Giver of skulls

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Joined 101 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 1923

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  • Someone needs to curate and maintain the blocklist. Paying for software once is a surefire way to have it stop blocking anything a few years down the line because the company stopped updating their lists when the sales ran out.

    If you pay a set fee for something that requires continuous maintainance you’re either overpaying enough to compensate for cash flow interruptions or you’re at risk of the software being discontinued. The latter is especially true if you’re getting stuff for free, but in that case you’re also not entitled to any service.

    As for “why not block teamviewer at the router”: because then anydesk will still work. And if you block anydesk, Microsoft Remote Support will work. And if you block Microsoft Remote Support, RustDesk will work. And if you try to block every single RustDesk server, grandpa’s internet probably no longer works anymore, because you’ve just blocked off every data center in the world.


  • Impacted devices can perform a factory reset to recover functionality

    So it’s not bricking them, then? Stupid that they didn’t catch this in testing but the phone still works fine. These gross exaggerations are exactly why people aren’t paying for news anymore. I swear to god we’re five years away from people saying a single app crashing is bricking their phones.

    It sucks for those affected, but I’m amazed at how many people will lose decades of their lives and access to critical services like banks because their phone stops working. This time it was an update, next time it’s a gust of wind blowing your phone out of your hand. Recovering from a factory reset is a pain but if it costs more than an evening, you’re setting yourself up for a failure in the very near future…

    Side note, when have you last checked if you still have the 2FA recovery codes from your most important accounts? Maybe spend half an hour this weekend to make sure you can still access your bank accounts and email when your house burns down with your phone inside of it!




  • You’re not doing AJAX without Javascript, and that’s what the Google search site is optimised for. Plus, there’s no way to deal with the mandatory cookie consent popup without additional page loads either.

    You can do most of Google with CSS but you can’t do it easily without sacrificing functionality and Google doesn’t care about the people without Javascript anyway. Why invest time and effort into making this stuff work for customers that don’t earn you anything? It’s not an open source nonprofit that cares about its users, we’re talking about Google.



  • They need Javascript to serve users an experience that doesn’t look like it’s from the 90s. “You don’t need Javascript” is technically correct in the same way you don’t need Google because you can go look through an encyclopedia in the library.

    The kinds of people that disable Javascript probably don’t use Google anyway, and if they do, they’ll have their browsers so full of tracking protection that serving them costs more money than it earns.



  • That screenshot again proves that this person is extremely cringe, presumably a troll, but there’s still no threat. At worst that’s racism against Americans. Should obviously be removed by moderators from any normal online service that wants to encourage pleasant conversation, but that’s not necessarily illegal.

    As for the PDF, that’s not a legal definition by any kind, it’s a quick explainer for a law that only applies to hosting providers receiving complaints from European authorities. So yes, if the Belgian police sent a takedown notice regarding terroristic content then it does apply.

    However, that regulation is mere instruction to EU states to draft compliant laws. It’s not actionable legislation in itself (similar to the GDPR).

    The full text of the Regulation does include this instruction for EU countries, which I haven’t seen before:

    In order to provide clarity about the actions that both hosting service providers and competent authorities are to take to address the dissemination of terrorist content online, this Regulation should establish a definition of ‘terrorist content’ for preventative purposes, consistent with the definitions of relevant offences under Directive (EU) 2017/541 of the European Parliament and of the Council (6). Given the need to address the most harmful terrorist propaganda online, that definition should cover material that incites or solicits someone to commit, or to contribute to the commission of, terrorist offences, solicits someone to participate in activities of a terrorist group, or glorifies terrorist activities including by disseminating material depicting a terrorist attack. The definition should also include material that provides instruction on the making or use of explosives, firearms or other weapons or noxious or hazardous substances, as well as chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) substances, or on other specific methods or techniques, including the selection of targets, for the purpose of committing or contributing to the commission of terrorist offences. Such material includes text, images, sound recordings and videos, as well as live transmissions of terrorist offences, that cause a danger of further such offences being committed. When assessing whether material constitutes terrorist content within the meaning of this Regulation, competent authorities and hosting service providers should take into account factors such as the nature and wording of statements, the context in which the statements were made and their potential to lead to harmful consequences in respect of the security and safety of persons. The fact that the material was produced by, is attributable to or is disseminated on behalf of a person, group or entity included in the Union list of persons, groups and entities involved in terrorist acts and subject to restrictive measures should constitute an important factor in the assessment.

    However, the Regulation also refers to human rights such as freedom of expression. One can be of the opinion that it’s better for the USA to stop existing without any plans or support for actual genocide. Someone expressing hate for your country isn’t immediately a terrorist.


  • Do you have a copy of the actual threat? Because “you are a settler” is stupid but not an actual threat.

    I don’t know where you got that picture from, I can’t find the legal definition for a terroristic threat within the EU. The best I could find is:

    For the purposes of this Convention, “public provocation to commit a terorist offence” means the distribution, or otherwise making available, of a message to the public, with the intent to incite the commission of a terrorist offence, where such conduct, whether or not directly committed.

    That’s just a convention, though, not direct law. The definition by the convention does require proof of intent, which I haven’t found about the cringe hexbear user.






  • Arbitration court with one person is a win for the company. Arbitration court with a thousand people is a massive loss for the company. That’s why these arbitration clauses aren’t always bad. If anything, for small cases they’re good for the people because the bulk of the legal charges are paid by the companies that write these clauses.

    A bunch of large companies went through a phase where they all went for arbitration clauses, and a bunch of them moved back quickly after they found out how much more expensive paying for ten thousand arbitration cases was compared to just one single class action lawsuit. Maintaining ten thousand legally binding, individually composed outcomes can haunt them for decades if they’re unlucky.

    Steam has learned the same lesson here.



  • Bad chargers, clearly damaged devices that are still used, you name it. Several exploding iPhone stories turned out to be the result of cheap, shitty chargers. Anything with a lithium battery can light on fire or even explode if you handle it wrong.

    There’s a good chance that Samsung should still be made to pay up for the damages and compensation, but I’ve seen people do very stupid things to portable electronics containing batteries.

    Based on the pictures, the earphone looks like it was on fire on both sides. That’s not a literal explosion at least (there’d be more than just hearing damage if it were). My guess is the lithium battery got damaged somehow and the escaping hydrogen gas caught fire One reason not to use earphones that have batteries inside your ear; had the batteries been hanging from the bottom like those Apple ones, the hearing damage probably wouldn’t have been as bad.