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#information technology
fallintosanity · 2 years
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psst, let me tell you a secret
are you listening? 
ready? 
Tumblr Blaze is the biggest fuck-you to Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, and other advertising companies in basically ever
wanna know why? 
On Facebook, I could show this post only to white, politically undecided, lesbian college students aged 18-21 who live in zip codes 75023, 75024, and 75025 (yes, even after the changes Facebook recently announced). Anyone who interacts with the post, therefore, is extremely likely to be a white, politically undecided, lesbian college student aged 18-21 who lives in Plano, Texas. If this post was an ad, and you clicked the ad and bought the thing it was advertising, then I’d also know your name, physical address, telephone number, email address, and approximate financial status. 
You probably don’t want me to know all that about you, right? 
Do you want your health insurer to know? What about your employer? If you’re queer and not out to your family and friends, would you want them to know? What if you’re a domestic violence survivor, hiding from your ex-spouse?
All they need to do to get all that information is buy a Facebook ad for under $5.
And before you say that you don’t share all that on Facebook: too bad! Even if you don’t, Facebook (along with pretty much every ad company out there) buys, sells, and/or trades the data it collects about you with other companies. Facebook collects data about you even if you don’t have a Facebook account.
Wanna know what’s scarier? 
Bad guys can also buy targeted ads, and use them to convince you to do things like vote for a particular presidential candidate, or vote against unionizing Amazon workers. This is a very common tactic used by hostile foreign governments to foster extremism and isolate vulnerable minorities, and influence elections and other political and social events. Even the tech companies themselves can and do use this data to manipulate your emotions, making you happier or sadder according to their own whims.
(why do you know all this, Sanity? because I’ve worked in information security, fighting for data privacy and security, for over a decade)
Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, and other advertisers claim that collecting all that data about you, and letting anyone target you with it, is absolutely, 100% necessary for the existence of the entire ad-funded Internet. They want you to believe that nothing bad could possibly come of it, despite proof to the contrary being in the news every other month. They want you to blindly continue letting them collect and use YOUR data to influence you to think, feel, and do what THEY want. 
But. 
BUT!!!
Enter Tumblr Blaze. 
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(from the Blaze FAQ)
Tumblr looked at advertising and said, you know what? we don’t need to target anyone. Targeted ads don’t actually work anyway. All that hyper-specific targeting is just an excuse for ad companies to raise prices and collect more data to use for their own purposes. 
Tumblr said, we bet people will pay real-life dollars to share their posts with up to 50,000 people, whether or not those people will care. 
Tumblr said, we’re going to blow up the entire online advertising industry.
That is fucking amazing, y'all.
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nando161mando · 3 months
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anonymousdormhacks · 5 months
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Whats the opposite of gothic? I'm in love with comp sci anti-gothic where it's just people being surprisingly polite and nice and funny through computers. A program's first lines are always "Hello world!". SMTP protocols apparently say "hello, pleased to meet you" to each other to establish a connection with a handshake. Python has a different version called Andaconda, which has a smaller version called miniconda. C++ is just C continuously improving on itself, because the ++ operator means to add one onto a previous value, and C# is two ++ stacked on top of each other. Lawmakers have to talk about the ethics of saving "cookies" to computers because one guy liked fortune cookies and decided to call them that. The internet itself wasn't created with security in mind because it was just meant to be a way for a group of people who trusted each other using it to send each other information, and so on, and so forth
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amalgamasreal · 1 month
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This is so goddamn real, I once saw an unnamed company DDoS itself multiple times in one week because they didn't take into account how their network would be affected by forcing OS patches across the entire fleet through their VPN if they happened all at the exact same time.
And the person who knew how to script the staggering so that wouldn't happen had been laid off because they cost too much less than a year prior.
