I’m very against Roblox. I know a kid who had a really hard time with online predators and a lot of it stated with Roblox. He’s 19 now. He and I were talking about it recently.
Parents think Roblox is like Minecraft bc of the aesthetics of the game. But, Roblox is not a game with a chat feature, it’s a chat room with some games. That’s a big difference.
They have 380 million users. Around 60% of the user base is under the age of 16. 40% is under the age of 12. That’s 152 million mostly unmonitored kids.
I’m sure Roblox has gotten better moderation during that time, but in our experience predators meet kids on Roblox and get them to exchange Discord or other contact info with them.
Discord is also a problem here, but that’s for another rant in another thread. If you are concerned about your kids and want to discuss it with me, feel free to message me.
TLDR: DO NOT LET YOUR KIDS PLAY ROBLOX unless you are actively monitoring the game.
A friend's 8 year old daughter was asking to play Roblox recently and they reached out to me since it's in my current area of study and advised them against it due to the lack of responsibility that the corporation takes for their users.
I suggested that they introduce her to Vintage Story on a self hosted server instead. That way, they can control who has access and content.
I'm actually surprised at how many parents let their kids play Roblox unmonitored. I mean, why not let them go to the playground unmonitored instead?
I feel like when 'Zero Trust' first became a thing, the theme was 'you should have every endpoint under your control hardened so it need not feer untrusted peers being able to connect'. E.g. if you think you absolutely need VPN to a 'private network' for security, then you are failing to be hardened in a 'zero trust' way, because you implicitly fear that your systems would fall to untrusted peers.
I feel like it's evolved to 'don't let anything be able to connect to anything under your control unless you have admin privilege over it as well'. Which is particularly a nightmare when you try to collaborate between two companies, each balking at the other's hard requirement to have admin access to all network peers of interest.
Corporations really, really love being admin on everybody elses devices. See kernel level anticheat.
I feel like people have gotten zero trust (I don't need to trust anybody) confused with "I don't trust anybody".
I was listening to a podcast by packet pushers and they were like "So you meet a vendor, and they are like, 'So what do you think zero trust means? We can work with that'".
Bun has been acquired by Anthropic. Anthropic is betting on Bun as the infrastructure powering Claude Code, Claude Agent SDK, and future AI coding products & tools.
Japan is on high alert as another suspected Chinese drone has been spotted near Taiwan. The ongoing diplomatic spat between Tokyo and Beijing doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon.
And yet Chinese made defense systems have utterly failed in Pakistan and Iran. Any conflict involving Japan and China would pull the US in on the side of Japan. Redo those numbers and good luck with that.
Im concerned about two things when considering your argument.
The US has been doing everything in its power to piss everyone else off lately.
Fighting a war in Taiwan or Japan is going to be a lot harder for the US than it will be for China. Taiwan is 100 miles from China but 6800 miles from California.
Well it isn’t like Japan is invading China. Seems like they just want to make it clear they will in fact respond if China tries something with Taiwan. Japan doesn’t have to beat China, they just have to make it not worth it. And they’d have Taiwan and hopefully the US supporting them in that effort.
I just read about people struggling with Next loud in the OpenDesk thread and wanted to share this in case someone is interested in contributing to this project.
Looks really nice and seems like it should be a great foundation for future development. Personally I can't lose Nextcloud until there are sufficiently featureful and reliable clients for Linux, Windows, Android that synchronize a local copy and help manage the inevitable file deconfliction (Nextcloud Desktop only barely qualifies at this, but it does technically qualify and that represents the minimum viable product for me). I'm not sure a WebDav client alone is enough to satisfy this criteria, but I am not going to pretend I am actually familiar with any WebDav clients so maybe they already exist.
Im using the android client no problem. Not sure about the the desktop ones, if you want I cant do some basic testing and report back, just let me know which clients
I'm not sure which clients. I haven't installed opencloud, because I didn't see any clients for it on a cursory look. I tried nextcloud, but it kept failing after updates, so now I just use cron jobs to automate manual backup scripts I wrote to an external HDD. If you do test any desktop OC clients and find any "good enough" ones, I'll start with it : ) and if you don't get to test any, know that I still truly appreciate your offer!
I've tried several WebDav clients, and I've found that the great majority will work great. Their performance will depend on the server. For example, Nextcloud was slow. CopyParty was blazing fast, as if it was a local folder.
You might want to checkout CopyParty too, it's UX/UI sucks, but you don't need to see it, since you can use it with almost any client on any platform via any protocol.
To be honnest, Nextcloud is kinda a piece of shit software. Every major version break something, an error in an extension can make it crash entirely without any failsafe preventing it. I already lost the database twice (in what... 5 major versions), and the only reason I still use it is because I'm too lazy to use anything not in the TrueNAS apps repository.
It's not bitching if it's true. Nextcloud has really poor performance alone, it tries to do to many things at once and none of it ends up being good. It was amazing for it's time and it's idea but it simply doesn't scale, not technically, not with time. They need to redo the architecture and probably move to something better performing than PHP. I never heard anyone in any environment even considering PHP as an option in 2025.
It's fine if you use the AIO or do some specific things on baremetal like Postgres and Redis. I've used in virtually every format over the last dozen years, and you eventually learn what works.
You can find Immich at [url=https://immich.app/]https://immich.app/[/url] If you want to buy Immich merch, go to [url=https://immich.store/]https://immich.store/[/url] You can learn more about FUTO at [url=https://futo.org/]https://futo.org/[/url]
Self-hosted photo and video management solution. Easily back up, organize, and manage your photos on your own server. Immich helps you browse, search and organize your photos and videos with ease, without sacrificing your privacy.
I know we all hate AI, but we're actually angry at generative LLMs. The kind of "AI" that Immich uses is a classifier and is absolutely not the same as ChatGPT.
I commented on ONE comment...not the whole thread.
However, if I am a contrarian because I have contrary core values, beliefs, and opinions, then vive la différence! Hope you had a great thanksgiving day if you do participate. If not, hope you had a wonderful day where ever you are.
Well, I'm a contrarian then. I assure you there is no butthurt here. I mean, why would I be? For real? You don't like AI, LLM, RAG, that's fine by me and fine for you to express such. Do I get the same considerations? The ' Read The Room' comment felt like imposed group think. If I took it wrongly, then I do apologize.
I hate AI that is corporate/state spying that requires contestant constant internet access while burning fossil fuels and raising the cost of PC components.
I love the AI that can help me find photos of my son using my ancient thinkstation that was already old when I got second hand.
AI/ML have so broad definitions that they can encompass many things. The technologies arent bad, the problems are Capitalism and Autocracies.
That was my understanding, that Immich and PaperlessNGX run AI locally on your machine. That's why the server PC sounds like a fighter jet ready to take off for hours on end when a large library is first added.
Their usage is basically just the same old machine learning that's existed for ages, long before the genAI bubble started. They really should avoid the buzzword for accuracy's sake but it's far removed from all the LLM generative dogshit.
