_siis

As in what happened with Ajit Pai, Corporate Sponsors, and the FCC/Net Neutrality?

In other words, its malign influence and deceit intended for some outcome or goal.

Ask yourself what happens when people with guns go up against people without guns. Its pretty clear, if you are in the latter group and you are confronting the former, you are choosing to die, and you are failing your ancestors and descendants by ending your genetic line through choice.

If you have detente or parity (i.e. both sides can defend themselves), the choice you often have in those cases is, will you, your spouse, and your children choose to become slaves for all time. All it takes is obedient consent, will you fight for your family or choose to die instead. The societal mechanics involved don't allow a third option. Slave or Fight/Die, that is the choice.

Basically, first they come for <someone who they say has done horrible things>... then they come for <your neighbors> ... and finally they came for you and there was no one to speak against them on your behalf.

You clearly have never heard of Sophie's choice, otherwise you wouldn't have said what you did.

Its a common setup with coercion, and used by corrupt entities to coerce behavior that ultimately causes suffering. People that suffer or who are put into an unstable psychogical state are more malleable and vulnerable to certain psychological attacks and tactics designed to indoctrinate. Look up the term struggle session, and what that entails.

Saying you have a choice is extremely naively and misguided. It lacks a true understanding of how the world actually works with regards to coercion.

Here's a form of Sophie's choice. An evil person/group has captured you and is holding you and your three siblings (brother and two sisters) captive. He gives you the choice of choosing one of your siblings who will not be killed, and he will kill the rest. They are present when he says this, and he emphasizes that failure to make a choice by the time specified means he kills them all. What is your choice, you always have a choice.

Regardless of what you choose, any survivors will hate you until their dying day because you killed the others, by choice. Failing to choose one, means you chose to have all of them die, and they realize you didn't love them enough to choose; in their final moments.

Do you really always have a choice? Is a coerced choice a choice?

These are important questions which you seem to not have thought through at all. They are normally covered in an intro to philosophy course, though coercion is not touched on normally until later coursework.

Some entities are perfectly fine with killing you, chopping you up and selling your organs, or using you as slave labor, or re-educating your ideology.

Choice is an illusion, in many cases, anyone saying otherwise as a generalization is naive; misguided, and uneducated, and a danger to anyone that would potentially believe it because they are inspiring a false/limiting belief in those people that would/could persist over their lifetime or beyond (a greater evil). It negatively impacts the fitness of all future descendants as an ideological contagion, until the resulting forces of natural selection and lack of adaptability ends their line (extinction).

If you inspire a false belief, you are responsible for all the suffering and negative outcomes that arise as a result of teaching that belief to others, both directly and indirectly. This is true even if you have no intent, or knowledge of what you do; because you should have known and done research, especially after someone brought it to your attention.

Unfortunately, until congress passes legislation requiring companies that operate as a place of public discourse to follow certain conventions this will keep happening because technically they own you (or rather they own the words that you say as data).

They have basically reached the monetization phase, where most smart users bail either just before or shortly after. You get the same dynamics with tyrants, only you have more risks and more options available to you in the real.

Kelnos, there are a few things you seem to not understand about these things in general. Fundamental things.

I've heard your point before, many years ago with regard to Blu-ray protections.

From a security/threat perspective, that is true, which is why the threat model is turned into an iterative process that can be updated arbitrarily.

It is understood the amount of labor required to break the model is specialized labor and limited, and there are mechanisms that can be used to isolate and target the sources of that limited labor when they communicate about forbidden knowledge like the internals which are kept as trade secrets, and then punished under the law.

They already embed mechanisms that cause devices to brick. There were several devices where they had to issue a firmware update to get around a fault caused by one of their updates with regards to an internal battery that caused bricking when it lost power. This is very common, and if you can't prove they did it; its just natural end to the lifecycle where you'll have to payup again for a worse product.

Its immoral and horrific. My grandpa's wife (remarried) passed not too long ago. She passed because they kept juggling her back and forth between skilled nursing, hospital, and hospice. She couldn't speak or communicate effectively because of a medical condition.