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nixcraft · 5 months
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My solution when someone asks for help about troubleshooting windows
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mindblowingscience · 2 months
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India has warned tech companies that it is prepared to impose bans if they fail to take active measures against deepfake videos, a senior government minister said, on the heels of warning by a well-known personality over a deepfake advertisement using his likeness to endorse a gaming app. The stern warning comes as New Delhi follows through on advisory last November of forthcoming regulations to identify and restrict propagation of deepfake media. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Deputy IT Minister, said the ministry plans to amend the nation’s IT Rules by next week to establish definitive laws counteracting deepfakes. He expressed dissatisfaction with technology companies’ adherence to earlier government advisories on manipulative content.
Continue Reading.
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pb-dot · 9 months
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Some Thoughts on the Reddit Blackout
Like many new arrivals on Tumblr these days, I used to be a Redditor until recent developments encouraged me to take my business elsewhere, and I have been following the development of the story as thoroughly as I can without actually giving Reddit any more traffic. With the most recent development of the Reddit admin corps taking on a suite of strategies lifted straight from the depression-era railroad baron playbook, I figured the time has come to talk a little about the wider implications of this whole story.
The Tech sector is, to the best of my understanding, in a vulnerable place right now. After the Web 2.0 gold rush and years of consolidation and growth from the biggest actors, your Alphabets, Twitters, Metas, and so on, many of the larger sites and services are reaching the largest size they can expect to grow to. How, for instance, could Facebook or Twitter grow much more now that everyone and their mother is on Facebook and Twitter? Prior to the Musk buyout, Twitter seemingly settled on upping engagement, making sure people were on Twitter longer and invested more energy and emotion in the platform, usually by making damn sure the discourse zapping through that hellhole was as polarizing and hostile as possible. Meta, meanwhile, has been making bank on user data as advertisers, AI folks, and any number of other actors salivate over getting their hands on the self-updating contact and interest registry that is Facebook.
With the rise of what we apparently have decided to call AI, data is now more valuable than ever. I consider this to be yet another Tech Hype Bubble on the level of NFTs or Metaverses, but, like with the two above, I can imagine it's hard to explain that when you are a Tech CEO and your shareholders ask you "Hey, how do you plan on earning us money off of this AI/NFT/Metaverse thing?" This is not to say CEO Steve Huffman isn't handling this whole thing with the grace of a three-legged hippo, but merely to suggest that his less-than-laudable decisions and actions in this mess don't arise from his character alone but also is a result of wider systemic issues.
One of these issues is the complicated role user data plays in modern websites and -services. Since its inception as a publicly accessible space, the question of how to monetize the Internet has been a tricky one for site and service owners. Selling ad space on your website or service has long been the go-to, but this in itself presents its own issues, having to curate content that is considered ad-friendly, malicious or careless actors making using said service or website less attractive for customers, and finally how to convince your advertisers that they get what they pay for in the first place, ie. "how do I know people even look at our ads?" All of this is before you even stop to consider how ads massively favor large, established actors.
It's no small wonder, then, that several startups in the era of internet mass adoption chose to forgo ads, or at least massively deprioritize them and/or relaunch them as "promoted posts," in an attempt to escape the stigma around ads. Meta/Facebook is probably the biggest fish in this particular pond, but we also see other services such as Twitter and Reddit follow the same pattern.
What makes this work is that the data these platforms collect from their users isn't all that valuable on a person-to-person basis, knowing that so-and-so is 32 years old, lives in a traditionally conservative part of the city, goes to Starbucks a lot, and listens to Radiohead isn't particularly useful information for anyone but a dedicated but lazy stalker; When viewed as an aggregate, however, large collections of data on a large population becomes quite valuable. This is especially true if you're working with, say, targeted ads or political campaigns. Look no further than the Cambridge Analytica data scandal for an example.
Now, all this is to illustrate the strange position the user occupies in Web 2.0. We tend to think of ourselves as the customer of Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr, and so on, but it isn't the case. After all, we don't pay for these services, and if we do it's to buy freedom from ads or other minor service modifications. It is more correct to say that we make up the product itself. This is true in two respects, first, an active social community is vital for social media to not be entirely pointless, and second, we generate the data that the platform holder seeks to monetize. This hybrid product/participant role doesn't map cleanly to traditional understandings of "worker," but I argue it is a closer fit than "customer."
