But, I also wonder if people are using meta or x platforms to do the exact same thing?

Absolutely. And they’re using Youtube, Fediverse platforms, old-fashioned forums, and anything else that you can have user-generated content posted on it.

TikTok is being singled out because the real story of ‘every platform has CSAM and CSAM for sale’ is not very palatable for the oligarchs that own the platforms, and it’s much simpler to point to a foreign-owned platform as “the problem” and not the ones they run/invest in.

until you were able to watch porn

You mean you never watched 3gpp encoded 240p porn over WAP sites via a java browser on your dumb phone?

…what? Stop judging me.

“I don’t like cold war relics!” declares man currently sucking on Vladimir Putin’s dick.

how something like Zen

Zen is a Firefox fork.

I have to ask: what are you going to do? Shoot Facebook? Snipe iCloud?

Start blasting Google?

Pretty sure a rifle is in no way a useful tool for any sort of online privacy.

What’s hilarious to me is that this was totally a Thing when I was younger.

Not for measels, because we weren’t braindead dumbfucks, but for chickenpox.

You’d have whole groups of kids get together to have everyone get sick at once, instead of one kid at a time for months and months as it spreads through classes at school.

IDK if it made sense, but it was legit a thing that people were doing.

Of course, there’s a vaccine now, so if you’re still doing this you’re one of the aformentioned braindead dumbfucks.

It’s an internet liberal problem. They’ll go along with the groupthink, but not a one of them will be willing to lead the group because being wrong is punished more harshly than just doing nothing is.

So, you get endless debates about the rightness of doing something, vs people just doing it.

Sounds like a fantastic plan.

The handwringing about if we’re being nice enough to the alt right is directly contributing to why we have so much mess we’re now having to deal with. The approach seems sane to find music that’s very specifically nazi rock, so they’re being extremely limited in response, imo.

Screw em, kick them out of anywhere you find them, and then nail the door they used to get in shut.

<MAGA would like to know your location.>

The implication seems like, “we all talk to each other and if you lie to me you lose all of your accounts”.

Well uh, yes, in some cases, that’s exactly the correct interpretation.

A lot of tracker admins DO talk to each other, because this is a fairly small world, and yeah, nobody wants a shithead around so they’ll definitely let other people know who their shitheads are so they can be handled before they become a problem.

Nothing inherently wrong with that, imo.

Ah HP printer drivers, my favorite form of self-inflicted malware.

My favorite HP sucks story happened many a year ago. The boss’s shitty HP multi-function POS died, and we got him a nice Brother instead, and then went to uninstall the drivers.

Somehow, and the reason for this is totally unknown to anyone other than HP engineers, the driver ‘uninstaller’ decided that today’s hilarity would be that it was going to uninstall… everything.

After about 15 minutes of the drive churning away I got concerned, rebooted it, and found that nearly 75% of everything on it had been deleted by the uninstaller.

No fucking idea, but that was a fun thing to explain and then fix.

I hate to go ‘Boy, I don’t buy it’ but, uh, I kinda don’t?

This is one of those things that COULD happen, as long as every teacher, every administrator and the state itself were all intentionally trying to make it happen.

CT has standardized tests that are required to be taken to progress through school, so how can someone who can’t read or write pass those?

And EVERY teacher she had from first grade on just accepted the fact she clearly was unable to read or write, and thus was almost certainly not doing any work, and just decided that’s a-ok and we’ll just pass her along anyways without doing anything?

Somehow feels like there’s a lot more to this story than just her side as presented by that article.

Uber-like surge pricing on electricity

We don’t really: that story you heard from a few years ago was the only company that billed like that. The customers made a bet that the pricing averages through the day (lower at night, higher cost during the day) would average out in their favor over fixed-cost billing, and frankly, it did right up until it didn’t.

They took a risk and got bit by, frankly, not understanding how the system works and basically ate the spikes.

Everyone else paid $0.09/kwh or so during that whole period, and the electric providers ate the cost because when you’re averaging out spikes across millions of kwh, it won’t lead to bankruptcy.

“Work 50% longer weeks so you can make something that’ll both make me richer AND cost you your jobs!” is not the motivational speech he thinks it is.

Or, if it was named by users of Microsoft products:

New Teams (2) Final-Final (1) Final-THIS ONE

They’re almost certainly doing that because they’re forcing you into SMS 2fa as a ‘backup’ to the TOTP solution.

Cheaper to get everyone’s phone number so you can send them a text message when they fuck up their totp app/delete it/get a new phone/whatever than deal with support calls.

It’s stupid and insecure and incredibly dumb, but, well, business decisions.

Honestly when you mention child predators and terrorists, the first place I tend to think of a church these days.

I mean, are they planning on showing up and keeping an eye on all the ‘youth pastors’ too?

No? Then this must be about something else.

Harry Potter and the American Actors trying to pretend to have British accents, Part 1.

You’re thinking the MOS (now western design) 6502, not the Moto 68k chips. 68k is Macintosh and Amiga and other systems of that era.