B1FIDO

Anyway, honest question: who the hell is "domainregistry.com"? They claim they've been "accredited since 1996". I've never, ever heard of them, and I used to work for InterNIC.

Their so-called founder, "Larry Erlich", is not notable either. Neither of these have Wikipedia entries. Does anyone know who they are, or where they came from?

You can describe the cards and give them the numbers and then tell them why you believe they've been tampered.

I mean it's totally illogical, right?

When I was accused of possessing counterfeit money, I went right to my bank and showed the bills to them (they were, of course, authentic).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Desire

tl;dw: A well-intentioned surveillance state may, in fact, love the beings they are surveilling. They may fall in love so deeply, that they want to become like us. I know it's a revolutionary concept.

Instead of the transaction info which is strictly defined and uniformly formatted, they've attempted to give "friendly names" to each one and "simplify" the descriptions.

This has been a supremely bad idea. Firstly, it deprives me of essential info about each transaction, which I cannot access at all in the mobile app. I need to go into the website on a desktop computer, click through a few screens to say "this description is incorrect!" and request that they show me the original.

The "simple descriptions" elide a lot of useful info, such as the vendor's phone number.

Sometimes they are completely incorrect, like the name of my church gets a completely different and misleading name in every transaction. I cannot disable this.

Last year, there was a transaction during tax time that I believed to be some sort of penalty by the government, and I was freaking out about it, but it turned out to actually be my refund and had been "helpfully renamed" by my bank to be extremely misleading.

I have discussed these issues with the online support staff, and in person at my branch, and they are sympathetic, but there is nothing they can do about the app, and the only workaround for me is to individually flag each transaction as it comes in, and fix it, and there is no "global disable" or "global unfuck everything" button for any of us, anywhere.

Good luck trusting that supply chain, man!

Of course they would be suicidal to go into that situation unarmed, as well. But carrying a weapon would be double-plus-ungood and guaranteed to make them a target for unaliving, sticking out from amongst the crowd bearing rocks and sticks or even Molotov cocktails.

Unfortunately, in the past few months, Gemini AI really started shoving its way in. And there were some features that were really unpalatable, that were basically dealbreakers for this. Yeah, I believe the "AI Summaries" had a lot to do with it. They were bad, misleading, and I did not want them crowding up my app.

I couldn't disable those features without disabling Smart Features entirely. So that's what I did.

So now I sort of suffer without the automatic email event-calendar integrations, and the other cool stuff that AI had provided, but it's totally usable. I have no trouble using it as an email service with that AI disabled. It works fine.

Anyway, it is no secret that Google has always used the text of our emails for their own marketing and analysis purposes. Always has. Why did you think Gmail was a free service? Obviously, you were paying for it! We all paid for it with our email content!

XMPP was more than Gtalk, but I think that Gtalk was the "death knell" for XMPP, having absorbed it and sort of claimed it as their own. Anyone who would've used federated Jabber addresses in those days is using Mastodon now.

One of the central tenets of the New Deal was that, in a pluralistic society, under disestablishmentarianism, it was unfair to expect families to rely on charity from religious groups where they didn't subscribe to their creeds and didn't share their faith or beliefs. If you accepted charity from, e.g. the Baptists, would you find yourself indebted to them, spiritually?

That is a large reason why secular welfare states became so important and popular with voters. Because if the State managed the welfare, the purse strings, the distribution, and the need-based awards, nobody needed to worry about whose church was doling out the food, clothing, or housing.

Interestingly, though, through a number of turns, the State is actually funding faith-based charities now to distribute all that food, clothing, and shelter. Or some/most of it. Obviously, secular housing authorities are handling Section 8 Vouchers, but a lot of shelters are religious facilities and they're run by church volunteers. Food banks, funded by the USDA, may be non-profits, or churches, synagogues, or community colleges. But they're all receiving USDA funding, and they all follow USDA policies to distribute that same food and assistance.

Even in those heady early days of the mid-90s, it was recognized that many end-users were behind NAT and firewalls and otherwise-inaccessible endpoints of the Internet. Many of us were also on dialup lines that were intermittently connected, so they needed to establish some sort of persistent presence.

So the ICQ client was designed to check-in with a central server to indicate the online/away/DND/offline status of the client. I do not know how much of ICQ's messaging went through that server, but I believe that a lot of clients in those days were designed to, eventually, connect peer-to-peer for delivering files and stuff. Mainly, because the operators of servers didn't want to be overwhelmed with transferring lots of data!

