• 84 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Everything Wordpress is heavily infested with that. However you don’t have to let it impact you – it kind of looks to me like they pressure commercial vendors to put their stuff under the GPL if they’re wanting to offer a free version, so there’s a robust ecosystem of actually-FOSS tooling for it. My experience has been that it’s always worked pretty well in practice; you just have to keep your nope-I’m-not-paying-for-your-paid-version goggles firmly affixed. (Also, side note, GPT does an excellent job of writing little functions.php snippets for you to enable particular custom functionality for your Wordpress install when you need it.)


  • Wordpress 1,000% (probably coupled with WooCommerce but there are probably some other options)

    I honestly don’t even know off the top of my head why you would use anything else (aside from some vague elitism connected to the large ecosystem of commercial crap which has tainted by association the open source core of it) – it combines FOSS + easy + powerful + popular. You will have to tiptoe around some amount of crapware in order to keep it pure OSS though.


  • Yep.

    There are two big end-user security decisions that are totally mystifying to me about Lemmy. One is automatically embedding images in comments without rehosting the images, and the other is failing to warn people that their upvotes and downvotes are not actually private.

    I’m not trying to sit in judgement of someone who’s writing free software but to me those are both negligent software design from an end-user privacy perspective.



  • Of note about this is that image links in comments aren’t rehosted by Lemmy. That means it would be possible to flood a community with images hosted by a friendly or compromised server, and gather a lot of information about who was reading that community (how many people, and all their IP address and browser fingerprint information, to start with) by what image requests were coming in kicked off by people seeing your spam.

    I didn’t look at the image spam in detail, but if I’m remembering right the little bit of it I looked at, it had images hosted by lemmygrad.ml (which makes sense) and czchan.org (which makes less sense). It could be that after uploading the first two images to Lemmygrad they realized they could just type the Markdown for the original hosting source for the remaining three, of course.

    It would also be possible to use this type of flood posting as a smokescreen for a more targeted plan of sending malware-infected images, or more specifically targeted let’s-track-who-requests-this-image-file images, to a more limited set of recipients.

    Just my paranoid thoughts on the situation.









  • He’s just trying to help you, dude. lemmy.world is by far the biggest instance; 3x the users of the next biggest instance and much more than most. But, lemmy.world is also defederated from some notable instances like beehaw and hexbear. Another instance which also has in the tens of thousands of users (enough to be subscribed to “most stuff”) might well give you better search results.

    You may decide that the defederated-from-here instances aren’t worth bothering with, with some justification, but you came in asking for help, he’s trying to help you, and you’re lecturing him about what’s what. 🙄




  • The layers at the tip of his tusk had strontium levels that matched the site where he had been unearthed. The researchers then looked at a layer formed a week before his death and searched a geochemical map for places where Kik might have been that had a matching strontium level. The team worked back through time, week after week, piecing together Kik’s whereabouts over the course of his life.

    As it turned out, Kik grew up far from the northern reaches where he met his end. When he was a young mammoth, he followed his herd around eastern Alaska. In his adult years, Kik moved widely across central Alaska. And in the last 18 months of his life, he ended up on the north side of the Brooks Range, where he likely died of starvation.

    In the new study, published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, Dr. Wooller and his colleagues examined Elma’s six-foot-long tusk. Unlike Kik, her remains were found by Chuck Holmes, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, at the Swan Point archaeological site in Alaska. While Kik died far from people, Elma’s remains ended up in a hunting and fishing camp; she may have been the victim of a hunt.

    THIS IS SO COOL


  • What THE FUCK. I knew this stuff but for some reason reading it again made me all furious again.

    Eva Mireles, from inside the adjoining classrooms where the shooter was, called her husband, Ruben Ruiz, a Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District officer, who was outside the school. According to DPS Director Steven McCraw, during the call Mireles told Ruiz that she had been shot and was dying; when Ruiz “tried to move forward into the hallway, he was detained [by law enforcement] and they took his gun away from him and escorted him off the scene.” Mireles eventually died from her gunshot wounds.[82][83]

    After the police cordoned off the outside of the school, parents pleaded with officers to enter the building. When they did not, parents offered to enter the building themselves.[84][85] Officers held back and tackled parents who tried to enter the school, further warning that they would use tasers if the parents did not comply with directions. Video clips of these interactions were uploaded to social media, including one that depicted a parent being pinned to the ground.[86] Police pepper-sprayed a parent trying to get to their child, and an officer tackled the father of another student. Police reportedly used a taser on a parent who approached a bus to get their child.[13] A mother of two students at the school was placed in handcuffs by officers for attempting to enter the school.[13][87] When released from the handcuffs, she jumped the fence and retrieved her children, exiting before police entered.[88] A video clip showed parents questioning why police were not trying to save their children, to which an officer replies: “Because I’m having to deal with you!”[89]

    And, they harassed her afterwards because she was giving interviews that made them look bad.

    Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, said he arrived at the school thinking he was the first law enforcement officer on the scene. He claimed he abandoned his police and campus radios because he wanted his hands free to shoot the gunman, and stated he also thought the radios would slow him down. He said one radio’s antenna would hit him when he ran, while the other radio was prone to falling off his belt when he ran, and that he knew from experience that the radios did not work in some school buildings. Arredondo said he was unaware of 9-1-1 calls being made from the classrooms the gunman was in because he did not have a radio and no one told him; the other officers in the school hallway were not in radio communication either.[97]








  • That’s how Linux happened. Microsoft got so good at eliminating competition, and so lazy about making a product that was more than barely-passable, that it created a unique combination of “we want something good” and “something good cannot be constructed” that drove a whole generation of techies to get familiar with Linux simply because there was no good alternative for certain types of serious computing. The selection pressure of “any competitor company will get destroyed” eventually produced a competitor that wasn’t a company.

    I think that’s what’s happening right now in social media. For a long time ActivityPub went nowhere, and then the big players all got so godawful that you couldn’t ignore the godawfulness, and now look what’s happening. It’s not because Mastodon and Lemmy are great “products” as such; mostly, people just want something that’s not shit. Then in the longer run the selection pressure will create something that’ll be a lot harder to kill or control.

    It would have been easier for Facebook and Twitter not to be shit, but apparently that’s too much to ask. I think the ultimate outcome will be way for the better this way.