Funny, as someone that uses Android, sideloads apps, and is the "tech guy" for some older people, I went "yep, Google's own Play Store is full of shitty apps".
I recommend getting an Android phone (there are cheap Google Pixels out there) and try to sideload an app. Also browse the web a bit without an adblocker. I'd be surprised if by the end of the experiment you thought that sideloading is the reason their grandma's phone is full of crap.
I had a part-time job as cleaner when I was younger. We used Henry hoovers. They were used and sometimes abused 5 days a week... during the almost 3 years I was there, I think I only saw hoses and the floor head breaking.
So after going through a few hoovers at home from different brands, I bought a Henry for £100 3 years ago. The nose/hose detached after a few months. Not ideal, but I've fixed that in minutes with a bit of superglue. No other issues since then, no indications that it's about to fail.
I don't know if quality is still exactly the same as before, and they're certainly a bit heavier and noisier than some alternatives, but if you want something that lasts, get a Henry, not a Dyson.
It's hard to be in charge of a project like this. You're criticized no matter what you do.
The old UI was criticized by some for being outdated, a mix of old and new styles, didn't fit well with new OS/app styles, etc. It was crap. So they update the UI and it's still crap... for other users. Damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Both outlook.office.com and mail.google.com use much more memory and CPU than any "fat" client, and are constantly changing little things about the UI. Safari now often closes outlook automatically on an M5 Mac because it's using significant amounts of energy.
And I use a fat client because I like having all of my email addresses aggregate to one place, and I like it when that software gives me a modern look and feel ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All your mail in one place does not require a 'fat' client, something like Claws mail [1] (not in any way related to the recent LLM claws craze) can handle it without problems. Modern looks, well... it looks the way it looked about 25 years ago give or take a few iterations of GTK. Compact, efficient, to the point. If that's not your thing and you'd rather have large amounts of empty space and unrecognisable buttons it can be skinned to look 'modern'. In my startup sequence I launch 4 communications tools on one screen: gajim, telegram-desktop, signal-desktop and claws-mail in that order. Even though Claws gets launched last it appears first on screen because it is lightweight while the other three are anything but - Telegram is a native QT application, gajim is Python (nothing more needs to be said) and signal-desktop is Electron (even less needs to be said).
I don't see the point in doxing anyone, especially those providing a useful service for the average internet user. Just because you can put some info together, it doesn't mean you should.
With this said, I also disagree with turning everyone that uses archive[.]today into a botnet that DDoS sites. Changing the content of archived pages also raises questions about the authenticity of what we're reading.
The site behaves as if it was infected by some malware and the archived pages can't be trusted. I can see why Wikipedia made this decision.
For a very brief time, "doxing" (that is, dropping dox, that is, dropping docs, or documents) used to mean something useful. You gathered information that was not out in public, for example by talking to people or by stealing it, and put it out in the open.
It's very silly to talk about doxing when all someone has done is gather information anyone else can equally easily obtain, just given enough patience and time, especially when it's information the person in question put out there themselves. If it doesn't take any special skills or connections to obtain the information, but only the inclination to actually perform the research on publicly available data, I don't see what has been done that is unethical.
It's neither of those. Stalking refers to persistent, unwanted, one-sided interactions with a person such as following, surveilling, calling, or sending messages or gifts. Investigating a person's past or identity doesn't involve any interaction with the physical person. Harassment is persistent attempts to interact with someone after having been asked to stop. Again, an investigation doesn't require any form of interaction.
> Harassment is persistent attempts to interact with someone
No, harassment also includes persistent attempts to cause someone grief, whether or not they involve direct interactions with that person.
From Wikipedia:
> Harassment covers a wide range of behaviors of an offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behavior that demeans, humiliates, and intimidates a person.
Doxing in the loose sense could be harassment in certain circumstances, such as if you broadcast a person's home address to an audience with the intent to cause that audience to use that address, even if the address was already out there. In that case, the problem is not the release of information, but the intent you're communicating with the release. It would be the same if you told that audience "you know guys? It's not very difficult to find jdoe's home address if you google his name. I'm not saying anything, I'm just saying." Merely de-pseudonymizing a screen name may or may not be harassment. Divulging that jdoe's real name is John Doe would not have the same implications as if his name was, say, Keanu Reeves.
Because the two are distinct, one can't simply replace "doxing" with "harassment".
Generally speaking, every case I've seen of people using the term "doxing" tends to be for the case that specifically is harassment; it has the connotation of using the information, precisely because if you aren't intending to use it there's no good reason for you to have it.
Language evolves. Connotation tends to become definition. Not always the only definition, but connotation becomes the "especially" or the "definition 2", and can become the primary definition over time.
That's not what I mean. If we agree that harassment is wrong and that doxing is not harassment (because not all doxing is harassment), then it's incorrect to say that doxing is wrong. For example, the article from the blog, even if we agree that it is doxing, isn't harassment. The person being discussed is presented in a positive light:
>I for one will be buying Denis/Masha/whoever a well deserved cup of coffee.
