Pew pew pew

Everything Wordpress is heavily infested with that. However you don’t have to let it impact you – it kind of looks to me like they pressure commercial vendors to put their stuff under the GPL if they’re wanting to offer a free version, so there’s a robust ecosystem of actually-FOSS tooling for it. My experience has been that it’s always worked pretty well in practice; you just have to keep your nope-I’m-not-paying-for-your-paid-version goggles firmly affixed. (Also, side note, GPT does an excellent job of writing little functions.php snippets for you to enable particular custom functionality for your Wordpress install when you need it.)

Wordpress 1,000% (probably coupled with WooCommerce but there are probably some other options)

I honestly don’t even know off the top of my head why you would use anything else (aside from some vague elitism connected to the large ecosystem of commercial crap which has tainted by association the open source core of it) – it combines FOSS + easy + powerful + popular. You will have to tiptoe around some amount of crapware in order to keep it pure OSS though.

Yep.

There are two big end-user security decisions that are totally mystifying to me about Lemmy. One is automatically embedding images in comments without rehosting the images, and the other is failing to warn people that their upvotes and downvotes are not actually private.

I’m not trying to sit in judgement of someone who’s writing free software but to me those are both negligent software design from an end-user privacy perspective.

Of note about this is that image links in comments aren’t rehosted by Lemmy. That means it would be possible to flood a community with images hosted by a friendly or compromised server, and gather a lot of information about who was reading that community (how many people, and all their IP address and browser fingerprint information, to start with) by what image requests were coming in kicked off by people seeing your spam.

I didn’t look at the image spam in detail, but if I’m remembering right the little bit of it I looked at, it had images hosted by lemmygrad.ml (which makes sense) and czchan.org (which makes less sense). It could be that after uploading the first two images to Lemmygrad they realized they could just type the Markdown for the original hosting source for the remaining three, of course.

It would also be possible to use this type of flood posting as a smokescreen for a more targeted plan of sending malware-infected images, or more specifically targeted let’s-track-who-requests-this-image-file images, to a more limited set of recipients.

Just my paranoid thoughts on the situation.

I have no real idea with Navalnvy, and only dim memories of news reports about Magnitsky which went into a little more detail, but I’ll tell you how I assume it operates: It’s basically mistreatment to the point that it’ll kill you, just slowly. Your cell’s cold all the time, in the arctic winter with no blankets. You get bad food and bad sleep and beatings and no medical care of any kind. Once your body starts to malfunction (Magnitsky started having kidney failure), they go on beating you severely enough to cause additional organ damage, but then just continue to put you in your cell day after day with no medicine. Basically, you’re going to die, but they’re drawing the process out enough that it’s indirectly, because of “medical issues” related to what they’re doing to you, instead of just from blunt force trauma or something. So it’s incredibly painful and long and drawn-out, a slow death of constant suffering from which you can’t escape or get any relief.

Not a map, but things I’ve seen on the roads in Boston:

• Left turn only from left lane, straight or left from 2nd lane, straight or left from 3rd lane
• Green light and perpendicular traffic coming to me on the cross street, also going, because they also have a green light
• Two lanes, surprise! Lane markers go away it’s one lane, not defined who yields, you guys can work it out

I don’t even know about that, because instead of the article I got my App Store opened up demanding that I install Phantom Surfer Browser to protect me from viruses.

Not since late last year they’re not. They spent early 2023 winning back the north of the country, then had a summer counteroffensive which captured essentially 0 of the East, then over winter they got nothing in terms of the ammunition and weapons aid they’d need to have to fight against an opponent which can outproduce them 20:1. They’re now desperately trying to hold the front line even though after 3 months of nothing they’re basically out of ammunition.

The big aid packages out of the US and EU are stalled apparently indefinitely. There’s that little package from the UK which hopefully will help a little, but unless the GOP stops being compromised by Russia sometime soon, it seems like they might be in real trouble.

Removed by mod

Surely all the people who wanted Nazis off Substack will also celebrate the ban on the Hamas flag

Oh wait, the Israeli government is very clearly promoting a violent ideology as well… we need to… outlaw the Israeli flag?

Oh wait

Hang on

Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:121.0) Gecko/121.0 Firefox/121.0.