Futo’s CEO being a alt right piece of shit is a better reason.
I didn't down vote ya but, I am quite certain that if we knew all the little idiosyncrasies, personal core values, or private lives of both open source and closed source software devs, teams, sponsors, equipment manufacturers, components, et al, we'd probably never turn on our computers. I mean, I get it, you are free to make choices. I wouldn't have it any other way. However, until the dev teams start writing that into their software, I'm ok with them being an alt right piece of shit. It's kind of like, I enjoy Ted Nugent's music. It comes up in my playlist every so often. I can't stand his political stance, but I am able to separate the two without condoning his political core beliefs. Gosh, if I were to listen to only those artists that align with my core beliefs, it'd be a mighty slim playlist. ymmv
Nope. Does he not have the right to be an alt-right piece of shit? I'm not sure what country you are a citizen of, but in my country, you most certainly have the right to be an alt-right piece of shit. Oh, and yes I'm very familiar with the tolerance paradox.
Where I'm from hate speech is (rightly) a crime. Because calling for the death (of let's make an example of my trans siblings) of a people is still violence.
Ok this has been carried far too long, so I'll digress the conversation. I do wish that one day very soon, being LGBTQ+ will br as boring as being hetero.
FUTO made a $40k donation to GrapheneOS supposedly with no strings attached. They ended up being unhappy with us not making content with them and promoting them. They began supporting attacks on us and tried to destroy the GrapheneOS project. Recommend not taking money from them.
Not really that helpful, it's just more he said/she said.
Grapheneos is a pretty poor choice of example, it has its own issues, they have conflicts with many others (see France pullout), they have openly fought with Murena, e/os, fairphone, among others. Plus, grapheneos likes to throw shade on "less permissive licenses", which is really weird, considering they use an MIT license, whose loose terms is abused by many not-so-great companies.
The lead of grapheneos is just as controversial as futo, gets into public spats with others, generally difficult to work with, etc.
I say this using GrapheneOS myself.
I'm not a fan of the Curtis Yarvin association, though.
The people running these companies aren't perfect. Sometimes they aren't ideal, either. But I'd rather use Immich than Google photos and heliboard than Swiftkey.
Immich's use of AI is arguably one of the most suitable cases for the technology and it runs entirely on your own device. I get the hate for AI but this ain't it
People need to learn the different between (AI) LLM and the AI workhorses known as Machine Learning that have been doing the real heavy lifting for decades.
As we're committed not to add paywalls, this purchase will not grant you any additional features in Immich. We rely on users like you to support Immich's ongoing development.
I read that. (I literally mentioned features not being paywalled in the original comment.)
If the key doesn't unlock features, what does it unlock?
Do you get a little thank you message from the devs when you enter it in? Does it add a "Supporter" tag next to your name on the app settings?
The practice exists in both software and games of adding paid cosmetics (e.g. Discord or Deep Rock Galactic) that don't change the core featureset but allow users to pay more to support the developers, so I think it's a valid question.
Bragging rights and improved sleeping ability from the knowledge that the devs are being supported.
The serious answer is it's often easier for people in a company to buy a license key than it is for them to arrange a donation to the devs. So this is an easy way to make small donations.
I'm running it outside of a container and outside a VM... as there's no abstraction layer on top of the underlying OS. Which I guess is inside the bare metal.
"Bare metal" has traditionally meant without any os either. Your code executes directly on hardware and has direct control over everything. Like a micro controller.
Code in a container executes on the hardware in exactly my the same way as code not running in a container - with the os as an intermediary.
does immich have an option to automatically delete older, backed-up pics from devices in order to free up space and not worry about running out disk space on smartphone?
I tried to search the docs and it seems it's missing
I've not seen that option, but I use syncthing instead of the phone application to sync my photos to a specific folder on my NAS which is then an external library for Immich.
TBH, I don't want anything deleting anything automatically.
I'll often delete newer pictures of temporary stuff but keep older pictures of my frinds & family, so, that's not a feature I'd see any value in. It tends to just make me lazy and build up GBs of junk photos on my NAS (and backups...)
That sounds like a great solution to my current frustration that the autobackup feature of Immich on iOS is so opaque. It only works when the app is open and even then oftentimes you're just staring at the backup screen while seemingly nothing is happening, despite Immich's backlog of thousands of photos still needing to be uploaded.
When using the app if you select all images one of your options will be delete from device when you click on that it will say hey some of these might not be backed up and one of your option is to only delete the things that have been backed up. It's not automatic but it is a way you can kind of just Mass do it to everything
Police in Hong Kong arrested three men on suspicion of manslaughter, several local news media reported, in connection with a blaze that has killed at least 36 people and left another 279 missing in the city’s deadliest fire in years.
Hundreds of residents were evacuated as the fire which started on Wednesday afternoon, spread across seven of the eight high-rise apartment buildings in a housing complex in Tai Po district, a suburb in the New Territories. At least 29 others remained hospitalized. Bright flames and smoke shot out of windows as night fell.
Authorities said earlier that investigators would be looking into factors including whether material on the exterior walls of high-rise buildings met fire resistance standards, as the rapid spread of the fire was unusual.
Officials said the fire started on the external scaffolding of one of the buildings, a 32-storey tower, and later spread to inside the building and then to nearby buildings, likely aided by windy conditions.
“We have reason to believe that those in charge of the construction company were grossly negligent,” said Eileen Chung, a senior superintendent of police.
The three men arrested, aged 52 to 68, are the directors and an engineering consultant of the firm.
France’s government is taking action against billionaire Elon Musk ‘s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok after it generated French-language posts that questioned the use of gas chambers at Auschwitz, officials said.
Grok, built by Musk’s company xAI and integrated into his social media platform X, wrote in a widely shared post in French that gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp were designed for “disinfection with Zyklon B against typhus” rather than for mass murder — language long associated with Holocaust denial.
The Auschwitz Memorial highlighted the exchange on X, saying that the response distorted historical fact and violated the platform’s rules.
I'm amazed it's France before Germany. But I'm also so happy that this is happening. The greatest war in history and all the horrors behind it should never be forgotten/hidden/suppressed/rewritten. Everyone commited atrocities in that war. Nobody is without stain. Document it all, and make it all widely available
"All those responsible for this mass slaughter must face accountability," said one campaigner in response to the new figures, "starting with Netanyahu and other members of his openly racist, genocidal, and warmongering regime.”
They were willing to sacrifice a those on October 7th to"justify" the genocide and claiming of Gaza...and probably the West Bank. You will never be able to convince me otherwise.
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the centre has rescued over 100,000 children from the frontlines and more than 1,000 from the occupied territories and Russia, through unofficial routes and brave, special operations. It estimates that one in 10 of these children has experienced sexual abuse. The victims, of all ages and sexes, include girls who have been raped and suffered forced pregnancy, “so they will give birth to future Russian soldiers,” said Alina Dmytrenko, government relations officer at the Save Ukraine Centre, an NGO that helps families escape Russian occupation, returns children abducted by Russia.
