infosex.exchange <3

You are probably looking for the infosec.exchange Mastodon instance

This host is mostly for my random stuff, and in little part acts like a well-intentioned placeholder for the typosquatted domain.

Discoverability and Archiving

Currently I'm using this host for saving the items from my own feeds to the Wayback Machine and provide in-links for search engines. I hate that I have to do this, but the non-sense ideology of Mastodon pretty much ruined the search feature for Fediverse as a whole, and this wasn't changed by the fact that they owned their mistake and implemented search eventually.

Yes, I (or anyone else) could do similar things with other peoples published feeds, regardless of the tantrum. No, you can't defederate this, because the process doesn't rely on an instance.

Gluttony Section for Search Engines

@joepie91 @esther We had a magazine (free, as in paid for by the ads btw) like this, then a website. FB killed both ofc...
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@joepie91 @esther Yes, the current model is bad.
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@joepie91 @esther First, I think I described a pretty realistic scenario, so I don't think this is idealism.

Second, my point with this whole discussion is exactly to avoid potentially harmful generalizations, so naturally I will point to examples where having ads makes sense and where proposed generalizations (ads inject need, zero-sum discoverability) fail.

Do I think the current ads ecosystem is anywhere near good? Absolutely not. But without identifying the *actual* problems we won't get workable solutions.
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@joepie91 @esther Let's say you promote $BAND's show. $OTHERBAND is also in town. As a potential guest I could easily handle knowing about 10 different shows for a weekend but I won't go to one that I don't know of.

In other words I don't think your money-for-presence model is a zero-sum game.
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@sidereal @esther Rn I need to move heavy stuff in the city, without a car, and I came to this solution. I had to perform similar tasks previously, but at those times I was simply less smart and it would've been helpful if someone (even an ad) told me that this service exists.

Re your 2nd point, the general usefulness of ads is undoubtedly bad. I still wouldn't say that "good deals" are nonexistent: shows/events come to my mind as another example.
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@esther Presentation can be an important factor, but an ad is an ad. My prev example also shows that we don't necessarily know what to look for in the first place.

I think we should ask questions like "What is the proper way to distribute information about different classes of products/services?" (the answers for medicine and fancy cars surely must be different) or "Why do we have ads in the first place?" so we won't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
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@esther I probably hate advertising as it is more than most people, but we have the old saying: "even the best wine needs a banner", and I can't dispute that.

Example: It recently crossed my mind that maybe I could rent cargo bikes when needed and turns out I could! This service would've been very useful to me, but I simply didn't know about it before. An ad in this case would've been beneficial for everyone.

My point is that ads don't necessarily "inject" a need but an option. Problem is that while the latter increases buyer freedom, the former increases seller revenue so guess which type of ads we see more frequently...
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On C (and not only C) locales

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/1e70e82baa9193f6f027338b0fab0f5078971fbe

#ragecommit
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CVE-2024-38063 (the Windows TCP/IP vuln) patch diff by @clearbluejar

https://gist.github.com/clearbluejar/d13fba26cab3a7ff2a995558d62cdd80?s=09
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@luc @cryptax I've spent enough time debugging some of those "integrations" to opt for just copying ASCII armored stuff...
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