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Cake day: March 9th, 2024

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  • This sounds like the kind of thing a Zoomer who has no memory of life before the Internet – or the Internet of the '90s before the advertisers got a hold of it, for that matter – would write.

    To clear that up, I’m coming up on 40. We got our first family computer with a 56k modem in 1995. I’m not saying ads are a good thing, I’m telling you that 99% of websites are ad-powered.

    Back then companies had websites as a novelty, or way to find information about their company. All the newspapers that had websites were simply putting their major articles on the internet as a bonus, and as a business strategy to push subscriptions for their physical paper. Most everyone still purchased a subscription to their physical newspapers and magazines. Now, basically nobody has a newspaper or magazine subscription unless it’s online, but most people still don’t… The tech savvy use archive.ph and similar, and the old and non tech-savvy use their 3-article limit and might buy a month subscription to read an article they really have to read, or maybe even a year like the old days, but most don’t pay for a subscription at all, and that’s where the ads come in.

    However, since social media has become the dominant news-spreading mechanism, many or most don’t even read articles. They read headlines and talk shit or ask questions in the comments section, of things which were answered in the article. In the 90s those people would be reading the articles as something to do, and to stay somewhat informed. Today, their smartphone would ding or buzz before they finished the first article.

    P.S. I’m Degoogled and use Graphene without GSF on my main profile so I use Aurora, Neo Store, and F-Droid. Currently using Boost installed with Aurora. What’s a good recommendation for a good, fast, FOSS Lemmy client that doesn’t show ads that I can get with F-Droid?


  • Those are not businesses. They are free projects which a dedicated person (or group of people) donate their time and energy to produce.

    Wikipedia has their semi-annual donation drives and many (not most, but enough worth mentioning) FOSS devs are salaried by companies like Google and Microsoft and are allowed to work on patches to out-of-scope projects on company time provided they’re still fulfilling their main roles. There are also Liberapay, Open Collective, Ko-fi and such but for the majority of FOSS devs not funded by large corps, just developing a large and widely-used program because they want to, donations rarely ever cover as much as they would make at a 9-5. There are also nonprofits that distribute donations to FOSS devs. For most it is a money pit, but to them the passion is worth more. They do it for the love, not the money.

    These are not businesses.


  • Sucks that I have to preface but people can be jumpy here. This is genuine curiosity, I’m actually asking, because it’s really probably something I should already know. Can you explain the nuance to me please?


    My understanding, speaking mostly of apps/websites, I know jobs can be much different:

    Most places have the first factor as a password.

    First factor (or “login”) = username+password pair.

    For the longest time that was all there was, “your login” was just a login, which meant a username and password combination. Then 2FA/MFA (“2 factor authentication / multi-factor authentication”) came along in the form of username+password combo plus SMS/email/Google Authenticator/Yubikey/etc to verify as the 2nd form of authentication. You can have 3FA 4FA 5FA whatever if you want and if it’s supported by the app/website. So 2FA is MFA, but MFA is not necessarily 2FA.

    I know jobs can be set up a lot differently.



  • That’s a nice thought.

    Then you suddenly realize no one knows up from down or down from up. Society would shift on such a massive scale people would probably just stick their smartphones in a drawer and only use them to message people they already know personally and check them a few times a day like an answering machine.

    Then suddenly you realize you haven’t heard about Ukraine, Russia, Israel or Palestine in months. It’s November 28th and you heard someone mention a ‘new president’ but you didn’t even vote. Shit, you forgot to vote. There were no social media or news websites reminding you about the election and you didn’t have it on your new wall calendar yet! Ah that’s what all those “Vote Now!!!” yard signs were about, fuck…

    It’s a nice thought, but the internet is powered by ads. (Almost?) Every subscription-supported website is also ad-supported. The internet would basically go under. AFAIK all the Lemmy apps have ads too. It’d be a nice change to get back to get a force shove back to the early-mid 90’s. Maybe we’d do things differently. People would certainly be outside talking to each other a lot more.









  • I believe that is the case, if you inspected the HTTP headers and found if to show Linux instead of Windows. my last experience with that would have been years ago. Arch does like to compile things from source instead of using binary blobs, and compilers and configs can undo a lot of the work the torproject has done to combat fingerprinting, which is why it’s recommended to run the pre-built binary and install no plugins. However it’s important to note that it ALSO gives you a unique JavaScript fingerprint every time, when tools use as much information as possible to generate a fingerprint, because it generates new information on every reload. That’s why OPSEC is important and for can’t help you if you use it wrong. If you login to 2 different unlinked sites in the same session, and you don’t want them to be linked, too bad now they’re linked via JS fingerprinting. JavaScript is more or less a programming language within the browser, and you’ll never escape JavaScript fingerprinting. Which is why it’s important to learn how to use tor properly, and leave JS disabled as much as you can.

    One thing you can do with your arch build is use the fingerprinting tool to see how unique you are, then get a new identity, then go back and do it again. Does it now say you’re one of 2 people who have used the tool, or does it show you’re (again) unique? If the latter, then it’s working (at least enough) properly.