techsupporter (u/techsupporter)

techsupporter commented on Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time coffee.link/vodafone-germ... · Posted by u/PhilKunz

phineyes · a month ago

This isn't unique to Vodafone. Google has also been slowly withdrawing from IXes globally in favor of PNIs and "VPPs" (verified peering providers). This only makes it harder for smaller networks to establish presence on the internet and feels pretty anti-competitive.

On the flip side, IXes are becoming harder and less desirable to participate in: port fees are going up, useful networks are withdrawing, low quality network participants are joining and widening blast radius. I'm not sure what the answer to this is, but this has not been a great year for the "open" internet.

techsupporter · a month ago

> low quality network participants are joining

(Genuinely curious because I truly don't know in this context) What is a low quality network participant? One of the "bulletproof" hosts?

techsupporter commented on You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recognition app, DHS document say 404media.co/you-cant-refu... · Posted by u/nh43215rgb

techsupporter · 2 months ago

> A birth certificate is just a piece of paper so that's a bit of a red herring.

No, it isn't. Birth certificates are how we have proven citizenship in the United States almost since the founding of the Republic.

> ...an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien...

What law gives ICE permission to ignore a document created through the authority of a co-sovereign government of our federal system? Responsibility for recording of births and deaths falls to the several States. If my state has issued a birth certificate documenting the fact of my birth, that is it per the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

ICE is not a court; they do not make determinations of law. If I have a birth certificate or, even more arguably, a passport then that beats whatever cooked up bullshit ICE is spewing from a mobile device. ICE is not a prosecutor; they do not decide who has faked documents or who has real ones.

People need to stop apologizing for ICE vastly overstepping what they are permitted to do in their haste to become an internal secret police.

techsupporter commented on US Passport Power Falls to Historic Low henleyglobal.com/newsroom... · Posted by u/saubeidl

techsupporter · 2 months ago

> Everyone follows the same rules at the airport.

All travelers do but all border inspection people do not. Or if they do, they apply their discretion very unevenly in some Very Interesting Ways.

I've watched it happen twice since COVID, both times traveling abroad for work and coming back into the United States with coworkers (different coworkers each trip) who are not nearly as pale as I am. Neither of us had Global Entry or anything like that back then. Both times, I got waved through with barely a glance and my US-passport-holding coworker got grilled. "Where do you live", "why did you go on this trip", "who do you work for", and so on.

To reiterate: All of us are citizens, all of us were born here, and we were taking the exact same trips at the exact same times coming back with the usual things you take with you on a business trip.

Anecdotes from friends who are darker than a sheet of printer paper tell me this situation has not improved.

techsupporter commented on An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server github.com/juanfont/heads... · Posted by u/quyleanh

sixothree · 8 months ago

Tailscale clients are the thing I am least happy about with Tailscale. Specifically mobile clients and battery usage.

The reason I can't use Tailscale at work is because it routes traffic through servers we can't control.

I would _love_ to use tailscale at work. It would solve so many problems. I am okay with being forced to open ports. But tunneling traffic through them is extremely worrysome.

techsupporter · 8 months ago

> The reason I can't use Tailscale at work is because it routes traffic through servers we can't control.

You can run your own DERP servers and exclude the Tailscale ones even if you don’t run your own Headscale server: https://tailscale.com/kb/1118/custom-derp-servers

techsupporter commented on Music labels will regret coming for the Internet Archive, sound historian says arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

6stringmerc · 9 months ago

Again I’m incredulous by the perspective shared by Ars Technica (often trumpeted by TechDirt) that “what is going on is not how copyright SHOULD work” while giving no reasonable consideration to how legally legitimate cases like this are from a standpoint are in US copyright cases.

I get the desire to FIX copyright in the US, I stand to benefit and so does society and creative progress. But these sensationalist writers are the lowest form of clickbait by simply taking a victimization position and digging in (re: TechDirt and Goldiblox absolutely being in the wrong for ripping off the Beastie Boys for a Super Bowl ad).

techsupporter · 9 months ago

I’m not sure what your criticism is?

Ars is reporting on a legal case and also on people who say they will be harmed by that case. The reporter then goes on to detail the policy work that groups are doing to try to change copyright laws in the country.

What else would you like to see? A legal analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the case?

techsupporter commented on Ads chew through half of mobile data nextpit.com/ads-consume-h... · Posted by u/mahirsaid

modeless · a year ago

Be sure to read my follow up article, "How ads are funding the services you request the other half of your mobile data from, so you can use them without paying except with some mobile data and some pixels on your screen."

techsupporter · a year ago

Does it have an in-frame modal that pops up immediately after page load to beg me for my email address?

What about an embedded video window that covers the bottom 2/3rds of the content and follows with scroll?

Oh and I hope you've not left out the absolutely mandatory "Read More" button that spawns a user interaction and auto-plays everything on the page.

Those are all of my favourite things on the web and I really enjoy seeing them all over the place!!

techsupporter commented on The cochlear implant question aeon.co/essays/why-i-want... · Posted by u/Tomte

swalker326 · a year ago

I have two deaf daughters, both have cochlear implants and I’m very happy with the decision. My wife and I both learned sign, and let our kids wear or not wear their cochlear’s as they see fit. The youngest is too young to really understand but the oldest understands and almost exclusively selects to wear them. She is in main stream school but does spend time with her dhh friends. She 100% prefers to be with other dhh folks and sign, but likes being able to hear.