“We have these cases which are very sensitive,” she confirmed. “It is a system. It is part of Russia’s aim when it comes to children: to break Ukrainian identity and trust. To turn Ukrainians into Russians. All the children who come here are traumatised, afraid to talk, to express emotion. But with sexual abuse, all of this is much heavier.”
“Russia is specifically targeting children,” she added. “It is shocking. How can you abuse the most vulnerable?”
First of all, thanks a lot for the amazing response and interest in Journiv. We have hundreds of stars, thousands of docker pull and many many feature request (and bugs reports) on Github in just two weeks (sleepless two weeks for me 😀).
Journiv v0.1.0-beta.8 is out and in it I have added the most requested features.
Highlights:
OIDC support (now pretty stable)
In app with history. So you always have your memories safe and backed up even if you don't want to deal with docker backups
Journiv began as a deeply personal project, a way for me to capture memories, reflections, and the stories behind thousands of photos and videos of my fast-growing kids. What started as a tool for my own parenting journey has grown into something that fills a real gap in the self-hosting community.
If you’re curious, you can read the full story behind Journiv here.
I’m grateful that Journiv is now helping others preserve their memories as well.
The Journey Ahead
Journiv is in active development, with a fully functional backend, a web frontend, and mobile apps launching soon. It is self-hosted, and designed to be your companion for decades.
Journiv is being built because our memories deserve to be ours, forever.
So this Thanksgiving, give your family the gift of memories that last forever!
TL;DR: Journiv is a a beautiful, self-hosted, privacy-first journaling app with mood tracking, daily prompts, and meaningful insights. The mission is simple: your memories should always stay yours. Own them, don’t rent them.
Journiv 0.1.0-beta.4 is now live on GitHub and fully Docker-hostable. Start owning your thoughts and memories forever and keep them completely private.
The Story Behind Journiv
I got into self-hosting last year and while exploring options journaling solution, I realized there wasn’t a truly modern, self-hosted equivalent to Day One or Apple Journal. Most alternatives were either general note apps or old abandoned projects.
I wanted something focused on journaling with:
“On This Day” memories
Prompt-based journaling
A clean, minimal, distraction-free writing experience
So… I built my own: Journiv, a beautiful (at least I am trying to make it so), self-hosted, privacy-first journaling app with mood tracking, daily prompts, and meaningful insights.
Get Involved
Give Journiv a try, share your feedback and report issues. It means a lot at this stage.
Thank you using Journiv. Please report and feature request or bugs on Github. Regarding how long term: - It is very dependent on the support and sustainability the project gets from the community. So if you feel the project makes your life better and is valuable to you then definitely consider contributing and supporting it journiv.com/sponsors - Journiv, core mission is to let users completely control their data and enable freedom to do whatever they wan't with it. So open data formats and robust export is being built from day one. Journiv-viewer (coming soon journiv.com/docs/guides/journi…) allow users to access their journiv export as HTML webpages completely client side and standalone HTML pages. So even if you don't have journiv instance running years down the line you have easy access to your journals. This viewer can also generate markdown export zips with frontmatter which can then be imported to any markdown viewer or note app which support markdown without any metadata loss.
It would be great to be able to share a journal with other users for collaborative journals that all parties can view and edit. A few use cases could be family or travel journals.
Nice app. Very intuitive and does not get in the way. I don't see the integrations tab in my settings like in the immich integration vid. I am very interested in that feature.
Thank you. Please report any issues or feedback on github. This post has details on current status of immich integration reddit.com/r/immich/comments/1… It will be coming soon. Stay tuned!
Thank you. Journiv can be used by multiple user on same instance. Journiv has been built with industry grade security practices (journiv.com/docs/configuration…) and support user management (journiv.com/docs/configuration…) with role based access control. If you are using with multiple user it is recommended to use postgres as the db over sqlite: journiv.com/docs/configuration…
Journiv currently does not support shared journal where you can share your journal with other users in your instance. It is a requested feature so will be added github.com/journiv/journiv-app…
It would be great to be able to share a journal with other users for collaborative journals that all parties can view and edit. A few use cases could be family or travel journals.
NPR spent months looking into Trajector, interviewing 11 former employees and hearing from 60 veterans who hired the company. The investigation revealed a company that started with a mission to help disabled vets, but that former workers say now is intent on aggressive debt collection and maximizing profits. NPR discovered a web of corporate entities that Trajector uses to contend that it stays within the bounds of a law to protect veterans. Despite repeated written warnings from the VA that it may be breaking that law, the company continues to operate.
NPR also found that the company's moneymaker is a computerized robo-dialer system named "CallBot" that bombards a VA phone hotline meant for vets. Trajector is not accredited by the VA and the VA won't give it any information about vets' disability pay. So it uses CallBot as a side-door to sleuth that out. Trajector regularly enters social security numbers and birthdates obtained from tens of thousands of its clients into the phone hotline, which reveals the amount of each veteran's monthly disability payment. When the company detects an increase, it automatically sends a bill, sometimes for as much as $20,000, and then starts calling to collect.
Trajector is not alone. In recent years, scores of large and small outfits have sprung up promising to help vets apply for disability benefits. Critics call them "claim sharks."
I have been trying to find a PeerTube instance so I can upload music my son's band performs.
I signed up to 5 different PeerTube instances over the past two weeks. 4 of them have not accepted or rejected my application, despite all of their pages saying the accept within 24-48 hours. The fifth instance denied my application with, "read the coc and reapply". I had read it before applying, but I read it again and reapplied, it was again denied with the same reason given.
I would like to find an instance for music, preferably not hosted in the US.
I've been using makertube.net as a non-posting user for now, and they say they are open for new content creators, though it requires contacting them. I don't know if it is one of those that remain silent, but i've seen quite a bunch of creators on it.
The fifth instance denied my application with, "read the coc and reapply"
Don't know what instance that is specifically, but if their application process is anything like reddthat's lemmy application process, there's probably a bit in there about something specific you're supposed to include in the application so they can weed out bots.
I use peertube.wtf and have had no issues if thats of help. There's an artist on peertube who posts his music I'll see if I can check what instance he's on...
Last month, Firefox turned 21, marking two decades of building a web that reflects creativity, independence and trust. At TwitchCon, we celebrated by launching billionaires into space and launching a new card game, Data War.
Billionaire Blast Off started with a simple premise: send billionaires into space and have fun doing it. With Data War, we created a fun and often chaotic game where you compete to win a one-way ticket to space for a data-hungry billionaire.
An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. The only available option are user donations.
To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.
I put it like this under the admin list for now, with plugin description as mouseover text. It could also go into a separate box like the subscriptions list, with plugins descriptions always visibl...
I also developed a plugin for automatic language tagging of posts/comments, it works quite well even on very short text. Will also put it on voyager.lemmy.ml soon.