I just did a bunch of testing. The issue is that final version number, “Firefox/121.0”. Google returns very different versions of the page based on what browser you claim to be, and if you’re on mobile Firefox, it gives you different mobile versions depending on your version:

% wget -O - -nv -U 'Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:62.0) Gecko/121.0 Firefox/41.0' https://www.google.com/ | wc -c
2024-01-08 15:54:29 URL:https://www.google.com/ [1985] -> "-" [1]
    1985
% wget -O - -nv -U 'Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:62.0) Gecko/121.0 Firefox/62.0' https://www.google.com/ | wc -c
2024-01-08 15:54:36 URL:https://www.google.com/ [211455] -> "-" [1]
  211455
% wget -O - -nv -U 'Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:62.0) Gecko/121.0 Firefox/80.0' https://www.google.com/ | wc -c
2024-01-08 15:52:24 URL:https://www.google.com/ [15] -> "-" [1]
      15
% wget -O - -nv -U 'Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile; rv:62.0) Gecko/121.0 Firefox/121.0' https://www.google.com/ | wc -c
2024-01-08 15:52:04 URL:https://www.google.com/ [15] -> "-" [1]
      15

If you’re an early version of Firefox, it gives you a simple page. If you’re a later version of Firefox, it gives you a lot more complete version of the page. If you’re claiming to be a specific version of mobile Firefox, but the version you’re claiming (edit: oopsie doesn’t exist or even really make sense didn’t exist when they set this logic up or something), it gets confused and gives you nothing. You could argue that it should default to some sensible mobile version in this case, and they should definitely fix it, but it seems to me like it’s clearly not malicious.

Edit: Wait, I am wrong. I didn’t realize Firefox’s version numbers went up so high. It looks like the cutoff for where the blank pages start coming is at version 65, which is like 2012 era, so not real old at all. I still maintain that it’s probably accidental but it looks like it affects basically all modern mobile Firefoxes, yes.

What’s the user-agent? I’m curious now.

Is this still true? I just tested and it works for me on LibreWolf, both for google.com and google.com.br.

Honestly, Google doing this as a deliberate anti-Firefox measure seems so wildly stupid and counterproductive on their part that I’d assume it was some failure (serving a slightly different version of the page to Chrome as for other browsers, and the non-Chrome side breaks for some reason) before thinking it was malicious.

If someone learns something bad about you, and your first reaction is not “this is why it’s not true” but “how did you find that out, we must punish the person who told you,” you might be a violent POS.

Yeah. To me it seems transparently obvious that at least some of the applications of AI will continue to change the world - maybe in a big way - after the bust that will inevitably happen to the AI-adjacent business side after the current boom. I agree with Doctorow on everything he’s saying about the business side, but that’s not the only side and it’s a little weird that he’s focusing exclusively on that aspect. But what the hell, he’s smart and I hadn’t seen this particular business-side perspective before.

Hollow Knight

Top notch

(Eh, fuck it, I already spent this much time on it. Part 2:)

But the point is it wouldnt be better than a “substack without nazis”. Like not every board on 4 chan is overrun with nazis, not every section of twitter is controlled by chuds. There are "good’ parts to each website, just like substack. But if they removed nazis from their site entirely then all 3 would only get better.

Then can you name a single website or hell even a physical publication or space or anything of the sort that went from “Nazis arent tolerated” to “Nazis are tolerated” and actually got better? That helped people de-radicalise instead of just serving Nazi propaganda, giving them money and helping them recruit?

Pretty much any forum that includes Nazis will get worse as a result, yes. Absolutely 100%. That’s why I wouldn’t ever “force” a forum operator to include Nazis if they don’t want to. But:

Like your core argument is that its better to let them shout their propaganda as it will actually hinder them right?

Yes. Absolutely yes. With a caveat but mainly, yes.

Nazi ideology is abhorrent. Most people hate it. Most people, if they find out it’s going on in their community, are going to be fucking disgusted, and curious to know more about where the fuck is this even coming from. I absolutely think that Nazis feeling like they can be open about being Nazis is way better than keeping secretive and doing the same shit they would be doing, just without associating in the public sphere. I’d be happy to check with experts on extremism to make sure that they feel the same, if you’re open to hearing it.