Using one term when what is meant is actually the other serves nothing but to sow confusion.
You can harass someone while discussing them in a positive light.
And i don't just mean under colloquial definition, i mean under the legal definition of harrasment. In fact its fairly common for unwanted "positive" attention to be harrasment - e.g. unwanted sexual advances mostly fit that description.
You are generalizing an irrelevant point. What I was getting at is that unlike the usual usage of doxing, it was not a call to go bother that person. I didn't think I needed to make that point this explicitly within the context of this subthread.
Which is irrelavent as that is not a requirement for it to be harrasment.
I get that a call to action is a common feature of doxing and it wasn't present here, but its not a particularly common feature of harrasment outside of the context of doxing and nothing in the definition of harrasment requires it.
That's just another way of saying "words don't have meanings". Yes, it evolves, but to preserve the original meanings, that evolution should be slowed down as much as possible to avoid “black is white” effects.
In this case archive.today has a lot of influence over the information we take in because of the rise in paywalls. They have the potential of modifying the news we absorb at scale.
In that context I don't think the question ("actually, who is providing all this information to me and what interests drive them") is one that's misplaced. Maybe we shouldn't look into a gift horse's mouth but don't forget this could be a Trojan horse as well.
The article brought to light some ties to Russia but probably not ties to its government and its troll farms. Rather an independent and pretty rebellious citizen. That's good to hear. And that's valuable information. I trust the site more after reading the article, not less.
The article could have redacted the names they found but they were found with public sources and these sources validate the encountered information (otherwise the results could have been dismissed)
Did you read the article? They dug deep, they didn't just do a google search and leave it at that. They drew links between deleted posts and defunct accounts, they compared profile pictures of anonymous profiles.
I'm not defending the archive.today webmaster but it's unfortunately understandable they are angry. Saying what the blogger did was merely point out public information is a gross oversimplification.
That is NOT the line for doxxing at all, I don't know why you hang your argument on that aspect. Even institutions that care about secrecy like governments state that documents that aggregate ostensibly public information can raise the classification level of a document above being non-classified. The reasons for this are obvious, essentially aggregated information can lead one to draw conclusions that otherwise are not obvious. That is akin to what the original article by Gyrovague does.
Again, did you read my comment? I know what it means now. My point is about highlighting the change in meaning, not about obstinately denying what the word means.
>Even institutions that care about secrecy like governments state [...]
A given organization can have whatever policy it wants with regards to which documents it wants to allow to be made public. It could make all documents printed on non-yellow paper classified. That has nothing to do with the ethics of doxing.
>The reasons for this are obvious, essentially aggregated information can lead one to draw conclusions that otherwise are not obvious.
A secret is not something that's not obvious, it's a datum that's strictly controlled by the people who know it. If I can find some information about your real identity just by searching for it online then it's not a secret; you don't control that piece of information. You've given up that control by divulging the information in a public space where information often remains indefinitely.
Eh, you can find in public data things like "what is someone's address" based only on their name by looking up public records of mortgage records. That however is quite bad form, and if you did do that, I think it would be pretty unethical.
It's also kind of ironic that a site whose whole premise is to preserve pages forever, whether the people involved like it or not, is seeking to take down another site because they are involved and don't like it. Live by the sword, etc.
> It's also kind of ironic that a site whose whole premise is to preserve pages forever, whether the people involved like it or not
Oddly, I think archive.today has explicitly said that's not what they're there for, and the people shouldn't rely on their links as a long-term archive.
Sites that exist to archive other websites will almost always need to dynamically change the content of the HTML that they're serving in some way or another. (For example, a link that points to the root of the website may need changed in order to point to the right location.)
So it doesn't necessarily raise questions about whether the content has been changed or not. The difference is in whether that change is there to make the archive usable - and of course, for archive.today, that's not the case.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624740 has the earliest writeup that I know of. It was running it via a script and intentionally using cache busting techniques to try to increase load on the hosted wordpress infrastructure.
Ah good to know. My pi-hole actually was blocking the blog itself since the ublock site list made its way into one of the blocklists I use. But I've been just avoiding links as much as possible because I didn't want to contribute.
This is an impressively unhinged take. I still have no idea what the person is trying to achieve. And I'm sad we're likely going to lose that resource in the future.
I understand being mad but no, unfortunately, despite me knowing humans are human and they get angry at times, this response does still leave a bitter taste in the mouth and many people will perceive it that way. Changing the content of the archived pages is the worst thing they've done honestly. The "3 Hz DDoS" is funny perhaps but then if it's so harmless, then why even bother? But regardless, tampering with the archives, that is, tainting the content that people appreciate you for won't sit well with people.
We're taking about both now, at least one a week it seems. Without the DDoS, we'd mostly forget about the blog. I didn't even know about the blog until the DDoS started.
