Something interesting

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • That may have been part of the reason, but the theory behind MFA is that there are 3 primary ways to authenticate who you are: what you know (password), what you have (secure one time password generator or hardware token), and what you are (biometrics). Password managers and digital one time password generators have kind of blurred the lines between passwords and one time passwords, but you’re raising your risk a bit if you put them in the same place.




  • Exactly, from a security perspective, it’s a bad idea to put 2 factor tokens together with your passwords. You effectively eliminate the security benefit that 2 factor provides if you do because if people get into your password manager, they have everything they need to access your accounts. The only people it “helps” having it all in one app are people who don’t understand the purpose of 2 factor and just see it as an inconvenience when services force it on them. Even though I use BitWarden for passwords, I don’t think that I’ll be changing from Aegis to BitWarden’s stand-alone authenticator because Aegis is doing its job nicely.








  • Stuxnet itself doesn’t care whose centrifuges it destroys (in fact it doesn’t care or have an awareness that it’s destroying anything at all), it does what it’s programmed to do and is deployed to do by people with political goals. It’s not the same thing as Stuxnet itself being political.

    I did say that I could conceive of one way that software licenses could be considered somewhat political if one’s politics reject the validity of intellectual property. But then again, the software licenses are also not the code itself. If one doesn’t believe in the concept of intellectual property, one is free to accept whatever risk is involved with breaking the license and using it anyway. The software doesn’t care who’s running it.

    I know this is all somewhat pedantic, but I pretty firmly believe no software is inherently political. At least maybe not until we have a computer system that achieves some form of sentience and its operating instructions are subject to its own will.






  • Yeah, I’m certainly not going to delete my Reddit account immediately. When Digg was fucking up, it took several rounds and I really made sure I was going to be comfortable on Reddit before I deleted my account there. But once critical mass was achieved, there were major threads on Digg that became literal ghost towns of deleted account comments pretty quickly. It was obvious what was happening. I don’t expect we’re going to see quite the same massive collapse at Reddit unless they follow up this API decision with killing old.reddit in a month and then dropping all NSFW communities in another month. If they do those things, Reddit is going to essentially die.


  • Lol thank you for that article. I never knew reddit started out by astroturfing their own site. I’m sure they’d probably stopped doing that by the time I joined, but with that, various leadership/admin scandals in the time since, and now gaslighting third party app devs/users, I’m pretty much done with their shit. I might browse communities that haven’t gone another direction yet, but I don’t think I’m going to contribute anything over there anymore.



  • Tone policing is classist

    Apologies if this is something that you think should be obvious to anyone, but I’m genuinely curious what you mean by “classist” here.

    I occasionally encounter assholes from all walks of life and prefer to avoid them all the same. I’m actively in favor of reasonable moderation on social media sites to filter assholes out because it’s better for my mental health.

    Nobody’s saying we can’t have differences of opinion and disagreements. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable that we should be expected to engage respectfully or not at all. This is a standard that should be applied equally to all. It’s difficult to do, but we should also strive to hold people we otherwise generally agree with on principle accountable if they’re being aggressive/hostile/antagonistic because, at best, they’re being a bad advocate of our own positions and, at worst, they’re being an asshole.