• 0 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 17th, 2023
  • ciferecaNinjo@fedia.iotoTechnology@beehaw.org•Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead
    3·
    1 year ago

    Here’s the heart of the not-so-obvious problem:

    Websites treat the Google crawler like a 1st class citizen. Paywalls give Google unpaid junk-free access. Then Google search results direct people to a website that treats humans differently (worse). So Google users are led to sites they cannot access. The heart of the problem is access inequality. Google effectively serves to refer people to sites that are not publicly accessible.

    I do not want to see search results I cannot access. Google cache was the equalizer that neutralizes that problem. Now that problem is back in our face.

  • ciferecaNinjo@fedia.iotoTechnology@beehaw.org•Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead
    4·
    1 year ago

    From the article:

    “was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.” (emphasis added)

    Bullshit! The web gets increasingly enshitified and content is less accessible every day.

    For now, you can still build your own cache links even without the button, just by going to “https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:” plus a website URL, or by typing “cache:” plus a URL into Google Search.

    You can also use 12ft.io.

    Cached links were great if the website was down or quickly changed, but they also gave some insight over the years about how the “Google Bot” web crawler views the web. … A lot of Google Bot details are shrouded in secrecy to hide from SEO spammers, but you could learn a lot by investigating what cached pages look like.

    Okay, so there’s a more plausible theory about the real reason for this move. Google may be trying to increase the secrecy of how its crawler functions.

    The pages aren’t necessarily rendered like how you would expect.

    More importantly, they don’t render the way authors expect. And that’s a fucking good thing! It’s how caching helps give us some escape from enshification. From the 12ft.io faq:

    “Prepend 12ft.io/ to the URL webpage, and we’ll try our best to remove the popups, ads, and other visual distractions.”

    It also circumvents #paywalls. No doubt there must be legal pressure on Google from angry website owners who want to force their content to come with garbage.

    The death of cached sites will mean the Internet Archive has a larger burden of archiving and tracking changes on the world’s webpages.

    The possibly good news is that Google’s role shrinks a bit. Any Google shrinkage is a good outcome overall. But there is a concerning relationship between archive.org and Cloudflare. I depend heavily on archive.org largely because Cloudflare has broken ~25% of the web. The day #InternetArchive becomes Cloudflared itself, we’re fucked.

    We need several non-profits to archive the web in parallel redundancy with archive.org.

  • ciferecaNinjo@fedia.iotoTechnology@lemmy.world•Return to office is ‘dead,’ Stanford economist says. Here’s why
    151·
    1 year ago

    Not sure people are finding meeting-free gigs. I read about someone holding down 4 jobs who once had to attend 3 meetings at once (that story might have been in Wired mag, not sure). Like a DJ he had multiple audio streams going with headphones and made a skill of focusing where his name would most likely come up. I’m sure there’s also a long list of excuses like “had to run to stop the burning food” or whatever. Presumabely a long list of excuses to wholly nix a meeting in the first place as well.

    Some people are secretly outsourcing some of their work as well, which works for workload but not for meetings.

  • ciferecaNinjo@fedia.iotoTechnology@lemmy.world•Return to office is ‘dead,’ Stanford economist says. Here’s why
    14·
    1 year ago

    it’s about time we restructure the workforce.

    I suppose a big part of that will be managers learning how to measure productivity more accurately than your clocked-in hours. That’ll be the most interesting change… the “corporate welfare” program of just getting paid to occupy a desk space will have to be replaced with more sophisticated real performance measurements.

    I have no idea how that pans out in software. Every bug is vastly different so they can’t merely count the number of bugs you fix. SLOC is a bit of a sloppy measure too.

  • ciferecaNinjo@fedia.iotoTechnology@lemmy.world•*Permanently Deleted*
    1·
    2 years ago

    I seem to recall favoring Epson ~15 years ago when researching the various inkjet scams that were in play at the time. Like all printer makers who are in the US market, Epson has ethical issues:

    https://fedia.io/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/71413/10-liquids-that-cost-less-than-printer-ink#entry-comment-336967

    but their main competitors are worse. Not sure I can develop enough self-hate to buy a printer that prints yellow #trackerDots though.

