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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • First day on a job and a coworker took a pistol out of his briefcase/bag and began cleaning it/wiping it down. It was a small office of 5ish people. I was just basically there to help play a tech support role for some outdated software they were running. My coworker was an older sales rep for the company and he was responsible for hiring me (don’t ask me why). Anyways, first official day I was working he brandished his pistol. I don’t know why. He looked a bit like Kelsey Grammer which bummed me out because I love Frasier. (Shout-out to /c/Frasier ) He had other hangups and ultimately quit a few weeks later.

    When he pulled that gun, time slowed down. With all of these mass shootings I just didn’t know what to expect. My mind raced but my body froze. I wish I could say I said something but I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut and pretended like nothing was happening.

    People can be so unhinged. That was almost 10 years ago now.



  • Personally, it’s not worth it. Giving up your DNA can be used against you. People can perform “social proof” phishing attacks on you by claiming sibling relationships. In the USA, law enforcement can use ancestry.com data to aid them in an investigation. So, if you leave some DNA at a crime scene (guilty or not) you might get caught up in the investigation.

    You can also get caught up in the information breaches that seem inevitable with these things.

    Plus: Ancestry.com is not necessarily as accurate as it is purportedly advertised. DNA doesn’t have magic labels that tell us what it represents or where it came from. The only way to associate certain aspects of DNA with a particular gene, region, etc. is by comparing it to large sample sizes of people that exhibit the features you’re seeking out. So, basically lets say you want to know if you come from Scotland. The way they would accomplish that is they would collect DNA from tons of people who - at least anecdotally - claim they are from Scotland. They then use that as a baseline for “Scottish DNA”. When you submit your DNA sample, they look for markers that are unique to those people who claimed they were from Scotland. The less DNA they have from a particular race/region, the less accurate they can be. I’m not saying Ancestry.com is lying. Their methodology makes sense and across broad strokes will give you a reasonably accurate genealogy. They are also capable of validating siblings/cousins thanks to DNA matching. But it’s only as good as the data they have. The more data they have, the more accurate it will be. But that’s probably not public information and would be impossible to tell without access to their PII data. They might have 0% of data from people in Kazakhstan or Laos or Papua New Guinea. So, it’s possible you have ancestry in places they currently can’t know about.

    It’s just not worth it because it opens you up to a lot of risk and the reward is dubious information about your family history. They might know where you’re from, but they can’t give you a 100% ancestral lineage. You might discover lost siblings, cousins, etc. but it’s not really that uncommon (so who cares?)

    Lastly, the cost is just silly. They make you pay so they can have access to your most personal data? That’s wild to me. They should pay you.

    Just my 2 cents though.








  • This article is super thorough which I appreciate. I will say, though, it feels a bit biased towards two concepts:

    1. That men are being pushed into these situations
    2. That age verification is the only solution

    I can understand that some people might be getting more extreme content in order to fulfill the dopamine hit. But most of these men went onto chatrooms and requested CP. That’s a big leap to go from “18+ teen” porn on Pornhub and then hop into a chatroom on some other site to seek out underage porn. It’s not like Pornhub pushed them into that chatroom or even - as far as I understand - offered a chatroom.

    I also don’t see how age verification will do anything to stop this. The article seemed a bit tech illiterate. The whole point of illegal forms of porn is that they’re illegal. They’re hosted on the darkweb or shared behind forums and chatrooms. They’re not hosted (I think) on platforms like Pornhub. So how does age verification resolve this issue if the illegal websites won’t comply? Not to mention, now the only legal sources of porn are behind some form of ID restriction which is going to make a lot of people who want to remain anonymous seek out alternative websites.

    I don’t believe Pornhub has likely been entirely innocent. Any website which allows users to upload media experiences this kind of corruption. I’m sure Google Drive has had countless zip folders of questionable material uploaded to it. As has, probably, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and - yes - Lemmy instances. What are we going to do? Require people use a driver’s license for every online account so we can track who is uploading the illegal content? Who is responsible for validating IDs in that situation? Is a UK ID valid for a website hosted in the US?

    As for the last section related to children seeking out content of teens their own age, I think age verification makes more sense there. But, again, it would require some massive overhaul of centralized IDs and tracking people across the web to stop it. It would effectively end the web as we know it.

    It seems like - to me - the best thing we can do is educate people on why some porn is ok and why other porn is not. I think we should encourage others to report the illegal stuff when they see it. I just don’t think age verification will be effective. It’ll either work and make the internet inaccessible. Or it’ll be easy to bypass and just make everything less usable.


  • Holy shit the article is far less tame than the title. They provided several ways to run commands as root and they can be generated as an over-the-air HTTP call. As per the article, if you buy the Jooki domain, it’s very likely you can control every single Jooki on the market. You can make the speaker do whatever you’d like. Pretty scary stuff. One has to wonder what nerds can do with that kind of tech: turn speakers into a low quality mic? Use them as bots for a DDoS attack? Just start blasting heavy metal music? Or just brick every device?

    It’s pretty wild what the devs have done here. I can excuse executing commands as root from a file on the SD card. It’s not exactly safe or smart but it’s also not the most dangerous thing to assume only people with access to the device would do that. Hardly a worry for most parents as long as you’re not especially reckless. But to allow OTA root level commands to be run? That’s a horrible design. At least setup a user that can only execute a few pre-designed scripts. Don’t just give them carte blanch to run havoc on your hardware.

    Just another reminder that every wifi enabled device is likely a ticking timebomb. Especially low quality devices meant for kids. Baby monitors, speakers, etc. have a history of being built cheaply and poorly. That’s why I bought non-wifi baby monitors for my family.