Hacker News: clowd

New comment by clowd in "Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok block democratic hashtags"

clowd — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 20:37:21 +0000

While we're talking about stuff that didn't happen, I'm sure glad the Steelers are headed to the Super Bowl.

New comment by clowd in "YouTube putting scammy ad about "double your Bitcoin" on Bitcoin University vid"

clowd — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 03:12:03 +0000

They're putting these crappy ads e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e.

The quality of ads on YouTube has fallen to somewhere beneath the sewer, just as YouTube has launched a scorched-earth campaign against adblockers. Scams, celebrity impersonation, AI-generated nonsense, AI-generated nonsense promoting AI nonsense generators. YouTube's ad inventory is a vast wasteland of festering, unmoderated dreck.

New comment by clowd in "X sues Media Matters to silence moderation criticism"

clowd — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 03:47:05 +0000

...towards reality. The "free speech absolutist" guy got his little feelings hurt again.

New comment by clowd in "I spent $855.77 on Google Ads and got my ads banned 5 times"

clowd — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 20:44:35 +0000

> “If you want to build something people will use, don’t build anything,” he said. “Build an ad and see if people click it. Then only build something once it gets a lot of clicks.”

Well no wonder your Google ads keep getting banned.

New comment by clowd in "Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]"

clowd — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 20:23:36 +0000

There's no indication that Trump is a multi-billionaire but the rest of your comment is spot on.

New comment by clowd in "Reddit banned Reddiw's (alternative API) subreddit and author's Reddit account"

clowd — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 02:20:22 +0000

And not a true one, either.

I don't know what the hell Reddit is doing the past couple of weeks but they seem determined to completely destroy themselves, and quickly.

New comment by clowd in "FBI Whistleblower Testifies about Retaliation"

clowd — Fri, 19 May 2023 03:36:30 +0000

O'Boyle isn't a whistleblower; he's an insubordinate employee who refused to do his job and was improperly distributing information about investigations.

New comment by clowd in "Reddit's proposed API changes and the continued existence of RedReader"

clowd — Mon, 01 May 2023 03:11:21 +0000

Will this not be subject to the same limitations reddit is imposing on RedReader and others? I guess I don't know enough about how they distinguish a "third-party app" versus a website hooking into their API.

New comment by clowd in "Tell HN: Cloudflare verification is breaking the internet"

clowd — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 21:27:48 +0000

> If people use Firefox, they're probably a privacy wonk LARPing an imagined threat model, and are using a shitty cheap VPN used by countless attackers

What kind of nonsense is this? Firefox is a mainstream browser used by millions of people every day. Maybe you're confusing it with Tor?

New comment by clowd in "Tell HN: Cloudflare verification is breaking the internet"

clowd — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 17:36:18 +0000

If Cloudflare has decided that Firefox is a "non-mainstream browser" and is applying a penalty to its users, then Cloudflare is the problem.

New comment by clowd in "Tell HN: Cloudflare verification is breaking the internet"

clowd — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 17:23:14 +0000

Yes, this is annoying as hell. It's gotten to the point where I just close out of a site when I see that interstitial come up.

New comment by clowd in "PayPal has restricted our account after we invoiced a key containing “ALEP”"

clowd — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 02:00:51 +0000

Is your assertion that it's unconstitutional for the US government to regulate interstate commerce?

New comment by clowd in "9-year-old girl wanted to save her goat from slaughter. Then came the warrant"

clowd — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 01:58:46 +0000

Are you saying that the SacBee article is misrepresenting something to "manipulate" people? What does it purport to be true that's not true?

The only problem GPT is fit to solve is an empty hard drive you'd like to have filled with random, useless garbage. But I don't understand how GPT is germane to this goat escapade in the first place.

New comment by clowd in "PayPal has restricted our account after we invoiced a key containing “ALEP”"

clowd — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 21:18:26 +0000

Complying with US federal law does not equate to acting as an agent of the US government, no matter how many times this trope may be repeated.

New comment by clowd in "PayPal has restricted our account after we invoiced a key containing “ALEP”"

clowd — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 21:16:03 +0000

The government hasn't created a list of no-no words, they've created a list of entities with whom US Persons cannot conduct financial transactions. I don't know what "ALEP" is but you can be sure it refers to some organization designated by the Office of Foreign Asset Control. PayPal's crappy system is PayPal's crappy system; their implementation wasn't directed by USG.

New comment by clowd in "“I’m selling data of 400M Twitter users that was scraped via a vulnerability”"

clowd — Sun, 25 Dec 2022 17:04:18 +0000

Slight correction: alleging Donald Trump's government was doing unconstitutional acts.

Which we know they did, in spades, in other contexts; but I've seen no evidence in the "Twitter files" to indicate anything illegal was going on in this context. The government briefed Twitter that they expected disinformation campaigns and to be on the lookout for them. The government also flagged a bunch of tweets as "hey, these are sus and might violate your rules, you ought to take a look" like anyone else can do.

Whatever Musk and Taibbi are trying to cook up, they seem to have forgotten who was running the federal government at the time. It wasn't Joe Biden or tHe LiBeRaLs. The whole thing is stupid.

New comment by clowd in "DALL-E Mini – Generate images from a text prompt"

clowd — Sat, 11 Jun 2022 03:24:37 +0000

That one errors out with "Too much traffic" and this one doesn't.

New comment by clowd in "Who's Attacking My Server?"

clowd — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 02:06:04 +0000

httpd is the one service I don't use fail2ban for, preferring a DIY solution instead.

I created an Apache config file with rewrite conditions to catch a bunch of "exploity" URI parts, abusive user-agent strings, referer spam targets, etc. This is loaded at the server level from httpd.conf, so I don't have to touch any vhosts and it's only parsed once when the service starts. Matching requests are rewritten to a script which drops the offender's IP and the ban reason into a file, and emits a terse "go away" message to the client. A separate daemonized process picks up those entries and adds them to an ipset in the firewall.

I went this route because fail2ban isn't always part of my deployment on a web server, but PHP is. Apache provides all of the matching capability to detect abuse from within itself, and the pair of PHP scripts are sufficient to act on those detections.

New comment by clowd in "I wrote Task Manager and I just remembered something (2020)"

clowd — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 17:32:42 +0000

> There should be nothing that TaskMgr can't kill

Except Defender/Malware Protection...

New comment by clowd in "Twitter Permanently Suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Account"

clowd — Sun, 02 Jan 2022 21:48:10 +0000

I don't think "everyone else" has been banned from Facebook; aside from Trump, I can't think of any other American elected official they've banned. Gab and Parler both work fine in a web browser.