Melody Fwygon

  • 7 Posts
  • 166 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • So we have:

    • Ad Blockers
    • ‘Ad Blocker’ blockers
    • ‘‘Ad blocker’ blocker’ blockers
    • ‘’‘Ad Blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blockers
    • ‘’‘‘Ad Blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blockers
    • ‘’‘’‘Ad Blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blockers’ blockers; and finally;
    • ‘’‘’‘‘Ad Blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blockers’ blocker’ blockers; with;
    • ‘’‘’‘’‘Ad Blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blockers’ blocker’ blocker’ blockers

    in development.




  • I mostly agree here.

    Although; I have a slightly different experience as well that makes me highly distrustful of people who tout being ‘sapphic’ as well; as I’ve seen quite a few people who identify with that label participating in the same kinds of toxic and exclusionary behavior that the self labeled ‘lesbians’ that are referenced in this article are participating in.

    In general; excluding members of the rainbow who are less numerous than our identity group is; is in fact punching down on them and is not cool. If you bear any label in the whole spectrum; you should at least try to know better, and reject exclusionary behavior.

    Of course people will be exclusionary to the extent they can get away with it. Don’t let them get away with it when you see it. Call it out and educate them kindly if possible; especially those who should know better.

    As someone who is as deeply queer as she is transfeminine; I do experience some strange bouts of gatekeeping; especially around people who think I am inherently less feminine than they would prefer.



  • This actually doesn’t surprise me. Valve is getting greedy.

    But; to be clear; by using these tools, to unlock the DLC without paying for it, you are cheating in the game. That’s a mere fact; and not a moral judgement of anyone choosing to do so.

    Personally, I don’t judge anyone for doing so; and would use these tools myself if I thought a DLC were too predatory, expensive or otherwise unfair to not have it available.

    That’s not saying it’s fair or right for Valve to do so; nor is it saying the VAC bans or account suspensions are deserved. If you get hit by this; you absolutely should pirate every title you already own/purchased via Steam right away, and pirate anything else you want in the future.

    The only way to make them regret doing things like this is voting with your wallet; and asking others to do the same. Stop spending money on Valve. Once their earnings fall they’ll be forced to hear people’s concerns.



  • In Short, No.

    The Xperia phones are often horrendously locked down and don’t provide bootloader unlocks all the time.

    I would definitely recommend a Pixel device if you’re going to go De-Googling. That, or go select your desired ROM beforehand and buy whatever they support the best. You can find out if you look into Graphene or Calyx or Lineage as examples for which devices they support the best right now. Buy it unlocked, and unlock your bootloader.


  • I have a /48 that I can basically roll through.

    A /64 is more than enough though to prevent most casual attempts at entry; and does force more work / enumeration to be done to break into a network and do damage with. I’m not saying the privacy extensions are the greatest; but they do work to slightly increase the difficulty of tracking and exploitation.

    With a /48 or even a /56; I can subdivide things and hand out several /64s to each device too; which would shake up things if tracking expects a /64 explicitly.

    I actually use /55s to cordon off blocks inside the /48 that aren’t used too. So dialing a random prefix won’t help. You’d be surprised how often I get intrusive portsweeps trying to enumerate my /64s this way…and it doesn’t work because I’m not subnetting on any standard behavior.



  • I run both because of this; and because SLAAC enables features in Desktop OSes that offer some level of additional privacy.

    For example; Windows can do “Temporary IPv6 Addressing” that it will hand out to various applications and browsers. That IPv6 address rotates on a periodic basis; once every 24 hours by default; and can be configured to behave differently depending on your needs via registry keys.

    This could for example, allow you to quickly spin up a small application server for something; like a gaming session; and let you use/bind that IPv6 address for it. Once the application stops using it and the time period has elapsed; Windows drops the IP address and statelessly configures itself a new one.


  • What happens is what’s intended.

    Everyone is going to do it; and it will cause companies, artists and creatives to step back and rethink a bit on how they monetize their creations responsibly. The ones that refuse to rethink and adapt will fail and flounder under the tiny handful of straw that Piracy adds to the load.

    That’s a GOOD thing.

    What’s unfortunate is that companies and people still think it’s productive to worry and handwring over piracy as if it’s killing someone; instead of being the thing you “don’t fly too close to, lest your wax wings get melted off and you plummet to the ground.”




  • You can automate this; but you have to make sure that the automation you create is going to respect the ratelimits. I’d recommend something simple like using a command alias or short script written for your specific IRC client.

    It’s what I used to do with that sort of thing; and there are plenty of well known Open Source scripts in the wild as well

    As an example; I would use mIRC with it’s scripting system and write my own event trigger scripts to automatically request, wait for and then accept the DCC chat requests and route them appropriately in the interface. There were also scripts that helped with getting the lists; unpacking them, and displaying those lists in my client…so I didn’t have to extract the text from the zip myself, and could select what I needed from the bot.

    All of this was lightweight automation that was intended not to flood the bot with commands and fed into command queueing modules that let the bots have time to process.

    Sometimes in those days you could get actually (+b)anned, Auto/KILL’ed or /(G/K):LINE’ed for causing a bot to crash…so you had to be careful and respectful with regard to scripts.

    TL;DR; know your bot, source channel & network rules, and write your own scripts for safety or read any scripts you import in carefully and understand what they’re doing.



  • While this feed issue is manageable if you Pause Your Watch History and Clear Your Watch History before doing so; it does disable a lot of suggestions.

    Unfortunately Google and YouTube do not make these options easy to find and they are quick to nag you about turning them back on; and You Must Refuse This and ignore the errors and whines at every prompt for a while before they leave you alone.

    So by it’s very nature NewPipe completely defuses this garbage by simply being a much saner front-end than using the “Native” YouTube apps ever were.

    You know I think YouTube might start learning their lesson if more and more people began refusing to use their scummy front-end more than strictly necessary. Unfortunately they’re going to go through the usual stages of grief while doing so and they absolutely are currently trying to attack apps like GrayJay and NewPipe with spurious lawsuits.

    So instead; maybe those of you who “Pay” for YouTube Premium should simply cancel your service and start donating that amount to projects like NewPipe, when that is possible. (Yes I know Team NewPipe will not accept donations for legal reasons, but similar projects do exist, like FreeTube or Invidious, that can and do accept donations to cover costs for server hosted things in their developments.)



  • Unsurprisingly, Brave will try to profit from privacy seeking users…I hope their company dies a horrible financial death.

    I’ve always disliked Brave for their carelessness in pursuing their business needs, adding stupid things like worthless crypto to try to buy out the advertisers and selling out their search indexing to the highest bidder.

    Instead of just going the meta-search route by indexing by themselves; spreading out queries to multiple services; caching results; and just providing the results to users privately like a real company offering privacy would; they just gave up and let Bing do all of it.

    They could’ve even negotiated their API usage and allowed for relevant ‘in-result list ads’ that were clearly marked as Ads without compromising the privacy of their search services to help defray costs of hitting the APIs of bigger players like Google, Yahoo or Bing and allowing advertisements relevant to queries to flow without compromising on user’s privacy or letting big advertisers know who’s searching what.

    Additionally Brave has done a number of other shady things that on the surface might be advertised as helping your privacy; but really isn’t. In my opinion they should have hard-abandoned Chromium over Manifest v3 and rebased onto Firefox to keep their browser from becoming less privacy respecting overall.