Hospital marked her as NPO (no food, trouble swallowing), discharged her without resolving that back to skilled nursing (still NPO), and she went more than 10 days without any food or drink aside from saline IV, just waiting. It took a family member visiting and researching what NPO was on the chart, the gaunt look, and threatening a lawsuit before they finally took action and gave her a feeding tube (back to the hospital) before the talk "its not about the Quantity, but the Quality of Life"...

She didn't survive long after and passed within a month. Likely because of the sharp spike of no food, followed by food in her weakened condition.

During one of my visits for another family member (different facility) I overheard one of the staff on a smoke break outside insensitively joking with co-workers that the standard care is "skill em till they kill em".

I asked a friend who happened to have worked in medical/hospice, and they said its not uncommon to hear that among staff but they shouldn't have been saying that openly with patients or relatives nearby.

Absolutely horrific, there are no words that do justice or communicate the horror that awaits older people in these places.

Of course they are, all the money the boomers were planning to leave to their kids are now going to pay for quality not quantity of life in the remaining time they have.

While nothing is without risks, generally speaking investing in private business that produce actual goods where the supply chain is stable, or real estate so long as it continues to enjoy its advantageous tax loopholes. Those are the only comparable things that currently have a rate of return on inflation that I've found that come to mind with manageable risk assuming proper due dilligence.

Real estate requires a certain level of income to take advantage of those tax loopholes in the first place. Its also still at the height of the market, so opportunities will be coming available as that bubble deflates but you generally don't want to catch a falling knife. I'm personally expecting about a 15% correction, factoring in a minimum of 12% inflation over the next several years based on the 1983 methodology for calculating inflation.

Business risk due to inflation is going to become problematic if you can't control input cost. The operating budgets for many businesses also typically are funded on a variable interest rate loan which will stress many businesses which may present some opportunities in the near future.

Most budgets I've seen have not been factoring in the rate of inflation, but with two years of excessively high inflation and more expected in the future, anyone that knows what they are doing will be factoring this into their prices moving forward for the near term.

Edit: Regarding computational models (AI) and investing, they really aren't a good fit for a lot of things, primarily because there is no determinism properties (system's theory). Any time you have inputs with multiple potential outcomes, this property breaks; and Automata & CS Computation theory say computers will never be able to solve these fundamentally due to the halting or decidability problems. Anywhere human psychology plays a significant role in the outcome, you often have these issues which may not be immediately visible.

Approximations can be made, but there is no guarantee they will be accurate. You also can run into synchronization issues when you have many interconnecting systems (i.e. Dragon King Events).

Standard Disclaimer, not financial advice or accounting advice.

Human language always drifts in terms of word definition.

While that is true of general day-to-day speech or vernacular (vocal), that fails with regards to anything that is reasonably technical, or written, and making a comparison between the two overgeneralizes and is apples to oranges. Both are flawed ways of thought.

If you've ever tried to communicate the structure of a binary tree, abstract syntax, what makes up determinism, syntactical vs lexical parsing, systems properties, or anything else that is highly technical there are specific technical words which are used fundamentally to describe the structure, or behavior, and these meanings do not vary.

They have specific meaning to describe specific things. Communication is the sharing of meaning, and its receiver based. If the receiver has no words to describe it, or the words used have so many possible meanings; they won't understand. Its the all is nothing. There is a signal or there isn't.

If you corrupt language and communication calling something its not, and doing so in a way that can cause loss under any circumstance on someone else, you then are arguably so much worse than a liar, engaging in crazy making behavior, and definitely lack credibility. This is true even if you do not intend this which is why one must be careful in what they say and not bandy words (and their meanings) about irresponsibly.

To be clear, that includes the loss of time and confusion resulting from misleading others. There's enough deceit in the world without adding to the noise or legitimizing corrupt acts.

Corruption of language has no place in civil and rational conversation.

If you know anyone that's worked in the industry, you know there have been issues well before 2014.

Since the company merged with its competitor they had a complete management shift which incentivizes many of the failures we've seen recently.

Al Jazeera did an investigation into them in 2014; you should be able to find it available online somewhere. It was damning and surprisingly well researched.

Mind you this was well before they changed the system regarding the nose pointing down; without disclosing it to the pilots.

They are just going business as usual. I and many I know well would never willingly fly in one of their planes.

