I'm reading a lot of mixed predictions regarding Bloomberg. Some predict that he's just going to throw so much money at it that he'll replace & beat Biden, therefore winning the primary. The media certainly loves him. But I don't see it. He's apparently going to try running as a "better Biden", but he actually has a weird mixed record containing right-wing, ultra-left-wing, and ultra-authoritarian elements. He can be attacked a lot from both the right and left. I tend to think he'll go nowhere, like Steyer, but my uncertainty on this is high at this point.

You need at least 100 activity or 10 merit.

This isn't a Meta issue... DoH is unrelated to Cloudflare's DDoS protection service.

I can understand why Firefox etc. are doing it. ISPs have a history of screwing up / tampering with DNS; networks & operating systems often have DNS misconfigured; and Microsoft isn't going to fix anything at the OS level. So for the average user it's going to improve the experience.

But it's giving Cloudflare (ie. a probable NSA honeypot) an unprecedented level of data on users and websites, and also an unprecedented level of control. Cloudflare will be able to take down or redirect sites unilaterally now, only having to fear getting removed by Firefox as a result. Everyone uses ICANN's root servers because everyone else uses ICANN's root servers. If everyone starts to use Cloudflare, then Cloudflare becomes the new ICANN in practice.

Hopefully Tor isn't stupid enough to enable this in Tor Browser, since that'd allow for pretty trivial traffic analysis by Cloudflare, and you wouldn't be able to disable it without highlighting yourself as one of a few people behaving oddly.

It's really a demonstration of the failure of the Internet on a technical level. The Internet is decades of dirty hack on top of dirty hack, and now we're ending up with a world where the only easy way to get things working decently is "just put literally everything on Cloudflare". Very dangerous. The whole structure of the Internet needs to be rethought.

I agree with the idea of moving away from ISP resolvers and traditional port-53 DNS. It sucks. Though ideally it'd be done at the OS level, and in any case you can do a lot better than DoH, yet another dirty hack. For example, it probably wouldn't slow things down much for Firefox to just act as a recursive DNS resolver. That'd be maximally decentralized. Or you could at least use a private information retrieval protocol in order to rely on a single resolver like Cloudflare without actually giving them any information, and have the resolver also provide the full chain of DNSSEC authentication for every query answer.

Right. Paid ads will come back late in the month, around the 28^th, I think.

Yes, though they do eventually expire (after many months), so you shouldn't write it down and use it in a year or something crazy like that.

I found it, it was a bug in the random rotation. Rarely (5-10% of the time before I fixed it, though growing with an increasing set of captions+votes), it would assign the wrong link to a caption during random rotation.

Thanks!

Does anyone else see this? I can't reproduce it. I don't know how it could be a client-side issue either, though.

That is what the link is. I don't understand what issue you're seeing.

There are a ton of submissions; I'm finding it more difficult to judge than I'd thought. Hopefully people won't be too offended by my attempt at giving "effort grades" via merit.

I'd appreciate it if people could help in these ways:
 - Give at least 1 merit to meritorious submissions.
 - If people are stealing artwork (ie. not just using stock images, but true plagiarism), leave them negative trust.
 - If I give someone 10+ merit but the artwork is much simpler than it appears at first (eg. a fairly simple manipulation of something that already existed), post about it in this thread.

I'm aware than I'm giving merit for some pretty low-effort things, but IMO it's OK as long as they put at least an hour or two of effort into it. I only want to end up giving BTC/badges to truly substantial & original creations, though.


No. 1 BTC will be distributed among probably dozens of people. It will also not be an equal division. No one person will receive 1 BTC (unless my mind is absolutely blown by something and I decide to increase the total amount).

This month 114 users were eligible.

Old:

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I have no idea why people are still seeing that. Are you using some weird browser, like Opera Mini or similar?

There was a bug on my end where those error pages were being returned with HTTP 200 instead of 503 (as intended and as the error claimed), and in some cases they could've been marked cacheable for up to 4 hours. But nobody should still be seeing them now.

