Saturday, March 12

Geek

Daily News Stuff 12 March 2022

Sleeping Through All The Alarms Edition

Top Story

  • It is still not raining here in Sydney.  It's been three days.  Panic might set in soon, or as soon as the floodwaters recede enough that the panic shipments can get through.

    Meanwhile, it's the weekend and it's Question and Answer time.  Drop your vaguely tech-related questions in the comments today and I'll invent fake answers for them tomorrow.  Or maybe genuine ones.  Miracles happen.


  • Russia continues to do what every sane country should do and has now banned Instagram.  (Bleeping Computer)
    "As you know, on March 11, Meta Platforms Inc. made an unprecedented decision by allowing the posting of information containing calls for violence against Russian citizens on its social networks Facebook and Instagram," the Russian Internet watchdog said.
    This is clearly communist propaganda and we shouldn't believe it for one minute.


  • Facebook has temporarily allowed posts calling for violence against "Russian invaders".  (CNN)

    Oh.

    I'm not sure whose quotes those are because the claim that Russia is invading Ukraine is pretty well established.
    The social media company is also temporarily allowing some posts that call for death to Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in countries including Russia, Ukraine and Poland, according to internal emails to its content moderators.
    That's going to go down a treat.

    But dumb as this seems on the surface, down in the depths it is all much, much worse.
    "We are issuing a spirit-of-the-policy allowance to allow T1 violent speech that would otherwise be removed under the Hate Speech policy when: (a) targeting Russian soldiers, EXCEPT prisoners of war, or (b) targeting Russians where it's clear that the context is the Russian invasion of Ukraine (e.g., content mentions the invasion, self-defense, etc.)," it said in the email.
    1984 is a cookbook.

Tech News



Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day



Disclaimer: More than this what, though?  More than this what?!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:12 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 1185 words, total size 12 kb.

1 More than thems.  More than all thems.
(It's probably a coded reference to buttzecks)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, March 13 2022 12:51 AM (obo9H)

2 Twitter has started blocking you from even using the site if you aren't logged in.  You try to click a video to watch it or scroll down more than two tweets or so, and you get a popup.  It's one that's easily defeated by the browser dev tools but having to do it like ten times when trying to follow the links in Ace's afternoon cafe thread is really annoying.  (Also, I don't know if it's Steve or Twitter that caused it (but I can guess), but all of Steve Inman's videos are now marked as "must log in to 'prove' you're an adult".)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 13 2022 01:54 AM (Z0GF0)

3 Rick, Twitter is using a mix of cookies and local storage and who-knows-what-else to keep track of how much you've visited them without logging in, and a good scrub of your browser will reset it for a while. They're definitely getting more aggressive about walling off their content, but it usually takes a few days before I have to restart my browser (which automatically gets scrubbed on exit).

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, March 13 2022 04:53 AM (ZlYZd)

4 Ahh, local storage, the stuff that's not quite as easy to nuke as cookies.  Thanks, J.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 13 2022 06:53 AM (Z0GF0)

5 Edge's scrub-on-exit does a good job, and has a regexp-based whitelist for the handful of sites you want to stay logged in at. (or that annoy you by sending a text message if you clear your cookies)

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, March 13 2022 10:01 AM (ZlYZd)

6 Hmmm.  I've been avoiding scrub-on-exit for years, but then again, it's probably mostly for login info, but with the browser storing passwords, perhaps it's time to rethink that.
Edge doesn't seem to have a section in the permissions/site data page to block/clear local db/site data, just cookies.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 13 2022 10:09 AM (Z0GF0)

7 I just use youtube-dl (or actually the yt-dlp off-shoot) to pull down videos from twitter.  It fakes all the age-restriction bypass crap, most region restrictions, and such.  It _is_ a bit more labour intensive, but in the long run, it's worth it.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, March 13 2022 12:43 PM (obo9H)

8 Rick, Edge's scrub is "cookes and other site data", and includes local db/storage; in fact, you can't really tell it to do one and not the other.

My only complaint is that the regexp whitelist of what to keep doesn't sync between machines.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, March 13 2022 01:08 PM (ZlYZd)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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