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Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3 million peers

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  • You won't convince anyone one here that crypto isn't a scam. These people are set in their ways.

    And stubbornly entitled

    Their uncle must’ve been rug pulled when buying a shitcoin or something and now they believe crypto is nothing but a scam

    But yea there’s nothing to do. If you can’t educate them then let them stay in their ignorance if they like it. I just don’t feel that letting them spread their misinformation is a good thing

  • I'm a developer but have utterly no experience with torrent architecture, or for that matter anything outside of standard web services and the kinds of things companies do. But I've been wondering if BitTorrent technology would be usable for federating content for things such as Lemmy. After reading that somebody was begging for money to offset the $5k/month they were spending to run an instance (I mean, that shows true dedicaton but holy crap dude), it seems like a distributed architecture would make a lot more sense than somebody having to foot the bill for a big-ass server. I just personally wouldn't know where to begin on a project like that, but maybe if somebody with the right combo of skills and experience gave it some thought...

    2 years ago I talked about the core problem with federated services was the abismal scale ability.

    I essentially got ridiculed.

    And here we are, with incredibly predictable scaling problems.

    If we refuse to acknowledge problems till they become critical, we will never grow past a blip on the corner of the internet. Protocol development is HARD and expensive.

  • if you sell something for $1 at 10am your $1 still buys $1 at 10pm.

    in crypto, it's easily manipulated, and that's by design. it's a scam because the only people who have that control are the wealthy.

    If I sell 1BT worth of something at 10am, it could be worth 2BT at 10pm, but it could also be worth .1BT equally.

    the purpose of a Fiat currency is economic supremacy that is backed by the governing body and the economy that uses it.

    tell me, what governing body or economy is crypto backed by?

    Your $1 has absolutely changed in value by 10pm. What do you think inflation is? It might not be enough change for the store to bother changing prices but the value changes constantly.

    Watch the foreign exchange markets, your $1 is changing in value compared to every other currency constantly.

    The only difference between fiat and crypto is that changing the prices in the store is difficult, and the volume of trade is high enough to reduce volatility in the value of your $. There are plenty of cases of hyperinflation in history where stores have to change prices on a daily basis, meaning that fiat is not immune to volatility.

    To prevent that volatility we just have things like the federal reserve, debt limits, federal regulations, etc that are designed to keep you the investor (money holders) happy with keeping that money in dollars instead of assets. The value is somewhat stable as long as the government is solvent.

    Crypto doesn't have those external controls, instead it has internal controls, i.e. mining difficulty. Which from a user perspective is better because it can't be printed at will by the government.

    Long story short fiat is no different than crypto, there is no real tangible value, so value is what people think it is. Unfortunately crypto's value is driven more by speculative "investors" than by actual trade demand which means it is more volatile. If enough of the world changed to crypto it would just as stable as your $.

    Not saying crypto is a good thing just saying that it isn't any better or worse. It needs daily usage for real trade by a large portion of the population to reduce the volatility, instead of just being used to gamble against the dollar.

    Our governments would likely never let that happen though, they can't give up their ability to print money. It's far easier to keep getting elected when you print the cash to operate the government, than it is to raise taxes to pay for the things they need.

    The absolutely worthless meme coin scams/forks/etc are just scammers and gamblers trying to rip each other off. They just make any sort of useful critical mass of trade less and less plausible because it gives all crypto a bad name. Not that Bitcoin/Ethereum started out any different but now that enough people are using them splitting your user base is just self defeating

  • 2 years ago I talked about the core problem with federated services was the abismal scale ability.

    I essentially got ridiculed.

    And here we are, with incredibly predictable scaling problems.

    If we refuse to acknowledge problems till they become critical, we will never grow past a blip on the corner of the internet. Protocol development is HARD and expensive.

