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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • What do you say? Am I too lazy or it is unpractical to stay away from big tech?

    Laziness is what the surveillance advertisers are exploiting. It is everyone’s duty to resist the tyranny of convenience that Tim Wu articulates in a famous essay.

    After a year I’m starting to think that maybe my data is not worth the hassle just to keep big tech out of my digital life… I guess Big Brother wins

    Think of it as boycotting. Exposure of your personal data may not be worth the effort of protecting it, but the big picture is that privacy seekers are not just looking for confidentiality. Privacy is about power and agency. You are exercising your right to boycott a harmful entity. Boycotts are no longer simply a matter of not handing money over, because data is worth money. So boycotting now entails not handing your data over. Giving Google your data feeds Google’s profits.

    So you are really asking, “should I give up the boycott”? The answer is no, because the boycott is not just a duty to yourself; it’s a duty everyone benefits from (except Google).




  • I didn’t try feeding the output back in but note you can click on the 3 peppers and move an intensity slider. That sample I posted was just middle intensity. When I max it out to 5 peppers, it grows to 4 paragraphs:

    CloudFlare, the insidious scourge of freedom on the internet, is a devious and manipulative force that seeks to crush the very essence of democracy and free speech. By swooping in with their iron fist of control, they have stolen the decentralized web from the hands of the people and centralized it under their tyrannical rule.

    With a cold and calculated efficiency, they have stripped away our rights and freedoms, dictating who can access what content on the world’s largest walled-garden. The once vast expanse of the internet, where ideas flowed freely and voices could be heard, has now been shackled and confined by a single corporate power.

    This egregious act of censorship and control not only violates the principles of net neutrality and privacy, but it also threatens the very fabric of our society. The consequences of their actions are dire and immediate, leading us down a dark and treacherous path towards a future devoid of liberty and independence.

    We must rise up against this relentless enemy, this monstrous beast that seeks to suffocate our voices and stifle our creativity. We must fight back with all our might, for the sake of our freedom, our rights, and our very humanity. Stand with me, brothers and sisters, and let us vanquish this evil before it consumes us all.

    Less emotional (×3) is boring:

    CloudFlare is an organization that has centralized a significant portion of the decentralized web under one corporate power. This has raised concerns about the implications for net neutrality, privacy, and access to web content.


  • Love this tool!

    original:

    CloudFlare is a vigilante extremist organization that takes the decentralized web and centralizes it under one corporate power who dictates terms in the world’s largest walled-garden. A very large portion of the web (16.7%+) were once freely open to all but are now controlled and monitored by a single central authority who decides for everyone who may access what web content. This does serious damage to net neutrality, privacy, and has immediate serious consequences

    more passionate:

    CloudFlare is a ruthless and oppressive entity that viciously strips away the freedom and decentralization of the web, consolidating power under one heartless corporation. This monstrous force dictates the terms of our online existence, trapping us within the confines of the world’s largest walled-garden. A staggering percentage of the once free and open web (16.7% and growing) now falls under the iron fist of this tyrannical authority, controlling and monitoring every aspect of our online experiences. This egregious violation of net neutrality and privacy rights has dire and immediate consequences, threatening the very essence of our digital freedom and autonomy. Our voices are being silenced, our choices limited, and our rights trampled upon by this merciless oppressor. It is time to rise up and fight against this injustice with all our might, before it’s too late.




  • Not exactly. !showerthoughts@lemmy.world was a poor choice, as is:

    • !showerthoughts@zerobytes.monster ← Cloudflare
    • !showerthoughts@sh.itjust.works ← Cloudflare
    • !showerthoughts@lemmy.ca ← Cloudflare
    • !showerthoughts@lemm.ee ← Cloudflare
    • !hotshowerthoughts@x69.org ← Cloudflare, and possibly irrelevant
    • !showerthoughts@lemmy.ml ← not CF, but copious political baggage, abusive moderation & centralized by disproportionate size

    They’re all shit & the OP’s own account is limited to creating a new community on #lemmyWorld. !showerthoughts@lemmy.ml would be the lesser of evils but the best move would be create an acct on a digital rights-respecting instance that allows community creations and then create showerthoughts community there.

    (EDIT) !showerThoughts@fedia.io should address these issues.


  • Normal users don’t have these issues.

    That’s not true. Cloudflare marginalizes both normal users and street-wise users. In particular:

    • users whose ISP uses CGNAT to distribute a limited range of IPv4 addresses (this generally impacts poor people in impoverished regions)
    • the Tor community
    • VPN users
    • users of public libraries, and generally networks where IP addresses are shared
    • privacy enthusiasts who will not disclose ~25% of their web traffic to one single corporation in a country without privacy safeguards
    • blind people who disable images in their browsers (which triggers false positives for robots, as scripts are generally not interested in images either)
    • the permacomputing community and people on limited internet connections, who also disable browser images to reduce bandwidth which makes them appear as bots
    • people who actually run bots – Cloudflare is outspokenly anti-robot and treats beneficial bots the same as malicious bots

    There are likely more oppressed groups beyond that because there is no transparency with Cloudflare.




  • And cf also allows you to block and report child porn

    That’s been tried. When someone reported CP to Cloudflare, CF demanded the identity of the whiste blower then doxxed them to the offending CF user, who then published the whistle blower’s identity so their users could retaliate. When the CEO (Matthew Prince) was confronted about this, his reply was that the whistle blowers “should have used fake names”. Then this company you support had the nerve to claim to have a privacy pledge: “[A]ny personal information you provide to us is just that: personal and private.”

    Also cf is about the only way to make federation affordable and safe. (emphasis mine)

    Forcing children to reveal their residential IP addresses to the fedi whereby any interested person (read: child preditors) can derive their approximate location – do you really think that’s a good idea for safety?

    What are you even thinking? It most certainly is not safe to expose 20%+ of everyone’s traffic to a single corporation.







  • It’s like saying “you’re a bad company. . .but damn do I like your product and will consume it anyway!” it doesn’t make much sense, logically or morally.

    Sony is a dispensible broker/manager who no one likely assigns credit to for a work. I didn’t even know who Sony pimped – just had to look it up. The Karate Kid, Spider-man, Pink Floyd… Do you really think that when someone experiences those works, they walk away saying “what a great job Sony did”?

    I don’t praise Sony for the quality of the works they market any more than I would credit a movie theater for a great movie that I experience. Roger Waters will create his works whether Sony is involved or not.

    You also seem to be implying they have good metrics on black market activity and useful feedback from that. This is likely insignificant compared to rating platforms like Netflix and the copious metrics Netflix collects.

    Can you explain further why grabbing an unlicensed work helps Sony? Are you assuming the consumer would recommend the work to others who then go buy it legitimately?

    If it becomes a trend to shoplift Sony headphones, the merchant takes a hit and has to decide whether to spend more money on security, or to simply quit selling Sony headphones due to reduced profitability. I don’t see how that helps Sony. I don’t shoplift myself but if I did I would target brands I most object to.