As far as I understand the person behind archive.today might face jail time if they are found out. You shouldn't be surprised that people lash out when you threaten their life.
I don't think the DDOSing is a very good method for fighting back but I can't blame anyone for trying to survive. They are definitely the victim here.
If that blog really doxxed them out of idle curiosity they are an absolute piece of shit. Though I think this is more of a targeted campaign.
One thing they always teach you in Crime University is "don't break two laws at the same time." If you have contrabands in your car, don't speed or run red lights, because it brings attention and attentions means jail.
In this case, I didn't know that the archive.today people were doxxed until they started the ddos campaign and caught attention. I doubt anyone in this thread knew or cared about the blogger until he was attacked. And now this entire thing is a matter of permanent record on Wikipedia and in the news. archive.today's attempt at silencing the blogger is only bringing them more trouble, not less.
The weird thing is that there was nothing new in that blog post. And on top of that it couldn't conclusively say who the owner of archive.today is, so no one still knows.
> As far as I understand the person behind archive.today might face jail time if they are found out. You shouldn't be surprised that people lash out when you threaten their life.
One of the really strange things about all of this is that there is a public forum post in which a guy claims to be the site owner. So this whole debacle is this weird mix of people who are angry and saying "clearly the owner doesn't want to be associated with the site" on the one hand, but then on the other hand there's literally a guy who says he's the one that owns the site, so it doesn't seem like that guy is very worried about being associated with it?
It also seems weird to me that it's viewed as inappropriate to report on the results of Googling the guy who said he owns the site, but maybe I'm just out of touch on that topic.
> is that there is a public forum post in which a guy claims to be the site owner.
Which forum post? The post mentioned by the blogger, the post on an F-Secure forum (a company with cybersecurity products) was a request for support by the owner of archive.today regarding a block of their site. It's arguably not intended as a public statement by the owner of the archive, and they were simply careless with their username.
Somebody who a) directs DDOS attacks and b) abuses random visitors' browser for those DDOS attacks is never the victim.
You don't know their motives for running their site, but you do get a clear message about their character by observing their actions, and you'd do well to listen to that message.
The character is completely irrelevant to whether they are a victim of doxxing.
They might be the worst person ever but that doesn't matter. People can be good and bad, sometimes the victim sometimes the perpetrator.
Is it morally wrong to doxx someone and cause them to go to jail because they are running an archive website? Yes. It is. It doesn't matter who the person is. It does not matter what their motivations are.
There are plenty of cases where the operator of archive.today refused to take down archives of pages with people's identifying information, so it's a huge double standard for them to insist on others to not look into their identity using public information.
That some messed up morality. If you are right you are right.
Now what you do in reaction might be legally and morally wrong and maybe you need to be punished for that. But that doesn't negate the injustice you suffered. Two wrongs make... two wrongs. One does not negate the other.
Irrelevant to a determination of fact, yes. But very relevant to the question of whether or not I care about any of this. Bad thing happened to bad person, lots of drama ensued, come rubberneck the various internet slapfights, details at 11. In other news, water is wet.
this seems like type of thing that should be on blockchain and decentralized nodes validate authenticity, it could support revisions but not lose originals
For offline maps, I switched to CoMaps when they forked Organic Maps. Development seemed to be moving faster there. I still have Google Maps and Here Maps installed, both with offline maps of the areas I'm usually at or to where I'm travelling. Too much redundancy perhaps, but no service/data source is good everywhere and I have a lot of free space on my phone, so it's not a problem for me.
For communications, I've been looking into Meshtastic and Meshcore. I have no need for them right now and they're not very reliable for messaging (especially Meshtastic, Meshcore works better here in London, but their coverage isn't great), but clients are fairly cheap and you can get a network going in case something happens.
Parts of Portugal were affected by bad weather recently, with some areas losing power and eventually mobile networks. On a Portuguese group for mesh stuff, some people reported being able to send some messages where phones were down, so it doesn't hurt to have a few clients just in case.
Performance of iOS 26 on some iPhones isn't great. Sure, a lot of people complain because they don't like change, but we shouldn't ignore the performance issues and poor legibility on some elements. Those are valid complaints.
Something I've heard from someone that owns an iPhone 16 Pro is that animations are (were?) laggy sometimes. I was also looking at some pictures on an iPhone the other day (unsure about the model, maybe 14?) and it felt like it was dropping some frames while switching apps.
So while it may not be fundamentally broken, it's the type of stuff that would annoy me a lot if I used an iPhone. I never expect to go from a smooth experience to a low-end Android phone experience after a software update.
MacOS... I've avoided upgrading my M4 Max MBP so far after upgrading the M1 Air we have at home. It's just not as smooth as before, even with reduced transparency.
I recommend getting an Android phone (there are cheap Google Pixels out there) and try to sideload an app. Also browse the web a bit without an adblocker. I'd be surprised if by the end of the experiment you thought that sideloading is the reason their grandma's phone is full of crap.
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