Its David Graeber, and the book is good. I had similar epiphany's with The Wealth of Nations, and Wealth and Poverty of Nations.

These things should be taught in public education but aren't, likely because of ideological indoctrination.

Unbacked debt breaks the guard rails for rational pricing of both products and labor. In the 1770s, it was recognized that the price of labor couldn't go below what it costs to raise 4 children with a spouse, which was necessary to have 1 make it alive to 18.

This seems like your going down the rabbit hole into an area where only the bigs can compete, its also a fools errand in my opinion.

There's a growing sentiment that the stock market is rigged, and I've seen several instances where that almost certainly seems to be the case and no action has been taken. It started with the COMEX eligible silver and gold holdings which have never been independently audited.

Then GME and FRC more recently.

Once you realize the mechanisms that allowed those to be successful, you realize they can do it with any publicly traded company, and its no longer an investment because the fundamentals have nothing to do with it. You can cause companies to fail simply by causing aggregated indebtness violations. Synthetic shares can be created indirectly which let you create more selling or buying than exist in the float. There's only one way the the basic mechanics say happens when that exists.

Its a casino, no longer a real investment and any company with better funding alternatives won't go public if they intend to stay in the business for longer than a few years. Most of the companies are zombie companies which are overvalued. Some are undervalued. Its not a good business to be in, there's some real evil schmucks playing games with information that isn't public.

I am, and it doesn't exist in the vast majority of systems today.

In reality its coercive, an intolerable act, and the last time we saw these things was 1767-1776.

Its beyond stupid, but the people doing these things have incentives to do them.

Here's an interesting related article. https://archive.is/HuXGQ

The main problem with economics is, at its core it is completely rotten. Completely unsound and rotten.

The discipline as it currently stands can be scrapped entirely. It provides no actual benefit.

Its primarily used to mislead, entrap, and then coerce, and the promises it makes are almost never credible. You see this in the economic impact studies which get done for places like the IMF in third-world countries to justify loans they'll never be able to repay, which get funneled and laundered back into certain US companies. It may be useful to force them to trade their UN votes to avoid austerity measures but that's about it, and GDP isn't a useful indicator of economic output or growth. GDP can be split up or concentrated in a single person and you'll get the same numbers.

I've studied the classic economic texts such as Adam Smith, and those are solid because that is how it worked when you didn't have a unbacked debt-based economy.

Almost everything after that fundamentally misleads, is flawed, or untrue.

The micro economics course I recently took for the second time and failed out of again was more akin to political courses for indoctrination. Anyone who has ever taken an argumentation or logic class is fundamentally disadvantaged when taking these courses. No amount of reasoning will get you to the correct answer.

Every third sentence in that textbook was misleading or outright untrue, intended to brainwash (using political warfare and malign influence).

It was largely at the whim of the author, and tests were guesses on guesses. No heuristics to get a set answer, no context, just a guess as to what was correct; the chapter being tested might have been about comparable advantage, and given you 3 answers that were all correct to choose from, but only 1 answers considered correct, and they don't provide sufficient information to get to a correct answer.

Worse, professor was simply a glorified proctor, no better than a teaching assistant who instead of lecturing pointed to Khan Academy, didn't adjust issues with the online autograder, and this guy teaches the course at all local state and community colleges (5+ campuses) the same way with impunity for the last 5-10 years.

The material it covers is fundamentally unsound. It makes key assumptions that are never really true. You have the tested vocabulary calling a free market, highly regulated by the government. Marking it incorrect when you choose "an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses".

The current curriculum has no business being a required part of general education for college degrees.

Also, what you learn will fundamentally never be true in an unbacked fiat currency system because as prices deviate from rational price, and more money is printed, you run into a form of the economic calculation problem which really galls the socialists.

You might call it a market, but they aren't really markets when there is no real price discovery. Its just internal exchanges of resources, or central planning by another name.

We can all thank Pearson for making it so easy for professors to not do their job.

Some time take a look at the COMEX registered vs eligible, what happens when you have two coordinating entities fixing the spot by trading near equal amounts of paper contracts between each-other and no independent audit, ever.

The sad fact is, there is a truly real evil going on when it comes to many rights. Parental rights are just the most recent battleground, and no one does a thing to curb it.

