splendoruranium

@splendoruranium@infosec.pub

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When a Torrent disappears from 1337x, how do you find out what happened?

Yesterday there was a controversial movie torrent that was getting 1000s of downloads and was on the “popular this week” page, and today it’s just gone. I went to the uploader’s account page and it’s not there either. Just like it never existed....

splendoruranium,

What you write on argumentative strategy absolutely pertains to the topic and I’d say it also holds true. I just don’t really see what it has to do with fascism. Aren’t you conflating a couple of things here?
Even when “Fascism traditionally employs that rhetoric” holds true, there’s no way that “Someone employing that rhetoric must be a fascist” can ever follow from that. A fascist might be a very special kind of moron, but it’s dangerous to then start calling every moron “fascist”, because it lessens the impact of that term, devalues it, if that makes sense. It makes undermining actual fascism much harder.

splendoruranium,

Their leader calls journalists vermin and they go on about the ‘Lugenpresse’, his followers shoot up synagogues, allied media spread Nazi/far right inspired anti-semitic canards like Cultural Marxism (‘Kulturbolshewismus’), they go on about how the ‘’‘left wing intellectual elite’‘’ are trying to undermine western values and cause a decline of morals and degeneracy (‘Entartung’), they’re afraid of difference, they hold the weak in contempt, they abhor nuance so use a limited newspeak vocabulary to limit critical reasoning, they’re obsessed with plots, and on social media many of his followers spread the Q-anon conspiracy which is a reworking of the antisemtic blood libel canard.

Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, is a duck.

I presume we’re no longer talking about the movie’s marketing department…?

Here’s a Sartre quote that’s also increasingly relevant (again):

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

What I’m reading here are things in the lines of “Good faith anti-Semitism doesn’t exist” or “anti-Semitism is intrinsically confrontational and quarrelsome”. I don’t quite think that’s a tenable position as it would be trivial to disprove. Am I misreading this? What is your take?
Are you sure the line is concerned with anti-Semitism in general and not only with a very specific kind of anti-Semite (e.g. mid-century, mid-Europe, Bierkellerputsch-y types)?

splendoruranium,

Asking the real questions! 😄

splendoruranium,

I strongly disapprove of private trackers. I’m forced to take part in some only because the content isn’t available anywhere else. And the private trackers generally forbid re-sharing their content on public trackers, which unnecessarily gatekeeps the content and perpetuates the problem.
If it doen’t help to make everything accessible to everybody then it’s not a valuable part of the sharing ecosystem.

splendoruranium,

It’s the content, presumably in order to maintain exclusivity of the little private club. That’s part of the problem, I suppose. Private trackers aren’t just an anonymous one-stop supermarket like some public trackers, they’re often small personal hangouts, actual communities. In of itself that sounds great, but it always carries the danger of content being held hostage for what - at least in my eyes - amounts to pointless, snobby elitism.

splendoruranium,

I am literally this. Just let us be tbh.

Are you absolutely sure that you flat-out “don’t have anything to hide” and would readily and truthfully furnish me with every information I asked of you? :P

splendoruranium,

You unfortunately can’t teach something like this to someone who doesn’t even understand the consequences of it. Or care.

You can absolutely explain it and teach it and make people care. It’s just not easy. I’ve only ever encountered uninformed “I have nothing to hide”-responses to equally lackluster throwaway explanations . It’s a very difficult and abstract topic, it doesn’t come naturally! Don’t treat privacy concerns as equivalent to pointing out dirt on someone’s clothes, treat it like calculus. Successfully conveying it requires time, conversation and didactics.

splendoruranium,

I wouldn’t mind you finding out any information about me. I would mind you feeling entitled to me putting in effort and time to answer you. I’ve read all the suggestions people here posted and none made me reflect or get anywhere near changing my mind. Privacy centric people just have to accept not everyone is like them. I respect your need for privacy. I don’t understand why you obsessively require me to hold the same belief.

I don’t think anyone requires you to hold any specific beliefs, nobody within this comment chain anyway.

It’s a bit akin to meeting someone on the street and being told “It’s nighttime!” while the sun is out. I’d definitely be interested in understanding why that other person considers it to be nighttime and I would at the very least be disappointed not to get a conversation out of it.

Three different fictitious requests:

  1. “Can you spare some change?”
  2. “Would you let me skip ahead of the queue please? I have an urgent appointment later on.”
  3. “Will you let us share your user data with our partners in order to improve our services?”

I’m assuming here - and please correct me if I am wrong - that you would be likely to acquiesce to 3. in most contexts, maybe even more likely than to acquiesce to 1. or 2.?

splendoruranium,

Privacy sentiments are subjective beliefs, not an objective fact like nature.

I genuinely don’t see a point in engaging with you, even just based on what I stated above where you use your personal beliefs in line with objective, provable elements of the natural world. So I’ll choose not to. Cheers. 👍

While I obviously cannot force you to continue a conversation you do not wish to have, I’m a bit perplexed by what you’re saying here and at what point “belief” entered the conversation. If you’re saying that data, personal and otherwise, has no real, objective, provable value then surely that would go against all physical evidence? There must be some kind of misunderstanding here. Well, cheers ✋

splendoruranium,

I don’t, at least I’m not making an active effort. Why would I? I already have enough music to generate playlists that could last for years. That’s more than enough music.
Apart from that there’s the usual cultural osmosis that can’t be avoided. A song that is used in a movie, plays on a radio/car stereo or at an event somewhere and you like it. Bam, discovery!

Should I worry about "legitimate interest" tracking cookies?

I know they’ve been around since the GDPR came into effect, but I’ve suddenly noticed a sharp increase in the cookie prompts on web pages which have a second “legitimate interest” page. Some of these have an “object all” button, but plenty require you to manually opt-out of sometimes hundreds of ad-trackers....

splendoruranium,

Legitimate interest is their interest, not yours.

The interest might be theirs but the “legitimate” part absolutely has to incorporate a written justification somewhere within the the depths of the mandated records of processing activities that explains why the business/institution couldn’t possibly do what they’re doing without processing that particular piece of user data. “I want that” is not legitimate interest in the sense of Article 6.

splendoruranium,

Unlimited* plans are always sold on the idea that a sizeable part of the user base aren’t going to use an actual unlimited amount of the resource.

Unless there is a contract regarding a fee over a period of time, there isn’t that much that users can do to compel a service to offer a service they no longer want to offer.

Absolutely! But I don’t think that’s the point of contention here. The problem is the “abuse” rhetoric, since it’s not just incorrect but disingenuous to basically claim that the users did anything wrong here. They’re imposing limits because they miscalculated how many heavy users they could handle.
Again, that’s a completely reasonable move, but framing it as anything but a miscalculation on their part is just a dick move.

splendoruranium,

I’m a bit baffled that this hasn’t popped up yet: Sell them on eBay.
Mark them as broken goods/scrap and re-iterate that fact very clearly in the product description. Broken drives often sell for up to 1/3 of the value of a working one, no scamming needed.

I cannot tell you why that is, but my theory is that a lot of folk buy up broken drives in private sales in the hopes that the “broken”-diagnosis is just user error and that the drive is actually fine. Knowing my users that might actually be true in many cases.

Edit: I didn’t quite catch that you were not able to successfully overwrite your data. I guess that’s a point against selling it. Always encrypt your drives, that way you can always sell them when they break!

splendoruranium,

It absolutely is, at least from my observations!

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