TootSweet

Publicly-available web applications typically keep an "access log" -- a log of every request made to a website or web application hit by end users including the URL path. This log is usually viewable by developers.

Aside from that, typically web applications are constantly monitored by various monitoring/alerting software like Data Dog, NewRelic, Dynatrace, Pagerduty, etc, which has the ability to constantly monitor things like the error rate and if the end user's error rate sharply increases from 1% to 10%, let's say, it will send a message directly to a developer's phone.

The thing is, the content of the access logs and the alerts generated are things that depend very significantly on end user behavior. You can literally put arbitrary content into a url and that will show up in the access log. Manipulating alerting might be more challenging, but it could be done with a coordinated group of people (a la [LOIC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Orbit_Ion_Cannon, though it would take a lot less traffic than a DDOS typically would).

Particularly for websites that don't offer any way to contact them, I'll sometimes drop a message to them in a url and refresh a good dozen times or so. Particularly to express displeasure. Just on the hope that someone will run across it in the access log.

• https://example.com/your_website_apparently_just_doesnt_load_at_all_in_chrome
• https://example.com/fuck_your_signup_wall
• https://example.com/I_cant_in_good_conscience_continue_to_utilize_your_service

Stuff like that. It's surprising how often I feel I have a reason to do that.

(And to be fair, the chance someone would happen across it would be pretty seriously low if a) I was just doing this on my own and b) the site got any significant amount of traffic for me to get drowned out in. I tend to take that into account when I'm doing this. Given how much traffic it gets, what time of day it is, how good the IT department is likely to be, etc, how likely is it to be seen?)

But if you can get a bunch of people involved, you can coordinate to hit one particular URL with a message in it and get a lot of 404s that might well end up in reports or alerts.

But why would you want to do this?

• Protest - A clear message to a company or other organization (government agency, whatever) that what they're doing is not ok with the people. Proof that a company has received such a message can also provide ammunition for a movement.
• Alerting employees to the bad actions of their employer.
• Just being helpful - It's entirely possible for some sites that they just don't know that some particular thing may be broken, vulnerable, or otherwise "bad" in a fixable way. And if there's not a better way to contact them, this might be the only real option. While the whole "coordinated effort a la LOIC" thing might not work, if this became a more common practice, it could be of benefit.
• Clandestine communications with employees without bosses finding out.

Good practices:

• For alerts, remember there's a human on the other end of that alert. Don't wake them at 3:00am for your political cause. Ping them at 2:00pm (their timezone.) It's cool if their boss is paying them to deal with that.
• Consider your target. Do the math. Get an idea how likely it is that what you're attempting will accomplish your goal -- get to the right audience or whatever.
• Try to make what you're doing stand-out to who you're attempting to communicate with. Put ASCII art in it. Use all caps. Put in words/phrases they're likely to be grepping for.
• Maybe use an unusual user agent if you want your messages easily grepped for. (Once you've got their curiosity, they might want to see more.)
• Consider anonymizing technologies like VPNs or Tor. Depending on your aims.
• Consider what will end up putting your message in reports to management.

Could this be used for evil? Yeah, probably. Maybe it's already being done?

• Spamming/scamming website owners. (This could get especially annoying on a large, industrial scale.)
• Head hunting/poaching employees.
• Log injection.

What about for an ∞ year old to date a √-400 year old?

I'm sure the word "yogurt" belongs in quotes when describing this stuff. But as a 5-year-old, I loved the stuff. I can't imagine I'd like it now if they still made it. But it's associated with fond memories.

!covidconscious@lemmy.world

There are other communities for discussion of COVID-19, but none really on this topic.

As someone who still masks and isolates, I can't imagine I'm the only one, and I'm guessing there are enough people with relevant things to talk about to make an active community.

OC

Let no one accuse me of being a competent artist or comedian.

Ok. Slight lie. I saw one firefly. It was early in the season and in broad daylight, so not when it should have been blinking. But it was a firefly.

But this year is the first that I haven't seen a single firefly light up. And it's late enough in the season now that I doubt I'll see one before the snow falls.

The planet is fucked, folks. Not that I didn't already know this. The weather has been steadily more severe over the last few years. And hotter. And you steadily hear news about icebergs this and ice shelves that and more hot-habitat species moving further from the equator as the climate warms.