Also, I don't mean a cultural evil, as most people dismiss this as just being your cultural opinion. I mean the type of multi-cultural evil that strips people of their ability to respond (agency), tells them misleading lies, promotes flawed and self-defeating beliefs, causes loss in one form or another, and worse most of the time the people doing this are mentally ill but you still have to deal with the outcomes.

This is a real problem because if you conform, you are tacitly approving of those beliefs and your children will learn socially from your response to it. Unfortunately, in a world where you get CPS or the police called to charge you with child endangerment its a pretty mad world, and its happening more and more.

An interesting parallel are these philosophies that you can somehow make things safe, all ultimately fall into some form of socialist or fascist narrative where someone at the top decides what is or isn't safe because you as an individual are unimportant comapared to the group which is paramount.

These narratives are very common in totalitarian and fascist societies that use propaganda and political warfare to kill potentially disruptive thinking.

That's not how it should be though. Its a direct attack on property rights which are a cornerstone of most successful civilizations.

This is a growing problem. As far as I'm aware, Cloudflare does not collect or report these type of metrics because if they did, they could be abused.

There is no way to actually know who is or isn't a bot. The methodology for bot detection changes dramatically, isn't published, often isn't well tested, and fails to fully capture turing tests in any meaningful way. Its all about forcing more requirements on the user, where the more unique the user is, the more likely its a user and counting all blocks as a net win. The only problem is it drives surveillance capitalism, and its a flawed assumption.

Maybe you should start an end-user Firefox extension/platform that aggregates where it checks for these, and allows the user to self-report when it fails (or detect and show repeat failures.

That's a lot of false logic and implicit assumptions there buddy.

Perhaps you want to take another go, only this time don't push a false narrative?

It was possible to reach sites without cloudflare before and view the content.

Now its primarily being used as a stopgap to block and de-anonymize people. The website doesn't need to determine if you are good or bad.

They simply need to manage their resources, and send the response to requests.

That is if they are actually in the business of providing something to someone like content or something else. Otherwise the business they are really talking about is data brokering and surveilling without really disclosing it, and that's another discussion completely.

Most of the traffic on the internet isn't junk, somewhere about 30% is protocol overhead, some small percentage is discarded during path and routing, and a large percent is the data people ask for.

There are tactics you can use as a website owner that target bad actors without blocking en-masse. Server side checks that characterize specific actors that are not related to IP or ASN. Those can then be easily targeted, and its not hard to set that kind of response up as an automated response.

The modern cryptographic functions we were talking about are all based on primes.

Unless you are suddenly trying to shift gears to muddy the water for some other purpose and apply what I said to 'all cryptography', it was pretty clear what we were talking about prior to this response.

Perhaps you should do a bit more research into the origin of those magic constants that get used to initialize those functions.

Where do you think they come from... yes you could change them but then you wouldn't be following the specification, and you can't legitimately call it the same thing.

AFAIK, they are all in some form related to primes, whether that's a truncation of a floating point representation of a prime or some other operation like a square root of a sequence of primes, because evidence has shown that the chaotic nature of primes works best and this is a property we want in cryptographic systems.

There is also the potential to use it as a watering hole for more sophisticated or subversive measures where they subtly change what you post to promote something you don't actually promote (so at some point they deviate from pure proxy to mitm).

Wouldn't they be able to do the same preventing you from scraping the site? They may have many IPs to work with, but you may not?

Dean, that's said a lot but its a pernicious lie that many people mistakenly believe.

What makes it a lie is it doesn't acknowledge or characterize the requirements that must hold true for it to be the truth (or a successful outcome).

Those requirements are simple but don't currently exist in the majority of areas which is why we are having such huge problems today, and people mistakenly believe its something else because they haven't properly educated themselves, and they are working against indoctrination of the education they received early in life.

Those requirements are simple.

* Protection of property rights in the things you own (i.e. you can't be deprived of the benefit from stock you own, arbitrarily (based on someones say so) without effective recourse).

* A store of value that is stable and doesn't change. Inflation depreciation each year with stagnate wages guarantees only consolidation of existing wealth at the expense of anyone else, inflation is also double taxation without representation, one to the government, and one to the privately owned institution of the FED. (followup: The Creature from Jekyll Island).