All in all the decision is yours to make and people can weigh in or tell you what to do. We got a lot of hate from Deaf community members for going down the road of implants, but we also got a lot of support. There are hatful people in all walks of life. Do what you think is best and love your kids.

techsupporter · a year ago

My niece was born deaf and her parents went the opposite direction: they chose not to have her get an implant because of the risk of surgery at such a young age and being fortunate to live in an area with a sizable deaf community. They took ASL classes (my spouse and I joined them) and she’s now enrolled in a mix of ASL and English interpreted classes.

I agree that people can only make the decision with what they have at the time. After watching her grow up these last several years, her parents think they made the right choice.

techsupporter commented on The cochlear implant question aeon.co/essays/why-i-want... · Posted by u/Tomte

throw894389 · a year ago

My deaf coworker does not even know sign language, she uses phone for everything. She lives perfectly normal life.

Entire office is not going to learn new language, just to speak with an odd deaf person. And communicating specialized stuff like technical programming is not possible, gestures only cover basic words.

techsupporter · a year ago

> And communicating specialized stuff like technical programming is not possible, gestures only cover basic words.

I want to gently push back on this. While sign languages do have signs for common, “basic” words (ASL has a lot of 1:1 mapped signs for English), sign languages are languages. They can, and do, express “specialized stuff”.

I have two coworkers who are deaf and they absolutely communicate specialized medical and technical concepts to each other and other people who use sign language. It’s amazing to watch them sign to each other, as someone who is only intermediate at ASL.

techsupporter commented on Judge stops FTC from enforcing ban on non-compete agreements computerworld.com/article... · Posted by u/CrankyBear

Dalewyn · a year ago

>in the matter of law?

The question is a matter of law.

If the law is vague, it is the duty of the judiciary to call that out and of the legislature to rewrite the law to be more precise. Vague laws are not an excuse for executive agencies to go ham, and I applaud the judiciary for reining in executive abuse of power.

That the specific consequence is enforcement of non-competes is ultimately irrelevant.

techsupporter · a year ago

> If the law is vague, it is the duty of the judiciary to call that out and of the legislature to rewrite the law to be more precise.

Why? Nothing in our Constitution requires precise laws. Arguably (and since I'm making it, I'll say I'm in favor of this argument), the Constitution would preclude overly strict laws because the Executive is a co-equal branch of government.

> Vague laws are not an excuse for executive agencies to go ham, and I applaud the judiciary for reining in executive abuse of power.

Why not?

Congress has the authority to pass the laws it sees fit. Why is it suddenly a problem that Congress passed a law that says "the agency known as the Federal Trade Commission is established and the President, through a set of commissioners appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, shall ensure that the these list of goals are accomplished and shall establish such rules as the Commission deems appropriate."

We aren't a parliamentary system. The Congress has the power of the purse and the power to enact laws. The President has the power to implement the laws and to spend the money.

What's changed in recent years is the judiciary has come along and decided that a hundred years of Congress writing laws with bullet-point goals and the President acting under those laws is no longer relevant because "Congress didn't write enough words." That's not how textualism works.

techsupporter commented on Long-term unemployment leads to disengagement and apathy psypost.org/long-term-une... · Posted by u/FeistySkink

pempem · a year ago

I think you might be overestimating the number of people who could do this: "you could always get a job as long as you had a pulse and could name a programming language".

Gig work has been found to be intensely on the rise, with very little of the already meager protections of full time employment. Companies that basically run saas + employment marketplaces reduced their overhead and risk strategically by only hiring 'gig' workers. Most of these people, uber drivers, doordashers, thumbtackers, etc, etc cannot tell you whether an LLC is better for them than an SCorp, cannot navigate a defined benefit plan and cannot afford insurance, retirement, sick days, and so on. This was purposefully strategic and shared openly.

30 year mortgages are not recent, but their relationship to the average income has changed drastically in just two years. Educational debt has been on the rise for 20+ years. These honestly are all well documented.

People's expectations were that pensions would be replaced by 401ks, and retirement could start at 65. For many 65 means a job at walmart, sam's club, or other forms of low level employment.

techsupporter · a year ago

> People's expectations were that pensions would be replaced by 401ks, and retirement could start at 65.

And that's kind of the rub: I don't think people's expectations were that 401k plans would replace pensions; I think employer's expectations were this and the individual worker was sold a false bill of goods.

From what I know (I wasn't economically active when this change happened), the original push for 401k plans came from a desire to lessen the taxable earnings of highly-paid bank executives when we had a much higher top margin tax rate in the United States. As there's also no requirement that employers match employee contributions to 401k--or that matched contributions be available to the employee immediately--employers could almost overnight relieve themselves of the "burden" of pension contributions.

(Not that pensions are, especially today, some magic elixir. Look at how many pensions have had to go to the public assistance well after they were either mismanaged, undercontributed, or both/more by the sponsoring employer.)

Thus we've wound up in this system where, like many things in the US, everyone loses except the people who got there first (or the people who are already very well-resourced).

Generally speaking, with caveats like always exist in life:

If you're roughly 65 or older, you probably held at least one job where you have an employer pension so that plus Social Security means you're probably doing pretty well.

If you're roughly 50 or older and in a union, you have the same thing but with a smaller pension proviso, assuming you weren't able to (and didn't, if you were able to) buy out your pension into a 401k.

People late 40s to 50s are about the age where they lost the benefit of pensions and are fully on the hook for savings if or when they want to stop working but didn't get the full run of having a 401k. They will be looking largely to Social Security and hope.

People in their early 40s to 30s and younger are asking what they're being taxed for and are facing a job market where even more jobs are piecework or lack benefits, alongside massive hikes in the costs of living where there are jobs so saving is even harder.

Yet somehow a US worker is more productive than ever. Those gains are all going somewhere, and it looks like we're all slowly figuring out where...and as a society we don't like it.