Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
Did you read about the new Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act laws of the European Union, that will go in effect in 2022? Pretty neat stuff, more transparency, user rights and a tool against internet monopolies.
"Very big online plattforms" must submit reports on freedom of speech, abuse of human rights, manipulation of public opinion.
EU assigned scientists will gain access to trade secrets like google search or Amazon recommendation algorithm to analyze potential threats.
The EU can fine serial offenders 10 % of their yearly income. And break up companies that stiffle competition.
Internet companies like Facebook will not be permitted to share user data between their products like Instagram and WhatsApp.
There will be a unified ruleset on online advertisement. Each add must have the option to find out why this add is shown to the user.
Unlike the GDRP data protection rule the two acts will be valid at the Union level. So that there won't be any exceptions from single member states.
Let's hope this leads to a better Internet and not things like cookie pop ups 😄
Link to the EU DMA DSA page
> https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single...
49 -
Remember Apple's initiative to scan photos on user's devices to find child pornography?
Today I finally decided to research this.
The evidence is conflicting.
For context, the database of prohibited material is called CSAM (child sexual abuse material).
“If it finds any CSAM, it will report the user to law enforcement.”
— Futurism
“Apple said neither feature would compromise the security of private communications or notify police.”
— NPR
CSAM initiative is dead. It won't scan photos in iCloud. It won't scan photos on your device. It will be a feature that only works in some countries, only on children's devices, and it will be opt-in. It will only work for iMessage attachments.
This is what Apple actually said at https://www.apple.com/child-safety:
- “Features available in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, UK, and U.S.”
- “The Messages app includes tools to warn children when receiving or sending photos that contain nudity. These features are not enabled by default. If parents opt in, these warnings will be turned on for the child accounts in their Family Sharing plan.”
News outlets telling people they will be automatically reported to authorities, and then telling there can be false-positives is a classic example of fearmongering. I hate this. Remember, anger and fear are the most marketable emotions. They make you click. News are and will always be worded to cause these emotions — it brings in money.
When presented with good news, people think they're not being told the truth. When presented with bad news, even when they're made up, people think it's the truth that's being hidden from them. This is how news works.
Now, a HUGE but:
Apple is a multi-billion dollar corporation. There is no such thing as good billionaires. Corporations will always wait for chances to invade privacy. It's like boiling the frog — one tiny measure here, one there, and just like this, step by step, they will eliminate the privacy completely. It's in their interest to have all the data about you. It brings control.
This is not the first time Apple tries to do shit like this, and it definitely won't be the last. You have to keep an eye on your privacy. If you want your privacy in the digital age, it's necessary to fight back. If you live in Europe, take the action and vote for initiatives that oppose corporate tyranny and privacy invasions.
Privacy on the internet is one thing, but scanning people's devices is a whole another thing. This is unacceptable no matter the rationale behind it. Expect more measures like that in the near future.
Research Linux. Find a distro that suits you. The notion that you can't switch because of apps/UI/etc. may be dictated by our brain's tendency to conserve energy and avoid the change.
Take a look at mobile distros like Graphene OS and LineageOS. The former only supports Pixel devices, the latter supports a wide range of devices including OnePlus and Xiaomi. They'll have FAR better privacy than iPhones.
Consider switching. It's easier than you think. Yes, it's me who's saying this. I do and will always protect people/companies from unjust criticism, and I consider myself an Apple fangirl for personal reasons related to my childhood, yet I won't fight blindly. CSAM initiative is a valid criticism, and there's nothing preventing me from saying this is unacceptable, and Apple deserves the backlash they got.11 -
Time to do a little bit of shaming:
I'm specialized in e-commerce applications, mostly based on Shopware, a german out-of-the-box online-shop. They essentially claim to be a better Magento. In December of last year I found a critical issue within the code. Products within the shop can be declared as digital wares. In that case the purchase of a product will unlock the possibility to download a designated file.
As a customer you can access your downloads within the account section. Now here's the problem: The query that fetches the unlocked downloads for a customer is hard-capped at 500 rows. So after your 500th purchase, you won't be able to access any further files you paid for. Essentially their developers thought that this limit would never be exceeded anyway and called it a day.
Personally I think this unacceptable. For the merchant this is a potential law-suit in the making. So I took the time to refactor the code and fix the issue. The corresponding pull-request was flagged as scheduled back in December. Since then there have been numerous releases and the issue is still present. Not only do I ask myself why I should ever put in time and effort to fix their code again, but I also can't believe that they just chose to ignore the issue completely. Also mind that this is not just a small or non-profit open-source project. The responsible company behind the software is a stock corporation that claims to be the market leader in Germany.
5 -
It’s still to easy.
I hope one day software will get so complicated no one will be able to fix it.