* A transparent market with functioning price discovery (sales are done only on the market and visible, i.e. no darkpools, and wash sale collusion to fix prices is severely punished).

Without those three things, you will never in a guaranteed determinable way become financially independent because of fraud, deceit, collusion, and corruption.

It is not sufficient to say we have those through the court system, because the court system is not self-enforcing, there are bad actors within the system that go unpunished, its reactive, and the costs for such privileges to defend against unbacked spurious complaints made by entrusted officials (who broke their oath of office) may far exceed the value of the objects thus they can be deprived arbitrarily (google youtube, Civil Asset Forfeiture, US Private Vaults).

If you decide to dig a bit further and research more into this, you may find that common failures in any of those areas are also commonly found in socialist (centralized systems) such as communism, both now and historically.

I'd have to agree. There are so many levels of fraud and other violations (deceptive business practices) going on at that place.

Any other legitimate business would be taken to task for a quarter of what they are doing. Maybe they know they can get away with it because they have a blanket liability shield from the AWS contracts?

but it does not protect your right to bypass any digital security mechanism to do this, or to disclose how you did this to anyone else by threat of law.

They lobbied for laws to explicitly prevent this, and given the strict constructionalist nature of the current courts, its unlikely we'll regain or be able to enforce these rights in this capacity without significant intervention by policy makers.

Honestly, this has been happening for decades, long before remote work was a 100% thing. If they lie you fire them plain an simple. Company needs to do its due diligence, and the fact that complaints like this keep coming up trying to drive a corruptive narrative instead of performing due dilligence is just stupid, and that's on the company.

Trying to characterize having the camera off as being a nefarious tactic because you can't see them working is beyond asinine. There are many good reasons to have the camera off while working.

One being you are there to do work, you are being paid to do the work. One thing video has never gotten right inherently is the whole eye contact part of a video chat.

When you don't look directly at someone (the angle is wrong) while you are communicating its a non-verbal sign of disrespect or in-congruence, and it causes non-verbal communication issues regardless of intent.

The camera has never adjusted your eye angle, so you will always have that issue of people distrusting those communicating over video to a lesser or greater degree. With a flat picture and a phone call, you don't have that. You focus on the work and get things done.

If the candidate misrepresented their expertise, fire them.

If they aren't doing the work, fire them.

If they plain just aren't working out for other reasons, fire them! (after due dilligence).

I don't see why you have to bemoan your lack of due dilligence and instead blame it on something ludicrous like anyone with the camera off is doing this (when they aren't).

Lets call this plug what it is, you want to surveil your employees like a micro manager instead of actually doing due diligence (i.e. the job of hiring).

Seriously how hard is it to just fire someone that's a new-hire?

Its a new position, if it doesn't work out, hire someone else, and terminate the temporary contract with the appropriate legal clause and time periods.

Most work is an 'at will' position, so as an employer, if they lied, use that and 'fire at will'.

Excessively surveilling your employees while they do work only does one thing, and that's drop productivity through the floor. Not only that, it shows serious deficits in Upper Management, and any skilled/experienced candidates will walk away from positions with redflags like that.

You either want work to get done, or you just want to pretend that while doing something else.

What's your actual priority, making money and doing the job (due dilligence is part of that), or watching your employees work in minutia and spinning a narrative. You can't have both.

Hi OP, I'm sorry to hear about your experience there, and I appreciate you warning people.

I was not aware of their abuse policy when I was forced to move my services from another unprofessional provider. I had settled on Hetzner. I'm glad you said something.

Over the last few days I've reached out to them for further clarification on their policies, and over those (multiple) communications there were enough professional red flags that its become clear they can't be considered for any future hosting of production or professional services.

Initially, I was stonewalled with: --- Thank you for reaching out to us directly to clarify this matter.

In accordance with German law, we are not permitted to disclose internal information to third parties or to review or verify the content of any potential abuse reports. As a matter of fact, we neither can confirm nor deny what is described in that thread. We want to assure you that our abuse team handles cases with care and sets reasonable deadlines and measures based on the gravity of the allegation.