There are a few reasons: - Test if the plugin system really works - As an example for other plugins - Avoid bloating Lemmy core with functionality that isnt needed by everyone - With plugins its much easier to make adjustments or new releases, and no need to wait for a new Lemmy release (and no need to fork all of Lemmy for minor adjustments)
The University of Pennsylvania (Penn) has announced a new data breach after attackers stole documents containing personal information from its Oracle E-Business Suite servers in August.
Billionaires Michael and Susan Dell pledged $6.25 billion Tuesday to provide 25 million American children under 10 an incentive to claim the new investment accounts for children created as part of President Donald Trump’s tax and spending legislation.
The historic gift has little precedent, with few single charitable commitments in the past 25 years exceeding $1 billion, much less multiple billions. Announced on GivingTuesday, the Dells believe it’s the largest single private commitment made to U.S. children.
Its structure is also unusual. Essentially, it builds on the “ Trump Accounts " program, where the U.S. Department of the Treasury will deposit $1,000 into investment accounts set up by Treasury for American children born between Jan. 1, 2025 and Dec. 31, 2028. The Dells’ gift will use the “Trump Accounts” infrastructure to give $250 to each qualified child under 10.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Leapmotor announces the opening of its Automotive Security and Safety Lab, marking a major breakthrough in intelligent safety a big step forward in making smart driving safer and more reliable for everyone.
So instead of tuning the law by adding a few lines about sex-centered homicides, they invented the new term and just stated that some sex is more important than other. It is amazing how politicians manage to invent the most stupid solution to any problem.
So you are infuriated by the name? That sounds like misogyny since there are no androcides and the law, whatever the name, would still concern only femicides.
Anyway a "gendercide" law could be great and could include also hate crimes against homosexuals, transsexuals and so on, but guess what?
Other bigots like you go completely nuts when someone mentions these words and the current proposed law for that specific type of crimes is blocked.
EDIT: you are the one who is proposing (completely out of nowhere) a "gendercide" law even though you know androcides don't exist and even though you didn't mention other genders.
Sounds all purely in bad faith, which is why I'm prone to include you in the bigots club.
Honestly any kind of gender-motivated hate murder should be punished but from my point of view isn't the biggest issue the murder part? If you're already sentencing someone for an intentional murder wouldn't they be ideally getting something resembling a maximum sentence? In which case would the specific motive really make a huge difference in punishment? I'm just trying to understand why this is a big deal when the starting point is already murder.
No, there are many cases and conditions that can change the final sentence, which can be, but not always is, the life sentence (26 years in italy or 21 with "good behavior").
I'm not an expert though so for better informations you should research it yourself.
I have briefly scanned the headline and am ready to share my immediate opinion on this significant political issue that I did zero research on. Where do I put it?
A murder charge is a minimum sentence of 21 years up to life if it had aggravating circumstances like premeditation.
So I guess this means you can be convicted of murder and femicide now and serve double life sentences. What does it accomplish practically aside from responding politically to the murder of that Giulia girl?
If you have a problem with criminalizing hate crime murders against women, you are probably part of the problem. We have a worldwide epidemic of violence against women.
Femicide doesn't get solved with more laws. It's a deep rooted issue which needs education. Proper support for abused people, really investigating and enforcing laws. Providing mental health support.
It's not like the people who are killing women right now are too worried about the existing laws. They do it out of hate and cowardice. Cultural expectations, mental health issues. And just because "they can".
But really. Support for women before they are killed. In many cases, the signs show way before and the abusers are let go with just a warning.
Wouldn't it be smarter to have a law that simply and generically adds penalties on a crime committed out of hate against a population group?
So instead of "just" femicide, it could also cover hate against e.g. members of religions, the handicapped, or, in a reverse case, maybe even cover a hate-murder on a man?
Despite the administration’s claim of streamlining the government to make its operations more efficient, a range of recent federal policies have, in fact, exacerbated food wastage.
The United States should not kid itself. It will not recover its manufacturing position from China in any foreseeable future. According to World Bank data, in 2024 the US’s GDP of US$29.2 trillion was 60 ...
So what, all our economies are built on a fake immaterial model. Until I see the magic bullet that can stop climate change none of this seems like good news to me almost every single country on earth is going to miss it’s climate goals, if we want an example of an interesting economy we should probably look at Bhutan or something.
There is no silver bullet, it's about doing what we can to transition off fossils as fast as possible. Latest analysis sees 25% global emission reduction by 2035, consistent with a 1.7 °C pathway, with 90% of emission cuts coming from power sector cleanup and widespread electrification.
Yeah probably won’t happen we are heading to 3 degrees the hotter it gets the less you’ll be able to grow, to the elites whether they’re in China or the USA you don’t matter as long as they have money they think they’ll be fine. I’ve met a lot of these people in power they’re only thinking about themselves at this point and trying to placate the masses so they can suck as much wealth out of them as our environmental systems collapse. Coral reefs are already dying it’s going to have a massive affect on global fish supplies, genie is out the bottle now.
You're just projecting here. If the standard of living of the regular people didn't matter to the party, then these sorts of things would not be happening in China today.
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2…
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. nber.org/system/files/working_…
Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet.
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) semanticscholar.org/paper/Chin…
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. data.worldbank.org/indicator/S…
If you want to contrast with a country where the elites don't care about the people, then look no further than India. Both countries started roughly at the same level of development back in the 50s and the difference today could not be more stark.
Even from purely selfish perspective, it's obvious that social stability is what allows the elites to enjoy their life style. A social collapse would not be good for them. While the US is run by imbeciles without any vision, that doesn't mean China is. The reality is that despite that chart you linked, China is making by far the most progress of any country in transitioning of using fossil fuels.
Not only that, but they're also actively exporting tech like solar panels around the world. So, countries like Pakistan are now decarbonizing as well cnn.com/2025/05/01/climate/pak…
We are headed for difficult times ahead, but some countries will face these challenges collectively and their societies will come together, meanwhile others will tear themselves apart.
No I’m not I know more about politics than you do I’ve been working in this shitty game for 17 years I’ve met world leaders helped people win elections helped countries win wars. You’re just a propagandist à la goebbels.
The United States should not kid itself. It will not recover its manufacturing position from China in any foreseeable future. According to World Bank data, in 2024 the US’s GDP of US$29.2 trillion was 60 ...
Um, duh? Does anyone understand how long it takes to build manufacturing equipment or the buildings meant to house it all? Or if that equipment can even reasonably be manufactured itself? Or if there are even enough people to do the work? Or if enough of those people are educated well enough to do the work? Or if there’s money anywhere to make any of that possible at all never mind within a reasonable timeframe?
Say you have cash on hand, or the ability to get a monster loan, to start a factory. You would be a fool to build in the US!
You know the tariffs will be disastrous and eventually repealed, and we're seeing both actions right now. So even if tariffs allow you to compete with imports, the rug will get yanked out from under you at some point. And there you are, holding the bag on a brand-new, worthless factory.
