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2 months agoWhat supplier did you buy guns from who did not give to the NRA? I cannot find a single supply chain that avoids the NRA.
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Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: June 28th, 2022
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1·2 months agoIt is nobody’s duty to expose anything for the sake of exposing it.
Bullshit. Exposure is the 1st step.
It is our duty to expose things for the sake of solving them.
Of course. But not necessarily directly. There are many ways to solve a problem. Spotlighting an embarrassment is a precursor. You can also travel to a call center and apply to work for them to improve their system. You do you.
If you have a better solution, we’re ready to hear it.
It’s not my problem to solve. Do you also demand that testers fix the bugs they report?
You’re perversely out of step with how volunteer effort is managed. Volunteers choose for themselves how much effort they contribute. You are not their manager. It’s not for you to drive-by task people and bark out orders. When a bug is reported, it’s public for anyone to solve, if they want. It’s a community. Not a corporation.
I don’t see anything being covered up.
You don’t know how threadcrap works. It’s designed to suppress the thesis by creating a distraction.
I’m confused what you think a better alternative would be? If there was a test number, what if that worked, but you couldn’t call the real 911?
A test number would suffice in some situations. When an incompetent VOIP provider takes an action to block calls “for security purposes”, they cannot legally block /all/ calls. 911 calls must be permitted. And 911 test calls would obviously require the same status. I do not trust their competency. But if their call blocking allows a 911 test number through, it proves that their blockade is not a simple crude block on /everything/.
A test number would not be the only solution. With some services you can set the CID to whatever you want. So in principle a CID of 555-1212 could have special meaning to 911 receiptionists. So a tester would set the CID info to that number before calling 911.
911 is not always instantly answered by humans. When answered by a machine, there could be a cancel code. E.g. dial “119” after connecting to cancel it.
There’s no way around it: to be absolutely sure your phone can contact 911, you have to… dial 911.
Sure, if you need that extra level of certainty. In the typical cases that I mentioned (no GSM subscription), a test number would be sufficient. It would show that the dialed number reaches a switch that treats it.
and it will be fine.
Citation needed that there will be no fine to pay. Why not do a bit of research before making such claims? Quick search for false 911 call should flood your search results with fines, like $316 in Los Angeles.
South Carolina: misdemeanor. The penalties can include up to six months in jail, a fine of up to $200, or both.
It’s only an illegit 911 call if you call them for fun or if you test so often it can no longer be considered necessary.
Citation needed.
When attackers notice their victim making a distress call, they obviously convince them to back off and say the call was an accident. Emergency dispatchers will send help anyway to ensure coersion is not the case.
That’s a dicey hack. Maybe you could get away with it but you should know that there are typically fines for placing illegit 911 calls because they get enough false calls to have in place a system that automatically charges whatever the fine is. Was $50 for the 1st offense decades ago IIRC… likely higher now.
Gotta reference? Or can you elaborate? At the moment, I have a VOIP phone I need to test (as normal calls are blocked).
To be clear, it’s more about testing the phone network and services, not the hardware or software you use to dial numbers. I know my device on my side of the transaction functions fine.
First, it’s wrong to assume everyone has multiple phones. Those with multiple phones are also those who least need to test 911.
But if we can get past that, are you also assuming that the test phone has a phone number? Suppose you call the test center with a friend’s phone (always amusing when a policy imposes having friends, but anyway). The conversation would likely go like this:
me: I will make a test call from a different phone than the one I am calling from.
911 center: Okay, what is the phone number of the phone you are testing (so we know which inbound call to disregard)?
me: The test phone is not subscribed. There is no number.
911 center: Then we cannot do the test.Or do you imagine the 911 center would say: just call us now and we will ignore whatever call we get?
Of course if a GSM phone has no chip, it also has no number assignment. If the test phone is a VOIP phone, the subscriber may not have a DID. There could be a phony internal number assignment in that case, but the customer does not necessarily know it.
The next problem is /which/ call center do you call when you are on a voip phone served in a different state than where the call is made from?
2·2 months agoI was browsing a Lemmy instance (beehaw.org). What is less hostile than that?
Website enshitified. Had to use lynx to see the text for more than 1 second:
$ torsocks lynx https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/08/password-manager-login-difficulty/688396/?gift=A_VYuI0Bs4X1cJsYonaJVE29HRH1L8Ei13mJ3d1owSA
Timing is important with clapping. No mention of what happened just before Lux clapped.
3·2 months agoThese storms should really be named after the CEO’s of ecocidal corporations or right-wing politicians as a reminder of those contributing to climate change.
Should have been: Tropical storm “Donald”.
Enshitified website says: “Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker”
The NY Times used to have an onion that was not so restricted:
https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2lljsciiyd.onion/
But it’s down.
Would someone plz post the text of this article? Or an alternate source?
3·4 months agoExactly. Most local banks outsource to bigger evil corps (visa and m/c) for the network. American Express is smaller but it’s a hard-right corp ethically worse than visa and m/c.