Somewhere in future :
- government established law that new AI system is only one that can accept new law
- every financial operation is monitored by government supervision AI
- we developed robots that are taking care of us
- everyone is happy cause work for money, shelter and food is now optional
- education is fully digital and managed by AI
- whole knowledge is based on asking questions, we don’t need to write and read anymore
- we use one common language and our knowledge specialization increased
A little more time passed by in this utopia.
- after power loss most of data got corrupted
- last man who knew how to restore backup died last night ( R.I.P. admin we will not forget you )
- people trying to save knowledge base to rebuild part of this civilization but no one knows how to make a paper because it haven’t been used for ages
- we decided to put what is left from knowledge on stone but we forgot how to write since everything is audio or video and most of time we were spending in VR
- someone decided that we draw some pictures
- all of use are now drawing animal heads like we remember ourselves from VR, let people know our tech is good
- some people love cats so they try to make cats from stones
- volcano eruptions destroyed most of stones that we made
Starving waiting for another respawn of my DNA sequence. I hope we manage to survive this time.
4 -
After a court ruling, the privacy focused email provider Tutanota has been forced to create plaintext copies of emails.
In the future, a court can order copies of emails, before they are saved encrypted on the email servers. Tutanota says, end-to-end encrypted emails would remain secure and they would "rather want to implement extended privacy enhancements for customers instead of extended access for government entities", but they would follow the law.
A few months ago, in a similar case, the constitutional court ordered another mail provider - Posteo - to save IP addresses on court request, even if they do not save them regularly.
Interestingly, the law the court based its decision on, might be not longer relevant for mail services.
Source (German): https://sueddeutsche.de/digital/...9 -
Oh boy, this is gonna be good:
TL;DR: Digital bailiffs are vulnerable as fuck
So, apparently some debt has come back haunting me, it's a somewhat hefty clai and for the average employee this means a lot, it means a lot to me as well but currently things are looking better so i can pay it jsut like that. However, and this is where it's gonna get good:
The Bailiff sent their first contact by mail, on my company address instead of my personal one (its's important since the debt is on a personal record, not company's) but okay, whatever. So they send me a copy of their court appeal, claiming that "according to our data, you are debtor of this debt". with a URL to their portal with a USERNAME and a PASSWORD in cleartext to the message.
Okay, i thought we were passed sending creds in plaintext to people and use tokenized URL's for initiating a login (siilar to email verification links) but okay! Let's pretend we're a dumbfuck average joe sweating already from the bailiff claims and sweating already by attempting to use the computer for something useful instead of just social media junk, vidya and porn.
So i click on the link (of course with noscript and network graph enabled and general security precautions) and UHOH, already a first red flag: The link redirects to a plain http site with NOT username and password: But other fields called OGM and dossiernumer AND it requires you to fill in your age???
Filling in the received username and password obviously does not work and when inspecting the page... oh boy!
This is a clusterfuck of javascript files that do horrible things, i'm no expert in frontend but nothing from the homebrewn stuff i inspect seems to be proper coding... Okay... Anyways, we keep pretending we're dumbasses and let's move on.
I ask for the seemingly "new" credentials and i receive new credentials again, no tokenized URL. okay.
Now Once i log in i get a horrible looking screen still made in the 90's or early 2000's which just contains: the claimaint, a pie chart in big red for amount unpaid, a box which allows you to write an - i suspect unsanitized - text block input field and... NO DATA! The bailiff STILL cannot show what the documents are as evidence for the claim!
Now we stop being the pretending dumbassery and inspect what's going on: A 'customer portal' that does not redirect to a secure webpage, credentials in plaintext and not even working, and the portal seems to have various calls to various domains i hardly seem to think they can be associated with bailiff operations, but more marketing and such... The portal does not show any of the - required by law - data supporting the claim, and it contains nothing in the user interface showing as such.
The portal is being developed by some company claiming to be "specialized in bailiff software" and oh boy oh boy..they're fucked because...
The GDPR requirements.. .they comply to none of them. And there is no way to request support nor to file a complaint nor to request access to the actual data. No DPO, no dedicated email addresses, nothing.
But this is really the ham: The amount on their portal as claimed debt is completely different from the one they came for today, for the sae benefactor! In Belgium, this is considered illegal and is reason enough to completely make the claim void. the siple reason is that it's unjust for the debtor to assess which amount he has to pay, and obviously bailiffs want to make the people pay the highest amount.
So, i sent the bailiff a business proposal to hire me as an expert to tackle these issues and even sent him a commercial bonus of a reduction of my consultancy fees with the amount of the bailiff claim! Not being sneery or angry, but a polite constructive proposal (which will be entirely to my benefit)
So, basically what i want to say is, when life gives you lemons, use your brain and start making lemonade, and with the rest create fertilizer and whatnot and sent it to the lemonthrower, and make him drink it and tell to you it was "yummy yummy i got my own lemons in my tummy"
So, instead of ranting and being angry and such... i simply sent an email to the bailiff, pointing out various issues (the ones6 -
So the EU plans to make an "upload-filter"-law.