In 1976, Sir John Gubb Pasha wrote "The Rise and Fall of Empires." He studied the world empires and stated they all follow the same stages. I think it is more that the U.S. is in the last stage. (people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb…))
US volunteers who have poured into Ukraine to help amid war are dismayed by Trump’s continuing pressures on Kyiv
Americans involved in the Ukrainian war effort are embarrassed and dismayed by Donald Trump’s continuing pressures on Kyiv and think his administration’s latest peace plan is tantamount to backstabbing and another catastrophic failure of US foreign policy.
“Complete bullshit and a betrayal by Trump,” said an American special forces veteran who has helped train and advise the Ukrainian military since the full-scale Russian invasion began in February 2022. “But are you even surprised?”
Last week, a 28-point piece-plan reportedly drafted by Steve Witkoff, a Trump envoy negotiating with Kremlin adviser, Kirill Dmitriev, was leaked to the press and then revealed to be an apparent repackaging of Vladimir Putin’s maximalist demands on Ukraine.
And nicely signaling USA can't win any war anymore, or protect any ally. Buggered out of Afghanistan. Walking away from Ukraine. I guess Venezuela isn't that impressed by that big boat nearby.
Got a warning for my blog going over 100GB in bandwidth this month... which sounded incredibly unusual. My blog is text and a couple images and I haven't posted anything to it in ages... like how would that even be possible?
Turns out it's possible when you have crawlers going apeshit on your server. Am I even reading this right? 12,181 with 181 zeros at the end for 'Unknown robot'? This is actually bonkers.
Edit: As Thunraz points out below, there's a footnote that reads "Numbers after + are successful hits on 'robots.txt' files" and not scientific notation.
Edit 2: After doing more digging, the culprit is a post where I shared a few wallpapers for download. The bots have been downloading these wallpapers over and over, using 100GB of bandwidth usage in the first 12 days of November. That's when my account was suspended for exceeding bandwidth (it's an artificial limit I put on there awhile back and forgot about...) that's also why the 'last visit' for all the bots is November 12th.
A friend (works in IT, but asks me about server related things) of a friend (not in tech at all) has an incredibility low traffic niche forum. It was running really slow (on shared hosting) due to bots. The forum software counts unique visitors per 15 mins and it was about 15k/15 mins for over a week. I told him to add Cloudflare. It dropped to about 6k/15 mins. We excitemented turning Cloudflare off/on and it was pretty consistent. So then I put Anubis on a server I have and they pointed the domain to my server. Traffic drops to less than 10/15 mins. I've been experimenting with toggling on/off Anubis/Cloudflare for a couple months now with this forum. I have no idea how the bots haven't scrapped all of the content by now.
TLDR: in my single isolated test, Cloudflare blocks 60% of crawlers. Anubis blocks presumably all of them.
Also if anyone active on Lemmy runs a low traffic personal site and doesn't know how or can't run Anubis (eg shared hosting), I have plenty of excess resources I can run Anubis for you off one of my servers (in a data center) at no charge (probably should have some language about it not being perpetual, I have the right to terminate without cause for any reason and without notice, no SLA, etc). Be aware that it does mean HTTPS is terminated at my Anubis instance, so I could log/monitor your traffic if I wanted as well, so that's a risk you should be aware of.
It could be, but they seem to get through Cloudflare's JS. I don't know if that's because Cloudflare is failing to flag them for JS verification or if they specifically implement support for Cloudflare's JS verification since it's so prevalent. I think it's probably due to an effective CPU time budget. For example, Google Bot (for search indexing) runs JS for a few seconds and then snapshots the page and indexes it in that snapshot state, so if your JS doesn't load and run fast enough, you can get broken pages / missing data indexed. At least that's how it used to work. Anyway, it could be that rather than a time cap, the crawlers have a CPU time cap and Anubis exceeds it whereas Cloudflare's JS doesn't -- if they did use a cap, they probably set it high enough to bypass Cloudflare given Cloudflare's popularity.
Is there a particular piece? I'll comment on what I think are the key points from his article:
1) Wasted energy.
2) It interferes with legitimate human visitors in certain situations. Simple example would be wanting to download a bash script via curl/wget from a repo that's using Anubis.
3A) It doesn't strictly meet the requirement of a CAPTCHA (which should be something a human can do easily, but a computer cannot) and the theoretical solution to blocking bots is a CAPTCHA.
and very related
3B) It is actually not that computationally intensive and there's no reason a bot couldn't do it.
Maybe there were more, but those are my main takeaways from the article and they're all legit. The design of Anubis is in many respects awful. It burns energy, breaks (some) functionality for legitimate users, unnecessarily challenges everyone, and probably the worst of it, it is trivial for the implementer of a crawling system to defeat.
I'll cover wasted energy quickly -- I suspect Anubis wastes less electricity than the site would waste servicing bot requests, granted this is site specific as it depends on the resources required to service a request and the rate of bot requests vs legitimate user requests. Still it's a legitimate criticism.
So why does it work and why am I a fan? It works simply because crawlers haven't implemented support to break it. It would be quite easy to do so. I'm actually shocked that Anubis isn't completely ineffective already. I actually was holding out bothering testing it out because I had assumed that it would be adopted rather quickly by sites and given the simplicity in which it can be defeated, that it would be defeated and therefore useless.
I'm quite surprised for a few reasons that it hasn't been rendered ineffective, but perhaps the crawler operators have decided that it doesn't make economic sense. I mean if you're losing say 0.01% (I have no idea) of web content, does that matter for your LLMs? Probably if it was concentrated in niche topic domains where a large amount of that niche content was inaccessible, then they would care, but I suspect that's not the case. Anyway while defeating Anubis is trivial, it's not without a (small) cost and even if it is small, it simply might not be worth it.
I think there may also be a legal element. At a certain point, I don't see how these crawlers aren't in violation of various laws related to computer access. What i mean is, these crawlers are in fact accessing computer systems without authorization. Granted, you can take the point of view that the act of connecting a computer to the internet is implying consent, that's not the way the laws are, at least in the countries I'm familiar with. Things like robots.txt can sort of be used to inform what is/isn't allowed to be accessed, but it's a separate request and mostly used to help with search engine indexing, not all sites use it, etc. Something like Anubis is very clear and in your face, and I think it would be difficult to claim that a crawler operator specifically bypassed Anubis in a way that was not also unauthorized access.
I've dealt with crawlers as part of devops tasks for years and years ago it was almost trivial to block bots with a few heuristics that would need to be updated from time to time or temporarily added. This has become quite difficult and not really practical for people running small sites and probably even for a lot of open source projects that are short on people. Cloudflare is great, but I assure you, it doesn't stop everything. Even in commercial environments years ago we used Cloudflare enterprise and it absolutely blocked some, but we'd get tons of bot traffic that wasn't being blocked by Cloudflare. So what do you do if you run a non-profit, FOSS project, or some personal niche site that doesn't have the money or volunteer time to deal with bots as they come up and those bots are using legitimate user-agents coming from thousands of random IPs (including residential! -- it used to be you could block some data center ASNs in a particular country until it stopped).
