I’m really liking this, thank you for the suggestion.

@[email protected] has whored his karma already, he isn’t answering these additional questions which call into question his false assumptions.

Yes, we could have an internet without businesses. See here.

This sounds like the kind of thing a Zoomer who has no memory of life before the Internet – or the Internet of the '90s before the advertisers got a hold of it, for that matter – would write.

To clear that up, I’m coming up on 40. We got our first family computer with a 56k modem in 1995. I’m not saying ads are a good thing, I’m telling you that 99% of websites are ad-powered.

Back then companies had websites as a novelty, or way to find information about their company. All the newspapers that had websites were simply putting their major articles on the internet as a bonus, and as a business strategy to push subscriptions for their physical paper. Most everyone still purchased a subscription to their physical newspapers and magazines. Now, basically nobody has a newspaper or magazine subscription unless it’s online, but most people still don’t… The tech savvy use archive.ph and similar, and the old and non tech-savvy use their 3-article limit and might buy a month subscription to read an article they really have to read, or maybe even a year like the old days, but most don’t pay for a subscription at all, and that’s where the ads come in.

However, since social media has become the dominant news-spreading mechanism, many or most don’t even read articles. They read headlines and talk shit or ask questions in the comments section, of things which were answered in the article. In the 90s those people would be reading the articles as something to do, and to stay somewhat informed. Today, their smartphone would ding or buzz before they finished the first article.

P.S. I’m Degoogled and use Graphene without GSF on my main profile so I use Aurora, Neo Store, and F-Droid. Currently using Boost installed with Aurora. What’s a good recommendation for a good, fast, FOSS Lemmy client that doesn’t show ads that I can get with F-Droid?

Those are not businesses. They are free projects which a dedicated person (or group of people) donate their time and energy to produce.

Wikipedia has their semi-annual donation drives and many (not most, but enough worth mentioning) FOSS devs are salaried by companies like Google and Microsoft and are allowed to work on patches to out-of-scope projects on company time provided they’re still fulfilling their main roles. There are also Liberapay, Open Collective, Ko-fi and such but for the majority of FOSS devs not funded by large corps, just developing a large and widely-used program because they want to, donations rarely ever cover as much as they would make at a 9-5. There are also nonprofits that distribute donations to FOSS devs. For most it is a money pit, but to them the passion is worth more. They do it for the love, not the money.

These are not businesses.

What are your suggestions besides ads and subscriptions, professor?

That’s a nice thought.

Then you suddenly realize no one knows up from down or down from up. Society would shift on such a massive scale people would probably just stick their smartphones in a drawer and only use them to message people they already know personally and check them a few times a day like an answering machine.

Then suddenly you realize you haven’t heard about Ukraine, Russia, Israel or Palestine in months. It’s November 28th and you heard someone mention a ‘new president’ but you didn’t even vote. Shit, you forgot to vote. There were no social media or news websites reminding you about the election and you didn’t have it on your new wall calendar yet! Ah that’s what all those “Vote Now!!!” yard signs were about, fuck…

It’s a nice thought, but the internet is powered by ads. (Almost?) Every subscription-supported website is also ad-supported. The internet would basically go under. AFAIK all the Lemmy apps have ads too. It’d be a nice change to get back to get a force shove back to the early-mid 90’s. Maybe we’d do things differently. People would certainly be outside talking to each other a lot more.

Since its servhold, you may be able to remove the offending content (for a short time, anything public-facing) and then contact reg.xyz to get it unsuspended. You’re right though that’s not very good customer service.

On a related note, it’s possible a misconfiguration allowed some of the contents or index to be shown publicly and it got caught in a search engine and was taken down in an automated DMCA sweep. I believe .xyz is an American registrar so have to respond to DMCA but could be wrong on that. I like to stay with any .TLD that archive uses… md, ph, etc.

https://help.sav.com/hc/en-us/articles/11933048624923-Resolving-serverHold-on-Your-Domain

Njalla just buys domains from major registrars on your behalf and owns them on your behalf. Godaddy, Tucows, etc. It was the owner of the entire .xyz space (gen.xyz) who shut your domain down. Njalla is just passing along the info. Porkbun will do the same.

I noticed my main VPN and backup VPN failing to connect the other day, but that was 3-4 days ago. Haven’t tried since, because I switched to Pop!_OS in that time.

At the time I thought it was just my ISP being my ISP.

E: Both with Wireguard and OpenVPN, across multiple servers.

Since some people are having issues with the site, here it is from the ACLU:

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/congress-passing-bill-that-massively-expands-the-governments-power-to-spy-on-americans-without-a-warrant

ACLU Statement on Congress Passing Bill that Massively Expands the Government’s Power to Spy on Americans Without a Warrant

This bill would reauthorize Section 702 surveillance for two more years without any of the necessary reforms to protect Americans’ civil liberties

WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives passed a bill today that will reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for two years, expand the federal government’s power to secretly spy on Americans without a warrant, and create a new form of “extreme vetting” of people traveling to the United States.