    I would love to see printer makers get sued for the tracker dots on the basis of wasting yellow ink printing something the consumer didn’t ask for.

  • ciferecaNinjo@fedia.iotoTechnology@lemmy.world•*Permanently Deleted*
    4·
    2 years ago

    1. Wasteful cleaning: printers spray the ink to clean the heads. Some printers are coded to be extremely liberal in the ink that gets wasted in this manner. E.g. cleaning the heads daily whether you use it or not. So the excessive waste effectively means you pay more for what you actually get to use. Yes, it’s deliberate. It’s not like the mfr really wants you to have sparkling clean heads.

    2. Expiry: some printers assume a cartridge will only last X long regardless of your actual consumption. Like the drugs industry, the expiry date is set to maximize profits. Cartridges self destruct or get rejected past expiry. They want you throwing out good product to buy more. I think the PR excuse they use is to say it serves as a way of detecting when the ink is out, however sloppy.

    3. Consumption metering shenanigans: like (3) above, the printer falsely reports an empty cartridge. But in this case it emits a laser or some kind of IR beam through the cartridge and when the beam reaches the detector, the cartridge is regarded as depleted. They place this beam high enough that ink still remains below the beam. IIRC, Brother inkjets did this… or maybe it was just their fax machines.

    3.1 (sloppy math) Instead of detecting how much ink is in the cartridge, the printer keeps track of how much was dispensed. But IIRC the math doesn’t work out so it ends up overcounting the amount dispensed which yields another trick to falsely treating a non-empty cartridge as empty.

    1. Anti-competition: some cartridges have chips in them which talk to the printer so the printer knows if the ink is approved (i.e. has the same brand as the printer). This suppresses competition to give monopolistic pricing.

    4.1. (DMCA) ^ the chips were quickly hacked by competitors. So printer makers introduced encryption mechanisms, which were also defeated. IIRC, the printer makers abused (or attempted to abuse) the DMCA by claiming their tech safeguards were bypassed to violate their “intellectual property” rights. (I think)

    4.2. (Disloyalty punishments) printers connect to the cloud to self-update their firmware. Some of these updates introduced firmware that logs whether non-OEM ink was used and printer self-destructs on a certain date when the logs report a disloyal customer. Funnily enough, the company who did this tried to argue that the move was to “protect” the printer from bad ink, as if they’re looking after the customer’s best interest.

    I’m sure I’m missing some of the tricks… that’s just off the top of my head.

    HP has mastered these shenanigans the best. I think no ink is costlier than HP after you account for all the tricks & traps. I kind of see it as bad-on-bad. HP has been an evil company for a long time even if you disregard the printer industry. HP supports Israel’s gaza blockade and oppression of the Palestinians. Note as well HP has been caught sending customers data about what they print back to HP.

    So people should be boycotting HP /anyway/.

  • ciferecaNinjo@fedia.iotoTechnology@lemmy.world•*Permanently Deleted*
    71·
    2 years ago

    Photographers don’t have that option. Last time I checked, laser printers sucked for photos.

    I’m glad I don’t need to print photos. But if I did, I would probably consider one of these options:

    1. a continuous ink system (“CIS”). There are CIS kits for modifying a rip-off printer. There are also complete printers that come with an integrated CIS but they charge a fortune for those since they’re not gouging you on the ink swindles.

    2. project the digital image onto real photo paper in a darkroom & develop it with chemicals. I think Walmart has a machine that does that, in effect, and you pay per photo for their service.

  • ciferecaNinjo@fedia.iotoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.world•Don't you just hate terrible parking?
    5·
    2 years ago

    And IIRC, license plates only need to be censored if bad behavior is demonstrated. Notice that the car to the left which was correctly parked has an exposed license plate.

    What baffles me is that the plate number is only meaningful to law enforcement. The public does not get access to the records associated with a plate number. I see no reason to hide the info from law enforcement. The evidence may be too low of a standard to be usable, but so be it.