I guess the summary is, bot blocking could be done substantially better than what Anubis does and with less down side for legitimate users, but it works (for now), so maybe we should only concern ourselves with the user hostile aspect of it at this time -- preventing legitimate users from doing legitimate things. With existing tools, I don't know how else someone running a small site can deal with this easily, cheaply, without introducing things like account sign ups, and without violating people's privacy. I have some ideas related to this that could offer some big improvements, but I have a lot of other projects I'm bouncing between.
Babbar.tech is operating a crawler service named Barkrowler which fuels and update our graph representation of the world wide web. This database and all the metrics we compute with are used to provide a set of online marketing and referencing tools for the SEO community.
12,000 visits, with 181 of those to the robots.txt file makes way, way more sense. The 'Not viewed traffic' adds up to 136,957 too - so I should have figured it out sooner.
I couldn't wrap my head around how large the number was and how many visits that would actually entail to reach that number in 25 days. Turns out that would be roughly 5.64 quinquinquagintillion visits per nanosecond. Call it a hunch, but I suspect my server might not handle that.
The traffic is really suspicious. Have you by any chance a health or heartbeat endpoint which provides continuous output? That would explain why so little hits cause so much traffic.
It's super weird for sure. I'm not sure how the bots have managed to use so much more bandwidth with only 30k more hits than regular traffic, I guess they probably don't rely on any caching and fetch each page from scratch?
Still going through my stats, but it doesn't look like I've gotten much traffic via any API endpoint (running WordPress). I had a few wallpapers available for download and it looks like for whatever reason the bots have latched onto those.
I run an ecommerce site and lately they've latched onto one very specific product with attempts to hammer its page and any of those branching from it for no readily identifiable reason, at the rate of several hundred times every second. I found out pretty quickly, because suddenly our view stats for that page in particular rocketed into the millions.
I had to insert a little script to IP ban these fuckers, which kicks in if I see a malformed user agent string or if you try to hit this page specifically more than 100 times. Through this I discovered that the requests are coming from hundreds of thousands of individual random IP addresses, many of which are located in Singapore, Brazil, and India, and mostly resolve down into those owned by local ISPs and cell phone carriers.
Of course they ignore your robots.txt as well. This smells like some kind of botnet thing to me.
Like, there are bots that are trying to scrape product info, or prices, or scan for quantity fields. But why the hell do some of these bots behave the way they do?
Do you use Shopify by chance? With Shopify the bots could be scraping the product.json endpoint unless it’s disabled in your theme. Shopify just seems to show the updated at timestamp from the db in their headers+product data, so inventory quantity changes actually result in a timestamp change that can be used to estimate your sales.
There are companies that do that and sell sales numbers to competitors.
No idea why they have inventory info on their products table, it’s probably a performance optimization.
I haven’t really done much scraping work in a while, not since before these new stupid scrapers started proliferating.
Negative. Our solution is completely home grown. All artisinal-like, from scratch. I can't imagine I reveal anything anyone would care about much except product specs, and our inventory and pricing really doesn't change very frequently.
Even so, you think someone bothering to run a botnet to hound our site would distribute page loads across all of our products, right? Not just one. It's nonsensical.
Yeah, that’s the kind of weird shit I don’t understand. Someone on the other hand is paying for servers and a residential proxy to send that traffic too. Why?
Maybe, but I also carry literally hundreds of other products from that same brand including several that are basically identical with trivial differences, and they're only picking on that one particular SKU.
It doesn't quite work that way, since the URL is also the model number/SKU which comes from the manufacturer. I suppose I could write an alias for just that product but it would become rather confusing.
What I did experiment with was temporarily deleting the product altogether for a day or two. (We barely ever sell it. Maybe 1 or 2 units of it a year. This is no great loss in the name of science.) This causes our page to return a 404 when you try to request it. The bots blithely ignored this, and continued attempting to hammer that nonexistent page all the same. Puzzling.
This is far beyond my limited coding experience but I do enjoy a good puzzle. In your opinion do you think it could be some gen AI scraper. Like the gen AI is deciding what page to scrape and cuz its stupid it keeps selecting your page?
Alternatively I wonder if the product page just happens to have an unsual combinination of keywords that the bot is looking for. Maybe its looking for cheap prices of RAM and the page has some keywords related to RAM?
Good luck I hope you are able to get them to start hammering that page.
In my case the pattern appears to be some manner of DDoS botnet, probably not an AI scraper. The request origins are way too widespread and none of them resolve down to anything that's obviously datacenters or any sort of commercial enterprise. It seems to be a horde of devices in consumer IP ranges that have probably be compromised by some malware package or another, and whoever is controlling it directed it at our site for some reason. It's possible that some bad actor is using a similar malware/bot farm arrangement to scrape for AI training, but I'd doubt it. It doesn't fit the pattern from that sort of thing from what I've seen.
Anyway, my script's been playing automated whack-a-mole with their addresses and steadily filtering them all out, and I geoblocked the countries where the largest numbers of offenders were. ("This is a bad practice!" I hear the hue and cry from specific strains of bearded louts on the Internet. That says maybe, but I don't ship to Brazil or Singapore or India, so I don't particularly care. If someone insists on connecting through a VPN from one of those regions for some reason, that's their own lookout.)
They seem to have more or less run out of compromised devices to throw at our server, so now I only see one such request every few minutes rather than hundreds per second. I shudder to think how long my firewall's block list is by now.
Have you ever tried writing a scrapper? I have for offline reference material. You'll make a mistake like that a few times and know but there are sure to be other times you don't notice. I usually only want a relatively small site (say a Khan Academy lesson which doesn't save text offline, just videos) and put in a large delay between requests but I'll still come back after thinking I have it down and it's thrashed something
This dance to get access is just a minor annoyance for me, but I question how it proves I’m not a bot. These steps can be trivially and cheaply automated.
I don't think the author understands the point of Anubis. The point isn't to block bots completely from your site, bots can still get in. The point is to put up a problem at the door to the site. This problem, as the author states, is relatively trivial for the average device to solve, it's meant to be solved by a phone or any consumer device.
The actual protection mechanism is scale, the scale of this solving solution is costly. Bot farms aren't one single host or machine, they're thousands, tens of thousands of VMs running in clusters constantly trying to scrape sites. So to them, a calculating something that trivial is simple once, very very costly at scale. Say calculating the hash once takes about 5 seconds. Easy for a phone. Let's say that's 1000 scrapes of your site, that's now 5000 seconds to scrape, roughly an hour and a half. Now we're talking about real dollars and cents lost. Scraping does have a cost, and having worked at a company that does professionally scrape content they know this. Most companies will back off after trying to load a page that takes too long, or is too intensive - and that is why we see the dropoff in bot attacks. It's that it's not worth it for them to scrape the site anymore.