Interestingly, ICQ and Livejournal as well were completely invaded and taken over by Russians. Or perhaps it was not an invasion, but a planned psy-op all along. My original UIN was 279866, and my girlfriend's was slightly below that: she had signed up first and got me on-board.

But eventually, Russians broke into my account, changed the profile, and commandeered it for their own purposes. And Livejournal got sold to Russian interests too.

I believe it was them watching us over here all along. It must have been a personal-data goldmine to know when teens and young adults were online and who they were connected to, on the social graph, whether it was IM'ing or blogging the old-fashioned way on Livejournal.

So beware with your modern "disruptive" apps, particularly ones like those fun e-Scooters you can share and rent. They are probably psy-ops from foreign-based actors who enjoy watching and recording our movements.

For millennia there had been instructions and recipes for making abortifacient concoctions, to good or bad effect. Many of them are highly toxic to the mother herself. So many abortion-minded women faced the proposition of harming themselves to get at their unborn children.

And that is the premise of "legalizing" it: that it can be made "safe" and so they wouldn't need to use a coat-hanger in a back-alley "anymore" (although practically nobody did such things.)

Are they OK to stockpile those viruses and culture trillions more, on an industrial scale, in every American state? What about in Venezuela? North Korea?

It is hysterical and illogical for people to make these accusations. Get real.

It is very interesting to learn that the evolution of Roman Catholic vestments for priests began when the priests wore the same thing that other men of their class wore, but while fashions and cultures changed around them, the priests just kept wearing the same thing as always.

Likewise, for many nuns and sisters, they would dress modestly according to the local customs, and becoming standardized these were "habits", and stayed the same as the other fashions got updated.

This is why Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta modeled her institute's habits after the typical poor Hindu's sari. It was really going back to basics for them!

Remember when IRC was king, and basically, anyone could write an IRC client? Anyone could write a MUD client, or even a Telnet client. Those are open protocols.

When Pidgin came out, it was like a breath of fresh air for me. In the early 90s I had multiple IM accounts (starting with ICQ!) and unifying them, especially under a Linux client, was a dream come true.

But of course, AIM purported to use Oscar at the time, but they really hated F/OSS and 3rd-party clients, and so did the other proprietary guys, so it became cat-and-mouse to keep the client compatible while the servers always tried to break their functionality.

Now this dumb announcement comes out that a 3rd party has (apparently legally) established interop with a Meta property with (I am guessing) a completely proprietary, undocumented, secret protocol underneath.

I am not impressed. I am McKayla Maroney unimpressed.

I want open protocols and I want client devs who are free to produce clients in freeform, as long as they can follow the protocol specs. Now we have email clients who speak SMTP, IMAP, and POP3, including the "secured, encrypted" versions of those protocols. We should ask for nothing less when it comes to other communications.

Of course, with a well-known email address, you could run a higher risk of credential stuffing, and an account takeover by someone who hijacks your email account, and then pivots from there to taking other accounts.

But this seems to be a risk we all take: email addresses are meant to be shared, to be public, and to be well-known to anyone to correspond with us.

I will say that disclosing my email address to certain parties has had noticeable effects. For example, I used "MYADDRESS+Echovita@gmail.com" once, and only once. My godfather had passed away, and I ordered some flowers for his funeral. And I put that order through with that email address.

Well, Echovita themselves had a data breach shortly afterwards, and I was inundated with scam emails. Just all sorts of attackers and they were basically all using the same M.O. But they were readily identifiable because I had used that "+Echovita" to identify it uniquely. And they really haven't stopped coming in. It's been 5 years since that breach.

So yes, especially with untrusted parties, it may help to tag your email address. I don't worry about receiving spam anywhere. But like I said, since I've never ever disclosed the addresses of 2-3 of my "alt accounts" they simply never receive any mail at all, spam or no spam.

You could click "Seems Safe" on these messages, but they are not scanned by Google, and they are simply adding a disclaimer that they currently can't vouch for the safety of a message that they couldn't scan. It seems to me that this is a prudent and helpful course of action.

In fact, this is plainly evident by the way they give you tools to operate them in a systematic way. You can add multiple accounts to a single Android "user". You can add them to a single Google Chromebook account under one signed-in account. You can add multiple accounts separately to the same Chromebook.

