I worked in telecom for a couple of years up until recently. There’s actually a growing body of self-regulation going on within the SMS industry. Most notably, any business sending text messages has to apply for a “license” to do so, with some pretty strict consent requirements. Violating those requirements comes with heavy penalties, mostly enforced by downstream carriers. If you’re curious, 10DLC/A2P are the terms to Google for.

If you ask the FSF, open source is a bigger set than free software, mostly to do with restrictions on the uses of the code

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html.en

Ditto. I mostly use it when Google (search, not Bard) fails me. I find it’s really good at answering questions of the ilk: “I swear there’s a function for this in the library I’m using, what’s it called again?”, or telling me that it doesn’t actually exist.

Me personally? Not really. But it’s definitely a feature I’ve heard folks wanting.

Tangential, but my last employer (US based) outsourced L1 IT to a call center in India, and it was maddening. They didn’t know very much beyond the script, and often you just had to say the right words to get your issue escalated, but it would always take a day or so to get called back. It drove me nuts as an engineer, but I’m sure it works fine for people who are less familiar with computers.

I’ve found that the chat agents are much less able to “be a human” and help you out, it feels like talking to a chatbot sometimes. It’s a lot easier to get someone to empathize with your problem over the phone, IME

Someone on Mastodon raised a good point that the idea of “changing handles” is incompatible with a lot of fedi, too. I’m curious how they will tackle that problem when they eventually federate

FWIW, /etc/passwd itself contains no passwords (the name exists for historical reasons) but it definitely is a globally accessible file that can give you clues about the target system. Given this, it’s more likely the user is attempting to find out if arbitrary disk reads are possible by using a well known path on many servers.

Mastodon actually lets you follow hashtags, which is a nice compromise, but it definitely isn’t curated so you gotta pick which hashtags you follow kinda carefully.

I think it scratches a similar itch as most techbros: “if I can solve this hard problem, all problems are easy!” It’s a mentality I see constantly, especially on the orange site.

I hope co-host lasts. Their attitude has been wonderful and I want to see more like it.

Yeah, I’m looking to jump to Kbin when I can, but right now it looks like a lot of the instances are having major federation issues, which makes it a bit untenable.

LanguageTool is super cool because you can run it locally! I love it because of that, alone.

The idea of a security tool using the same name as one of the most serious security vulnerabilities of the last decade is very funny, lol.

At least with SO, they have historically put up dumps of all user data on archive.org (that stopped recently but it’s allegedly coming back). If something were to happen, at least the information would still be decently accessible, just not indexed as well.

Ditto, actually. The 3D printing communities I’ve seen here are just so much smaller.

Well, it sounds like they’re also not going to be maintaining the Flatpak long-term, just upstreaming some fixes. Am I reading this wrong? Not sure who maintains the Flatpak; hopefully someone other than RH…

“Enshittification”, as Cory Doctorow calls it, is a real thing :)

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

While I haven’t read through the spec to see how they deal with this, my immediate thought upon seeing the JS snippets is how spam sites might use it. Similar to a MFA fatigue attack, it seems plausible to me you may use this API to get your spam shared by shoving the share menu on people’s faces repeatedly.

Interestingly, for me they link to Mastodon. Heh.