When I connected with the executive, they asked if I knew why my account had been locked. When I answered I was unsure, their tone turned somewhat accusatory. I was told that the driver who had delivered my package reported receiving racist remarks from my “Ring doorbell” (it’s actually a Eufy, but I’ll let it slide).

I reviewed the footage and confirmed that no such comments had been made. Instead, the Eufy doorbell had issued an automated response: “Excuse me, can I help you?” The driver, who was walking away and wearing headphones, must have misinterpreted the message. Nevertheless, by the following day, my Amazon account was locked, and all my Echo devices were logged out.

ok, this is a lot of fun https://t.co/XP46mvtlCA pic.twitter.com/glqP8HrdM9

— TracingWoodgrains (@tracewoodgrains) October 5, 2023

https://mstdn.games/@chris/110553477682106144

PSA: #Reddit is restoring deleted and overwritten posts to save what they consider "their data". This is a new low and probably illegal at least in Europe. You can send a GDPR or CPRA request here: https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request

These are screenshots of my profile on June 14th before and after overwriting and then deleting all my posts with Powerdelete. Today, June 16th all my posts have been restored by Reddit without my knowledge or consent.

Orange Site discussion

Spammers are just creating accounts on instances that have no registration verification and creating thousands of posts that ping random people with images. The spam seems to originate from a group of Japanese script kiddies that just wanted to vandalise Misskey and now every instance is getting false-flag spam messages from thousands of accounts over thousands of instances.

The details are actually a bit fuzzy since it's all speculation outside of some discord screenshots and the spam that is actually sent, but it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Since there's like thousands of tiny instances and nothing stops spammers from just making their own, the only guaranteed solution right now is to make a whitelist of servers that moderate account registration. I made one post on an irrelevant instance earlier and got three of these spam messages from different accounts on different instances.

https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/111953045633249137

There is an ongoing spam attack on the fediverse for the last couple of days. It's more widespread than before, as attackers are targeting smaller servers to create accounts. Before, usually only https://mastodon.social was targeted and our team could take care of it. For server administrators out there: If you don't need open registrations, switch over to approval mode. If you do, blocking disposable e-mail providers is a massive stopgap to the problem. Mastodon also supports hCaptcha.

I just have to point out that all of this is being done by a community of 12-15 year olds because ActivityPub is shit actually . The script to test for open registration nodes is literally this:

export async function isNoCapNoMail(host: string, softwareType: string) {
 if (softwareType !== "misskey") {
   return false;
 }

 const endpoint = `https://${host}/api/meta`;
 try {
   const res = await fetch(endpoint, {
     method: "GET",
     headers: {
       "Content-Type": "application/json",
     },
   });

   const json = await res.json();

   if (json["emailRequiredForSignup"]) {
     return false;
   }

   if (
     json["enableHcaptcha"] ||
     json["enableMcaptcha"] ||
     json["enableRecaptcha"]
   ) {
     return false;
   }

   return true;
 } catch {
   return false;
 }
}

Someone's definitely improved this by now since it does more than just misskey, but you get the point. Just imagine the damage someone could do with an integrated captcha solver. Most ActivityPub software doesn't have any kind of middleware for handling incoming messages and maybe drop them based on filters, but that'll probably change soon.

More rumours elsewhere

I have found some more information on this CPTK, the japbros probably already knew but uhh:

1. They're just skids

2. Most of them are like kids (literal 11-14 year olds)

3. They have done many raids in the past, they DDoS'd 2chan back in 2022 and they've taken legal action against them

4. Their old group imploded due to infighting

5. According to the Karasawa Wiki (yeah that lawyer who got doxxed like 100 times for being a 2chan troll), their leaders have been doxxed, MULTIPLE times. And they're all kids.

Anyway good luck to Bluesky on their fediverse integration lol

Which company looks like X at 10pm on a Saturday night? #Xdeveloperchallenge pic.twitter.com/BWUmCiCkqS

— John Ji (@johnji_) April 21, 2024

cracker foids: ❌

American Citizens: ❌

non-autists: ❌

they/thems: ❌

Elon won

Prepare for the enshittification and bedbathandbeyonding of Magic the gathering.

If I had to make a guess as to why, given the fact that the people they laid off were all senior leaders and the numbers are good, it would be preparing for a pump and dump.

if you want to be able to pump and dump a really strong brand then you need to be able to have leaders who don't mind burning the brands equity in order to make money. My guess is that specifically what intending to do here.

Change the leadership, make new “sticky” products, pump revenue numbers, then spin out a public offering of the magic brand that looks like a great new reboot and refresh.

However the brand is only there to smuggle in the subscription model around new products that have strong margin. Everyone* gets rich cause they slaughtered their fattest pig and yet another cultural staple is killed.

>However the brand is only there to smuggle in the subscription model around new products that have strong margin

you know like selling pieces of paper for over a $100 a box for the last few decades?

I've seen people say that it would be nice to regulate loot boxes in video games, but they can't figure out how to do it without banning Magic's business model. I never understood why that would be a problem.

The genius thing about Magic is that it doesn't place individual value on a card... Video games don't have such safeguards. It's all on the studios servers and they can adjust value on the fly... I feel that's an intrinsic difference that places a video game closer to a casino ("the house always wins") than a TCG (throw out what you think is worth and let the community sort it out).