    Yeah, volunteer moderation is also an issue, any decent ppl doing it get burnt out if they get an influx of ppl and quit also like lemm.ee

  • Orphaned IPs as well. If you have an IPv4 from your cloud provider and you want to retire it, you should thoroughly scrub your DNS and all other configs before doing so. Otherwise it's trivial for someone else to spin up a machine on that IP address and abuse your domain.

    Basically, when you stop paying for hosting, also remove records from your domain, or itll link to the new person with your old hosting ips website and show that on your domain. I always forget when I swap hosting on my personal sites and haven't updated the records, see some random dropshipping or local (not to me) business website on my domain lol

  • Yeah, volunteer moderation is also an issue, any decent ppl doing it get burnt out if they get an influx of ppl and quit also like lemm.ee

    Lemmy also doesn't make that easy, since it's not like e.g. Reddit or the phpBB forums of old, where everyone moderates on their own turf only, but each instance has to essentially moderate all other communities on all other instances too.

  • paying in crypto is nice partly for this reason

    But a lot of uneducated people will spam "crypto is a scam"

    Yes, doing illegal things secretly is a valid use case for crypto. So far, it's also the only one

  • Yes, doing illegal things secretly is a valid use case for crypto. So far, it's also the only one

    What about donating money to people online without giving away your name and privacy? What about avoiding scams for P2P transactions? What about boycotting the banking system? What about avoiding international payment fees?

    These all seem valid use cases to me

  • Your $1 has absolutely changed in value by 10pm. What do you think inflation is? It might not be enough change for the store to bother changing prices but the value changes constantly.

    Watch the foreign exchange markets, your $1 is changing in value compared to every other currency constantly.

    The only difference between fiat and crypto is that changing the prices in the store is difficult, and the volume of trade is high enough to reduce volatility in the value of your $. There are plenty of cases of hyperinflation in history where stores have to change prices on a daily basis, meaning that fiat is not immune to volatility.

    To prevent that volatility we just have things like the federal reserve, debt limits, federal regulations, etc that are designed to keep you the investor (money holders) happy with keeping that money in dollars instead of assets. The value is somewhat stable as long as the government is solvent.

    Crypto doesn't have those external controls, instead it has internal controls, i.e. mining difficulty. Which from a user perspective is better because it can't be printed at will by the government.

    Long story short fiat is no different than crypto, there is no real tangible value, so value is what people think it is. Unfortunately crypto's value is driven more by speculative "investors" than by actual trade demand which means it is more volatile. If enough of the world changed to crypto it would just as stable as your $.

    Not saying crypto is a good thing just saying that it isn't any better or worse. It needs daily usage for real trade by a large portion of the population to reduce the volatility, instead of just being used to gamble against the dollar.

    Our governments would likely never let that happen though, they can't give up their ability to print money. It's far easier to keep getting elected when you print the cash to operate the government, than it is to raise taxes to pay for the things they need.

    The absolutely worthless meme coin scams/forks/etc are just scammers and gamblers trying to rip each other off. They just make any sort of useful critical mass of trade less and less plausible because it gives all crypto a bad name. Not that Bitcoin/Ethereum started out any different but now that enough people are using them splitting your user base is just self defeating

    1000001665

  • What about donating money to people online without giving away your name and privacy? What about avoiding scams for P2P transactions? What about boycotting the banking system? What about avoiding international payment fees?

    These all seem valid use cases to me

    donating online

    Yeah i suppose any form of payment that you have to keep secret for some reason is a reason to use crypto, though I struggle to imagine needing that if you're not doing something dodgy

    avoiding scams for p2p transactions

    Wat. Crypto is not good at solving that, it's in fact much much worse than traditional payment methods. There's a reason scammers always want to be paid in crypto

    boycotting the banking system

    What specifically are you boycotting? The money that backs your crypto (i.e. that you bought it with) still sits in a bank account somewhere and continues to support the banks. All you're boycotting then are payments, but those are usually free for consumers (many banks lose money on them) so you're not exactly "sticking it to the man" by not using them. Evem if you were somehow hurting banks by using crypto, if you think the people that benefit from you using crypto (crypto exchange owners and billionaires that own crypto etc.) are less evil than goverment regulated banks, you're deluded.