Basically, if a forum is open to signing up to be the lightning-rod of bad faith they’re going to get from the Nazis, and abuse they’re going to get from the wider community, and degradation their forum is going to suffer as a result, in order to let the Nazis into the public sphere so that people can see for real what’s going on, and talk back to the Nazis directly instead of having all the Nazi-to-Nazi communication go on in some other place that the public isn’t privy to, I think that’s a good thing. 100%. I think that’s going to hurt the Nazis. Again, I’d be happy to check with experts on extremism to make sure that they feel the same, if you’re open to hearing it.

The caveat: That doesn’t mean I’m naive about the danger of letting these ideologies have a good foothold in society. You said “let them shout their propaganda”… I think combating Nazi propaganda is an important thing to do, yes. I think putting Nazis out of business or in prison because of their crime is fuckin’ fantastic.

I think it’s extremely important to combat Nazi propaganda when it comes in more subtle form, pipelines, engineered disinformation, or things without Swastikas (your TPUSAs and your Patriot Fronts). Those, to me, are much more dangerous than Substack blogs with swastikas. That’s a different thing from kicking the swastikas off Substack though.

Im non binary, and have many trans friends. People used to not give a shit until the right organised together to hate us. Now because of your glorious free speech they have been given a pass to be awful disgusting human being and spread their hate and ive lost 3 friends in 5 years to suicide because of it, because of things you think should be not only protected by law, but actively given a platform, advertised and monetised by companies like sub stack.

I am sorry for your loss. I’ve lost a friend to suicide. It sucked.

Is the lives of those people a good trade for you?

I want to talk to you about this, because I take it pretty seriously and obviously the rise of hatred on the internet is a huge problem.

I’m a little hesitant to say more because I don’t want to sound like I’m probing for information about something so personal or using it to “debate” with you. That’s honestly not my goal here. If you’re open to talk more I can tell you what I think would be a good ways to actually reduce hatred on the internet. I’m going to say this with all the kindness in the world: Kicking the Nazi blogs off Substack isn’t going to do shit. Not in the sense of “too small but any little bit is helpful.” In the sense of “counterproductive, putting you and your friends in more danger.”

Tell you what – if you’re comfortable, explain it to me. What type of hatred has directly impacted you, what needs to happen to fix things in your view. Any level of detail that you’re comfortable with, if at all. My goal is more just to explain myself and hear you out as opposed to “debate,” so let me hear you out.

(Edit: Reframing it so we’re talking about “hatred against trans people on 4chan” and what to do about it instead of “Nazi philosophy on Substack” and what to do about it makes a lot of what you’re saying and how you’re reacting make more sense. Nazis are going to be pretty rare, although they’re out there. Anti-trans people are in the modern climate everywhere. That’s why I’m asking more directly for the root of what you’re talking about.)

are you just going to ignore this question like ignored all the other questions that would have uncomfortable answers for you?

Which questions didn’t I answer? I’ll address anything you want to ask me if I missed any questions before or anything.

I don’t feel the same way about murder.

Why though?

I feel like you may be wanting to “debate” this, like until one of us “wins,” which isn’t my goal here. But if what I wrote before wasn’t a good enough explanation to understand my point of view, here goes:

I don’t feel the same way about murder because humans don’t naturally tend to murder each other. It does happen in certain circumstances, but there’s actually a massive resistance to it internally. Militaries have to do careful psychological training to make sure people are ready to kill because there’s so much resistance. Most people tell each other what they think at least once a day, and communication networks for formally sharing each other’s opinions get a lot of use. Most people go their whole lives without murdering one another other. Even in societies with permitted circumstances where people can kill each other and it’s fine, it’s a pretty rare thing.

In conclusion, using a communication network to share your ideas is a fairly natural thing. More so than murder.

Does that answer the question? Again, you don’t have to agree with me on this point of view, but it’s honestly a little hard for me to believe that my explanation wasn’t a coherent explanation of what I think. If you’re using “why” as code for “I want to argue, say something to ‘prove’ your side and convince me, let’s keep going back and forth about it,” I would prefer not to.