---

I asked about what processes and controls they have in place to prevent fraud, and the written policies and timetables, and they didn't appear to understand English well enough to answer, they thought I was talking about other common forms of abuse rather than fraud.

As a customer, they were unable to provide me with any kind of written policy, adversarial response schedule, or other controls commonly needed to mitigate fraud.

No details or specifics on their policies, other than what they refer to as 'reasonable' time tables based on the allegation which are not clarified further.

It appears they consider multiple complaints more severe regardless of the legitimacy of the claims which they don't appear to evaluate prior to shutdown, and their Abuse Team decides on a case-by-case basis what actions are to be taken, and the response times allowed.

As a result, it appears this provider has an unreasonable amount of counter-party risk associated with it. Any company could file a claim, and hold your business hostage (as OP described).

What's worse, if they suspend or terminate your account as a result without notice; any monitoring that might have alerted you so that you could respond more quickly would likely not function correctly and fail silently without a cross-platform investment.

The game of chess is dead and no longer holds any value.

Whether its on lichess.com or some other platform like chess.com, the guarantees no longer exist for there to be any value playing the game.

Specifically there is no longer a guarantee you are actually playing against another human, and cheating is largely not punished.

The vast majority of the time, and this depends entirely on whether its a weekend or not because its typically worse then (90-100% of the games), You won't be playing a human, you will be matched up against a bot, which may or may not have a human moving the pieces.

The platforms of course say they combat cheating, but in reality their efforts are ineffective, and that communication is entirely disingenuous if not intentionally deceitful or fabricated.

As of last weekend on average, a solid 70-80% of the sampled games were people using an engine to play for them.

Background, I'm rated around 1900-2000, have studied for decades, and my opening repertoire has been designed so there is a high deviation between engine supplied moves and known theory and strategy.

In most cases by move 17 there have been enough cumulative and unique moves to have shown whether they are using an engine. Specifically, there is no strategic plan for them but they choose engine supplied moves at various depths.

There are a number of branches where if it appears they are using an engine I may induce certain lines that are not obvious but may ultimately result in a loss to evaluate their responses.

Typically heavily technical and complex positions with no strategic theme for their side but multiple possible trees and tempo to account for with a winning advantage of 0.8-1 with perfect conversion, and when they ultimately convert perfectly (usually in seconds) around move 30 its pretty damn obvious to anyone what happened.

When there is no credibility between people that they will follow the rules. There is no point in playing the game.

You can only improve when playing against another person, if you are playing against a computer, there's no point, it is just a giant lookup table that's deep enough and accurate enough to memorize all possible moves, even down lines which haven't been documented. Winning is not making mistakes, and minor mistakes are what computers with perfect iterative evaluation capitalize on.

In these current circumstances there is no point, all a game of that nature provides is the person cheating is stealing your time, psychologically abusing you (and generally being deceitful), often because they themselves have a significant mental illness.

The ease of new anonymous accounts makes the pool of potential victims...games highly likely that if you follow the rules you are volunteering to be a victim for the sake of their illness. The only solution to such an environment is not to play.

The failure of the platforms and also the two main chess organizations to address this, only make this game defunct whether they want to admit it or not publicly (due to vested interests).

There is value in teaching certain problem solving patterns to developing minds, and as soon as that's done, chess can provide no further value.

Ultimately, the Computer scientists that developed and continue to develop chess engines have killed the game by making it meaningless and their actions have damaged the livelihood of those that choose that as a profession.

Why would anyone invest the time and resources today in becoming a GM when you can play better than a GM with an engine at your side with no prior experience.

Why would anyone buy products for chess that teach you how to play better to win (the right way) when an engine can win for do it for you and the majority of your opponents are just engines.

Lichess and Chess.com both like to say they do a lot to remove cheaters, and that's only a small part of the problem.

It comes down to time to detection, and time to re-entry.

If the first is large, and the second is small, water will fill the boat faster than you can bail it out and this has been a problem for decades.

AI won't magically solve the problem either, lichess already knows their siamese network can be thwarted with a minor tweak in inputs that are necessarily generated on the client. They chose to censor the discussion about it instead of correction, like that kind of discussion can't take place off their service by malicious actors, its just being an ostrich and burying the head in the sand.

Every security person knows not to trusts the client.