Recent comments in /f/Tech

Wingless wrote

This is a fairly naive approach that tolerates having a lot of sites not work. To be sure, the sites that do work without Javascript are the best sites, the least spy-industrial-complex afflicted of what is out there.

But, that said, there is a more modest approach which is to run NoScript on Firefox and authorize Javascript on one site at a time as needed. Now NoScript and Firefox both come with big crooked "whitelists" but at least for the moment you can still disable what you see there.

A notable advantage of disabling scripts is that a LOT of news websites are really, really dumb. They have come up with something so stupid I couldn't believe the first time they did it and now everybody of course wants to copy it. Namely, the sites seem to rely on cookies to let people read one article from a web search, then start pretending they can't find any other article you click on. But I guess they use a script to check if you're accepting their cookies? So I just block all cookies from nyt, sanluisobispo, usnews, bostonglobe, kansascity, idahostatesman, miamiherald ... whatever dot com, and then they are as readable as in the glory days of the web before this script nonsense and the third party spy ads it was meant to propagate had ever been introduced, despite putting on a pretense of not being readable at all. I wonder if subscribers have as good an experience.

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Rambler OP wrote

Usually what happens instead is that you get an unsolvable challenge. Well, not always unsolvable, occasionally the algorithm has mercy and lets you through after minutes of suffering. But it's not really worth trying.

I've been stuck in reCAPTCHA hell before where I swear they were sent to specifically discourage someone from continuing.

"Select All the Crosswalks" but then, they have an image of the rumblestrips cut into the side of highways (that warn you when you veer off road) when, photographed correctly "look like" crosswalk stripes. Didn't select it because it's not a crosswalk, failed. Then everything else is "Select the bicycles" with images of motorcycles too. Does Google know the difference between the two? I do. Still failed, maybe I should have selected the motorcycles also.

And don't even get me started on the ones where you have like 4 pixels of an image in another square. Do you select it as well? Part of the fire hydrant is in that square. When selecting the street lights, do you choose JUST the very clearly obvious ones, or do you select the small, out of focus ones in another square as well?

Usually at this point I just say, "fuck it" and find what I'm looking for elsewhere.

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Rambler OP wrote

In the last year, Google has started to roll out reCAPTCHA Version 3. And, unfortunately, there’s not much that can be said for this, because it’s such a closely guarded secret. All that we do know is, from the minute you enter a website with reCAPTCHA Version 3 on it, you will be monitored in the background, and when you go to click ‘submit’ you’ll have already been assigned a ‘How Likely This is to be a Robot’ score.

There are no documents detailing how they work this out, and we can only hope that they are taking into account Incognito Mode, and importantly, accessibility tools. For all we know, those with a negative score may have their comment immediately archived or their form submission sent into a spam folder. And there’s no way to tell if you’ve failed.

Facial recognition

Something that Monzo Bank are doing, is a sure-fire way of ensuring you’re not a robot. Their identification checks involve you sending a picture of your ID, and thereafter sending a video of you saying a phrase. Not only is this checking you are a human, it’s ensuring you’re the specific human in question.

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Rambler wrote (edited )

I'll have to check this out. I'm not a fan of tech and their warnings / labels / "additional context" but it seems like it can be disabled.

About 80% of my YouTube usage is music anyway, so if it's going to give additional information about the videos it might as well have neat band trivia and related artists instead of fake news warnings and context added.

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Rambler OP wrote

As someone who has never gotten "into" crypto, that's' more or less my ignorant understanding on it. I know it's more complex than that based on skimming some articles in the past but it seems like an accountability / ledger system in a sense.

Hopefully someone will come along and hit us with some knowledge though.

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Rambler wrote (edited )

I wonder how efficient it is. Even modem solar isn't all that efficient in terms of electrical production. My old 100w Monocrystalline panels are more efficient than the cheaper polycrystalline panels but still kind of bad in regards to potential.

Polycrystalline panel efficiency ratings will typically range from 15% to 17% whereas monocrystalline panel efficiencies can range from 17% to 22%, so they still kind of suck. Not to mention producing batteries are harmful to the environment as well.

Would love to see the technology advance to very effective panels that can be mass produced so you don't need a crazy large array even for moderate power.

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trevor wrote

I think this is a step in the right direction but with how the article is worded it makes it sound obnoxiously free speech. Like for example, if I were to say, "I think we need to make an ethnostate" and that got removed because it breaks the rules of that platform, am I still able to sue? Ruqqus has a good system for this where it doesn't outright remove anything, but allows mods to kick posts into a general board. But what about the platforms that weren't made with that in mind?

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