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GhotiFish

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Random Ideas 9 years ago

I think number 10 is firefox's pocket.

any info on number 9? diagrams or something?

I know what you're saying, but think about things like jquery that every site uses. It's reasonable to source it remotely because everyone has it cached. Unless you had some content ID system in the browsers to pull locally sourced scripts up, we'd lose that instant CDN effect.

That said. It's hard to compare the benefits of that to the cost of the nonsense in OP's story. For every 50ms we've gained from cached jquery we've lost 3s to stupid advertising.

To be blunt, it kinda does.

Before, the major actor that could issue genuine consequences for speech was the state. The word "Consequences" in the statement "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences", means a punch to the face or a stern shaming from townsfolk. You got on with it, kept doing your job, continued to live your life.

When the state objected to your speech, it would end your life, it would destroy you.

But fast forward to today. Suddenly loud demographics of people have the ability to destroy you in the long term, destroy your working prospects, smear your reputation, mark you as unhireable, harass you everywhere. State level consequences. It's no longer a punch to the face in a bar for obnoxious speech. It's no longer the "consequences" in "freedom of speech does not mean freedom of consequences". Those consequences are now state level. How meaningless would this statement be if it was "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of consequences from the state."

"You're free to talk, no one will stop you, but we the state still get to destroy your life." How meaningless is that?!

You say people shouldn't be vilified as an outcast. But that's what will happen!

I hear what you're saying here, but just taking what the article was saying, that shouldn't be much of an issue.

    Then one of the participants drank some contraband Scotch and became 
    unusually, violently ill. He confessed his transgression to the 
    researchers, and follow-up studies confirmed his account: WIN 18,446 
    didn’t mix well with booze.
I suspect this inmate was more than a little liquored up. Just a guess. But more importantly this part:
    WIN’s side effects sounded familiar to Amory. In his clinical practice, 
    he’d occasionally prescribed Antabuse (disulfiram) to patients who 
    struggled with alcohol addiction. The drug blocks a form of the enzyme 
    acetaldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH), which helps the body metabolize 
    alcohol;
which means it's effects are used in practice to combat alcoholism.

Can't be that bad. Though, that still means that there could be other interactions not described?

This is such a clean concept.

If you have a tiny application, doing a tiny thing, do you need redis? Do you need sqlite? do you need to write some custom-text-file-ma-bob? nah. I feel like simple simple little tools like this are in short supply.

Just thought I would mention: PassFF does not works with the current version of firefox. The current plugin does not work and is not supported. According to the author, we should wait for the Web-Extensions version which will be coming... no idea... soon? I asked about 2 months ago. So pass is basically just a command line password manager unless you run firefox developer edition.

a co-worker did this, it took him to a screen that was designed to imitate the windows blue screen of death.

I assume it was also attempting to deliver some kind of payload as well, because the browser crashed on that page.

There is no way an advertising standard in which google was a part of laying the ground rules could be considered a "Better Ad".

I guess in the same way a farmer might listen to its cattle? A nasty disease or two would get fixed, nice food to keep them fed, but if they're telling the farmers "don't eat me" I can't imagine the farmers would be very receptive.

Likewise. Stop spying on me, stop advertising to me, stop pushing products I don't want on me, stop treating my computer like your personal playground.

None of this is going to gain traction. All of those are the point. No amount of listening will fix this.

some terrible ads don't look terrible, but instead behave terribly. Violating your privacy, Consuming your bandwidth, ect. How would you recognize these except to audit them yourself? If you read the criteria from the coalition for better ads:

    ...the following types of ad experiences fell beneath the initial
    Better Ads Standard: pop-up ads, prestitial ads, ads with density 
    greater than 30%, flashing animated ads, auto-play video ads with 
    sound, poststitial ads with countdown, full-screen scrollover ads, and 
    large sticky ads.
In other words, privacy compromising is not considered bad behavior. Nor is exorbitant use of bandwidth, It seems their focus is merely on what the average consumer would consider toxic.

same source as the story: https://www.betterads.org/coalition-for-better-ads-releases-...

This 100% blocked me. I tried to work around it by using lets encrypt to provision me certificates on the fly, but I got rate limited.

Then I started speccing out a way to get single certs for many subdomains in one request using SAN, and the whole thing looked like it would require more development time compared to just buying a wildcard cert. Very frustrating.

you know. It occurs to me that you could actually do this without storing the password in plaintext!

All you'd have to do is iterate every potential answer into a bloom filter and store that. The math gets a little hairy around the 50 character mark as you'd have 117600 operations to do to construct the bloom filter, and it gets worse if you expect more characters.

Here's how you would construct it.

For every 3 choose n of the password, insert a value of those 3 characters ("abc") + delimit (":") + the positions (1,2,4), You can't just insert the characters because the index of characters is part of the answer.

all you'd need to do is store... a ~1MB bloom filter per client. Huh, that number was bigger than I thought it would be.

Well nevermind. Fun thought though.

conversely, what's the argument against assigning copyright? I'm pretty sure the EFF can be trusted to keep nano open source.