    What about avoiding international payment fees?

    You'll spend more money using crypto for that, not less

  • donating online

    Yeah i suppose any form of payment that you have to keep secret for some reason is a reason to use crypto, though I struggle to imagine needing that if you're not doing something dodgy

    avoiding scams for p2p transactions

    Wat. Crypto is not good at solving that, it's in fact much much worse than traditional payment methods. There's a reason scammers always want to be paid in crypto

    boycotting the banking system

    What specifically are you boycotting? The money that backs your crypto (i.e. that you bought it with) still sits in a bank account somewhere and continues to support the banks. All you're boycotting then are payments, but those are usually free for consumers (many banks lose money on them) so you're not exactly "sticking it to the man" by not using them. Evem if you were somehow hurting banks by using crypto, if you think the people that benefit from you using crypto (crypto exchange owners and billionaires that own crypto etc.) are less evil than goverment regulated banks, you're deluded.

    What about avoiding international payment fees?

    You'll spend more money using crypto for that, not less

    Yeah i suppose any form of payment that you have to keep secret for some reason is a reason to use crypto, though I struggle to imagine needing that if you're not doing something dodgy

    imagine you’re a YouTuber and want to accept donations: that will force you to give out your name to them, which they could use to get your address and phone number. There’s always someone that hates you, and I rather not have them knowing my personal info

    Wat. Crypto is not good at solving that, it's in fact much much worse than traditional payment methods. There's a reason scammers always want to be paid in crypto

    if you’re the seller then it’s a lot better. With the traditional banking system, with enough knowledge you can cheat both sides: stolen cards, abusive chargebacks, bank accounts in other countries under fake name/fake ID…

    Crypto simplifies scamming when the seller, and pretty much makes it impossible for buyers

    What specifically are you boycotting?

    Card payments, international tranfers, national transfers taking days to complete, money being seizable at all times

    many banks lose money on them

    Their plans are basically all focused on the card you get. Pretty sure they make money with it, else many wouldn’t offer cash back (selling infos and getting a fee from card payments?)

    if you think the people that benefit from you using crypto (crypto exchange owners and billionaires that own crypto etc.) are less evil than goverment regulated banks, you're deluded.

    Banks are evil anyways, does it really change anything? The difference is that it technically helps everyone using crypto, not only the rich.

    Plus P2P exchanges are a thing

    You'll spend more money using crypto for that, not less

    That’s just factually false. Do you know the price of a swift transfer? Now compare it to crypto tx fees, with many being under $0.01

  • OpenAI says new GPT-5 AI model can provide PhD-level expertise.

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    Saying I'm wrong without a logical reason doesn't make you right
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    Liberals love nationalism
  • AdGuard is yet another app to block Windows Recall

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    semperverus@lemmy.worldS
    It doesn't mean you don't get those things, it just means that you don't use them via a control panel. There are a few solutions for shadowplay that are all decent to excellent, rtx HDR I think is automatic in Proton? Not sure what you mean by game filters unless you're talking about reshade, and I wasn't aware there was a video upscaler in Firefox.
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    That was 20 years ago.
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    dojan@pawb.socialD
    Don’t assume evil when stupidity I didn't, though? I think that perhaps you missed the "I don’t think necessarily that people who perpetuate this problem are doing so out of malice" part. Scream racism all you want but you’re cheapening the meaning of the word and you’re not doing anyone a favor. I didn't invent this term. Darker patches on darker skin are harder to detect, just as facial features in the dark, on dark skin are garder to detect because there is literally less light to work with Computers don't see things the way we do. That's why steganography can be imperceptible to the human eye, and why adversarial examples work when the differences cannot be seen by humans. If a model is struggling at doing its job it's because the data is bad, be it the input data, or the training data. Historically one significant contributor has been that the datasets aren't particularly diverse, and white men end up as the default. It's why all the "AI" companies popped in "ethnically ambiguous" and other words into their prompts to coax their image generators into generating people that weren't white, and subsequently why these image generators gave us ethnically ambigaus memes and German nazi soldiers that were black.
  • Catbox.moe got screwed 😿

