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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Tor exit nodes are vulnerable to various levels of attacks.

    But it also doesn’t change the underlying problem. If you put ALL of your traffic through Tor? Cool. You have accomplished nothing (other than flagging yourself because of what exit nodes you are accessing from) because your cookies and even behavior are still being correlated.

    Like… it doesn’t take much to question why FightThePower_6969 looks at both /r/antifa101 AND /r/denver, for example. Ooh, and they also look at /r/warhammer40k and have a cookie from this website listing bus schedules and…

    I do agree that tor is an amazing (if problematic) tool and it is generally the gold standard for when you need to obfuscate traffic in a way that doesn’t involve giving mullivad your credit card number. But people still need to understand what traffic they are putting into each different port. And even realize that there are some truly nasty tracking methods out there that can do nasty stuff with even OS level DNS caching between browsers.


  • From what I can tell… that is actually what most people WANT in their VPN. They don’t care about privacy or anonymizing data. They just want to hide information from the LAN admin and/or appear to be in a different region for the purposes of content (used to be so they could watch European Netflix. Now it is so they can watch Colorado Pornhub…).

    I dunno. I’ve been in far too many Internet Arguments ™ with people over what they ACTUALLY think a VPN is. People watch ltt’s ads and figure they just pay for a VPN and leave it on 24/7 and that will solve all their problems. When the reality is that they are actively ignoring their actual cookie and activity based footprints and it just means that Google et al have a note that says “John Doe of 123 Fake Street in Bumfuck Wisconsin connects via an endpoint in Denmark”.

    And while I wouldn’t trust microsoft at all for… anything? Do y’all really think those black box companies paying youtubers to lie to you about what VPNs do aren’t collecting your data?


  • It also causes the problem that no fix is searchable. All fixes require a community member to respond.

    Incorrect. While I find the search capabilities of Discord (and the Discord/Teams likes) to be… bad, it isn’t THAT much worse than a phpbb in a lot of ways.

    What you lose out on is the ability for search engines and, increasingly a concern, LLMs from being able to index it. I shouldn’t have to explain why that might be a “pro” as far as the folk actually doing support are concerned.

    As for delays? If it is a well supported bit of kit, a quick search and a skim of the FAQ (Discord is actually really nice for having a way to aggregate questions like that in an almost ticketing like system) is going to cover the major stuff. And my experience (on both sides) with Slack et al is that users are generally glad to help out.

    It does suck because, unless it is a super common issue, you need to actually ask a question and interact with a human. But it also tends to mean that people are a lot faster to have you run a few tests rather than respond once a day to a thread.

    For the support people, they have to answer the same questions over and over and over because there is no way for users to search for and solve their own problems.

    Tell me you’ve never provided support without telling me you’ve never provided support, heh.


  • There are layers to this.

    Persistent chat rooms are here to stay.

    As a user? I dislike this. I am sure you do too.

    As a developer who gives a shit about the users? The number of times I have had to spend sometimes upwards of a dozen back and forth emails trying to explain to someone that I am not lying to them and the answer they found on the forums are for a bug that was fixed 5 years ago… Let alone having to, politely, tell a greybeard to shut the fuck up because they keep telling people to search instead of ask for help…

    Whereas a more ephemeral approach that actually encourages people to ask questions? Yes, it does cause long term issues when someone is trying to debug a project that has been on life support for years. But, by and large, just checking the current FAQ and then asking in a chatroom results in a better experience for the users, the devs, and the community managers trying to bridge the gap. And… you should really try to avoid being dependent on said EOL software. Not always possible but… yeah.

    And that isn’t going to change. So they’ll either stick with discord or use something MUCH less stable… like Matrix.

    This is bad.