Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

  • 6 Posts
  • 714 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle












  • I have no idea what the law is in India, but if he got a “hacking” charge for this it would be a gross miscarriage of justice, considering he never once did anything resembling social engineering, brute forcing passwords, any sort of injection attack, or anything else that might actually be involved in hacking.

    However, assuming he never tried to reach out to the company themselves first (and I saw no indication in the article that he had), this is really quite a horrible irresponsible disclosure. It’s pretty obviously a significant leak of sensitive data—both customer and business data—and giving them 90 days to fix it before alerting the public to what you found is pretty basic security ethics.



  • AO3 is a website for sharing fanfiction. Archive of Our Own.

    Slash fiction is a subgenre of fanfiction focused on romance, because for example you might describe your fanfiction as “Kirk/Spock” (pronounced “Kirk slash Spock”).

    “Shipping” is the act of supporting a “ship”, short for “relationship”. It can be in fanfiction or just in fan discussions. It may or may not be supporting the “canon” ships, which are relationships actually shown in the original story. (Kirk/Spock is absolutely non-canon, but Picard/Crusher is a canon ship.)

    Sometimes ships get given names, which might be a portmanteau of the characters’ names (Castle and Beckett from the show Castle being “Casket”), or associated with a characteristic of the characters (“rocketship” is Team Rocket characters Jessie and James from Pokémon), or reference something that happened to the characters in universe (Young Justice’s “Spitfire” referencing romantic advice given to Wally West that in part lead to him getting romantically involved with Artemis).

    Even if you’re not particularly interested in shipping, if you get involved in online communities discussing long-running series, you’re bound to become familiar with it.




  • This is what really shits me. “Oh, the sports companies won’t be able to fund themselves.” If that’s true, too fucking bad. Our laws shouldn’t exist to arbitrarily prop up certain industries even when we’ve decided that the industry is causing harm.

    But also, it’s just fucking not true. You can make an argument and say “oh but gambling companies fund 60% of the sport league” or whatever number it is, and pretend that banning gambling would cut the NRL’s budget by 60%. But that’s just not how it works. They’re sponsors because they were the highest bidder, not the only bidder. You’d just go to the next highest bidder if gambling sponsorships weren’t allowed. In the short term, maybe a 10% loss of revenue at most. Realistically, in the long term, it’d be negligible.

    Same goes for pokies at local pubs and clubs. Australia has 0.3% of the world’s population and 18% of the world’s poker machines. And if you look specifically at poker machines not located in casinos it goes up to a ridiculous 76%. The entire rest of the world doesn’t allow poker machines at local clubs like we do, and their venues do just fine. The cries that venues would die off if they couldn’t have pokies are just nonsense.



  • even now you can still host your own website / services at home without any specialized gear

    Yes, as I said, that’s the only thing I’ve done myself—in particular, at times I’ve run it off of my main desktop, and at other times on a Raspberry Pi with an external hard drive attached—but that’s specifically not what I was asking about because the previous comment was specifically talking about non-developers who might have that basic HTML understanding and just want a server where they can throw up an HTML file and have it served up. A goal that’s more technically involved than a wordpress.com site, but less involved than self-hosting a LAMP stack and running the Let’s Encrypt certbot.

    (Plus, of course, the growing prevalence of cgNAT making self-hosting impossible for many people necessitates the use of a hosting company or user-friendly web service.)