The Nazis were allowed to hold rallies and publish newspapers in Germany too. Thats how they became so powerful, and how they became powerful in the US too, that is until the bombing of pearl harbour and the government raiding the headquarters of The German American Bund and arresting their leaders. After which American Nazi’s lost all their influence. funny that. And then they’ve never been able to gain power in any country that has taken a strong stance against them. And you can use communism as an example too, communists were never able to gain influence in the west and especially America, despite how popular the idea was because of the active effort that went into stopping them.

I think we may just not be able to see eye to eye on this.

• The German American Bund was prosecuted for breaking the law. Not for being Nazis, although I’m sure that the realpolitik of them getting extra heat because they were Nazis was a huge factor. We were mid World War 2 when this was happening.
• Before and during (!) the war, they were “allowed” to operate, only prosecuted if they broke other unrelated laws, which they seemed to be doing.
• … as are modern neo-Nazi organizations.

(Side note, if that Wikipedia article is to be believed, the Black Panthers got treated way worse than the Bund. No one assassinated any Bund leaders like they did Fred Hampton, at least according to the article.)

Do you agree with what I just wrote so far? Agree that those three bullet points are factually accurate, at least? I feel like there’s so much gulf between how we see these events that it’s gonna be tough to find any type of common ground here.

Well I wouldnt know any off the top of my head, but a quick google shows plenty of results

https://news.sky.com/story/warwick-students-expelled-and-fined-after-racist-messages-11402539#:~:text=The Midlands university expels three,declaring love for Adolf Hitler.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/11/23/a-self-proclaimed-nazi-is-banned-from-his-college-campus-in-florida-but-allowed-to-remain-a-student/

(Edit: Ken Parker wasn’t expelled. He was still allowed to attend online classes, and presumably to speak in those classes and all. They just kicked him off campus because of physical safety concerns, which sounds pretty fucking justified)

Those people are being expelled because of a wide variety of stuff, including Naziism, but also posting favorably about rape, holding assault rifles and saying he’ll “shut down” other students, a lot more than just “being Nazis.” It sounds like they were expelled for things I’m fully in favor of expelling people for. I’m talking about someone like Richard Spenser – who says Nazi things but only rarely commits actual physical crimes (although often enough to put himself in trouble).

It looks from a quick search like there are multiple universities that have invited him to speak, so it’d be surprising if any student who emulated him was instantly expelled right after they invited him to speak. Do you have an example of something like that?

and again to use communism as a counter example, universities are where many people become socialist/communist because the organise there and can get the word out. If Nazis were allowed to do the same you would have much higher rates of kids becoming nazis.

I think we are simply too far apart in how we see the world to have this conversation. I’m getting sort of echoes of religious people who say “But if God isn’t there to punish you what’s to stop you doing rape and murder?”

Most people in my circle of people I know consider themselves “allowed” to start to follow Nazi ideology, if they want to. 0% of them do it because they’re not fucking psychopaths (or even if they are, not to that level). In college, it was the same. Communism as an ideology (the Karl Marx version at least) doesn’t involve exterminating any inferior races, so people are more into it. You really believe that if people were “allowed” to be Nazis, a lot of them would? The only reason communism gets more followers is communists are “allowed” and Nazis are not?

Let me ask you a 100% sincere question. Who is it that should decide what is “allowed” and not? The university administration? State or federal government? Student organization threatening boycotts if people start to “allow” the wrong types of ideologies? Who?

(Spent too much time on this, I’ll write up a part 2 that includes replies to the rest of your message later on.)

This sub-thread is very long and I’m starting to lose focus. I don’t think we agree on everything, but I appreciate that you’ve been civil.

Haha yeah, all good. I enjoyed it, thank you as well. I’ll wrap up my thoughts if you don’t want to go back and forth indefinitely.

Why do you find people using their limited economic power coercive? You say you like boycotts. Telling Tide that you saw their advertisement on a nazi blog so you’re not going to buy Tide until that’s remedied is a boycott.

It comes down to the goal of the boycott. A boycott to stop someone polluting or abusing human rights, I’m down for. A boycott because some comedian said something someone doesn’t like and they want to “deplatform” him, I’m against. A boycott because Substack allows Nazis, and you’re trying to get third parties to punish Substack to make them stop, I also don’t like.