So for Anubis they're "judging your value" by saying "Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is to access this site?" For consumer it's a fraction of a fraction of a penny in electricity spent for that one page load, barely noticeable. For large bot farms it's real dollars wasted on my little lemmy instance/blog, and thankfully they've stopped caring.
The author demonstrated that the challenge can be solved in 17ms however, and that is only necessary once every 7 days per site. They need less than a second of compute time, per site, to be able to send unlimited requests 365 days a year.
The deterrent might work temporarily until the challenge pattern is recognised, but there's no actual protection here, just obscurity. The downside is real however for the user on an old phone that must wait 30 seconds, or like the blogger, a user of a text browser not running JavaScript. The very need to support an old phone is what defeats this approach based on compute power, as it's always a trivial amount for the data center.
The deterrent might work temporarily until the challenge pattern is recognised, but there's no actual protection here, just obscurity.
Anubis uses a proof-of-work challenge to ensure that clients are using a modern browser and are able to calculate SHA-256 checksums. Anubis has a customizable difficulty for this proof-of-work challenge, but defaults to 5 leading zeroes.
Please tell me how you're gonna un-obscure a proof-of-work challenge requiring calculation of hashes.
And since the challenge is adjustable, you can make it take as long as you want.
You just solve it as per the blog post, because it's trivial to solve, as your browser is literally doing so in a slow language on a potentially slow CPU. It's only solving 5 digits of the hash by default.
If a phone running JavaScript in the browser has to be able to solve it you can't just crank up the complexity. Real humans will only wait tens of seconds, if that, before giving up.
This here is the implementation of sha256 in the slow language JavaScript:
const msgUint8 = new TextEncoder().encode(message);
const hashBuffer = await window.crypto.subtle.digest("SHA-256", msgUint8);
const hashHex = new Uint8Array(hashBuffer).toHex();
You imagined that JS had to have that done from scratch, with sticks and mud? Every OS has cryptographic facilities, and every major browser supplies an API to that.
As for using it to filter out bots, Anubis does in fact get it a bit wrong. You have to incur this cost at every webpage hit, not once a week. So you can't just put Anubis in front of the site, you need to have the JS on every page, and if the challenge is not solved until the next hit, then you pop up the full page saying ‘nuh-uh’, and probably make the browser do a harder challenge and also check a bunch of heuristics like go-away does.
It's still debatable whether it will stop bots who would just have to crank sha256 24/7 in between page downloads, but it does add cost that bot owners have to eat.
That's counting on one machine using the same cookie session continuously, or they code up a way to share the tokens across machines. That's now how the bot farms work
It will obviously depend heavily on the type of bot crawling, but that is not hard coordination for harvesting data for LLM's, as they will already have strategies to prevent nodes all crawling the same thing - a simple valkey cache can store a solved JWT.
but the vast majority of crawlers don't care to do that. That's a very specific implementation for this one problem. I actually did work at a big scraping farm, and if they encounter something like this,they just give up. It's not worth it to them. That's where the "worthiness" check is, you didn't bother to do anything to gain access.
I recently added Anubis and its validation rate is under 40%. In other words, 60% of the incoming requests are likely bots and are now getting blocked. Definitely recommend.
I was a single server with only me and 2 others or so, and then saw that I had thousands of requests per minutes at times! Absolutely nuts! My cloud bill was way higher. Adding anubis and it dropped down to just our requests, and bills dropped too. Very very strong proponent now.
It's a mix, I put two screenshots together. On the left is my monthly bandwidth usage from CPanel on the right is Awstats (though I hid some sections so the Robots/Spiders section was closer to the top).
I mean, I thought it was long dead. It's twenty-five years old, and the web has changed quite a bit in that time. No one uses Perl anymore, for starters. I used Open Web Analytics, Webalizer, or somesuch by 2008 or so. I remember Webalizer being snappy as heck.
I tinkered with log analysis myself back then, peeping into the source of AWStats and others. Learned that a humongous regexp with like two hundred alternative matches for the user-agent string was way faster than trying to match them individually — which of course makes sense seeing as regexps work as state-machines in a sort of a very specialized VM. My first attempts, in comparison, were laughably naive and slow. Ah, what a time.
Sure enough, working on a high-traffic site taught me that it's way more efficient to prepare data for reading at the moment of change instead of when it's being read — which translates to analyzing visits on the fly and writing to an optimized database like ElasticSearch.
CrowdSec - the open-source and participative security solution offering crowdsourced protection against malicious IPs and access to the most advanced real-world CTI. - crowdsecurity/crowdsec
I'm going to try and implement crowdsec for all my ProxMox containers over Cloudflare tunnels. Wish me luck and that my wife and kids let me do this without constantly making shot up fore to do.
Had the same thing happen on one of my servers. Got up one day a few weeks ago and the server was suspended (luckily the hosting provider unsuspended it for me quickly).
It's mostly business sites, but we do have an old personal blog on there with a lot of travel pictures on it, and 4 or 5 AI bots were just pounding it. Went from 300GB per month average to 5TB on August, and 10/11 TB in September and October.
What is the blog about? It may be increased interest as search providers use them for normal searches now.. or it could be a couple of already sentient doombots.
Please don't be a blog about von Neumann probes. Please don't be a blog about von Neumann probes. Please don't be a blog about von Neumann probes..
I had to pull an all nighter to fix some unoptimized query because I had just launched a new website with barely any visitors and hadn’t implemented caching yet for something that I thought no one uses anyway, but a bot found it and broke my entire DB through hitting the endpoint again and again until nothing worked anymore
I don't know what "12,181+181" means (edit: thanks @Thunraz@feddit.org, see Edit 1) but absolutely not 1.2181 × 10^185^. That many requests can't be made within the 39 × 10^9^ bytes of bandwidth − in fact, they exceed the number of atoms on Earth times its age in microseconds (that's close to 10^70^). Also, "0+57" in another row would be dubious exponential notation, the exponent should be 0 (or omitted) if the mantissa (and thus the value represented) is 0.
My little brain broke when I started trying to figure out how big the number was... thanks for breaking it down even more intuitively, yeah it is way to large to have been correct!
That's insane... Can't a website owner require bots (at least those who are identifying themselves as such) to prove at least they're affiliated with a certain domain?
It's a shame we don't have those banner ad schemes anymore. Cybersquatting could be a viable income stream if you could convince the cleaners to click banner ads for a faction of a penny each.
China’s aggressive trade stance against Japan appears to kill any chance it has of joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership [CPTPP] trade bloc in the near future.
Beijing’s confrontation with Japan over a remark about Taiwan has led to a series of retaliatory blows already hurting the Japanese economy.
But China’s sharp response to new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s frank admission that a Chinese attack on Taiwan might trigger a collective self-defence response could also rebound on the People’s Republic.