But not a single firefly fireflying? In my area? That's a qualitative shift that has more impact on my outlook than just the abstract knowledge that we're killing the planet and the slow progression of a few known trends.

Bonus: and that likely explains why older shows tend to have self-contained episodes while newer shows tend to be serial.

If you found yourself transported to early 1788 Philadelphia, say about a year before the U.S. Constitution was signed, an if the Founding Fathers were all willing to hear you out, what would be some of the first things you'd say specifically to warn them and try to prevent some of the bad things that have happened in the real-world timeline since then? Basically, what differences would you want to see made to the U.S. Constitution from the beginning and how would you impress specifically on the Founding Fathers the necessity of diverging from their instincts in specifically those ways?

And keep in mind the Founding Fathers' beliefs on things like slavery, "the free market", guns, LGBTQIA+, etc.

I suspect this may be a lesser-known one. It was on CBS in 1996 and was cancelled after only one season (partially because of the FCC's strengthened requirements for making kids' shows "educational"), but it's very much imprinted on my brain.

You can file this (along with the "Star Tropics" video game franchise) under "underrated media that deserves a reboot but no way in hell is that ever going to happen."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/33915876

This is a California state court case that could drastically change the landscape for Free and Open Source Software moving forward. And particularly that FOSS that is covered by Copylefted licenses like the GPL family of licenses.

The premise of the case is that by selling smart TVs with only the compiled version of GPL'd (and likely forked) code projects such as the Linux kernel, BusyBox, selinux, ffmpeg, etc, Vizio is blatantly violating the "Source Code Provision" of the GPL which requires that they provide along with this compiled code, also the source code or failing that a written offer of source code to any recipients of these compiled versions of these GPL'd applications and libraries.

(Now, of course, anyone can get the source code of the Linux kernel or BusyBox or any of the other applications at issue. But in the process, Vizio and their manufacturers have written kernel drivers for the hardware specifically on the TVs (which are derivative works of the Linux Kernel and therefore covered by the GPL), and probably made modifications to several of the other codebases in order to make them do novel things specifically for the smart TVs in question. Beyond that, the GPL requires Vizio to provide any programs/scripts/signing-keys/etc to compile and install the source code (or a, say, consumer-modified version of the source code) onto the TVs. It's the Vizio-specific/chip-manufacturer-specific modifications/derivative works and compiling/installing code that's most important.)

The "Software Freedom Conservancy v. Vizio Inc." case is seeking to force Vizio to comply with the GPL. Assuming the SFC is successful and the courts rule in their favor, the eventual result is expected to be a fully FOSS OS "distribution" (of, basically, GNU/Linux) that end users can install on their Vizio TVs in place of the factory-installed OS. This FOSS OS distribution, of course, would allow users to remove ads and other antifeatures from the TVs in question. And over time, it's highly probable that this FOSS OS smart TV distribution would expand to other models and brands of TVs. Roughly speaking, the goal of this lawsuit is to be able to create an "OpenWRT but for smart TVs."

But this case could definitely affect the industry not just for smart TVs. Smart phones, game consoles, automobiles, robot vacuum cleaners, sex toys. So many consumer electronics devices run on, for instance, the Linux or Android kernel (both of which are covered by the GPL). And a lot of these devices also include many other programs and libraries covered by the GPL. There's potential for lots of different "OpenWRT but for " sort of distributions. And if SFC v. Vizio succeeds, it could greatly increase the likelihood of all of these coming to fruition.

Vizio has been stalling for strategic reasons. But there's a court date set for 2025-09-22. My understanding is that there will be options to watch a live stream of it via Zoom for Business. (Yes, it's proprietary, unfortunately.) You can even apply for a grant to travel to California to attend the hearing in person (though I think that's kinda mostly for bloggers and journalists and such). Also, a lot of court documents about the case are linked on the page I linked in this post.

Ok. Time for a bit of legal nerd stuff. (IANAL, not legal advice, etc.) Previous GPL enforcement cases have been copyright cases brought by the copyright holders. This case is novel in that it's a contract case. There's a legal concept of a "third-party beneficiary" to a contract. If Alice and Bob make a contract that requires Alice to pay Charlie $100, then Charlie is a third-party beneficiary and thus can bring a suit for enforcement against Alice. In this case, copyright holders of GPL'd code made a contract (the GPL) with Vizio that requires Vizio to make sure anyone they distribute compiled GPL'd code to can get the source code (and compiling/installing scripts etc), so anyone Vizio sells a TV to is a third-party beneficiary and therefore can bring a suit against Vizio to get the court to force Vizio to hold up their obligations under the GPL. At least that's the legal theory under which SFC is bringing the suit.

