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Arthur Besse

@ cypherpunks @lemmy.ml

Posts
645
Comments
1186
Joined
4 yr. ago

cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • Photographer John Abernathy throwing his Leica while being tackled by ICE and CBP in Minneapolis. Photo by Pierre Lavie

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  • A History of DHTML and Web Applications - The History of the Web

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  • I don’t think anyone called those “web apps” though. I sure didn’t.

    As I recall, the phrase didn’t enter common usage until the advent of AJAX, which allowed for dynamically loading data without loading or re-loading a whole page. Early webmail sites simply loaded a new page every time you clicked a link. They didn’t even need JavaScript.

    The term "web app" hadn't been coined yet but, even without AJAX I think in retrospect it's reasonable to call things like the early versions of Hotmail and RocketMail applications - they were functional replacements for a native application, on the web, even though they did require a new page load for every click (or at least every click that required network interaction).

    At some point, though, I'm pretty sure that some clicks didn't require server connections, and those didn't require another page load (at least if js was enabled): this is what "DHTML" originally meant: using JavaScript to modify the DOM client-side, in the era before sans-page-reload network connections were technically possible.

    The term DHTML definitely predates AJAX and the existence of XMLHTTP (later XMLHttpRequest), so it's also odd that this article writes a lot about the former while not mentioning the latter. (The article actually incorrectly defines DHTML as making possible "websites that could refresh interactive data without the need for a page reload" - that was AJAX, not DHTML.)

  • A History of DHTML and Web Applications - The History of the Web

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  • Weird this article doesn't mention Hotmail and RocketMail, which both had email client web apps in 1996.

  • "lessons learned"

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  • Real NASA research papers

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  • thank you OP for allowing me the opportunity to read this entire image here on lemmy prior to seeing the creator's mastodon username, so that i could believe it was real for a minute :)

    (for anyone unfamiliar with it, check out her other amazing work...)

    also ping and thankyou to @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social (in case mentions on lemmy notify mastodon users?)

  • Real NASA research papers

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  • now do gtkmm

  • Website for Sustainable Alternatives to BigTech

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  • Sadly there are none I can recommend wholeheartedly, all have various problems 😢

  • Website for Sustainable Alternatives to BigTech

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  • There are some controversial picks in there like Proton Mail or Brave. They do have a pretty wide adoption but have severe downsides. I’ll probably remove them again. What do you think?

    here is a comment i wrote recently listing some of the reasons not to use proton. i'd also recommend against vivaldi (proprietary), brave (so many reasons), and everything in your messaging category besides matrix (and matrix also has lots of problems but it is the least bad of the ones you're recommending). sorry that i don't have time to elaborate right now (it's a lot), but for the inevitable "what about signal" question see my comment here and more here.

    ps. if you do use signal, consider adjusting your Who Can Find Me By Number setting (see that link for a fun implementation of the attack against signal users who leave it as it is by default). note that the same thing could technically be done in matrix too, albeit by matrix ID instead of phone number. 😬

    pps: here are my comments about tuta 🙄

  • Has anyone used the Librem mail or VPN?

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  • Why not just use proton?

    A few of the many reasons not to use Proton:

    • their e2ee is snakeoil (see my comment here about why - but tldr it requires completely trusting them and if you completely trust them you wouldn't need e2ee, the point of e2ee is to avoid needing to trust the service provider)
    • their server-side code is closed-source
    • they're a freemium service which can and does arbitrarily decide to start charging for previously-free features
    • they've suspended a number of users who they should not have
    • their CEO is a trump fanboy.

    ...

    Its Swiss based.

    You know who else was Swiss based? 🙄

    Not sure about purism but I think its US so avoid it like a plague.

    I don't know enough about Purism to endorse them but afaict they don't have any of the above problems.

    Purism's e2ee is PGP; you can use their service via their client software or whatever other client you want, and can communicate with people who are using different implementations with different mail providers. I don't see any mention of them even offering webmail but I expect that if they do they would probably offer PGP there using a browser extension instead of having extremely-impractical-to-verify-before-running-it js code being sent anew from the server every time you load the page (which is how Proton's webmail works, and also what they offer for non-Proton users to receive mail encrypted using their nonstandard encryption).

    I'd rather have US legal jurisdiction and credible e2ee which doesn't allow the operator to trivially circumvent it for targeted users than to have Swiss jurisdiction and snake oil.

  • Misplaced Priorities

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  • the suggestion that you should maybe write down an eight digit hex string "in case you need it" is just adding insult to injury. i guess anything less than a 32bit space for error codes would be insufficient

  • Apple: Our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free (1976)

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  • ugh. this page has some other nice stuff, but the basic browser typesetting is glaringly wrong for this historic document. see a scan of the original here

  • Found this dude in the dishwasher…

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  • SpaceX Eyes 1 Million Satellites for Orbital Data Center Push

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  • Musk Busted Pleading to Visit Pedo Island in Epstein Files for ‘Wildest Party’

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  • The "girls FTW" mail in that bluesky post is indeed fake, but the daily beast article linked by this post does not include that one.

    It is noteworthy how the existence of a fake thing which can be debunked can cause people to assume that similar-but-real things are also fake 😭

  • Musk Busted Pleading to Visit Pedo Island in Epstein Files for ‘Wildest Party’

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  • that screenshot is almost^[i say only almost because there have been some documents removed from previous batches after they were released, but there are no credible reports about the one in your comment] definitely fake; unlike the ones in the dailybeast article, phrases from it do not find anything in the search.

