I’m the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

  • 0 Posts
  • 426 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 29th, 2023

help-circle



  • Way way back. I was given a 486 (when pentium 90/100s were normal) at work to run the experimental internet connection on (the head of the company at the time didn’t think this internet fad would last). So I installed some magazine coverdisk linux and connected the office to the internet via a single modem.

    I think it had a peak uptime of 550 days before it was replaced.












  • I’m old enough such that when I was at primary school (this is years 5-11 for non UKians) there was a computer. Not in every class, no. A computer, on a wheeled trolley that could be moved around. Well actually I think there were probably three. Because there were three floors and no-one was going to move that trolley up and down the stairs. But still it definitely was not one per class.

    It was barely used. In fact, the teachers didn’t really know HOW to use it. They actually just let me go at it, because I did know how to work it.

    In secondary school (11-15/16), things were somewhat different in that there were slightly more modern computers, most classes had one and there was a dedicated room where there was a classroom number of computers available. This was where we were taught “ICT” which, was essentially showing how to use word processors and spreadsheet software. Again teachers of the time were quite far behind and I’m not exaggerating here, I used to help the teacher, teach this class. But there was no programming, or any advanced use. It was very basic tasks with specific software. All of our written work, even for this class was written with a pen, in an exercise book.

    Now, budgets were still terrible. I can be pretty sure about this because I remember that because we DID still do everything on paper, photocopies were handed around the room. Oh they weren’t any flash laser photocopy (well sometimes in secondary school it was). No, these was the kind with the fuzzy purple ink that was hand rolled to make a copy. But we got by.

    Now, there’s no doubt we live in a digital world and computing must be taught because we do everything on a phone or computer now and people need to know how to do it. But, there’s still surely a good reason to be doing work in exercise books with a pen and paper? Everything cannot be on a computer.



  • Looks to me like they’re essentially redirecting the request from the normal api to do age checks to their own api, and just saying “Sure, they’re an adult” to discord (since that is all the “proper” api tells them). There are easy ways for Discord to fix this. So do not expect it to work for long.

    What could be risky? Well it seems to be loading some libraries. What are they doing? Don’t know, didn’t check. Probably just keeping the line count of the actual code down. But, who knows?

    The other thing (and they of course do need to do this). They pass the full URL that would be sent to the “proper” api to their own. So if there is some private info about you/your account they usually send on, these guys would have that data too.

    Just a quick 5 minute look though. I didn’t look too much into it because, I’m not going to use it :P

    EDIT: Looks like they actually detail what they do and it seems to involve actually tricking the age verification api too. Interesting stuff. Still not going to do it.



  • Peter Backman, CEO of theDelivery.World, said the practice was only misleading if customers were purposely trying to support independent restaurants and takeaways.

    That’s some high grade bullshit. There is going to be a subset of people (and I’d argue it’s a growing number) that want to support local businesses and so yes it’s misleading to all those people.

    But more than that. A corporate/franchise brand has such a huge value they will sue you if you use it without permission. So if they’re choosing not to use a brand they paid good money to use, it can only be because they want to deceive.


  • I’d say the ideal situation is that tools are developed library first, then cli or gui as preferred allowing others to pick up the slack and make the other tool (or tools) using the functions in the library.

    One of the reasons automation is so much easier on linux than windows is because there are many more cli tools to do things. On windows many tools are gui first and cannot easily be automated.