China has released its ‘wolf warriors’ and ramped up trade pressure on Japan dramatically, warning its citizens to stay away from Japan, while reimposing a ban on Japanese seafood.
[...]
Japanese artists have had concerts in Beijing cancelled or postponed, [...] supposedly because of public dissatisfaction over Takaichi’s remark. Manufacturing giants such as Toyota and Sony also expect “direct blowback” from Beijing [...] Chinese airlines cancelled flights on at least a dozen routes to popular destinations such as Kyoto and Osaka last week, according to a report by the [Chinese state-controlled media outlet] South China Morning Post.
[...]
But there are also signs that China will pay a price for its latest display of petulance.
Its acts of economic coercion are almost certain to derail – or add years – to its bid to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which Beijing applied for in 2021.
The problem for Beijing is the CPTPP requires a very different approach to the ‘trade wars’ that China has launched against trading partners, such as Australia, several years ago.
Members of the trade grouping must meet three criteria known as the ‘Auckland Principles’ – preparedness to meet the pact’s high standards, a record of compliance and adhering to trade commitments, and concensus, with all existing members agreeing to on new countries wishing to join.
[...]
Nations must agree to non-discriminatory dialogue with other members and transparent decision-making, as noted by Australia’s ABC News, which said the latest flare-up has occurred as the 12 “CPTPP members were meeting in Melbourne to assess new membership bids.”
“On the eve of those discussions, one member state is being economically punished by the country seeking entry,” it said. “That creates a structural problem for China: CPTPP enlargement requires unanimity. And Japan holds a veto.”
[...]
The idea of Japan permitting China to join the CPTPP now is “almost unthinkable,” the ABC report said, not only because of its coercive trade actions, but other factors, such as its behaviour in the East China Sea.
Taiwan will prepare itself for combat within the next two years amid "intensifying" threats from China, the nation's president has declared.
Lai Ching-te held a news conference on Wednesday morning amid a ramping up of military and political pressure by Beijing, which views the democratically-governed island as its own territory.
Speaking after announcing plans to boost defence spending with a "special" $40bn (£30.6bn) budget, Mr Lai said Xi Jinping's regime was "speeding up military preparations to take Taiwan by force".
It comes after Mr Xi used a phone call with Donald Trump to describe Taiwan's return to mainland China as "an integral part of the post-war international order".
President Lai Ching-te said the government will work to counter any attempts at "repression", and achieve a "high level of combat preparedness" within two years.
It comes after Mr Xi used a phone call with Donald Trump to describe Taiwan's return to mainland China as "an integral part of the post-war international order".
Of course, Trump is already surrendering to Russia, why would not China use the opportunity?
In my recent analysis of YouTube’s information density I included the results from an advanced statistical analysis on the number of videos present on the home page, which projected that around May 2026 there would only be one lonely video on the hom…
You jest, but if conservatives have their way, you'll soon have to verify your ID by uploading a video every time you visit the site (if not logged in). Even for non-adult content!
Because the reason for the ID isn't to "protect the children" or anything like that. It's about control. Conservatives want the power to decide what people get to see and ID verification systems are just a small part of that.
Ah that explains why my subscription page has all the videos I haven't watched at the top and all the videos regardless of watched status right below so the same video is listed twice on the same screen on a slow day.
Now if they could just make sure when I open the app/channel that I land on the subscription screen instead of recommended that would be a real QOL improvement.
Jesse adding “removed” to that sentence in that scene is an example of the Mandela effect. Lots of people remember it that way, but he actually says “Yeah science! Yeah Mr. White!”
I still end up using the Youtube app on my phone sometimes and I'm absolutely floored at the audacity of even making the first video an ad. Total, absolute, utter bullshit.
I have a Google phone, which has YouTube embedded on it. I can't remove it. I had to disable it, then tell my phone to redirect all YouTube links to my browser. Now I can block ads again!
Might be simple for you, for me and for many around here, but... anything that involves adb is far from simple to the vast majority of people who use Android
I suppose; however, I usually link a few sites that basically hold a users hand while leading them through it. Including text to copy and paste into the command line and how to open the command line. Pretty much anything that might be a barrier is taken care of.
You can install Shizuku and Canta then. Shizuku provides the necessary permissions for Canta to run adb commands if you are scared of the command line.
You won't type out even a single command in the terminal, I guarantee it.
...but I'm not scared of the command line, in fact I use adb to remove bloat from my phone from time to time. What I said is that majority of people using android aren't like us. But yeah, it's good that tools like those you pointed out exists, I'm sure there is an audience for them
They were condescending on the bug with the fourth highest internal ratings that simply requested that shorts could be removed (particularly for children and for mental health). A particular gripe of some engineers was that it couldn't be removed from the subscriptions page. I was impressed they removed the condescending comment after a month but they never really addressed the large volume of employees telling them this was the wrong thing to be doing
pewpew
in reply to cm0002 • • •w3dd1e
in reply to cm0002 • • •I’m very against Roblox. I know a kid who had a really hard time with online predators and a lot of it stated with Roblox. He’s 19 now. He and I were talking about it recently.
Parents think Roblox is like Minecraft bc of the aesthetics of the game. But, Roblox is not a game with a chat feature, it’s a chat room with some games. That’s a big difference.
They have 380 million users. Around 60% of the user base is under the age of 16. 40% is under the age of 12. That’s 152 million mostly unmonitored kids.
I’m sure Roblox has gotten better moderation during that time, but in our experience predators meet kids on Roblox and get them to exchange Discord or other contact info with them.
Discord is also a problem here, but that’s for another rant in another thread. If you are concerned about your kids and want to discuss it with me, feel free to message me.
TLDR: DO NOT LET YOUR KIDS PLAY ROBLOX unless you are actively monitoring the game.
redwattlebird
in reply to w3dd1e • • •A friend's 8 year old daughter was asking to play Roblox recently and they reached out to me since it's in my current area of study and advised them against it due to the lack of responsibility that the corporation takes for their users.
I suggested that they introduce her to Vintage Story on a self hosted server instead. That way, they can control who has access and content.
I'm actually surprised at how many parents let their kids play Roblox unmonitored. I mean, why not let them go to the playground unmonitored instead?
Kilgore Trout
in reply to redwattlebird • • •It's highly likely there is no playground.
jj4211
in reply to cm0002 • • •I feel like when 'Zero Trust' first became a thing, the theme was 'you should have every endpoint under your control hardened so it need not feer untrusted peers being able to connect'. E.g. if you think you absolutely need VPN to a 'private network' for security, then you are failing to be hardened in a 'zero trust' way, because you implicitly fear that your systems would fall to untrusted peers.
I feel like it's evolved to 'don't let anything be able to connect to anything under your control unless you have admin privilege over it as well'. Which is particularly a nightmare when you try to collaborate between two companies, each balking at the other's hard requirement to have admin access to all network peers of interest.
moonpiedumplings
in reply to jj4211 • • •