Kev Quirk

I wanted to love it but I agree with Kev Quirk's take: https://kevquirk.com/micro-blog-is-still-confusing/

>Of course the email is for suckers as it has more than enough clues about being scam but I guess some poor souls might actually fall for it. I wonder whether that type of comment is in line with Hacker News Guidelines. In any case, blaming or demeaning scam victims (what you call "suckers" and "poor souls") only adds to the psychological damage that those people experience. There are plenty of studies, recommendations and campaigns on this issue. For example, the UK's Financial Conduct Authority has a whole section in their website https://www.fca.org.uk/scamsmart and have been running TV ads to help protect pensioners. The clues in the Metamask and DHL phising emails may have been obvious to you and many other Hacker News readers. I received them and quickly noticed they were phising messags. However, having the skills to spot (and stop) this type of messages doesn't mean we are always able to do it. A recent blog post by Kev Quirk, an infosec expert, is a case in point https://kevquirk.com/i-was-nearly-phished/

A response to the site in question: https://kevquirk.com/use-plaintext-email While the tone is (overly) snarky, it does make a few good points.

They lost me with their article "Why I’m Ditching Android" which is a switch from Google to Apple. Just like switching from Coke to Pepsi is not going to help you lose weight. You have to make a real change to be private. https://kevquirk.com/why-im-ditching-android

Feel free to remove my comment if it's not allowed. I am _very_ disappointed with Lemmy. The community is full of echo chambers, and that's already bad. But what broke the camel's back for me is the fact that one of the Lemmy creators one day literally posted what I will describe as a propaganda website. I had to double check, but nope, it definitely is a propaganda website. The fact that you made a software just to spread your dangerous ideology is _so_ disgusting. Malicious. I used less and less Lemmy since then. This also prompted me to contribute to PieFed[1], but at this point Fediverse for me does not feel the same anymore. That event left a bad taste in my mouth. I also have had bad experience with Mastodon, but this reply is already long. The word Fediverse has "diverse" in it, yet it feels like anything but diverse. It's full of people with same beliefs screaming the same argument every day. It's full of that open source purists forcing you to change to Linux or something like that[2][3]. [1]: https://join.piefed.social [2]: https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/112995177480955078 [3]: https://kevquirk.com/blog/linux-elitism-again

It's not personal, but Mastodon has DDoSed my website and many others, e.g.: https://itsfoss.com/news/mastodon-link-problem/ https://kevquirk.com/blog/mastodon-is-ddosing-me/ https://chris.partridge.tech/2022/request-amplification-in-mastodon/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/11/mastodon-stampede/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/06/mastodon_delays_fix_ddos/ Mastodon servers' collective behaviour DDoSes the sites its users link to. They just do. They don't have to, they've never had to, but they do. And they've been in no hurry to fix it. I've never used Mastodon and I'm not part of its community. But it irks me that its community has completely failed to remediate its collective bad behaviour, for years. Having read the relevant discussions in Mastodon's issue tracker, my view is that it's Eugen Rochko's ideological belief that you can't just include the link preview details along with the post (which you totally could do, and it would solve the problem)... and that has led to years more DDoS than there ever needed to be. [Admittedly, we now also have the problem of completely amoral "AI" scraping companies, who have zero qualms about pumping millions of requests into webservers, knocking them offline, completely eschewing all common indexing behaviour... but that doesn't make Mastodon's behaviour acceptable because it's no longer the worst source of callous DDoSing]