evenwicht

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/28580567

Love the irony and simultaneous foreshadowed embarrassment of Elon denying availability and service as a way to be more efficient.

The irony

Cloudflare enables web admins to be extremely bloated. Admins of Cloudflared websites have no incentive to produce lean or efficient websites because Cloudflare does the heavy lifting for free (but at the cost of reduced availability to marginalized communities like Tor, VPNs, CGNAT, etc). So they litter their website with images and take little care to choose lean file formats or appropriate resolutions. Cloudflare is the #1 cause of web inefficiency.

Cloudflare also pushes countless graphical CAPTCHAs with reckless disregard which needlessly wastes resources and substantially increases traffic bloat -- all to attack bots (and by side-effect text-based users) who do not fetch images and thus are the most lean consumers of web content.

The embarrassment

This is a perfect foreshadowing of what we will see from this department. “Efficiency” will be achieved by killing off service and reducing availability. Certain demographics of people will lose service in the name of “efficiency”.

It’s worth noting that DOGE is not using Cloudflare’s default configuration. They have outright proactively blacklisted Tor IPs to ensure hard-and-fast fully denied service to that demographic of people. Perhaps their PR person would try to claim CAPTCHA avoidance is efficient :)

The other embarrassment is that they are using Cloudflare for just a single tiny image. They don’t even have enough competency to avoid CF in the normal state & switch it on demand at peak traffic moments.

The discussion

More chatter here.

Love the irony and simultaneous foreshadowed embarrassment of Elon denying availability and service as a way to be more efficient.

The irony

Cloudflare enables web admins to be extremely bloated. Admins of Cloudflared websites have no incentive to produce lean or efficient websites because Cloudflare does the heavy lifting for free (but at the cost of reduced availability to marginalized communities like Tor, VPNs, CGNAT, etc). So they litter their website with images and take little care to choose lean file formats or appropriate resolutions. Cloudflare is the #1 cause of web inefficiency.

Cloudflare also pushes countless graphical CAPTCHAs with reckless disregard which needlessly wastes resources and substantially increases traffic bloat -- all to attack bots (and by side-effect text-based users) who do not fetch images and thus are the most lean consumers of web content.

The embarrassment

This is a perfect foreshadowing of what we will see from this department. “Efficiency” will be achieved by killing off service and reducing availability. Certain demographics of people will lose service in the name of “efficiency”.

It’s worth noting that DOGE is not using Cloudflare’s default configuration. They have outright proactively blacklisted Tor IPs to ensure hard-and-fast fully denied service to that demographic of people. Perhaps their PR person would try to spin this as CAPTCHA avoidance is efficient :)

The other embarrassment is that they are using Cloudflare for just a single tiny image. They don’t even have enough competency to avoid CF in the normal state & switch it on demand at peak traffic moments.

The microblog discussion

Microblog chatter here.

A lot of gov services use the same shitty social networks. But it’s just a bit extra disgusting when the FCC uses them along with the not-so social platforms. It’s an embarrassment.

The FCC privacy policy starts with:

“The FCC is committed to protecting the privacy of its visitors.”

Fuck no they aren’t. And we expect the FCC in particular to be well aware of the platforms that would make their privacy claim a true statement.

In particular:

• MS Github (98 repositories and maybe a bit strange that they are hosting UK stuff there.

• MS LinkedIn: “Visit our LinkedIn profile for information on job openings, internships, upcoming events, consumer advice, and news about telecommunications.” ← At least it’s openly readable to non-members. But I clicked APPLY on an arbitrary job listing (which had no contact info) and I was ignored, probably for not having a LinkedIn account. Which is obviously an injustice. Anyone should be able to access government job listings without licking Microsoft’s boots.

• Facebook: “Keep informed and engaged about consumer alerts, Commission actions and events.” ←Non-Facebook members cannot even view their page. And they are relying on it for engagement and consumer alerts.

• Twitter: “Follow @FCC for updates on upcoming meetings, helpful consumer information, Commission blog postings, and breaking FCC and telecommunications news with links to in-depth coverage.” ← At least it’s openly readable to non-members. But despicable that non-Twitter users cannot engage with the FCC. It’s an assult on free speech in the microblogging context. If you don’t lick Elon’s boots and give Twitter a mobile phone number (which they have been caught abusing before twtr contractors were caught spying on old accts, which came before Twitter was breached [twice in fact]), you cannot microblog to your government.

• YouTube: “Playback recorded webcasts of FCC events and view tutorials, press conferences, speeches and public service announcements on the FCC's YouTube channel.” ← One of the most atrocious abuses of public resources because Youtube is no longer open access. You cannot be on Tor, you cannot use Invideous. Due to recent extreme protectionism by Google, you are subject to surveillance advertising tied to your personal IP address.

Public money finances the FCC to make whatever videos the FCC produces. Since we already paid for the videos, they should be self-hosted by the FCC, not conditional upon entry into an paid-for-by-advertising walled garden with Google as a gatekeeper. It should be illegal to do that -- and we would expect the FCC to drive a just law in that regard. We would also expect the FCC to have the competency to either stand up their own peertube instance or simply put the videos on their website. People should be fighting that shit for sure.

What a shitty example they set for how government agencies should implement comms.

The main landing site for the FCC blocks Tor users with a 403. This means their contact page is also exclusive access, along with a number of otherwise pubilc access databases.