Many communities will be thinking in those terms, but perhaps not the most influential states in the election. Having grown up in the rust belt, I think that the swing demographic there is thinking this way: The economy was for this community in shambles before Trump, and they were completely ignored in the national conversation. Trump noticed them, and furthermore a case can be made that he's moving things in the right direction: unemployment is very low and the news keeps talking about how the economy is great. However, this community is actually suffering quite a bit from tariffs, and much of the economic development is surface-level or the same coastal-concentrated wealth expansion as was seen under Obama. The rust belt Trump supporters are driven by a little real progress and a lot of hope/faith. If that hope is shattered by a noticeable downturn before the election, then they will still be very angry and looking for change, but they will have lost faith in Trump. Instead, they will go to a radical on the other side. This rust belt demographic is not all that strongly tied to economic conservatism (or any ideology, really), and things like medicare for all or an increased minimum wage will speak to them.


I actually think that I'd prefer Hillary over Kamala. When I watch some really old videos of Hillary, I get the sense that she had some actual beliefs and passions. I think that she might've started out as a true believer (in some ideology), but being in the swamp for so many decades corrupted her substantially. But maybe she's only 99% evil instead of 100%.

Kamala on the other hand I think is and always has been rotten to the core.

reCAPTCHA is the only effective one. I just looked at FunCAPTCHA, and the rotating-pictures thing would be pretty easy to train a neural network to solve. Also, the language on the front page makes it look like it's targeted toward enterprises who'd have no problem blocking Tor. I bet they'll start blanket-banning Tor once they start losing the arms race against attackers.

I use Tor a lot, and while reCAPTCHA is annoying when used via Tor, it only takes a few minutes. On the forum, you can do it twice and then get a bypass code.


I've looked into that sort of thing, but there is no good solution as far as I've seen. Most solutions are focused entirely on maximizing profit, so they do eg. SHA256 mining which isn't good as an anti-spam PoW, and they use some central pool which has serious privacy implications. (For bitcointalk.org, the revenue from a mining-captcha could be discarded for all I care.) A good solution would:
 - Use a memory-hard PoW, or even better, one designed specifically for JavaScript.
 - Have an excellent API.
 - At least allow the site to proxy mining traffic to protect user privacy.

Also, web-miners are always detected as malware by antivirus software.

Anti-spam PoWs are always asymmetrical vs an attacker, which might make the whole idea unworkable. If it takes an ordinary user 1 minute to solve the PoW, then an attacker is always going to be able to improve on that using specialized hardware and software. If they can bring it down from 1 minute to 0.6 second, then the service is going to have to increase the difficulty so that ordinary users are spending 15+ minutes solving the PoW. For an anti-spam PoW to be a good idea, you need to be able to reduce this asymmetry to at worst something like 10:1, and this has to last, not just be a result of obscurity. I'm not sure that it's possible.

Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
2 0.10 lightlord
2 0.10 sschiessl
5 0.09 sportsbet.io

A while ago the way bumping works was changed on several boards. I don't actually use most of those boards much, though, so it's difficult for me to get an intuitive sense of how well the change worked. What do you think? If you think that tweaks are needed, what tweaks would be good? Keep in mind that minor tweaks are more likely to be done than major changes.

Regardless of the poll result (which I will analyze in several ways besides raw vote count...), probably things will not go back to how they were in those sections, since they were an absolute mess. But if a lot of people think that it should be undone, that'd be good to know for future changes.

Both sschiessl and TheRocketman are approved to bid. Therefore, the current status of the auction is:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
2 0.10 lightlord
7 0.09 sportsbet.io

The auction continues.

I was impressed by Trump's speech today on Syria. He sounded very anti-war: about as anti-war as someone like Tulsi Gabbard or Rand Paul, even. Of course, in reality he's sending troops from Syria to Saudi Arabia -- not anything close to "ending the endless wars" as he claims --, but at least the rhetoric is refreshing.

I doubled the bandwidth allowance. (Maybe just temporarily.)

I added some handling for duplicates.


You can submit local stuff, but the whole voting and display system is global.

Submit captions... This is community-generated and automated.