A long time ago there was a scarce handful of small banks (like <10 nationwide) who used the Discover/Diner’s club network but that has shrunk to like 1 or 2 banks IIRC.
Cash is very much still a thing for Germany.
Indeed Germany is a cash strong-hold. But the German system is fragile. When cash is refused by a German company, the enforcement authorities are looking the other way. There is also no German ombudsman to appeal to, so without accountability enforcement agencies have no incentive to act. The only thing currently enabling cash to persist in Germany is the capitalistic drive to serve customers who like cash – which is almost sufficient today but it’s a downward trend worldwide. So cash will die in Germany as soon as a large enough portion of consumers quit caring. I think the tipping point is not far off. It’s just a matter of a few elderly folks dying off.
Many online stores allow you to do bank transfers to pay for products.
Okay, but Discovercard is a US institution with very little acceptance outside the US. Americans never have a bank transfer option for online purchases. Most Americans don’t even have an IBAN. Only 7 banks in the US have an IBAN themselves (out of ~2000 banks). So of the ~1993 or so banks some get an agreement with one of the 7 banks to borrow their SWIFT access. It’s quite messy and the fees are absurd. Because the money goes via 3rd party, the comment field is used for critical information about the ultimate beneficiary.
BBB typically facilitates comms in these cases. Indeed I have never gotten a BBB-inspired remedy from a quite large corporation. But large corps almost always respond to the BBB in my experience. It’s useful in the very least to force a corporation to talk. That talk can be used against them in court or presented to an attorney general.
I would rather have BBB compel a corp to talk than to lick Elon’s boots. Compared to Yelp and Twitter, BBB is the lesser of evils.
BBB is a scam, they extort companies to pay them to remove stuff basically. Not very helpful for consumer reference if companies can pay for a good profile.
It is true about the extortion-based mud-cleanup shady way of operating. But from a consumer standpoint they still get results often enough. I’ve experienced it 1st hand w/many complaints I’ve filed with different BBB agencies. I’ve experienced roughly an even distribution of these outcomes:
- the business confesses, apologizes, and makes the situation right. The complaint pays off 100% (and it costed nothing back when fax numbers worked).
- the business responds defensively, refuses to remedy the problem. In some of these cases BBB spanks them with a bad score. In other cases BBB plays the deadbeat and does nothing. Which way it goes depends to a notable extent on the bribe money from the merchant to BBB. Even when the bribe works and the company gets off despite wrongdoing, at least they still have the hidden penalty of paying the bribe.
- the business ignores the BBB. This should always be automatic condemnation and an extra poor score. But in reality sometimes BBB is just fucking lazy themselves.
- BBB does not even accept the complaint and the merchant is not even contacted. This is the most infurating and unjust scenario. Some BBB agencies are anti-consumer. In principle, this is still not an entire loss because there is a potential shred of justice in going to the press to embarrass the BBB.
Perhaps you have a quite high bar with high expectations. For me, if BBB forces a silent merchant to talk, that’s already sufficient progress to justify the complaint. Communication is half the battle.
2·9 months agoI’m surprised no one mentioned emacs. I’ve not done much with version control lately but back when I was coding at a day job, emacs was king. All the important version control functions are mapped to key bindings and macros.
Emacs functions graphically with a mouse for novices, which makes it good for starting off. Then as you get more advanced you memorise bindings for frequent functions so the mouse slows you down less and less. The default keybindings in emacs have become ubiquitous so e.g. many of the emacs bindings work in BASH and other apps. So when you learn emacs, your knowledge becomes portable outside of emacs.
A lot of the same can be said for vi variants. But that’s mostly it. Editors other than emacs and vi are isolated and less powerful – though I’ve not really looked hard outside of emacs lately so things may have changed.
2·10 months agoI would not interact on a centralised Cloudflare node like LW. But I still appreciate your suggestion because it might inspire me to check with some of these decentralised venues:
- krabb.org/c/selfhosted
- europe.pub/c/SelfHosted
- lemmy.nexus/c/selfhosted
- lemmy.rmict.nl/c/selfhost
- selfhosted.forum/c/main
Oof, seriously? Where to start… I am not going to write a book in this thread. It’s a surprising question. To be clear, this is not the #NRA of the 1970’s, which started as a gun safety organisation. Today’s NRA is the complete inverse. It’s anti-gun safety. NRA has become extremist. They lobby hard against every single gun safety measure that emerges. They would fight for the right of 12 year olds to carry hand grenades and land mines if it were up for discussion. They would advocate for schitzophrenics to carry ak-47s. They fight policy that would prohibit parents from leaving an insecure loaded gun lying around in reach of toddlers.
The NRA is in bed with ALEC and Koch brothers. They channel dark money from Russia and other illegit sources into republican war chests. ALEC is not just a lobby but also a bill mill that:
etc.
I don’t give a shit what the guy who packs guns into shipping boxes believes. I care where the money goes. When you buy a gun that feeds the NRA, you feed actions and policy that assault liberal values. You’re not a democrat in practice if you feed the NRA.