@my_hat_stinks - eviltoast
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • it’s pretty shady to be looking for legal safe harbor for scammers who rob people all over the world every day.

    This is an argument that happened entirely within your own head, not in this thread. I think I made it clear right from the start I’m against scammers and approve of (ethical) actions taken against them, but I’m also against people who dox, invade privacy, engage in vigilantism, and gain unauthorised access to other’s computer systems (particularly when it’s for profit and ego). These are not mutually exclusive, there is no disconnect there. I even gave an example of more appropriate actions to take against scammers, notably actions that are actually effective.

    Criticism against “justice” porn is not remotely the same thing as condoning scammers. You’re arguing in bad faith and you know it.


  • This is very untrue and you definitely shouldn’t be giving out legal advice like this on topics you’re not knowledgeable on, but exactly which part is a crime and how criminal it is will depend on your local laws. Some such computer misuse laws are intentionally written very broadly with generic wording precisely so that edge cases such as unintentionally granting an unauthorised party access to a system does not clear them of wrongdoing when they do so.

    As for how to tell which laws are relevant and whether you’ve breached them? Well, I’m sure the answer will shock you.






  • I’ll definitely be downvoted for this too but I completely agree. There’s a fine line between entertainment at scammers’ expense and vigilantism for views. Publicly spreading the faces of people you’re accusing of a crime without any sort of trial is definitely the latter and has little direct impact on shutting down these operations. This video screams ego trip.

    I used to watch Kitboga and they were much more ethical (at least when I watched). They’d lean heavily into the entertainment side, waste a lot of the scammers’ time which they then couldn’t spend on actual victims, and report/shutdown accounts as they came up which actually does directly impact their operation. Your scam call center still works if one of your workers gets their face posted online, it doesn’t if you have no bank account.


  • A little ham-fisted, sure, but if you think it’s irrelevant you evidently didn’t take any time to actually think about it (you did also reply instantly, so I’ll take that over you lacking reading comprehension).

    I’ll simplify.

    Digital piracy is illegal copying of unlicenced content.
    Alice creates content.
    Alice licences the content to Bob.
    Bob decides to distribute the content with advertisements from Charlie.
    You download the content.
    Charlie does not pay Bob.
    You did not breach any licences.
    You did not pirate the content.

    And just to further clarify, Alice is the person who made a video, Bob is Youtube, Charlie is an advertiser. Your argument is not an ad is piracy if “the advertisement company [hasn’t] paid the content creator.” The advertiser pays the distribution company, and the relationship between those two companies is irrelevant. The advertiser failing to pay does not retroactively turn you into a pirate.

    The whole argument is pointless in the first place, it’s irrelevant whether or not you consider ad blocking to be technically piracy. A sensible adblock argument would be around the ethics of manipulation versus payment, or security versus whatever it is advertisers want. Arguing semantics doesn’t matter.




  • Parachute effectiveness is a very reasonable thing to study, it’s pretty important to know how one parachute design performs compared to other designs and the obvious baseline is no parachute. A lot of things which appear to be self-evident have been extensively studied, generally you don’t want to just assume you know how something works.

    Though throwing people out of a plane at altitude with no parachute probably isn’t the most ethical way to study parachute effectiveness.



  • Dark matter might not even exist, all we know is that gravity-based predictions break down after a certain point. Dark matter is the just the most popular proposed solution where you essentially just add extra undetectable mass until it works. The distant second is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) or some variation of it, which is where you try to tweak the theories to fit observations instead. It has the same problem as dark matter where we keep coming up with better experiments which always fail to find anything.

    There’s a similar problem at the opposite end of the scale spectrum too; quantum mechanics doesn’t play nice with our current understanding of gravity leading to the search for the “theory of everything”. This is why I personally lean towards the idea that it’s our theories that are wrong and not an undetectable mass, but this isn’t my field so my opinion isn’t worth much (especially since a majority actually working in the field lean towards dark matter as far as I can tell).




  • There’s a lot of replies here about why US citizens are in the situation they are but not how to fix it, which was the question you asked. You have two political parties in a first past the post system with largely similar corporate focussed policies, people primarily vote against a party rather than for one that represents them. If you really want to change things you’ll need to overhaul your voting system to break up your two party system and encourage competition from parties that actually represent what people want.

    Unfortunately there is no safe and easy way to do this; it means the two parties in power giving up that power which they will not do willingly. You’ll need large scale consistent and actually disruptive protests, ie not just meeting up for a day then returning to life as nornal, but the US has a history of responding to protests the same way they do everything; with violence.

    So more practically, you can contact your representative at the appropriate level of government and hope they don’t completely ignore you this time.




  • I’m in the UK, it’s definitely “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” here. Maybe you just misheard as a kid?

    When I was in primary school someone in my class had to get all their teeth pulled, I have no idea how someone manages to rot their teeth so badly at around 5 years old. I don’t really have a point with that story, it just popped into my head and I had to share