• 6 Posts
  • 218 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Do they “give high rankings” to CloudFlare sites because they just boost up whoever is behind CloudFlare, or because the sites happen to be good search hits, maybe that load quickly, and they don’t go in and penalize them for… telling CloudFlare that you would like them to send you the page when you go to the site?

    Counting the number of times results for different links are clicked is expected search engine behavior. Recording what search strings are sent from results pages for what other search strings is also probably fine, and because of the way forms and referrers work (the URL of the page you searched from has the old query in it) the page’s query will be sent in the referrer by all browsers by default even if the site neither wanted it nor intends to record it. Recording what text is highlighted is weird, but probably not a genuine threat.

    The remote favicon fetch design in their browser app was fixed like 4 years ago.

    The “accusation” of “fingerprinting” was along the lines of “their site called a canvas function oh no”. It’s not “fingerprinting” every time someone tries to use a canvas tag.

    What exactly is “all data available in my session” when I click on an ad? Is it basically the stuff a site I go to can see anyway? Sounds like it’s nothing exciting or some exciting pieces of data would be listed.

    This analysis misses the important point that none of this stuff is getting cross-linked to user identities or profiles. The problem with Google isn’t that they examine how their search results pages are interacted with in general or that they count Linux users, it’s that they keep a log of what everyone individually is searching, specifically. Not doing that sounds “anonymous” to me, even if it isn’t Tor-strength anonymity that’s resistant to wiretaps.

    There’s an important difference between “we’re trying to not do surveillance capitalism but as a centralized service data still comes to our servers to actually do the service, and we don’t boycott all of CloudFlare, AWS, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo”, as opposed to “we’re building shadow profiles of everyone for us and our 1,437 partners”. And I feel like you shouldn’t take privacy advice from someone who hosts it unencrypted.


  • It sounds like nobody actually understood what you want.

    You have a non-ZFS boot drive, and a big ZFS pool, and you want to save an image of the boot drive to the pool, as a backup for the boot drive.

    I guess you don’t want to image the drive while booted off it, because that could produce an image that isn’t fully self-consistent. So then the problem is getting at the pool from something other than the system you have.

    I think what you need to do is find something else you can boot that supports ZFS. I think the Ubuntu live images will do it. If not, you can try something like re-installing the setup you have, but onto a USB drive.

    Then you have to boot to that and zfs import your pool. ZFS is pretty smart so it should just auto-detect the pool structure and where it wants to be mounted, and you can mount it. Don’t do a ZFS feature upgrade on the pool though, or the other system might not understand it. It’s also possible your live kernel might not have a new enough ZFS to understand the features your pool uses, and you might need to find a newer one.

    Then once the pool is mounted you should be able to dd your boot drive block device to a file on the pool.

    If you can’t get this to work, you can try using a non-ZFS-speaking live Linux and dding your image to somewhere on the network big enough to hold it, which you may or may not have, and then booting the system and copying back from there to the pool.








  • Like, each user is individually kicked off the PDS in reaction to some bad thing they did? Or labeling is reactive in that it labels bad stuff already posted, and each user has to pick labelers to listen to themselves?

    I’m not sure if Bluesky’s front-end defaults to using some particular labelers. I know there’s some moderation going on for you as soon as you log in, done by someone.

    But yes, each user has to choose whose moderation decisions they want to use, and they can’t rely on everyone they can see also seeing exactly the same space they themselves are seeing. But I’m not sure it’s possible or even desirable to get rid of the requirement/ability to choose your mods. I should be able to be in a community that has mods I trust, and the community chatting to itself and determining that so-and-so is a great mod who we should all listen to, and then all listening to them, sounds like a good idea to me.

    Being able to see and talk to people who aren’t in the same space I’m in might not be as good?



  • No?

    An anthropomorphic model of the software, wherein you can articulate things like “the software is making up packages”, or “the software mistakenly thinks these packages ought to exist”, is the right level of abstraction for usefully reasoning about software like this. Using that model, you can make predictions about what will happen when you run the software, and you can take actions that will lead to the outcomes you want occurring more often when you run the software.

    If you try to explain what is going on without these concepts, you’re left saying something like “the wrong token is being sampled because the probability of the right one is too low because of several thousand neural network weights being slightly off of where they would have to be to make the right one come out consistently”. Which is true, but not useful.

    The anthropomorphic approach suggests stuff like “yell at the software in all caps to only use python packages that really exist”, and that sort of approach has been found to be effective in practice.