  • 4chan's Chris "Moot" Poole created /pol/ immediately after meeting Jeff Epstein

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  • Yeah, thinking about it more, it's not really that weird to call adults of any age "kid", and it's somewhat common when talking about people substantially younger than oneself. it is maybe more common when referring to men though? 🤔

  • Musk Busted Pleading to Visit Pedo Island in Epstein Files for ‘Wildest Party’

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  • This one is fake

    i don't think so?

    Its not one of the few occurrences of the word there

    which word? i checked a couple and they're there. eg, here is Musk planning a visit in January 2014.

    daily beast is posting misinfo

    it is irritating that they only provided a source link for one of the many mails they quote and have screenshots of, but i checked a few of the others and they do come up in the search.

  • 4chan's Chris "Moot" Poole created /pol/ immediately after meeting Jeff Epstein

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  • 4chan's Chris "Moot" Poole created /pol/ immediately after meeting Jeff Epstein

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  • Please include EFTA ID #s

    seriously. there are fakes floating around, so screenshots of alleged docs without a link are indeed dubious. If you want to verify something though, the documents on the DOJ website are currently searchable: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/search (but of course some have also been deleted after being published...)

    edit: searching for 4chan.org shows that Epstein later became a user of it himself; he's emailing links to threads there to Karyna Shuliak and others. It also has 4chan's response to the FBI's subpoena for the IP address(es) responsible for four posts which were made immediately prior to his death being reported publicly.

    One of those four posts has been widely reported about:

    don't ask me how I know, but Epstein died an hour ago from hanging, cardiac arrest. Screencap this

    ... while another suggesting his death was faked has been seen mostly only on places like /r/conspiracy - so it seemed likely to have been fabricated after the fact:

    Not saying anything after this pls do not try to dox me but last night after 0415 count they took him medical in a wheelchair front cuffed but not 1 triage nurse says they spoke to him. Next thing we know a trip van shows up? We do not do releases on the weekends unless a judge orders it. Next thing we know, he's put in a single man cell and hangs himself? Heres the thing, the trip van did NOT sign in and we did not record the plate number and a guy in a green dress military outfit was in the back of the van according to the tower guy who let him thru the gate. You guys i am shaking right now but i think they switched him out.

    4chan's recently-released subpoena response (linked above) includes the text of that post (and not the others, because only that one was deleted apparently?) and confirms that it was made at 8:44 EDT, 10min before the news was public elsewhere. (But 30min after the other 4chan thread saying he hung himself, so, probably just a fiction-writing 4chan user working off of that... but still subpoena-worthy to someone at the FBI.)

  • Chapotraphouse @hexbear.net
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    Capitalism will not automate itself out of existence.

    web.archive.org /web/20170212214341/http://www.dmytri.info/capital-doesnt-automate-it-entangles/
  • Fuck AI @lemmy.world
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    AI-authored code needs more attention, contains worse bugs

    www.theregister.com /2025/12/17/ai_code_bugs/
  • Asklemmy @lemmy.ml
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    When did Cory Doctorow stop thinking that Jeff Bezos was cool?

  • Political Memes @lemmy.world
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    The Department of Canadian Heritage has made a difficult decision regarding their monument Memorial to the Victims of Communism – Canada, a Land of Refuge

  • Canada @lemmy.ca
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    Government retreats on Victims of Communism memorial names in aftermath of Nazi controversy

    ottawacitizen.com /public-service/defence-watch/victims-of-communism-memorial-names-nazis
  • Chapotraphouse @hexbear.net
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    The Department of Canadian Heritage has made a difficult decision regarding their monument Memorial to the Victims of Communism – Canada, a Land of Refuge

  • World News @lemmy.ml
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    Trump Designates Fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

    www.whitehouse.gov /fact-sheets/2025/12/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-designates-fentanyl-as-a-weapon-of-mass-destruction/
  • Not The Onion @lemmy.world
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    Trump Designates Fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

    www.whitehouse.gov /fact-sheets/2025/12/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-designates-fentanyl-as-a-weapon-of-mass-destruction/
  • Not the Onion @lemmy.ml
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    Trump Designates Fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

    www.whitehouse.gov /fact-sheets/2025/12/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-designates-fentanyl-as-a-weapon-of-mass-destruction/
  • A Boring Dystopia @lemmy.world
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    Google's latest reason to give them $14/month: "Watch in faster playback speeds with Premium"

  • Late Stage Capitalism @lemmygrad.ml
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    Google's latest reason to give them $14/month: "Watch in faster playback speeds with Premium"

  • Fuck AI @lemmy.world
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    "AI" gets an innocent man arrested; even after validating his Real ID card, cop discounts possibility of facial recognition false positive: "their software is pretty cool" and "our hands are tied"

  • Privacy @lemmy.ml
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    We Hacked Flock Safety Cameras in under 30 Seconds. 🫥

  • Political Memes @lemmy.world
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    #NotAllGenAI

  • memes @lemmy.world
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    #NotAllGenAI

  • Memes @lemmy.ml
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    #NotAllGenAI

  • videos @hexbear.net
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    True Stories (1986) - a film by David Byrne

  • United States | News & Politics @lemmy.ml
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    Oakland’s Flock License Plate Camera Contract Is Back Up for a Vote. Critics Are Crying Foul

    www.kqed.org /news/12066924/oaklands-license-plate-camera-contract-is-back-up-for-a-vote-critics-are-crying-foul
  • World News @lemmy.ml
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    Danish intelligence accuses US of using economic power to ‘assert its will’ over allies

    www.theguardian.com /world/2025/dec/12/danish-intelligence-accuse-the-us-of-using-economic-power-to-assert-will-over-allies
  • Wikipedia @lemmy.world
    Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

    Dick Van Dyke turns 100 today

    en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Dick_Van_Dyke