Even with verification the Internet will be full of misinformation.

Let’s look at the recent 2024 Springfield pet-eating hoax. A woman, who I can lookup the name of, posted that she heard people in her neighborhood were eating cats and dogs. That misinformation quickly spread and was shouted at a US Presidential debate.

While the woman who originally posted it apologized, no one who spread that misinformation did.

While verification might help keep some people honest, it’s likely only going to keep those already honest, honest.

I’m no lawyer but I don’t even think it’s that complex.

The law as written states “…However, the prohibition does not apply to a covered application that executes a qualified divestiture as determined by the President.”

It goes on the clarify in a little more detail what a " qualified divestiture" is, but ultimately the determination seems to be by the President.

Trump can “make a deal” that he considers a “qualified divestiture” and allow the app again. For example ByteDance can sell TikTok to AmericaDance, a new company that just so happens to work for and does everything ByteDance does.

Now this wouldn’t hold up in any real court, but that would take A LONG time to resolve at which point Trump declares a win and likely everyone just moves on. Bonus during the 2028 election Vance or whomever can say that Democrats want to ban TikTok.

In other words, Coca-Cola realized that they don’t need to spend $1 million dollars, they can just slap “Special Boy” on a bottle for 6 cents and achieve the same result.

Whoops, I had the wrong sound Mario. Fixed.

click uh, ladies and gentlemen this is your Captain speaking. Wha. Hoo hoo. Yahoooo! Yahoo! Yah! Yayayayaya! click

(Edit: wrong sound)

I agree it was expected but it’s important that it happened.

I’ve always assumed Meta’s investment in Threads’s ActivityPub compatibility was purely to show the EU, “Hey look, we’re trying to follow the open standard.”

For that reason I’ve believed that giving Meta a VERY short leash was reasonable. While I believed them to be full of shit, I think extending an olive branch and allowing them to be part of the Fediverse at large was a worthwhile effort.

They have however put almost no effort into being a good part of the Fediverse. They’ve implemented minor features and sharing, just enough to say " technically we’re working on it."

Now we can see them directly blocking. Now maybe in a few days they’ll say “whoopsie”, but I think this clearly shows they truly have no interest or intention of being part of the Fediverse.

I’m not surprised by this. I fully expected this. But I was willing to give them a chance. Maybe they didn’t deserve that chance. I think they’ve certainly forfeited it now.

At the time (and possibly still) Dell was promoting laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled. These laptops also avoided the “Windows Tax” and were ~$50-$100 cheaper.

*The “Windows Tax” being that Windows cost money. Most companies just built the cost of Windows into their product with no (easy) method of not purchasing Windows. So if you bought a $800 laptop, you actually bought a $700 laptop plus a Window license, even if you never planned on using Windows.

Also worth adding, since this story was big many years ago, when the college was contacted they were fine with her laptop. They had no requirement that she use Wimdows.

The Pentaverate is solid. It’s no Austin Powers or Wayne’s World, but it’s solid. It was great to see Mike Meyers back in form, even if it wasn’t his best work, just really good.

My hope is that he was just out of practice and he’s working on some great stuff behind the scenes. I know The Love Guru was a big miss for him and it really cut him down. He thought he’d created the next Austin Powers and it just fell flat. It wasn’t the worst film, but definitely a huge step down.

Long way if saying if you’re a Mike Meyers can, the Pentaverate is probably worth your time.

I always figured bipedal was to make robots adapt to do things humans do where humans do things.

So for a factory floor, bipedal might not make sense. But what about delivering packages to houses? Navigating a home to help someone or collect something? These types of robots are designed to be general purpose.

If you own a factory or wearhouse, ideally you design them with robots in mind. Of course until you can do that something more generally purpose might be better.

So the “other” thread links here, so I’m going to link to them. https://lemmy.world/post/23535522

I think that thread would have been a much better thing to post. However this isn’t some secret project, this is a single account that is obviously labeled, so this whole post is just a silly.

YSK conspiracy theorists exist.

anyone who cares can find them pretty easily

I care, I have found nothing similar to what you’re discussing.

anyone who reads this and then also reads the misinformation, will be able to see the connection

I just read a post that said Wikipedia was the best website on the internet, was that the misinformation? Someone else donated, was that misinformation? People have shared a variety of thoughts around Wikipedia, most of them are positive, but some are negative.

Negative doesn’t mean wrong. Negative doesn’t mean misinformation. It might be, but it isn’t certain.

That’s wild that it’s a BIOS setting. Just an extra level of fuck you.

It’s “S Hit Just Works” and it’s the slapping car meme.

The “S” is because the car salesman has a slight lisp.

Slaps Instance this bad boy just works.

“Heihei” translates to “chicken”.

So there is no guarantee that childhood “Heihei”, Moana 1 “Heihei” and Moana 2 “Heihei” are all the same chicken.

Sure Moana 1 & Moana 2 are probably the same. But childhood “Heihei”, probably a different chicken.

Because it’s bad if China has the information. It’s fine if “US entity” had the information. The ban is ultimately fake. No one banning the app cares about TikTok, they just hate that China is getting the information they want. What will happen is some US based company, Oracle last time, but someone like that will buy a sufficient enough stake in the company and the ban will not happen. It will be declared “safe” and the data will go to a US controlled entity, but also still secretly to China. (The later will be revealed years later, to the shock of no one.)

This gives them hardly any information beyond what they already have.

Except now they know the individuals using your Internet.

Sure if you live alone they already can easily put that information together. However if you have a partner, a relative and children all living in one house they now know who is in that home.

Plus maybe no one in the house uses Twitter and Aunt Alice the Twitter user came to visit, does she need to reverify? Your ISP knows that now.

ISPs would be gaining a lot of new information.

Re random IPs,

Sure, but my point is there is no such thing as a “truly random” IP address. You receive an IP from your ISP or VPN provider, that provider has a pool of IP addresses. Dynamic means you get one from the pool. Static means you get the one reserved for you, from a similar pool. The security/privacy benefits are nearly zero and not worth highlighting as an advantage.

Re static IP,

https://nordvpn.com/blog/static-ip-vs-dynamic-ip-address/ says,

Costly. Static addresses usually cost more for ISPs and consumers than dynamic IP addresses.

Uh the Internet is wireless, Jen.

I really appreciate this post since I think many discussions about VPNs are misleading or treat them as a magic solution to all problems.

I think you’ve given a fair outline of what a VPN.

But, being the Internet, I have a few thoughts,

Hiding your IP address: VPNs will replace your IP address with a random IP address assigned by the VPN provider.

I don’t think the word “random” is needed. The IP address a VPN assigns is no more random than the IP address your ISP assigns. I think someone could see random and assume more security, which would be incorrect.

IP addresses are usually static, meaning it never changes, but sometimes your ISP may assign you a dynamic IP address, which will change every few months or so.

Last I knew ISPs still charged for static IP address, so most would be dynamic. Although often times a dynamic IP address is de facto static, since an ISP will never change it.

If you open up ports on your router (for various purposes), it can leave your network vulnerable to certain attacks as long as the attackers know your public IP address.

I think this should be a separate bullet point, since this is clearly security and not privacy. I think as a security point it needs further discussion. Really I imagine this only comes up in peer to peer connection scenarios. I don’t know if the denial of service attacks of old are still relevant.

Encrypting your traffic: VPNs can allow your traffic to be encrypted, so that your ISP or other people connected to the same network can’t see which sites you visit or (in some cases) what data is sent. The reasons why this is important are too long to list, but you can work it out on your own.

I think it’s important to clarify who you are encrypting your traffic from. Generally your traffic is already encrypted. DNS is often not encrypted.