All of this is to say that it is immensely gratifying to see the Reddit Blackout taking the shape of a strike rather than the more typical boycott model we've seen in the internet-based protests of yesteryear. Much of this, I think, we can thank the participating Reddit moderators. While the regular platform user can be *argued* to be a worker, the moderator inarguably is one, and the fact that they aren't paid for their efforts is more a credit to the prosocial nature of humans than to the corporate acumen of the platform holders. Either way, moderating a subreddit is work, if the subreddit is large, it's quite a lot of work, and moderators keeping malicious actors, scammers, and hatemongers out of everyone's hair is a must for any decently sized social space to not be an objectively terrible experience. So, if you were to, for example, withhold your labor (moderating for free) which you as a worker can do, it would be plain irresponsible to leave the place open for said bad apples to ruin everyone's bunches, thus the shutdowns.
I don't think it's a controversial take to claim that the Reddit admins also view this more as a strike than a boycott, given their use of scabs, intimidation, and other strikebreaking tactics in an attempt to break the thing up. This is nothing new, and the fact that Reddit admins are willing to stoop to these scumbag tactics tells us that their bluster about the shutdown not affecting their bottom line is nothing more than shareholder-placating hot air.
As this entire screed has perhaps demonstrated, I believe the Reddit Blackout is important. My stay at Tumblr so far has been excellent and will probably continue past this strike no matter what outcome it has, but for others in my situation, or perhaps entirely alien to the Reddit biome, I ask you to consider: If we do not stop this level of consumer and user-unfriendly bullshit Reddit have been pulling on the API change, where will it pop up next? Who's to say the next bright idea in corpo-hell isn't "Hey boss, how about we charge these nerd losers a dollar per reblog? And maybe a fiver for a Golden Reblog (TM)?"
This is perhaps getting into grandstanding, but I believe we are way past due for a renegotiation of what it means to be a platform holder and -user on this hot mess of an internet. If we as users do not take an active, strong stance on the matter, the Steve Huffmans, Elon Musks, and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world will decide without us. One does not have to be a fortune teller to see that the digital world this would create would not have our best interests in mind any more than the current one does.
So, in closing, I wish to extend my wholehearted support to the participating Moderators of Reddit and everyone who has decided to take their business elsewhere for the duration of the shutdown. Even without getting into the nitty-gritty of the API situation, this is a fight worth having, and may we through it make a world that's just a little bit less shitty.
Become Ungovernable
Become Unprofitable
Stay that way.
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tfrost · 5 months
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Just spent an hour struggling to figure out what I did wrong with my code just to find out I misspelled "background" to "backgrond" 😔
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In the United States, per-capita G.D.P. has almost doubled since 1980, while the median household income has lagged far behind. That period covers the information-technology revolution. This means that the economic value created by the personal computer and the Internet has mostly served to increase the wealth of the top one per cent of the top one per cent, instead of raising the standard of living for U.S. citizens as a whole.
Ted Chiang, Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?
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recursive360 · 10 months
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~DIGITAL ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE~
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ground-zoro · 2 years
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Reading about the sentient artificial intelligence that Google may or may not have, but refuse to openly test, made me realize an important but oft overlooked aspect of Turing Tests, and that's that they need to be impossible for an actual human to fail.
Any test than can legally confer and assign sentience and person-hood, or deny the same, is an incredibly dangerous eugenic weapon in the making. A high bar for artificial life is, perhaps, one thing, but a bar so high that disabled humans might easily fail is another.
And let no one say this test wouldn't be used to strip other humans of their rights and protections. Slavery is not long past, colonialism is still rampant across the world, and minorities like POC and queers are constantly under attack.
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fallintosanity · 2 years
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So y’all wanted more rants about information security & data privacy? Let’s talk about the two main privacy paradigms that are currently competing for dominance in Big Tech. For the sake of not writing a full goddamn thesis I’m going to only talk about models that actually address user privacy (so NOT Facebook’s “privacy is no longer a social norm” bullshit), and only in the context of the USA with a light dip into GDPR. 