Somewhat related, I think it’s great to attack Nazis directly. Something like this where you’re crippling them because they broke the law and hurt people, I’m very in favor of. I don’t like Nazis any more than anyone else does. I just think it has to be based on behavior rather than speech. Letting them speak, but not letting them hurt people, I think is going to hinder their cause a lot more than it helps it.

their “Holocaust is a lie check out these posts [nazi propaganda link 1, 2, 3]” post up is a hazard

Okay, here’s the crux:

I don’t think that post is a hazard.

I think having an exchange of ideas which includes dangerous ones, even very dangerous ones, alongside the truth, is a good thing. I think trying to get rid of “dangerous” ideas by banning people from talking about them does more harm than good. I think declaring that no one is allowed to say the holocaust is a lie is a hazard. I think it helps the Nazis to make that rule. I think the people who want to ban Nazis are, unintentionally, helping the Nazis quite a lot. People are talking to me in this subthread like I’m being soft on the Nazis and Nazis are terrible, but I think letting them say what they think, having everyone see it, and having other people free to illustrate why they’re wrong, is way harder on the Nazis than forcing them off somewhere where they can congregate in peace and no one can see them.

You might not agree, but that’s how I see it.

There are some points of view that are so hashed out, it is unlikely to be worth our time to debate them again. Nazi ideology, for example, was pretty firmly settled as bad. The forum I mentioned before had a clear “We are not going to debate if gay people have rights” rule. Someone might want to make an argument that they don’t, but the belief that they do is so axiomatic for the locale it’s not worth entertaining the “debate”.

So we disagree on this point. I don’t see any good coming from platforming holocaust deniers or homophobes or whatever. If I’m running a bar, I don’t need to let the nazis have their meetup in the back booth.

I’ve also never run a forum. I expect there’s a big “for me it was tuesday” experience. For the guy who wants to debate if queer couples really need to get married, it’s the first time he’s ever waded into this topic. For the moderation team, it’s tuesday, and the fourth time this has come up this week. I expect dealing with the worst sorts of people would take the shine off anyone’s idealism.

Yeah, I get this. I wouldn’t try to tell anyone running a forum that they have to entertain this type of debate, because it’s incredibly draining and may not fit the goal of the forum and may obscure the actual goal of the forum. I get all that and I wouldn’t try to tell you to run your forum any other way.

The thing is though, that “for me it was Tuesday” thing cuts both ways. You may have had this discussion a thousand times already, but for the guy that came in, it may be his very first time being exposed to certain things. I think a lot of religious people have this type of experience when they start talking with athiest people on the internet, and they may be coming from a pretty ignorant place when they start out. I had this type of experience as far as geopolitics and who the “good guys” are. And, I’ve heard a former white supremacist talking about having his awakening moment and leaving the KKK because of it.

The “talk.origins” newgroup on Usenet was this. It was a place to debate evolution versus creationism. Is that a pretty firmly settled question? Yes. Absolutely it is. Honestly, more so than gay rights (although gay rights is also settled, to me.) And yet, somehow, there are people in the world who don’t agree. A lot of them argue in bad faith, a lot of them are tedious or ignorant, there’s a ton of ground that gets covered over and over and over again. But is that a useful thing to have exist? Ab so fuckin lutely.

Does that mean that every 4chan troll arguing about the holocaust in bad faith, who’s never going to change his mind, deserves your time and attention? On a forum that’s not for that? Fuck no. I actually think that deliberate engineered misinformation, and the toxic and mind-change-resistant culture of debate on the modern internet, argues for a radical rethinking of what’s a sensible way to approach “an open exchange of communication” so that it doesn’t wind up as just the Nazis being able to spew hatred in places it doesn’t belong, and public forums being soft fertile ground for disinformation pipelines. I’ve also debated with enough closed minded people on the internet that I’m not naive about what the result of engaging with Nazis in an earnest debate is likely to be. But, a lot of the creationists on talk.origins were just as bad-faith about their conduct as modern 4chan trolls.

Hopefully that makes sense. I just don’t think that the answer is that as soon as someone says one ignorant thing about, for example, gay rights, they’re stripped of their ability to continue the conversation. Because if no one is ever willing to talk with them about it except other gay-bashers, how would you expect they would ever change their mind about it?