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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • The main thing this article is talking about is supermarkets in the UK that lock all their sale offers behind the loyalty card. Until about a year or two ago, you could go in and buy things on sale or buy one get one free or whatever offer, and then use (or don’t use) your loyalty card on top (to collect/spend points), but now you don’t get any discounts if you don’t have a loyalty card.

    The article/campaigners are spinning this up into something about smartphones, because that’s how most people use these loyalty schemes now, but they still have the old style cards so that’s a bit of a red herring. The real issue is the way they’re tying their standard offers to the loyalty program, and making it more difficult for consumers not to get caught out paying full price.





  • When accessed by BleepingComputer, however, the link returned a 404 (Not Found), and according to several others who tried to access the URL, no content ever existed at the location from the beginning.

    This really doesn’t mean anything, it’s not unheard of for malicious actors to not set up their C&C servers until later on. This has actually been exploited by law enforcement in other cases also, they simply registered the domain themselves and took control away ahead of the attacker.

    There’s a risk with setting up the C&C that it could be traced back to the attackers. By not setting it up until it’s needed you avoid that risk until it becomes necessary.



  • Yeah I read this article on another post, I’m not sure that’s the whole story.

    From what I remember, he was running a few “shops”. These don’t actually sell games, but they can be accessed by a piece of homebrew software on the switch, and then you connect to the “shop” to download games directly to the device - this was done instead of manually copying install files to the SD card, installing, and then deleting the original files to save space; or instead of installing over USB. The shops were much easier, not least because removing the SD card to copy games from a PC required a reboot, and rebooting an OG hacked Switch could be kind of a pain.

    I think the “sales” he did were actually just donations that got you early access to titles that weren’t widely available yet. However, it’s generally when you start taking money for these things that the shit hits the fan and the hammer comes down.





  • What are your plans when end of life /support comes to Windows ten?

    Switch to Linux and run virtual machines when I need to use Windows.

    Right now I don’t quite have the drive to do it, but an end to support for Windows 10 would push me over the edge. I just can’t stand Windows 11, not even because of all the bullshit but just the way it mandates the UI structure - last time I tried it my dealbreaker was that you can’t just have it always display all taskbar icons, you have to manually force each one to show. If a new icon comes up, it will be hidden.









  • It looks like you haven’t really digested anything of the conversation here before you came in to reply with corrections.

    Not everywhere.

    Previous rulings are a precedent in Common Law systems like the US, UK, Canada, or Australia.

    Only Supreme Court rulings become a precedent in Civil Law systems like the EU, Russia,most of the rest of America.

    Sure, but we’re talking about Brazil. You haven’t established whether Brazil is common or civil law. Also, we’re talking about a Supreme Court ruling.

    Not all of the EU is civil law. Ireland and Cyprus both use common law systems.

    While common law countries often have roots connected with the UK and are very similar, civil law countries are far more varied. Many civil law countries are distinctly different and arguably should be a separate class of legal structure - even ones with French roots (perhaps the most prominent civil law country).

    Ultimately, though, the differences between civil and common law structures are almost entirely technical in nature. The end result is largely the same - in a common law country, case law can continue to be challenged until a Supreme Court ruling, and as such it isn’t really proper case law until such a ruling, just like in civil law countries.

    https://guides.library.harvard.edu/law/brazil

    Brazil is, in fact, a civil law country. However, they do follow case law from Supreme Court, which would make this ruling about requiring a representative valid case law. Which is what I said to OP.

    The EU at its top level creates “Directives”

    This is exactly what I said.

    The EU made GDPR law (well, strictly speaking they made a directive, then member states make laws that must meet or exceed that directive)

    The EU made a directive, this directive led to GDPR laws made by member states. However I was apparently mistaken, it wasn’t an EU Tribunal court case that led to cookie splash screens through case law, it was Recital 66 (lol Order 66), essentially a 2009 modification to the 2002 ePrivacy Directive, followed by roundtable discussions that heavily favoured the advertising industry over civil interest groups leading to its formal implementation into the directive in 2012.

    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/truth-behind-cookie-banners-alexander-hanff-cipp-e-cipt-fip-

    To summarise:

    • What I said at the start was right - Brazil’s Supreme Court ruling requiring social media companies to have representatives is valid case law.
    • My example of cookie splash screens wasn’t ideal, but you did not give the right reasoning, or any reasoning - it was a poor analogy because it wasn’t a judge’s rulinig that modified the law but legal discussions that were prompted by public interest groups.

    Like I say, it really feels like you didn’t read very far before you made your reply. Your comment reads more as a statement of tangentially related things you know with a thin veil disguising it as a correction. If you’d just made those statements without the veil, or if you’d followed through with the corrections and actually explained what was wrong, I don’t think I would have found your reply so objectionable (although I may also have woken up on the wrong side of the bed to your comment, sorry about that).

    But then, I also wouldn’t have looked into the specifics of Brazilian law or the full origins of cookie splash screens, so thanks for the motivation lol.


  • Yes and no. It only really applies to Twitter/X and Twitter clones. You wouldn’t call a Facebook post a tweet, no matter how short, nor would you call a reddit or lemmy post/comment that.

    And even then, Mastadon has its own term, toots, and BlueSky calls them skeets.

    Until Twitter comes up with a new name in line with their new branding, I think the business should still be referred to as Twitter. But the business should go bankrupt before that happens, hopefully, the lenders need to call in their debts already.