Very broadly speaking, Big Tech in the US is coalescing into two camps regarding privacy: “opt-out privacy” and “opt-in privacy”. Apple is the flagship and main driver for the concept of “opt-out privacy”. Over the last few years, they’ve leaned heavily into the idea that data should be kept private by default, and only shared under limited circumstances at the user’s request. In other words, the user has privacy by default, and must opt out of that default for data to be shared.
Google is likewise the flagship and main driver for “opt-in privacy”: the idea that data should be shared broadly for the benefit of both the user and the service provider, and sharing is restricted on a case-by-case basis at the user’s request. In other words, the user shares data by default, and must opt in to privacy where desired.
It’s not a coincidence that Apple and Google are the leading drivers for Big Tech’s privacy models. Mobile phones are the most personal devices most people own: your phone goes with you everywhere, and on average, most people check their phones 344 times(!) per day. If you’re like roughly half of US mobile users, you have at least one personal health app on your phone. And until very recently, nobody was stopping shady advertising companies from harvesting every drop of user data they could from people’s phones. All this has made mobile phones one of the primary battlegrounds for digital privacy. 
Let’s look at Apple’s model first. 
(cut because this is 2k words and I don’t want to murder anyone’s dashes)
You’ve probably seen at least one variation of the recent iPhone privacy ads:
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And you’ve probably heard about all the features Apple has been introducing on iOS and the App Store to improve users’ control over who accesses their data, when, and why. Apple is going all-in on the idea that data sharing of any kind should be the exception, not the rule. They appear to be actively working to gut the advertising industry by methodically removing or blocking the mechanisms advertisers use to track users. 
Apple can afford to do this for a couple of reasons. First, they make the vast majority of their money by selling hardware, not data-fueled ads. While they do have an advertising business, according to Apple’s own privacy policy, “Apple’s advertising platform does not track you, [...] and does not share user or device data with data brokers.” They admit they do still perform some targeting, but claim they only do so if the targeted group contains more than 5,000 members - which is at least way better than Facebook’s ability to target a single person.  
This gets into the second reason why they can afford to gut the broader ads industry: Apple has a wealth of first-party targeting data (I’ll explain what that means in a minute), meaning that not only do they not need other advertisers or data brokers, but also that they’re in direct competition with those other advertisers and data brokers. So going all-in on privacy is good for Apple’s bottom line both from a user value perspective, and from a competitive one. 
Now let’s look at Google’s model. If you open your Google account, right on the first page of account management are two sets of privacy settings:
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Note the language used: “personalize your Google experience” and “choose the privacy settings that are right for you”. Google has two reasons to collect your data which are mostly tangential to each other. The first and most obvious is that Google-the-advertising-company needs your data in order to more effectively sell ads to third parties. This is what most people think of when they think about Google and privacy: Google wants user data to sell for profit. And, well, yes. Google has built its empire on the back of its ads business, and ads pay for pretty much everything else Google does. Google needs to be able to sell ads to keep funding all the legitimately cool shit it’s doing. 
Speaking of legitimately cool shit: Google-the-tech-company’s longest-standing desire has been to create the Star Trek computer in real life: a virtual assistant that “understands you, and [...] can have a conversation with you.” (That’s not just journalism speculation, either - it was explicitly the goal told by Larry & Sergei to employees when I worked at Google.) This is the second reason why Google needs your data: so it can be your own personal Star Trek AI assistant. As anyone who’s worked in an executive assistant role will tell you, you can’t provide useful assistance without having access to just about every component of your employer’s life. Similarly, if you let Google have access to your personal data, it can do a lot of genuinely useful things. 
This is why Google’s stance on privacy is so focused on choice: they’re trying to thread the needle between “if you give us your data, we can honestly improve your life” and “if you give us your data, we’ll sell it to third-party advertisers who do all kinds of unpleasant things with it”. The way they’ve internally resolved that ethical conflict is by believing - and trying to convince everyone else - that allowing them to sell your data for profit is a choice you willingly make in order to gain the benefits of Google’s technology. 
