I’m just waiting for someone to lecture me how the speed record in wheelchair sprint beats feet’s ass…

OCI

They do. Reality is not going to change though. You can enable a handicapped developer to code with LLMs, but you can’t win a foot race by using a wheelchair.

In short, untreated mental illness

Right. And then they locate it and search the rooms nearby. Exactly what their disclaimer is about

Just FYI, you need very little skill to clone the WiFi access gateway of a hotel WiFi, and then blast their SSID from your router, to lure close guests into your honeypot. Once people are on your malicious gateway, the fun starts.

In a hotel with hundreds of hackers on alcohol, it’s not unlikely for people to fuck around.

There is also no requirement to be a “good guy” to attend the conference.

Telegram is not just IM. Open the search and search for channels. Get creative, they have keyword filters. City name is always a good start. Check the channels with ❄️ and 🍄 emojis. This is where people are scammed for drugs. Maybe sometimes not scams.

A lot happens on Telegram, and it’s right behind that little search icon.

Reddit is free. Other people paying for your free service is a very weak argument to bring up. If Lemmy dies today, nobody but hobbyists and amateurs will care. Just like with LE.

I’ve been there. Not every CA is equal. Those kind of CAs were shit. LE is convenient. There are more options though.

I actually agree. For the majority of sites and/or use cases, it probably is sufficient.

Explaining properly why LE is generally problematic, takes considerable depth of information, that I’m just not able to relay easily right now. But consider this:

LE is mostly a convenience. They save an operator $1 per month per certificate. For everyone with hosting costs beyond $1000, this is laughable savings. People who take TLS seriously often have more demands than “padlock in the browser UI”. If a free service decides they no longer want to use OCSP, that’s an annoying disruption that was entirely not worth the $1 https://www.abetterinternet.org/post/replacing-ocsp-with-crls/

LE has no SLA. You have no guarantee to be able to ever renew your certificate again. A risk not anyone should take.

Who is paying for LE? If you’re not paying, how can you rely on the service to exist tomorrow?

It’s not too long ago that people said “only some sites need HTTPS, HTTP is fine for most”. It never was, and people should not build anything relevant on “free” security today either.

People who have actually relevant use cases with the need for a reliable partner would never use LE. It’s a gimmick for hobbyists and people who suck at their job.

If you have never revoked a certificate, you don’t really know what you’re doing. If you have never run into rate-limiting issues with LE that block a rollout, you don’t know what you’re doing.

LE works until it doesn’t, and then it’s like every other free service on the internet: no guarantees If your setup relies on the goodwill of a single entity handing out shit for free, it’s not a robust setup. If you rely on that entity to keep an OCSP responder alive for free so all your consumers can verify the validity of your certificate, that’s not great. And people do this to save their company $1 a month for the real thing? Even running the shitty certbot in compute has a larger cost. People are so blindly in love with this “free” garbage. The fanboys will never die off

the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day,

Gotcha. Millions of harmful posts every day. That really does sound like a great place.

https://discord.com/terms#5 is pretty permissive

Your content is yours, but you give us a license to it when you use Discord. Your content may be protected by certain intellectual property rights. We don’t own those. But by using our services, you grant us a license—which is a form of permission—to do the following with your content, in accordance with applicable legal requirements, in connection with operating, developing, and improving our services:

Use, copy, store, distribute, and communicate your content in manners consistent with your use of the services. (For example, so we can store and display your content.)
Publish, publicly perform, or publicly display your content if you’ve chosen to make it visible to others. (For example, so we can display your messages if you post them in certain servers or recommend that content to others.)
Monitor, modify, translate, and reformat your content. (For example, so we can resize an image you post to fit on a mobile device.)
Sublicense your content, to allow our services to work as intended. (For example, so we can store your content with our cloud service providers.)

I get that, I really do, and I honestly believe you have exactly the right idea.

But on the other hand, you have to realize that not all of the money purely goes to enabling knowledge sharing with Wikimedia. This is not an election, it’s a company, non-profit or for-profit doesn’t really matter. There are still people paying off business expenses from your donations.

I fully understand the necessity of this, but you might just feel better if your $5 literally bought someone a meal or if it paid for a fraction of a business flight to promote Wikimedia.

I do give in small streams and I do large annual contributions. I’m entirely not opposed to sharing.

I prefer to keep the small donations to individuals who also prefer a reliable stream of goodwill. Larger organizations also prefer reliable streams, but they also receive millions in donations overall, usually with significant large donors.

If you look long enough, you’ll find enough material to not want to contribute to Wikimedia. If your contribution was only a drop in the pool to begin with, maybe this is one of the expenses that is not for you to carry.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goes/ might be a good starting point.

https://www.wikimedia.de/2022/en/finances/ has some clear numbers up front, but I’m not sure if these only relate to Germany. I haven’t been following the sources recently.

They increased to 25 to encourage media uploads to train their own models with. They now have collected enough metrics to realize, most valuable content is below 10MB. Now they are optimizing. They won’t lose anything valuable to them and the users who are impacted might even buy Nitro now. Win-win for them

Makes sense. If you’re contributing less than $1000 monthly to anything, you’re not making a difference. If you want dedicated people to be on the receiving end, who also do a great job, every single person will cost thousands each month. Wikimedia is literally spending millions each year.

Honestly, don’t try to hunt for the “best” spot to contribute your exact amount of spare money to, with the hope of having the largest possible impact. It won’t happen. Treat a good friend to some food instead.

If you really feel like you already got some value out of a service in the past, give what you can, without limiting yourself financially in the process. If you feel like you don’t have the $1 to spend for Wikipedia, don’t spend it. Don’t guilt trip yourself into donations ever. Your donation today will not prevent a service from turning into shit tomorrow. Pay for what you got

I’ve been a funding member of the Wikimedia Foundation for over a decade. I have looked at their finances several times before and during financing them.

As with a lot of similar non-profits, a considerable amount of donations does not go into “running the servers”. You have to judge this by yourself, but they don’t embezzle any money and there is a reasonable bottom line. Wikipedia continuously helps tons of people, and the people who run the operation enable that.

You can download a full dump of Wikipedia any day. Compared to other lying companies, they have been true on their promises for some time.

Of all the $1 I could spend in a year, the one I give to Wikipedia is probably the least wrong invested, and that $1 actually already makes a difference

I’d be more worried about media than the ability to pirate it.

Music has adapted to generate plays. Platforms are already being polluted with genAI music.

TV was replaced by streaming services. Series come and go and are very specifically tailored to get people to subscribe. Exclusives are the standard. Single season productions are not uncommon. People are also already investigating ways to pollute this pool with genAI as well.

Movies are a stream of Marvel and Disney garbage that was already more CGI than acting. Now genAI and upscaled classics are on the menu.

Piracy will not go away. People used to record movies with camcorders in the cinema, now they pull raw files from CDN nodes. There is always the scene. The platforms that try to profit from the scene come and go.