I've always been fascinated with the Holocaust and so when there was an interview with a Holocaust survivor on 60 minutes, I had to watch it. The woman said a bunch of stuff, but what stuck with me is that she said that, "people need to be given permission" to act badly. The episode showed previously undiscovered notes and pictures from one camp, showing officers having a picnic and enjoying themselves after a hard day of???
Her point was that these people were given permission. I now see it everywhere. Food fight in the school cafeteria? There were a few instigators who gave permission to the rest. A city protest that turns violent? Again, a few vocal minority of the group started the violence and then the rest joined in. I see it at work and I also see it on-line. Anonymity and lack of accountability also enhances the effect.
Whether the instigators are real or bots doesn't really matter because they "gave permission" to the rest to misbehave.
Over my career, it's sad to see how the technical communications groups are the first to get cut because "developers should document their own code". No, most can't. Also, the lack of good documentation leads to churn in other areas. It's difficult to measure it, but for those in the know, it's painfully obvious.
I wanted to quit nagging my kids to close the pantry door. It conflicts with the fridge door and they're both getting banged up pretty bad. I replaced one of the pantry door hinges with a spring hinge (and removed the latch mechanism from the handle) and now the pantry door closes on its own. Sometimes, I hear them fling the door open and hit the fridge anyways, but I giggle just a little when it bonks them on the head.
Consider what would happen if employees across the globe posted to an open database about their employer, position title, salary bonus and health care information. I'm sure we'd all be sued. How is this legal?
In the US, I've noticed several places, mostly restaurants that now charge a convenience fee for credit card transactions. Double bonus for cash. I've even started using checks again as they don't have a fee.
Jeff? Is that you, son? I told you that it was nonnegotiable, now get off the internets, I'm expecting an important telephone call and don't want you tying up the lines.
While there are a lot of good technical suggestions here, I've found that a conversation goes a long way. In my experience, when talking with loved ones, explain your emotions. Not "I hate this" or "the governments are listening!", but those core emotions. "Having a device in my room that is always monitoring me makes me feel anxious and I don't feel comfortable in a place where I should feel safe." Make sure that the dialog is calm and remains about your feelings until you know that you're being heard. If you aren't, try other phrases or examples.
Once you've established your feelings, address their concerns and feelings (active listening). It sounds stupid at first, but it works. "I hear that you are frustrated when I don't come down for dinner immediately." Finally, propose some solutions that meet everybody's needs and that the parties can select one to try out for a week and evaluate it's effectiveness, trying new things until a mutually beneficial solution is found.
I'm not as enraged by this as most, but I think the true test will be to see if this feature is disabled by default in future releases. If they actually do listen to their users, that's better than any of the other big players.
I read a bit about the new "feature" and it seems to me that they're trying out a way to allow ad companies to know if their advertisement was effective in a way that also preserves the privacy of the user. I can respect that. I did shut it off, but am also less concerned because I have multiple advertisement removal tools, so this feature is irrelevant.
The fact that it's enabled by default isn't comforting, but who would actually turn this on if it were buried in about:config? In order to prove its effectiveness to promote a privacy respecting but advertisement friendly mechanism, this is what they felt that they had to do.
Of course, I could easily be all wrong about this and time will tell.
I don't know if this applies directly, but in my early days of hosting a server for fun, I installed a telnet server because my phone didn't have SSH at the time. I forgot to close it when i was done and someone got in and installed a password sniffer. This was a Slackware box, IIRC. My only indication that there was a problem was that the "." & ".." directories didn't appear from an "ls -Alf". I pulled the network cable and booted to a boot image and discovered that many key system utilities were replaced with imposters that would mask that there was an intruder. The '"ps", "ls" and other utils were symlinked to the "..." dir in /usr/local/lib.
I didn't trust anything on that server and nuked it. Now, anything that's internet facing is built from ansible and the config is stored in a repo and the repo is backed up on a drive that's physically disconnected except when backing up. I've messed up the initrd from time to time and it's usuall easier for me to reimage than try to fix it.
Thank you for a thoughtful post with citations and quotes. After reading the whole page by Mozilla, it seems like they're taking steps to show advertisers how they can get what they want while preserving people's privacy. I can live with that. They're trying to build a win-win scenario.
I'll still block ads. I'll still reject cookies, but I feel like it's a reasonable feature THAT I CAN SHUT OFF. I'm still in control of my browser! Great!
Look at the strangler pattern in microswrvice architecture. Applying this to your scenario, set up a front end to YouTube, cache the results locally (probably host in a place that allows it). Also host videos from other platforms like peertube. Once you have a lot of users, slowly prioritize "free" videos over YT content.
It's not likely to happen, but it's the pattern that FB uses to present news. First they showed a link to the story and you'd click through, then they required more of the story, then when all were hooked, they demanded the whole story to be displayed, effectively stealing all the users and the ability to advertise.
I feel like everyone's missing the point. Even 20 minutes a week is almost a day a year of your life sitting at a charger. I fill up my gas tank once a week and it takes maybe 5 minutes which is 4 hours a year that I spend feeding my car, staring at the stupid advertisements for a bacon-egg-and-cheese cinnamon roll covered in maple syrup or whatever other impulse items lie within the gas station. 5 minutes isn't enough to do anything whereas if I plan for 20 minutes, I'm going to go get a tea or something.
On the other hand, something we can all agree is a waste of time is, "how many hours of your life have been/will be spent sitting at a traffic light?"
I know of a guy who had good intentions. He just wanted to make Germany great again. I can't remember his name right now, but IIRC, it didn't end up being good for a whole lot of people.
I had one from Sony a long time ago. It even had a cable you could attach between two of 'em (600 CDs!) so that it could seamlessly start playing another track while loading the next song. I dropped it during a move and the next time I opened the door, it spit gears at me. I had intended to fix it some day, but started watching Hoarders and decided it wasn't worth it.
You're 100% correct on the tactile difference in the buttons. I didn't think of that. A similar complaint is every feature is a "button" on the infotainment screen. I saw this on a Dodge. My current car has no touchscreen and I have driven it long enough to just know where all the buttons are without looking. In my opinion, distracted driving should include these types of things that take your attention off of the road.
Anonymouse @ Anonymouse @lemmy.world Posts 12Comments 178Joined 2 yr. ago
I've always been fascinated with the Holocaust and so when there was an interview with a Holocaust survivor on 60 minutes, I had to watch it. The woman said a bunch of stuff, but what stuck with me is that she said that, "people need to be given permission" to act badly. The episode showed previously undiscovered notes and pictures from one camp, showing officers having a picnic and enjoying themselves after a hard day of???
Her point was that these people were given permission. I now see it everywhere. Food fight in the school cafeteria? There were a few instigators who gave permission to the rest. A city protest that turns violent? Again, a few vocal minority of the group started the violence and then the rest joined in. I see it at work and I also see it on-line. Anonymity and lack of accountability also enhances the effect.
Whether the instigators are real or bots doesn't really matter because they "gave permission" to the rest to misbehave.
Found the episode: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pictures-show-nazi-life-at-auschwitz-as-jews-died-in-gas-chambers-60-minutes/