If you want more info about this, this YouTube video is a panel of SFC folks doing a Q&A specifically about the Vizio case. It'll have some interesting tidbits of info.

I'm hopeful, and the courts have been sympathetic to the SFC's arguments so far. I'm crossing my fingers for sure.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/33915876

This is a California state court case that could drastically change the landscape for Free and Open Source Software moving forward. And particularly that FOSS that is covered by Copylefted licenses like the GPL family of licenses.

The premise of the case is that by selling smart TVs with only the compiled version of GPL'd (and likely forked) code projects such as the Linux kernel, BusyBox, selinux, ffmpeg, etc, Vizio is blatantly violating the "Source Code Provision" of the GPL which requires that they provide along with this compiled code, also the source code or failing that a written offer of source code to any recipients of these compiled versions of these GPL'd applications and libraries.

(Now, of course, anyone can get the source code of the Linux kernel or BusyBox or any of the other applications at issue. But in the process, Vizio and their manufacturers have written kernel drivers for the hardware specifically on the TVs (which are derivative works of the Linux Kernel and therefore covered by the GPL), and probably made modifications to several of the other codebases in order to make them do novel things specifically for the smart TVs in question. Beyond that, the GPL requires Vizio to provide any programs/scripts/signing-keys/etc to compile and install the source code (or a, say, consumer-modified version of the source code) onto the TVs. It's the Vizio-specific/chip-manufacturer-specific modifications/derivative works and compiling/installing code that's most important.)

The "Software Freedom Conservancy v. Vizio Inc." case is seeking to force Vizio to comply with the GPL. Assuming the SFC is successful and the courts rule in their favor, the eventual result is expected to be a fully FOSS OS "distribution" (of, basically, GNU/Linux) that end users can install on their Vizio TVs in place of the factory-installed OS. This FOSS OS distribution, of course, would allow users to remove ads and other antifeatures from the TVs in question. And over time, it's highly probable that this FOSS OS smart TV distribution would expand to other models and brands of TVs. Roughly speaking, the goal of this lawsuit is to be able to create an "OpenWRT but for smart TVs."

But this case could definitely affect the industry not just for smart TVs. Smart phones, game consoles, automobiles, robot vacuum cleaners, sex toys. So many consumer electronics devices run on, for instance, the Linux or Android kernel (both of which are covered by the GPL). And a lot of these devices also include many other programs and libraries covered by the GPL. There's potential for lots of different "OpenWRT but for " sort of distributions. And if SFC v. Vizio succeeds, it could greatly increase the likelihood of all of these coming to fruition.

Vizio has been stalling for strategic reasons. But there's a court date set for 2025-09-22. My understanding is that there will be options to watch a live stream of it via Zoom for Business. (Yes, it's proprietary, unfortunately.) You can even apply for a grant to travel to California to attend the hearing in person (though I think that's kinda mostly for bloggers and journalists and such). Also, a lot of court documents about the case are linked on the page I linked in this post.

Ok. Time for a bit of legal nerd stuff. (IANAL, not legal advice, etc.) Previous GPL enforcement cases have been copyright cases brought by the copyright holders. This case is novel in that it's a contract case. There's a legal concept of a "third-party beneficiary" to a contract. If Alice and Bob make a contract that requires Alice to pay Charlie $100, then Charlie is a third-party beneficiary and thus can bring a suit for enforcement against Alice. In this case, copyright holders of GPL'd code made a contract (the GPL) with Vizio that requires Vizio to make sure anyone they distribute compiled GPL'd code to can get the source code (and compiling/installing scripts etc), so anyone Vizio sells a TV to is a third-party beneficiary and therefore can bring a suit against Vizio to get the court to force Vizio to hold up their obligations under the GPL. At least that's the legal theory under which SFC is bringing the suit.

If you want more info about this, this YouTube video is a panel of SFC folks doing a Q&A specifically about the Vizio case. It'll have some interesting tidbits of info.

I'm hopeful, and the courts have been sympathetic to the SFC's arguments so far. I'm crossing my fingers for sure.