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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I would say to install the free Adguard DNS configuration profile, but only iOS has the capability of installing DNS configuration profiles. For Android you would need the paid app to do the same thing.

    With that said, on Apple devices the config profile - a cryptographically signed internal proxy for all DNS requests, including any made directly by software where they bypass the system’s DNS - works absolutely spectacularly, missing only those ads that are retrieved from the same source as legitimate content.

    So for example, in-app YouTube ads and Pinterest ads remain, because they are provided by the same API endpoints that serve up their content, meaning any DNS-based filtering cannot discriminate. But when I first installed it back in 2005 - shortly before I deleted the official Reddit app for it being the steaming pile of manure it was (and apparently still is) - I had ads in all sorts of apps suddenly vanishing, including all Reddit ads and promoted content



  • I have been using the same web browser, in terms of ideology, codebase and heritage, since the release of NCSA Mosaic.

    That was 32 years ago. And holy f**ck, that dates me.

    Sure, I dabbled around with others. There was the original Opera, back when Netscape cratered and the only other real option was IE. Opera’s tab behaviours made me install Tab Mix Plus for FF, and I still find that extension to be the second-most critically important extension FF has, right after UBlock Origin.

    And lately I took a shine to Vivaldi, but I have been weaning myself off of it once I realized that the Manifest v2 shutdown was unavoidable for it as well.

    And the only reason why I even have Chromium is as a sandbox for any Google services I access and as a “naked” web browser for those websites who implement malware and spyware in the name of “website security”. Which, of course, also means a majority of websites that are “protected” by CloudFlare’s incredibly hostile anti-user practices.

    And of course, I also run forks, such as Librewolf and others, also with the appropriate anti-malware and anti-spyware add-ins. It can be useful having multiple web browsers up at once.

    But my main will always be Firefox.




  • Apple is the least bad + most functional option out there.

    Nothing else will go further in being least bad, unless you are willing to completely sacrifice functionality and usability.

    Apple at least walks the walk of protecting user privacy because they aren’t dependent on non-hardware, non-app-store revenue (as in, selling user’s data). Google is absolutely dependent on revenue from selling user data because their hardware and App Store revenue is almost insignificant in comparison.





  • And I self-host precisely because of the money I save using surplussed hardware. I have a symmetrical 1Gb SOHO fibre connection from my ISP, so I can host whatever the hell I want, I just need to stand it up. And a beefy older system with oodles of RAM is perfect for spinning up VMs of various platforms for various tasks. This saves me craploads of money over even a single VM on cloud platforms like Vultr. Plus, even if I were to support a “heavy” service sufficiently in demand to warrant its own iron, it still costs me less than a year’s worth of hosting to obtain a decent platform for that service to run on all by it’s lonesome.

    My only cloud costs end up being those services which are distributed for redundancy and geographical distance, such as DNS and caching CDNs.


  • Sometimes criminals also shoot back at the police that come after them with guns.

    In the heat of the moment, the only difference between a vigilante and a cop is the level of training, the assigned equipment, and the choice for the cop to follow well-established procedural rules. It’s only when you zoom out do you see the legal system supporting the cop. But when zoomed in and examining the individual incidents, nothing says the cop can’t come away with added lead, either.


  • Vigelanty justice only works when target deserved like the dead CEO, otherwise it just crime.

    You clearly see the world in black-and-white, when it really is made up of shades of grey.

    Which means that since you haven’t already gotten the point, all the crayons and construction paper in the world isn’t going to help.


  • rekabis@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    4 months ago

    The point I was making… Is that the article brought a red herring fact that has nothing to do with anything

    Why did they bring it up?

    It was not a red herring in the least, and it struck to the very core of my own criticisms: while some vigilantes may be very stringent about their own investigations and targets, others may not.

    In this example, these vigilantes artificially engineered a target where none was likely to ever exist. They drew the target in using the profile of a perfectly legal 18yo woman, but then turned around and claimed that the target was actually chasing the profile of an 17yo - and illegally young - girl, when he was in fact not doing so.

    This was a very clear situation of entrapment by false pretenses.



  • rekabis@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    4 months ago

    I don’t have a problem with actual pedophiles that are caught in these dragnets.

    My problem arises from the lack of rigorous and well-documented investigation into the target before shite starts popping off. As the article pointed out, there is nothing wrong with a 22yo dating an 18yo. And the problem here is a sense of vindictiveness trying to manufacture targets where not all targets are guilty of pedophilia.

    So: you want to take a pipe wrench to warm over a pedophile? Make sure there is oodles of evidence that clearly and unambiguously makes the person a pedophile, and sure as shite I will look the other way. But the problem is that there is no self-reinforcing framework in place within the vigilante system to ensure and enforce this threshold of evidence. And without this system, innocent people are going to get hurt or killed.