This tactic is so old, but it weaponizes the annoying ubiquity of capchas. People just want to get to where they’re going, so they click the squares and do the dance to get past the seemingly arbitrary barriers.

This technique shows up on [email protected] every few weeks as the initial attack vector for some new RAT.

You may be right simply by Point 3 alone. It’s one i hadn’t considered.

Still, if that’s true, we’d be fighting a similar kind of adversary, but one that isn’t dismantling vital institutions like the Dept. of Education, USAID, etc. I wish we’d had that future to work with, because I worry about the children that will grow up having to deal with the consequences of their parents electing Trump; their paradigm will be shaped by the coming crises.

The fight could have gone on in both scenarios, but now, a lot more people (domestically and abroad) will get hurt in the short and long term, even as the fight does continue.

Anyway, thanks for the respectful reply. You’ve made some good points, and given that a lot of my side of the discussion is speculative, I don’t know that there’s much point in going much further. We have to deal with the current situation, awful as it is.

Stay safe. Stay strong. Hopefully we never have to meet on some frontline.

I actually think that was foolish for one reason: pick your weakest opponent to fight in future battles.

Democrats are weak and feckless. The majority of them can’t even unify around the active fascist takeover. I would rather be fighting for a better future against them than a fascist proto-dictator who has easily managed to get most of his party to fall in line and kiss the ring.

We killed our weaker opponent too early and made the stronger opponent even stronger.

I ultimately agree, but this is a good start

The current Democratic Party might be awful, but that doesn’t mean we can’t replace them with better leaders.

Fine. Most people here aren’t fans of the current Democratic Party.

They won’t. Nobody is coming to save us. We have to stop waiting for someone else to be the heroes we need.

Relying too strongly upon the ideals of dead people is how we got stupid religions that try to tell people what to do.

Close the open port(s) for a while and take a break? It’s bots, and maybe enough rejections will make the botnet move on.

My English teacher used to do variations on this joke.

You could make the argument that someone could guide her to a specific cheap brand, but I agree that it’s stupid

Only helps wherever adblockers work, but I’m all for a multiple discipline approach!

Start teaching people to ignore ads. I know I do, and it’s something my parents taught me when I was younger.

It won’t help with data collection, but it will make it a lot harder for these assholes to put the pieces together.

The crazy will continue until the leopards have had their fill.

If there weren’t children involved, I would be cheering for this outcome.

You could argue that… Well there’s the time when… Uh, no.

They were, but iirc, Boost sells “flavored” ones for non-emergency use. Or maybe it’s another company. Good Mythical Morning did an episode with those, I believe.

Yeah, and while I don’t have any technical qualms about the direction of Mozilla with regard to Firefox, I’m personally switching for peace of mind and because of the aforementioned inability to communicate well. I don’t like working with or supporting people that can’t just say what they mean. I mean, how hard would it have been to have a human-readable version for stupid people like me and have a legalese version for the lawyers?

Regardless, as people make decisions, they deserve to be informed. It would be stupid to decide to leave Firefox if all you knew was the uninformed outrage of the internet.

It’s mostly overblown. You can watch here or read here. The internet is overreacting again, but Mozilla has done fuck all to grasp why just yoinking understandable language and expecting people to understand legalese and draw lines to their Privacy Policy is making people upset or confused.

Imo, people jumping ship is justified, because a company that makes $37M just on investments should do better about being vocal and prescient champions of privacy. Even if their actual privacy policy is the same as it was a year ago, their failure to communicate with their supporters in a way they can understand should have consequences.