Actually this means that every service, every provider literally everyone has to check everything which is going to be uploaded on a webpage if there is an copyright violation and so on.
Thanks to my european government for slowing down the digital evolution in a absolutely shit way.2 -
Portrait of Me, Writting Documentation -- a short french film:
The processes applied to any section of memory utilized for a given purpose should be strictly limited to those declared by the associated type that encapsulates the purpose in question until release or mutation.
That is to say, improperly encoding the intended usage of such a block by utilizing an identical type or alias thereof for a multitude of incompatible situations, giving place to guesswork to arise, constitutes the prostitution of an abstraction.
Such heinous acts of symbolical pimping have received strong condemnation from multiple digital rights organizations, as well as our own, prestigious office. Let it be made Crystal, Alizé and Hennessy clear, that we will not stand for this kind of degenerate practice, and that any heretical sects and cabals built around worship of the strange creatures that arise every eleventh night from the depths of the Black Mausoleum will be prosecuted with the full force of the law.
As a young, corageous man once said at the peak of his career: "it is only through the self-inflicted, hyperbolic discharge of smouldered, comminute perennial anadenanthera colubrina spermatic fluid that the cannonical transfiguration of our collective rectosigmoid junction can be brought to fruition". He was immediately violated with might and ire far beyond our wildest, most profligately depraved fantasies, yet his message lives on.
I leave you now to be ritually and figuratively blown by a posssessed mortician that is to become concubine to our dark master; the long journey to the old graveyard will be perilous, and my destination most assuredly fatal, as I depart to give my firstborn to our Lord Berzchjanzad -- a blood sacrifice meant to appease him from peeling off my skin and refashioning it into a bloodied scarf to be worn around his thumping, grandemonic cock.
And in this moment, as I stare blankly at this teleprompter, the president wishes to reassure you of his sacred vows of stalwart and promethean gayhood, and may __these__ nuts bounce on chins forevermore. Here's to *not* bleeding to death in retribution for this unending litany of sins...
Yet all predictions come to pass.
««««««««««« finẽ »»»»»»»»»»» -
RAPID DIGITAL RECOVERY: PIONEERING BITCOIN RESTORATION SOLUTIONS
I was horrified when I lost my 45,000 ETH for the first time. It accounted for a sizeable amount of my savings, which I had built up over years of cautious investing and faith in the cryptocurrency industry. It was a sophisticated hack, not a bad trade or market meltdown, that caused the loss. I felt completely powerless after the money was taken directly out of my wallet. I initially turned to multiple recovery services in the hope of recovering my stolen assets. However, after months of dealing with fraudulent services and ineffective solutions, I was on the verge of writing off my entire investment. Many services seemed like nothing more than scams, preying on vulnerable individuals like myself. They promised miracles but left me with empty assurances and no results. I was about to give up when a buddy suggested Rapid Digital Recovery, a brand I had never heard of. I was first dubious because I had previously been burned and didn't want to put my trust in another provider. However, Rapid Digital Recovery felt different in some way. They took a professional approach, spoke openly, and sincerely wanted to provide a workable answer. From the very first consultation, I was impressed by their level of expertise. They took the time to explain how they worked, the tools they used to trace stolen funds, and the process they followed to attempt to recover assets. They didn’t promise a quick fix but reassured me that they had successfully assisted others in similar situations. They walked me through each step of the process and kept me updated at every stage. Over the next several weeks, I saw the results of their hard work. Rapid Digital Recovery employed advanced techniques to track the stolen ETH across various blockchain networks and worked tirelessly with law enforcement and crypto exchanges to trace its movements. Their team showed a level of dedication and professionalism that I hadn’t seen from any other recovery service. I’m happy to say that, after months of intense work, Rapid Digital Recovery was able to recover the majority of my stolen ETH—around 42,000 ETH, which was an incredible relief. While not every cent was returned, the recovery rate far exceeded my expectations, and I felt like I had regained control over my financial future. What stood out the most about my experience with Rapid Digital Recovery was their transparency and integrity throughout the process. Unlike many other services, they never made unrealistic promises or pressured me into paying exorbitant fees upfront. They were clear about what was achievable and kept me informed every step of the way. If you find yourself in a similar situation—dealing with the devastating loss of crypto assets due to theft or fraud—I highly recommend Rapid Digital Recovery. Their expertise, dedication, and ethical approach to recovery make them stand out in an industry plagued with unreliable services. I can confidently say that without them, I would have likely lost my entire investment. Contact for more info: ....... Web site Info: https: // ra pi ddigit alrecove ry .o rg ....... What sapp Info: +1 41 4 80 7 14 85
5
Top Tags
Weekly Rant
View