You can also see the split between opt-in and opt-out privacy in the two most influential laws regulating privacy and the use of user data. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), as currently enforced, uses the opt-in model: CA residents have the option to stop the sale of their personal data, but the law assumes that user data will be sold unless and until the user chooses otherwise. The CCPA even uses language similar to Google’s: on their website, they say the CCPA “gives consumers more control” over the collection, use, and sale of their data. 
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), on the other hand, primarily uses the opt-out model. This reflects the EU’s stance that privacy is a basic human right, as codified in the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights. The GDPR holds that personal data may not be processed unless there is legal basis to do so, sets strict limits on what constitutes a “legal basis”, and requires companies to collect and use only the minimum amount of data required to fulfil the given legal basis. 
While the CCPA and the GDPR use opposite privacy models, the two of them combined with Apple’s insanely effective efforts to stamp out data harvesting (as well as another effort I haven’t talked about at all, which is the death of the cookie) are having an interesting effect on the entire advertising industry. To explain this, I need to sidetrack briefly into what I mean when I say “the advertising industry”. 
Most people think of Google and Facebook when they think of advertisers. And, yeah, those are two of the biggest ad-space sellers in the world - but there’s a lot more to the industry. Data brokers like Acxiom, Epsilon, and Oracle America are among the thousands of companies who buy and sell the user data that allows Google and Facebook to effectively sell targeted ad space. The reason you’ve probably never heard of them, however, is because (for the most part) they aren’t the ones who collect the data in the first place. 
To vastly oversimplify a stupidly complex industry, you essentially have two types of data brokers: first-party and third-party (with the user themselves being the second party). First-party entities are the ones that collect user data directly for their own purposes; third-party entities buy data from first parties and sell it to other third parties. One company can be both a first- and a third-party entity depending on the situation. For example, Facebook collects your data as a first-party entity, and sells it to a third-party marketing company (let’s say Acxiom). Acxiom combines Facebook’s data with data it’s purchased from other first- and third-party companies and uses it to sell ads. Amazon collects your data as well, making it a first-party entity on its own website. But if Amazon buys Acxiom’s datasets, Amazon becomes a third-party entity for that data. (Cookies are part of this whole data collection and usage ecosystem, but how they work is another entire essay.) 
Where the fuck am I going with all this? Back to CCPA, GDPR, and Apple. While they’re all going about it in different ways, the end result is turning out to be the same: a noose around the neck of third-party advertising. If companies are allowed to collect user data for their own legal purposes, but not sell it, then suddenly all those third-party entities become irrelevant and having first-party data is critical. This is what I meant earlier when I said Apple has access to a wealth of first-party data for its own ads business. Apple doesn’t need to sell user data because it makes money from hardware sales, and it doesn’t need to buy user data because it has its own. 
Google also has huge amounts of first-party data, but the difference between them and Apple is that Google makes the vast majority of its revenue from selling ads, which depend in part on all that juicy third-party data. Honestly Google is probably going to be okay here still; they have enough else going for them (including their move into hardware sales via the Pixel) that the loss of revenue from selling user data to advertisers won’t hurt them much. But companies who rely entirely on advertising and the sale of user data, like Facebook, will and already do see a huge revenue impact from the move to restrict access to user data. 
So what does all this mean for you, the user whose data is in question? 
It’s too soon to say for sure, but the good news is that it looks like Apple’s moves are forcing Google to shift further toward opt-out privacy than Google might otherwise have preferred. And for the vast majority of companies, it’s more cost-effective to comply with the various existing and incoming US privacy laws (including CCPA) by using GDPR as a baseline - meaning opt-out privacy may soon be the de facto standard. 
This doesn’t mean all companies are actually going to comply in good faith, or at all - already reports are showing “loopholes, bypasses, and outright violations” of Apple’s measures; and GDPR enforcement, especially against Silicon Valley, is painfully low. But privacy industry experts generally agree that the trend is toward stronger protection for users against the unwanted use and sharing of personal information. 