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    archrecord@lemm.eeA
    I'll gladly give you a reason. I'm actually happy to articulate my stance on this, considering how much I tend to care about digital rights. Services that host files should not be held responsible for what users upload, unless: The service explicitly caters to illegal content by definition or practice (i.e. the if the website is literally titled uploadyourcsamhere[.]com then it's safe to assume they deliberately want to host illegal content) The service has a very easy mechanism to remove illegal content, either when asked, or through simple monitoring systems, but chooses not to do so (catbox does this, and quite quickly too) Because holding services responsible creates a whole host of negative effects. Here's some examples: Someone starts a CDN and some users upload CSAM. The creator of the CDN goes to jail now. Nobody ever wants to create a CDN because of the legal risk, and thus the only providers of CDNs become shady, expensive, anonymously-run services with no compliance mechanisms. You run a site that hosts images, and someone decides they want to harm you. They upload CSAM, then report the site to law enforcement. You go to jail. Anybody in the future who wants to run an image sharing site must now self-censor to try and not upset any human being that could be willing to harm them via their site. A social media site is hosting the posts and content of users. In order to be compliant and not go to jail, they must engage in extremely strict filtering, otherwise even one mistake could land them in jail. All users of the site are prohibited from posting any NSFW or even suggestive content, (including newsworthy media, such as an image of bodies in a warzone) and any violation leads to an instant ban, because any of those things could lead to a chance of actually illegal content being attached. This isn't just my opinion either. Digital rights organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have talked at length about similar policies before. To quote them: "When social media platforms adopt heavy-handed moderation policies, the unintended consequences can be hard to predict. For example, Twitter’s policies on sexual material have resulted in posts on sexual health and condoms being taken down. YouTube’s bans on violent content have resulted in journalism on the Syrian war being pulled from the site. It can be tempting to attempt to “fix” certain attitudes and behaviors online by placing increased restrictions on users’ speech, but in practice, web platforms have had more success at silencing innocent people than at making online communities healthier." Now, to address the rest of your comment, since I don't just want to focus on the beginning: I think you have to actively moderate what is uploaded Catbox does, and as previously mentioned, often at a much higher rate than other services, and at a comparable rate to many services that have millions, if not billions of dollars in annual profits that could otherwise be spent on further moderation. there has to be swifter and stricter punishment for those that do upload things that are against TOS and/or illegal. The problem isn't necessarily the speed at which people can be reported and punished, but rather that the internet is fundamentally harder to track people on than real life. It's easy for cops to sit around at a spot they know someone will be physically distributing illegal content at in real life, but digitally, even if you can see the feed of all the information passing through the service, a VPN or Tor connection will anonymize your IP address in a manner that most police departments won't be able to track, and most three-letter agencies will simply have a relatively low success rate with. There's no good solution to this problem of identifying perpetrators, which is why platforms often focus on moderation over legal enforcement actions against users so frequently. It accomplishes the goal of preventing and removing the content without having to, for example, require every single user of the internet to scan an ID (and also magically prevent people from just stealing other people's access tokens and impersonating their ID) I do agree, however, that we should probably provide larger amounts of funding, training, and resources, to divisions who's sole goal is to go after online distribution of various illegal content, primarily that which harms children, because it's certainly still an issue of there being too many reports to go through, even if many of them will still lead to dead ends. I hope that explains why making file hosting services liable for user uploaded content probably isn't the best strategy. I hate to see people with good intentions support ideas that sound good in practice, but in the end just cause more untold harms, and I hope you can understand why I believe this to be the case.
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    [image: 8978adf5-b473-470c-9f21-62a31e2fbc77.gif]
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    It's also much easier to implement.