At least their consumer complaints site open to all, including those with a privacy complaint:

https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us

But note from the article that Florida’s law is almost useless due to being exteremly narrow in the scope of who must comply. It only applies to tech giants, generally. E.g., generally must “Derive 50 percent of its global gross annual revenue from the sale of advertisements online”. That gets a lot of data abusers off the hook. It is said to be modeled after Virginia.

This Florida rule might be interesting:

Mandatory Disclosures for Search Engines. The FDBR requires search engines to provide easily accessible descriptions of the main parameters used to determine the rankings of search results, "including the prioritization or deprioritization of political partisanship or political ideology in search results." In addition, search engines must disclose the relative importance and influence of the main parameters on the search results.

So I wonder if you VPN tunnel to Florida to perform a search, how many search engines give this info which they perhaps withhold outside FL?

It’s a slightly labor intensive because for each line of text you have to specify an endpoint.. but it’s managable enough. Also worth considering is Inkscape, which has a function to flow text into a shape.

It would be fun to collect some templates for re-use. E.g. if someone wants to complain about the corrupt tyrant who just took power (the most powerful office in the world) a couple days ago, a middle finger would be appropriate for that sort of thing.

It’s one of the ugliest most undignified forms of service refusal. They just simply drop packets from Tor. Not even enough courtesy to send a 403 forbidden. So visitors are left guessing whether the website is down, slow, or giving deliberate mistreatment. People then have to try different browsers with different timeout thresholds to investigate.

There is no apparent mirror or alternative site hosting Florida statutes. Archive.org has a cache of some laws but FL state gets zero credit for that.

(update) in fact there are two state sites for legal statutes and both block tor:

• www.leg.state.fl.us
• www.flsenate.gov

I would love it if someone would successfully argue in court “sorry I broke that law but I could not inform myself of the law because every time I tried to reach the state’s website for statutes it just timed out” -- and get away with it.

Indeed the IRS website blocks Tor users from accessing tax information, as if tor users don’t need tax information. Important legal guidance exists on irs.gov, so it’s obviously an injustice to block people from becoming informed about their rights and obligations.

(edit)
What’s the fix? Would it be effective to make a FOIA request on paper so the IRS must send the info on paper via USPS? Or would that require compensation to offset their burden?

Inspired by acquisition of power yesterday by a corrupt tyrant and his possie of xenophobic chronies, people should be reminded that the voting is not over because you can vote in the consumer market every day for the next 4 years. Everyone in the world can participate in this voting process (despite ALEC’s effort to reduce democracy).

ALEC¹ is the extreme right lobby and bill mill. This org writes bills for Congress conservatives to:

• reduce environmental protection and neuter the EPA
• fight immigration, push xenophobia
• proliferate and privatize prisons
• privatize education
• reduce public healthcare
• reduce tax regs (individual & corp)
• neuter the CFPB
• suppress voting (e.g. tightening id rules)
• weaken labor unions
• reduce gun control
• mask corporate tampering in politics

They have a close hand-in-hand relationship with the NRA and they finance republican war chests.

These are some of the well-known ALEC members, all of whome I boycott:

• AmEx (American Express)
• Anheuser Busch
• Boeing ← also rampant safety scandals
• Bose
• Century Link
• Charter Communications
• Chevron ← also caught financing the cloakroom project to hide meetings between republican politicians and corporations; also uses AI from Microsoft to find oil
• Farmers/Foremost
• FedEx ← also known to ship shark fins, hunting trophies, and slave dolphins
• Geico
• LMG (Liberty Mutual/Safeco)
• Marlboro (Philip Morris)
• Motorola ← also equips the Israeli Defense Forces
• Nationwide Insurance
• PNC bank
• Sony ← also caught using GPL code in their DRM code
• State Farm
• Texaco
• TimeWarner (Spectrum)
• UPS

Most of these ALEC members finance ALEC particularly for its anti-union lobby. But it’s a package deal. They finance thw whole of ALEC and all its activity.

There was also a “grab your wallet” project to track all Trump’s assets for boycotting Trump directly, but I don’t know if that’s being updated anymore. There is a link to a google docs spreadsheet (yikes!) but I think it’s a decade old by now.

¹American Legislative Exchange Council

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/880059

And I can’t even imagine it’s an intentional addition, it’s just become part of boiler plate legal documents here in the deep south.

The wiki on anti-BDS laws

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/8862635

“Only because of that official investigation did Canadians learn that ‘over 5 million nonconsenting Canadians’ were scanned into Cadillac Fairview's database”. Wow.

This Wired article is contradictory. The spokesperson says:

“an individual person cannot be identified using the technology in the machines. The technology acts as a motion sensor that detects faces, so the machine knows when to activate the purchasing interface”

I suppose it’s possible that a sloppy developer would name an executable Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe which merely senses the presence of a face. But it seems like a baldfaced lie when you consider that:

“Invenda sales brochures that promised ‘the machines are capable of sending estimated ages and genders’ of every person who used the machines—without ever requesting consent.”

Boycott Mars

I already boycott Mars because they are a GMA member and they spent ~$500k lobbying against #GMO labeling -- and they have been blackballed for using child slave labor -- and Mars supports Russia. This is another good reason to #boycottMars.

Update

Apparently a LemmyBug replaced the article URL with a picture URL. The article is here:

https://www.wired.com/story/facial-recognition-vending-machine-error-investigation/

The vending machine pic is here:

https://infosec.pub/pictrs/image/2041d717-7cd7-4393-94f3-96aa87817aa7.jpeg