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Cake day: February 15th, 2021

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  • Ferk@lemmy.mltoComics@lemmy.mlThe exchange.
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    2 months ago

    The thing is that we do have “Morning!”, “Hello”, “Hey”, “Yo!”, “Hi!”… and many other greetings that are not in the form of a question that actually leaves it open for the other person to respond with honesty and that is often also used as a conversation starter. If you really aren’t open to a conversation, use one of the shorter friendly greetings.

    If I say “how’s it going?” and they answer with something I don’t have time to hear… at most I would excuse myself and politelly say that I don’t have too much time to talk… but complaining about the other person actually answering truthfully makes no sense.

    Of course it’s just a comic, but still… I don’t think the one answering is in the wrong here.


  • “you want a government backdoor on GPL licensed code? publish the backdoor for everyone to use, see and exploit/check for themselves. And/or watch as people simply take a version of the software built from a more reputable source without that backdoor instead. Thanks for the money!”

    “you want to force all foss projects existing in the global internet across countries to get paid by you or close? enjoy your logistic nightmare as you pay to be made fun of by all other countries while I fork projects with one click”




  • This.

    I don’t understand the appeal of microblogging. The content is generally very low quality, the signal-to-noise ratio is horrible… I’m not interested in the shower thoughts of any particular individual …or in marketing stunts.

    The only individuals I’m interested on are my family & friends, and even for them I’d rather use a more private platform.

    And when I want to read a public post I’d rather it’s well thought and ideally not restricted by micro-limitations. Even better if it’s curated by a public voting process among a community of people with my same interests, or some other process that makes it so I don’t have to waste my time going through tons of content I’m not remotelly interested on.


  • It can be formatted “nicely” with no issue. But that doesn’t necessarily make it easy to understand.

    What that person posted was in a function named smb() that only gets called by rmb() under certain conditions, and rmb() gets called by AdB() under other conditions after being called from eeB() used in BaP()… it’s a long list of hard to read minified functions and variables in a mess of chained calls, declared in an order that doesn’t necessarily match up with what you’d expect would be the flow.

    In the same file you can also easily find references to the user agent being read at multiple points, sometimes storing it in variables with equally esoteric short names that might sneak past the reader if they aren’t pedantic enough.

    Like, for example, there’s this function:

    function vc() {
        var a = za.navigator;
        return a && (a = a.userAgent) ? a : ""
    }
    

    Searching for vc() gives you 56 instances in that file, often compared to some strings to check what browser the user is using. And that’s just one of the methods where the userAgent is obtained, there’s also a yc=Yba?Yba.userAgentData||null:null; later on too… and several direct uses of both userAgent and userAgentData.

    And I’m not saying that the particular instance that was pointed out was the cause of the problem… it’s entirely possible that the issue is somewhere else… but my point is that you cannot point to a snippet of “nicely formated” messed up transpiler output without really understanding fully when does it get called and expect to draw accurate conclusions from it.


  • It doesn’t really matter whether it was “targeted” at Firefox specifically or not, what matters is whether the website has logic that discriminates against Firefox users. Those are 2 different things. “End” vs “means”.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if the logic was written by some AI, without specifically targeting any browser, and from the training data the AI concluded that there’s a high enough chance of adblocking to deserve handicapping the UX when the browser happens to be Firefox’s. Given that all it’s doing is slowing the website down (instead of straight out blocking them) it might be that this is just a lower level of protection they added for cases where there’s some indicators even if there’s not a 100% confidence an adblock is used.


  • That’s out of context. That snippet of code existing is not sufficient to understand when does that part of the code gets actually executed, right?

    For all we know, that might have been taken from a piece of logic like this that adds the delay only for specific cases:

    if ( complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users ) {
    
        setTimeout(function() {
            c();
            a.resolve(1)
        }, 5E3);
    
    } else {
    
        c();
        a.resolve(1)
    
    }
    

    It’s possible that complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users has some logic that changes based on user agent.

    And I expect it’s likely more complex than just one if-else. I haven’t had the time to check it myself, but there’s probably a mess of extremely hard to read obfuscated code as result of some compilation steps purposefully designed to make it very hard to properly understand when are some paths actually being executed, as a way to make tampering more difficult.



  • I think part of the reason why the long extension is often preferred is because it’s much clearer and it’s guaranteed to be supported and decompressed by the respective tools. Even when they don’t suppot tar archives, they’ll just give you the uncompressed tar in that case.

    It’s also very common to do that with other extensions (not just .tar) when compressing big files. For example, when archiving logs they’ll often be stored as .log.gz, which makes it automatically clear that it’s a log file directly compressed with gzip and meant to be examined with tools like zcat and zless to view it.

    And in cases like that you really need it to be clear on what data does the gzip stores, since it does not keep metadata about the file so you might not be able to get back the original name/extension of the file if you rename the gz file.



  • You can grow potatoes for political reasons too. Everything a human being does might be politically motivated, but that doesn’t mean potatoes are political.

    Anyone can take that same software, that was created as a particular political statement, and use it for the completelly opposite political reasons to make a completelly different political statement. Just the same way as many have used songs in contexts that are completelly politically opposite to what the original author of the song intended.

    In the end, the only thing that’s political is the goal/purpose/motivation of an action, not the result of the action. No piece of software/hardware/thing is political when you dettach the artist from the art and just see it for what it is, regardless of what the author might have wanted you to see it as.