>online loot boxes

>physical loot boxes

From yesterday's exhibits in US v. Sam Bankman-Fried:

The prosecution shows that the "insurance fund" that FTX bragged about was fake, and just calculated by multiplying daily trading volume by a random number around 7500 pic.twitter.com/EDiVPOHODP

— Molly White (@molly0xFFF) October 7, 2023

orange site sneeds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37804493

BeepingComputer

PoorphonePolice

IGN

Asked for comment, a Google spokesperson told IGN that it was a "small experiment."

"We're running a small experiment globally that urges viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium," they said via email. "Ad blocker detection is not new, and other publishers regularly ask viewers to disable ad blockers."

reddit discus

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/13e2cay/youtube_has_started_blocking_ad_blockers/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/13e30b6/youtube_tests_blocking_videos_unless_you_disable/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/13cfdbi/apparently_ad_blockers_are_not_allowed_on_youtube/?sort=controversial <- This is where it was originally first posted (1k Updoots and 1k cumments)

poster note: I tried adding all the 'its over' to capture the diversity that this decision will affect and was met with this

i do not feel bad at all

https://twitter.com/8teapi/status/1706520893621784780

Vicious Self-Degradation

you Google

Quora spots query and id's as frequent

Quora uses ChatGPT to generate answer

ChatGPT hallucinates

Google picks up Quora answer as highest probability correct answer

ChatGPT hallucination is now canonical Google answer

So fresh orange site is just addressing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611

Some wrongthink in the dead comments:

how do these assclowns never learn to not trust the government?

by "somecompanyguy", who has an important message in his bio

I mean seriously? guy takes a massive lead - steals data, and then proposes a license moat? come on. Fu*k this guy.

by "3327", who doesn't know he's shadowbanned

Sam Altman CEO of OpenAI cries Wolf to Senate panel, decides to play on the fear narrative (which politicians take hook, line and sinker) - - to call for licensing and regulation - - which only benefits major players, of course which huge pockets to bribe politicians even more.

Classic play to elbow out upstart small competitors . . . .

by "stevespang", who doesn't know he's shadowbanned

If safety standards is the r-slurred political correctness filter of chatGPT this will only lead to bad consequences

by "davidguetta", who doesn't know he's shadowbanned

I'm starting to think that OpenAI is a new Facebook, and their CEO is a dangerous butthole

by "ConanRus", who...

Second #lk99 replication from China pic.twitter.com/jcI3C35hxF

— LERE (@lere0_0) August 1, 2023

Re-uploaded for my rate-limited bros

Notice how the rock does the same thing irrespective of which way the magnet is oriented? Notice the absolute lack of refrigeration equipment? This is the real deal. I feel like we can finally relax. Everything's going to be just fine.

https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update_continued_access_to_our_api_for/?sort=controversial

Fellow rDrama redditors, come sneed in the comments about how you'll totes quit after this or when they kill old reddit or if you came from 4chan, sharty, kiwifarms, or anywhere that isn't reddit or twitter, laugh and celeberate in the comments about how Reddit is killing itself

If I have to use the official Reddit app on my phone, I will simply not use Reddit on my phone.

https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update_continued_access_to_our_api_for/jmdd426/?sort=controversial

Why is the pricing so high? It would cost me a comical $20 million dollars a year to keep my app running as-is, an app that like many third-party apps, have many moderators that depend on it.

I'm not sure if you understand how important third party apps are to the Reddit ecosystem. Not only do they provide an opportunity for folks who don't like the official app to be able to still use Reddit on-the-go, but many of the moderators who serve as the backbone of the entire site rely on third-party apps to do their job.

As a number, Apollo currently has over 7000 moderators of subreddits with over 20K subscribers who use Apollo, from /r/Pics, to /r/AskReddit, to /r/Apple, to /r/IAmA, etc. It would be easy to imagine that combined with other third-party apps across iOS and Android that well over 10,000 of the top subreddits use third-party apps to moderate and keep their community operating.

This is equivalent to going to a construction site and taking away all the workers' favorite tools, only to replace them with different, corporate-mandated ones. Except the construction workers are also building your houses for free.

Why infuriate so many people and communities?

https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update_continued_access_to_our_api_for/jmd4s8h/?sort=controversial

Our intent is not to shut down third-party apps. Our pricing is specifically based on usage levels that we measure to be as equitable as possible. We’re happy to work with third-party apps to help them improve efficiency, which can significantly impact overall cost. [-156, admin]

https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update_continued_access_to_our_api_for/jmd8zuh/?sort=controversial

Let me be clear: America will lead the way during this period of technological change.

But we're going to do it in a way that puts safety first.

Today at 2:30 PM, I'll sign a historic Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence that will do just that.

— President Biden (@POTUS) October 30, 2023

We are committed to Open Models @StabilityAI

We have given over 20 million A100 hours in grants to open AI research & projects across communities.

Stable Diffusion 3 will have an open release.

Same with video, language, code, 3D, audio etc.

Open collaboration is the way 🚀

— Emad (@EMostaque) February 27, 2024

MOAR FREE CODESHIT FRICK YEA

There's clearly an attitude of "we know what you want better than you" at google right now that can be seen by the ridiculous shit coming out of Gemini. This is why their search has been getting so bad. They make a lot of assumptions of what you want, where it used to just give you what you were asking for