Something interesting

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • That may have been part of the reason, but the theory behind MFA is that there are 3 primary ways to authenticate who you are: what you know (password), what you have (secure one time password generator or hardware token), and what you are (biometrics). Password managers and digital one time password generators have kind of blurred the lines between passwords and one time passwords, but you’re raising your risk a bit if you put them in the same place.




  • Exactly, from a security perspective, it’s a bad idea to put 2 factor tokens together with your passwords. You effectively eliminate the security benefit that 2 factor provides if you do because if people get into your password manager, they have everything they need to access your accounts. The only people it “helps” having it all in one app are people who don’t understand the purpose of 2 factor and just see it as an inconvenience when services force it on them. Even though I use BitWarden for passwords, I don’t think that I’ll be changing from Aegis to BitWarden’s stand-alone authenticator because Aegis is doing its job nicely.




  • It’s pretty bad, if your instance is missing comments and posts from another instance, they’re going to be missing the comments indefinitely unless back filling is ever added to the protocol or unless users do what you’re doing to manually pull comments and posts in. I think we’ll see some federation improvements on the next major version of Lemmy after v0.18, but it’s probably going to be shitty and unreliable until then. My personal instance is basically unusable right now.







  • Stuxnet itself doesn’t care whose centrifuges it destroys (in fact it doesn’t care or have an awareness that it’s destroying anything at all), it does what it’s programmed to do and is deployed to do by people with political goals. It’s not the same thing as Stuxnet itself being political.

    I did say that I could conceive of one way that software licenses could be considered somewhat political if one’s politics reject the validity of intellectual property. But then again, the software licenses are also not the code itself. If one doesn’t believe in the concept of intellectual property, one is free to accept whatever risk is involved with breaking the license and using it anyway. The software doesn’t care who’s running it.

    I know this is all somewhat pedantic, but I pretty firmly believe no software is inherently political. At least maybe not until we have a computer system that achieves some form of sentience and its operating instructions are subject to its own will.







  • Thank you for responding thoughtfully and giving me things to consider I hadn’t thought about much previously.

    This seems like a tricky problem to me because, while I understand that there are inherent issues with deplatforming people who are simply edgier and more coarse in their dialog, whether it’s due to their culture, socioeconomic status, or otherwise, I also feel like I have a right not to tolerate undue abuse in my online discourse. You mention your own ability to context switch with your use of language and I understand and appreciate that’s a luxury and ability many people don’t have in life. I guess I don’t really see a great solution to the problem you’ve described other than flattening wealth inequality and getting people to mingle more amongst cultures starting at a young age.

    As far as dealing with adults goes right now, though, I’m willing to have conversations with anyone who will genuinely consider my viewpoint and express why they agree or disagree rather than simply attack my character and offer nothing of substance. I’ll engage even if they come back in a more hostile tone than I’d normally appreciate. You have not attacked my character and you’ve replied thoughtfully, so this exchange has been productive (at least for me) 🙂

    Circling back to some of my previous thoughts, I think regardless of culture/class one general problem I see is that when we talk amongst our various in-groups, we don’t have a direct contrarian viewpoint to challenge. This lets us get lazy in our internal discussions, accept as fact the ideas others would challenge, leave unexplained the concepts that our in-group just tends to know already, and worst of all vilify dissenting viewpoints to a dehumanizing extent. I see it in all groups, but specifically I see it first hand in liberal groups I’m in and I realize that it can be seductive to talk about conservativism (for example) as simply evil. Hell, I often see fellow liberals tearing apart their own if someone doesn’t live up to a 100% purity standard they’ve created.

    When I start hearing my liberal in-groups parrot such talking points, I take a step back and remind myself this is emotional, not rational, discourse and is not a productive way to discuss sociopolitical issues with others. Unfortunately, I don’t think enough people do this, so we ultimately get shouting matches when different ideologies bump into each other. Thus, my impassioned plea is that we all try to moderate ourselves and our own in-groups to the extent we are able. We can downvote people we might otherwise agree with if they’re being assholes, for example. It will make intersectional dialog more enjoyable for everyone.