Just now I realized that for some reason I can't mount SMB shares to E: and H: anymore.. why, you might ask? I have no idea. And troubleshooting Windows.. oh boy, if only it was as simple as it is on Linux!!

So, bimonthly reinstall I guess? Because long live good quality software that lasts. In a post-meritocracy age, I guess that software quality is a thing of the past. At least there's an option to reset now, so that I don't have to keep a USB stick around to store an installation image for this crap.

And yes Windows fanbois, I fucking know that you don't have this issue and that therefore it doesn't exist as far as you're concerned. Obviously it's user error and crappy hardware, like it always is.

And yes Linux fanbois, I know that I should install Linux on it. If it's that important to you, go ahead and install it! I'll give you network access to the machine and you can do whatever you want to make it run Linux. But you can take my word on this - I've tried everything I could (including every other distro, custom kernels, customized installer images, ..), and it doesn't want to boot any Linux distribution, no matter what. And no I'm not disposing of or selling this machine either.

Bottom line I guess is this: the OS is made for a user that's just got a C: drive, doesn't rely on stuff on network drives, has one display rather than 2 (proper HDMI monitor recognition? What's that?), and God forbid that they have more than 26 drives. I mean sure in the age of DOS and its predecessor CP/M, sure nobody would use more than 26 drives. Network shares weren't even a thing back then. And yes it's possible to do volume mounts, but it's unwieldy. So one monitor, 1 or 2 local drives, and let's make them just use Facebook a little bit and have them power off the machine every time they're done using it. Because keeping the machine stable for more than a few days? Why on Earth would you possibly want to do that?!!

Microsoft Windows. The OS built for average users but God forbid you depart from the standard road of average user usage. Do anything advanced, either you can't do it at all, you can do it but it's extremely unintuitive and good luck finding manuals for it, or you can do it but Windows will behave weirdly. Because why not!!!

Fuck this shit, I'm done, mentally broken. I am trying to setup some basic Java project using buck. Their build times looked super promising and I wanted to migrate my multi module maven project to it.

I am currently working on it for FIVE hours now. And this fucking piece of SHIT doesn't work as I want it to. WTF FACEBOOK, IS IT SO HARD TO WRITE PROPER DOCUMENTATION THAT IS NOT OUT OF DATE?! People warned me, I ignored them. FML.

The time I used to try to get the repo working could have been used to build the project 250 times -.-

Brave Browser.

There’s a reason why brave is generally advised against on privacy subreddits, and even brave wanted it to be removed from privacytools.io to hide negativity.

Brave rewards: There’s many reasons why this is terrible for privacy, a lot dont care since it can be “disabled“ but in reality it isn’t actually disabled:

Despite explicitly opting out of telemetry, every few secs a request to: “variations.brave.com”, “laptop-updates.brave.com” which despite its name isn’t just for updates and fetches affiliates for brave rewards, with pings such as grammarly, softonic, uphold e.g. Despite again explicitly opting out of brave rewards. There’s also “static1.brave.com”

If you’re on Linux curl the static1 link. curl --head
static1.brave.com,
if you want proof of even further telemetry: it lists cloudfare and google, two unnecessary domains, but most importantly telemetry domains.

But say you were to enable it, which most brave users do since it’s the marketing scheme of the browser, it uses uphold:

“To verify your identity, we collect your name, address, phone, email, and other similar information. We may also require you to provide additional Personal Data for verification purposes, including your date of birth, taxpayer or government identification number, or a copy of your government-issued identification
Uphold uses Veriff to verify your identity by determining whether a selfie you take matches the photo in your government-issued identification. Veriff’s facial recognition technology collects information from your photos that may include biometric data, and when you provide your selfie, you will be asked to agree that Veriff may process biometric data and other data (including special categories of data) from the photos you submit and share it with Uphold. Automated processes may be used to make a verification decision.”

Oh sweet telemetry, now I can get rich, by earning a single pound every 2 months, with brave taking a 30 percent cut of all profits, all whilst selling my own data, what a deal.

In addition this request: “brave-core-ext.s3.brave.com” seems to either be some sort of shilling or suspicious behaviour since it fetches 5 extensions and installs them. For all we know this could be a backdoor.

Previously in their privacy policy they shilled for Facebook, they shared data with Facebook, and afterwards they whitelisted Facebook, Twitter, and large company trackers for money in their adblock: Source. Which is quite ironic, since the whole purpose of its adblock is to block.. tracking.

I’d consider the final grain of salt to be its crappy tor implementation imo. Who makes tor but doesn’t change the dns? source It was literally snake oil, all traffic was leaked to your isp, but you were using “tor”. They only realised after backlash as well, which shows how inexperienced some staff were. If they don’t understand something, why implement it as a feature? It causes more harm than good. In fact they still haven’t fixed the extremely unique fingerprint.

There’s many other reasons why a lot of people dislike brave that arent strictly telemetry related. It injecting its own referral links when users purchased cryptocurrency source. Brave promoting what I’d consider a scam on its sponsored backgrounds: etoro where 62% of users lose all their crypto potentially leading to bankruptcy, hence why brave is paid 200 dollars per sign up, because sweet profit. Not only that but it was accused of theft on its bat platform source, but I can’t fully verify this.

In fact there was a fork of brave (without telemetry) a while back, called braver but it was given countless lawsuits by brave, forced to rename, and eventually they gave up out of plain fear. It’s a shame really since open source was designed to encourage the community to participate, not a marketing feature.

Tl;dr: Brave‘s taken the fake privacy approach similar to a lot of other companies (e.g edge), use “privacy“ for marketing but in reality providing a hypocritical service which “blocks tracking” but instead tracks you.

I’m having this issue for the online marketplace I’m working on the side. It’s blockchain tech where you can purchase normal goods and services(no, not like Amazon or Fiverr, eww, this one’s more inclined with promoting organic growth for small businesses and freelancers).

I’m stuck with what solution is in the best interest of the user and the business for the long-term.

The dilemma about anonymity, online freedom and privacy is yes, it protects users from predators and attackers, but then, it’s harder for authorities to hunt down people who uses platforms for malicious intent, and also, digital footprint is helpful during litigation as evidence.

You don’t know who to trust.

-There is nothing to differentiate normal users with spammers, scammers, etc.
-There is no accountability for if they break the rules. They can easily delete and create a new account.

Platforms, communities big or small are plagued with these.
There are a lot of people out there who would rather project their insecurities on other people than to seek therapy.

Also, how platforms uses psychology tricks to make platforms addicting, it’s safe to assume that it’s bound to get toxic. Fixation on these platforms, leads to other needs being neglected or people forget to stay present.

Another thing, automated moderation is not that effective as there are still biases in data and human verification is still required. But then, human moderators get exposed to extreme violence, gore, etc that leads to poor mental health. (see Facebook got sued by moderators)

Also, I’ve had a recent experience where some unstable dev was stalking and harassing me. During that turmoil, I’ve found the many loopholes in every platform out there and how crappy their support is. Like they’ll just say, “make your account more secure”, bitch it’s your platform not providing enough security, your blocking feature means nothing coz anyone can still create accounts and message anyone.
It happened like February-August (it ended coz I quit going online and made private all my accounts). UGH I MISS ALL MY FRIENDS THO. FUCK THAT DUDE. He deserves to be in jail TBH

Lol if this product booms, now u know the back story lololol