When the government wants to obtain Americans’ private information, the Fourth Amendment requires it to go to court and obtain a warrant. The government has claimed that the purpose of Section 702 is to allow the government to warrantlessly surveil non-U.S. citizens abroad for foreign intelligence purposes, even as Americans’ communications are routinely swept up. In recent years, the law has morphed into a domestic surveillance tool, with FBI agents using Section 702 databases to conduct millions of invasive searches for Americans’ communications — including those of protesters, racial justice activists, 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, journalists, and even members of Congress — without a warrant.

“Despite what some members would like the public to believe, Section 702 has been abused under presidents from both political parties and it has been used to unlawfully surveil the communications of Americans across the political spectrum,” said Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “By expanding the government’s surveillance powers without adding a warrant requirement that would protect Americans, the House has voted to allow the intelligence agencies to violate the civil rights and liberties of Americans for years to come. The Senate must add a warrant requirement and rein in this out-of-control government spying.”

In the last year alone, the FBI conducted over 200,000 warrantless “backdoor” searches of Americans’ communications. The standard for conducting these backdoor searches is so low that, without any clear connection to national security or foreign intelligence, an FBI agent can type in an American’s name, email address, or phone number, and pull up whatever communications the FBI’s Section 702 surveillance has collected over the past five years.

The House passed all the amendments to expand this invasive surveillance that were pushed by leaders of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), the committee closest to the intelligence agencies asking for this power. The bipartisan amendment that would have required the government to obtain a warrant before searching Section 702 data for Americans’ communications failed 212-212.

Once this bill passes, there is absolutely nothing stopping the NSA from doing an IP lookup on this comment/my account, and putting me into a “potential domestic terrorist - watch closer” list. A list that will eventually be used later, for some reason or another, so let’s just hope we never get an authoritarian in the White House with stacked courts! That could never happen here, could it?

P.S. If you live in the US, just part of your connection going to another country (be it a CDN or server hosted in Canada, or US server gets overwhelmed and switches to Canada) - full content logs for you.

Cointelegraph is (was at least?) a reputable source for national security news. It’s mainly for OSINT and national security interested folks who know better than to do the majority of their research on a smartphone, so it may not be great on mobile, I don’t know.

Snowden chose Russia because the other option was life as a political prisoner without a chance at a fair trial. Egotist, sure, but at least we know what we know now. Can you imagine how fucked we’d be if he never leaked them?

And regardless of the source, (site or person quoted), what he’s saying is absolutely true. The NSA is about to be able to gather ALL mass communications and look at them whenever, without a warrant which was the only safeguard before.

I’m legitimately about to throw my tech into a fucking dumpster and get a dumbphone and a smartphone with all hardware removed besides what’s required by Briar.

Most will read this and think I’m being overly paranoid. When I talked about the FVEY (now 14EYES) surveillance dragnet before the Snowdon leaks, everyone thought the same.

ok

And when they add 3 feet of plastic, use archive.ph

AIM/MSN/Yahoo chatrooms. GeoCities. Neopets. Limewire, KaZaa, listening to Art Bell on the radio next to you while you search for the latest alien news and read ancient texts. Webrings. Message boards. NSA hadn’t partnered with Microsoft for the first version of PRISM.

It was more decentralized, but even in the centralized parts there weren’t yet entire industries dedicated to stealing every last bit of dopamine from you to sell to the highest bidder.

It was an amazing time. RIP 1985-2010

Mass centralization. Old school forums like phpBB and SMF and vBulletin and new-school forums like self-hosted discourse are also centralized, but by one small user calling the shots, and it’s very clear immediately which forums are well-run. If a forum isn’t well-run with a good community, a ‘competitor’ will quickly pop up that is, and people will go to it. Sure, you have to have some tech skills but there are easy guides for all of it. Discourse is a simple docker image and it’s the best for features and engagement IMO.

Sure you have to sorry about DDoS attacks and staying patched, but you can use OVH or another host with a large infrastructure that had DDoS resistant servers. Or, god forbid, cloudflare.

I give you a B+ for General_Effort.

not this again.

it’s ketchup mfer, 57 varieties of tomatoes!

Interesting thumbnail strategy on this ad. It’s hard to see it as just a seat. My mind keeps trying to make it into a human palm, so I’m seeing a tiny Polly Pocket tablet and stylus.

It’s like a panopticon, but purely mental and inbuilt since their first memories.

This will lead to some heinous things down the line, probably started by those who by some luck of the draw weren’t exposed to the panopticon.