As a user, you can help this trend along by actively enforcing your privacy rights wherever you can. If you’re in the EU, take advantage of the GDPR and file complaints against non-compliant companies. If you live in California, exercise your CCPA rights by digging through the privacy policies and settings of your accounts until you find the “do not sell my personal data” toggle. Whether you have an iPhone or an Android, go through your device’s settings and enable every privacy protection measure you can. Likewise, if you have a Google account, take five minutes to go through their privacy checkup feature. It’s actually quite well done, and will give you a better idea of what Google is collecting about you. 
The more of us who do this, the stronger the signal we send to both Big Tech and legislators that we want these protections and we will use these protections if we have them. For too long, companies (like Facebook) have argued that users don’t really want privacy - but they’re dead wrong. We just have to prove it to them.
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blueberrythebestberry · 8 months
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taviamoth · 11 days
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🚨 Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor:
The occupation army systematically targeted dozens of programmers, information technology experts, and employees in this vital sector, in addition to destroying their companies' headquarters as part of the genocide in Gaza.
The occupation army targeted and killed the minds and experts, especially those proficient in information technology, programming, computer engineering, and influencers in these vital fields, just like other elites in the local community such as doctors, academics, and others.
Euro-Med documented a list that included several information technology experts, including programming and artificial intelligence, who were martyred as a result of the "israeli" military attacks that targeted their locations in various places in the sector.
The Euro-Mediterranean's documentation included the assassination of the prominent programming engineer "Haitham Mohammed Al-Nabahin," who was considered one of the most skilled experts in his field in the sector. He died along with his wife, the engineer Nesma Zuhair Sadeq, in an Israeli bombing that targeted a house they had displaced to in the Al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on March 14.
Euro-Med documented the killing by the occupying army of Tareq Thabet, the program director of the "YUCAS" technological incubator affiliated with the University College in the Gaza Strip, and a graduate of the "Hubert H. Humphrey" American fellowship program, through bombing that targeted his home, resulting in his martyrdom and that of his wife, children, parents, and several family members.
Among those targeted and killed by the occupation army was also the software engineer Baraa Abdullah Al-Saqa, founder of the company (DITS) and specialized in website programming and smartphone applications (Senior and lead developer).
The list also included Mohammed Al-Attal, who passed on October 26, Hamza Al-Shami on November 2, and Obaida Khater on December 20, Anas Al-Sheikh on December 9, and Abdel Rahman Hamada on March 15, in addition to a group of other young programmers, including Rami Al-Sousi, Abdel Hameed Al-Fiomi, Bilal Zaqout, Ahmed Nidal Qadoura, the engineer Mohammed Hasouna, and others.
The crimes committed by "israel" through targeting and killing Palestinian talents and elites, and the widespread and deliberate destruction of companies and infrastructure, aim to hinder the development of the Palestinian society in Gaza in general and undermine its scientific, educational, and economic systems.
The crimes committed by "israel" aim to deprive vital sectors of the Palestinian society of specialized and distinguished personnel, which are difficult to replace in the short term, in addition to creating a state of panic and coercion among the remaining talents, which might push them to migrate.
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nando161mando · 2 months
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Harassing botnets with zipbombs.
The idea is this: instead of just blocking IP addresses that hit honeypot URLs, feed them a compressed document that massively expands on their end, making them run out of memory and crash.
This is extremely...
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caligula9997 · 2 months
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quick message about media preservation
social media is not forever. platforms will eventually die out, palestinian content will be removed or sterilized by the powers that be. a large amount of footage of israel's crimes in palestine seem to only be preserved on social media. there may already be organizations preserving this footage, but even so, I encourage anyone who can afford to, to preserve as much of this footage as possible in secure local storage.
any suggestions for preservation tools are welcome. social media scrapers, cheap nas solutions, etc.
also, let me know if my approach is misguided, or if I'm wrong about anything, I want to provide helpful information and preserve this history.
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