You can add multiple accounts with the same names, the same birthdates, and the same Driver License. I've validated at least two YouTube channels by showing exactly the same ID.

Google did not terminate your account for the reason you state. You are not telling us all the background information.

Google may indeed terminate multiple accounts for the same person because of TOS violations. They will definitely link and associate your accounts, so making an "alt account" for misbehavior is not safe. If my "alt account" is compromised or violates TOS, then I can expect they will discipline all 6 equally, because they're all linked.

But operating multiple accounts is very explicitly supported by Google, and by Microsoft as well, I will say. I don't know about Apple. Facebook definitely prohibited this in the past, although you can maintain multiple "profiles" and "pages" that have unique settings and personalities.

Now she is a very literate woman and loves poetry and "Penny Dreadfuls", so she uses language and words very deliberately. And so, I asked her why she wrote that, and she said it was some sort of unnecessary fee that they were charging to move her line from one address to another, and she clearly resented their opportunistic capitalism.

I certainly sympathized with her, especially since she is the type of woman who has probably been subjected to that sort of actual trauma in her own life, and that of her friends, she had every right to compare the experiences.

Until very recently (like 6 decades ago) the area where I live was right up against rural countryside, with sheep grazing, cattle farms, vegetables grown and everything. And those farmers sold out to real-estate developers.

But there are literally homeowners in SFHs with chickens out front and roosters crowing in the morning. And some of my colleagues own chickens and harvest the eggs every day for their own kitchens and families.

But just going through a few urban neighborhoods on Google Maps, it was not long before I found little farms. And these farms sometimes have websites where they advertise that they are selling produce and dairy: raw milk, fresh eggs, fresh fruits & veg, mutton and even live sheep or goats. And they may be doing it on the sly or under the table, and "raw milk" is especially a controversial marketplace right now, but they do it and seem to do alright.

These "urban farms" are often real close to tactical supply shops running out of some guy's garage, and other little "cottage industries" where people who purchased "McMansions" are recouping their investments, basically by skirting the city's zoning laws and tax regulations around businesses.

So yeah, if you've got a brown thumb like me, you can go shop at a farmers market, or you can look up one of these "urban farms" and buy direct, cash in hand.

I use them for different purposes. They are "role accounts" for projects I am doing, such as geneaology and astronomy.

In order to use YouTube sanely, and store different stuff in Drive, I separate them into unique accounts. I use those accounts for specific things, and my YouTube subscriptions, playlists, etc. are tailored for each role, for example.

This is not about email at all. Obviously, I can access all those email accounts through the one app on my smartphone or the one PWA on my Chromebook. They are easily manageable but separate.

I also run 3 Outlook/Microsoft accounts, and for the same reason. (One of them is my academic account from community college, and the other two are personal.)

I don't need to give out email addresses for the "role accounts" except where I "Sign In With Google" to various services. So I don't really send/receive email from them at all, except where I'm sharing links or documents with myself (the best way to do this cross-account is still by using email, oftentimes.)

This is very easy and straightforward. I operate 6 Gmail accounts, and three are "alts" where I've basically never given the address out to anyone at all, and they receive zero spam, zero UCE, zero marketing emails.

Of course, on my "main" I've disclosed the address to many entities and I use it for sign-in and shipping and many things. And yes, I do receive spam and scam emails there, but wcyd?

The reason given is that "Gmail hasn't scanned this message", so I suppose the scanners are unavailable/disabled for the time being.

They should also be tagged as "Important" but they are not. I believe this is a heuristic-based designation, and it has not been working too great lately. My most important mail is coming through as "unimportant".

So I would visit the machine room on occasion to go fix things with the SunOS 4 systems we had.

For a while, I considered requesting that my assigned desk be moved into the machine room, because our servers occupied two ordinary tables in a far corner of the place that was about as far from humanity as anyone could go. It was, of course, noisy with white noise and chilly with air conditioning to keep the machines more comfortable than the staff.

I never made my request and it never would've been granted. I imagine they couldn't even run a phone line into that place to get a hold of me.

If I were an attorney in court, I would argue that a "mechanical or automatic agent" cannot truly be a personal agent unless it can be trusted to do things only in line with that person's wishes and consent.

If an LLM "agent" runs amok and does things without user consent and without reason or direction, how can the person be held responsible, except for saying that they never should've granted "agency" in the first place? Couldn't the LLM's corporate masters be held liable instead?

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