Dumber decided to rush the ending.

Just clarifying because it looks like by they you mean HBO.

That could indicate a lot of things. It would be very difficult to distinguish a torrent from something like cloud folder sync. And that would still be a statistical guess. No ISP is going to go after customers because their VPN traffic is potentially torrent traffic.

Besides, even if they could detect that torrenting is taking place, they will not know what data is being transferred from and to where. It’s a meme, but torrents are actually sometimes used for non-copyright infringing data.

I disagree entirely.

Gatekeeping has a negative connotation to it, and it can be used negatively. But gatekeeping is also necessary if you want to maintain a good community.

The increase of ease of use of social media and internet at large, and making it available to the very general public is what caused social media to become a toxic waste dump of misinformation, low effort content and lack of critical thought.

The difference of quality of reddit between 10 years ago and today is absolutely staggering. Reddit is practically unusable outside of small communities.

The relative difficulty of using the internet acted as a natural gatekeeping mechanism to keep your racist uncle Bob and your antivax aunt Karen away. Now they can join by clicking a few buttons on their phone.

Since that no longer works, the communities need to take gatekeeping into their own hands. Otherwise, it can be overrun by people people who are just stupid, to be frank.

That doesnt do anything anyway. You alwere kinda wasting your own time.

A $100 brother laser printer (2280dw but it has been discontinued). It’s like a printer from an alternative universe where printers aren’t evil.

Had it for about 6 years now. Printed thousands of pages and only needed to replace the ink cartridge a few times. Had no issues with 3-rd party cartridges. Surprisingly never required any maintenance.

Other laser printer brands that can probably perform similarly, but I can only vouch for this one.

Governments should build their own emergency communication channels instead of relying on platforms that are entirely out of their control.

If anything, it’s a good early wake up call.

Anti-bot measures that affect regular users are amateur level anti-bot features.

Pretty much every major site has anti-bot features. You just don’t know about them because they don’t affect you and other normal users.

As many are speculating, this has more to do with them being unable to handle the load due to internal problems.

These are extreme last option measures they are using.

He never actually wanted to buy Twitter. He was just running his mouth to manipulate the market.

Twitter called his bluff and took him to court. He tried to weasel out of it with various excuses (like there are too many bots) but it didn’t work. When he came close to having the court accessing his personal communications, he folded and bought Twitter.

He massively overpaid for it compared to the already inflated market price, instantly losing many billions. Must have had some insanely illegal dirt in those communications for it to be worth it.

So no, it wasn’t some machiavellian plan to disrupt public communications. Musk is just not a very smart greedy asshole.

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

Which will provide the motivation to remove DRM from the web standards, as it should have never existed in the first place.

Well you showed that fucking over users makes them money. Thanks a bunch.

We already have precedent that it’s entirely legal. Making an argument that individual scraping should be illegal is practically impossible.

Scraping in this context is just accessing a public web resource and rendering it locally. The only difference with a browser is a customized interface.

So to make scrapping illegal they would either make accessing a public web resource illegal (ban the internet) or make formatting the accessed web resource illegal (make it illegal to use any software to view the accessed public web material, including browsers).

A long as there is a way to view a video, there will be a way to save it.