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I'm still watching my series from the boxsets, I'm now at the Roswell episode (1x17 Crazy) where Emilie de Ravin as Tess is introduced. I thought I had to wait for the second season for that, happy to already see her now.
#Roswell #EmilieDeRavin
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Gidi Kroon

Roswell is where I saw her first, later of course as well in Lost and Once upon a Time. She may even have been the reason I started watching Lost.

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As this is a leap year we go from February 28, 2024 to March 1, 2025.

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in reply to Missing The Point

Can we also skip March 2025 and go straight to April 1, 2025?
in reply to Missing The Point

in Britain until like 1500 the year started on the 25th of march instead of Jan 1. So that's not too far off

(Source: Tom Scott computerphile video)



Are there any alternatives to Amazon for buying UK releases of blu-rays or dvds? Or books for that matter?


Miranda Cosgrove shared a video of her spotting a billboard of Drugstore June and also posted the trailer of the film, as the film of a friend of hers that she's excited to see getting released. But if you pay attention you see Miranda herself in the trailer, probably in a small role. The IMDb page lists her too.
#MirandaCosgrove #DrugstoreJune


Mastodon's default is now for registrations to be closed on servers. Great! And for servers with open registrations to automatically require moderator approval of new sign ups if the server has not seen a moderator/admin in a week. That should deal with these abandoned servers, I'm happy about these changes.

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So Tumblr has been doing a thing where they have a Scarlett Letter to mark trans women. Well, any blogs containing "too much" mature content, but that seems to mainly mean trans women. So I looked into it, and it turns out it's weird and broken.

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in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

It turns out the actual image is not square, despite being rendered as a square. Strange. But then I looked at the html: this isn't an img, it's a canvas.
in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

Which'd make sense if they were trying to dynamically blur every scarlet-lettered user's profile image, but everyone with The Mark had this exact image. It doesn't change.

So I looked into the source and found where they're doing the canvas stuff, and yep, they're blurring the profile image. So why is the result always the same?

in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

It turns out the backend team and front-end team are not talking to each other: when a user gets scarlet-lettered, the backend resets their profile image to the default "cone.png" image:
in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

So everytime a scarlet-lettered user appears on your feed, it loads this same icon, dynamically blurs it down to 2x2 pixels, renders that out as a 350x150 image, then tells your browser to rescale that image to 65x65 for the profile picture.
in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

So yeah. All this client-side scripting is unnecessary: they could have just made the backend switch to a properly sized version of the blurred image, but apparently no one communicated how the two halves were working, so it does these pointless steps every time someone flagged shows up in an activity tab or on your dashboard.
It's almost impressive!
in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

a funny side-wrinkle of this is that tumblr has banned posting links to or images of their default site image.

Like, this url? https://assets.tumblr.com/images/default_avatar/cone_open_64.png

if you try to paste that on tumblr, it'll try to expand it into a preview, then fail. If you go to that image and copy it, then try to paste that on tumblr, it'll fail.

in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

download the PNG and try to upload it again, it'll fail.

they've banned the hash of their own default avatar image.

I don't know why they would do this.

in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

Please tell me that the justification of "scarlet letter" on Tumbler isn't to make transpeople more easily identifiable.

Because that sounds a lot like "the star of David should be easily seen from distance on any Jew".

This entry was edited (1 month ago)


The spam wave seems to have stopped 16 hours ago, from all sources simultaneously.

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I'm Keynoting at Sunshine Cyber Con!
"Past, Present, Predictions - A look into AI, Deep Fakes, PsyOps and the upcoming election cycle"
Hope to see you there!

Gidi Kroon reshared this.



I hadn't heard of any Streams repository (fka Zap, fka Osada, etc) people for about two months and thought it had just gotten quiet. Instead the forum and the people post quite regularly, but communication with them from my Friendica has broken down. When trying to reconnect I got all the errors about not being able to recognise the protocol (when it fails to load the actor definition). Not even individual posts load correctly when providing the url.

So I thought this could be a use for my Pleroma. But it also mainly fails to connect... :-( I can only load individual posts.

in reply to Gidi Kroon

At the same time I can't unfollow Guppe groups from my Friendica, only follow them. Even when they act as spam amplification...


Was wondering how you could consider communication using carrier pigeons secure, but of course it would be if you use IPoACs.

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Netflix releases full Nimona movie on YouTube
https://youtu.be/i4CFWTYFRlw
#vfxProductionFeed

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Owners of public Mastodon servers, you might want to set your signups to approval mode to prevent spammers:

1. Log in on your server's website
2. Go to Preferences
3. Go to Administration
4. Go to Server Settings
5. Click the Registrations tab at the top
6. In the "Who can sign up" menu select "Approval required for sign-up" (optionally also tick the box for requiring a reason)
7. Click "Save Changes" button

Spammers can exploit servers with instant signups.

#MastoAdmin #FediAdmin

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

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in reply to Grow Your Own Services 🌱

Okay, but how do you decide whether or not to approve a blank slate? A new user hasn't posted anything yet.
in reply to Humbird0 Fandom

@humbird0 it's a random decision, you have no means of knowing if it's a spammer registering or not. Seems nobody in this thread cares, though 😅
in reply to Bartek Krawczyk

If you tick the box asking for a reason with signups, that helps weed out automated accounts and troublemakers, especially on themed servers aimed at particular audiences.

There have also been cases where automated signups choose usernames that make it obvious they are part of a spam attack.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Grow Your Own Services 🌱

Ok so hear me out.

We make a bot to register accounts

We tell the accounts to send a daily message to the servers admin these instructions.

Profit.



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Hmmm, every server I'm getting spam from has a new user in their public directory named yqqwe, and each one of these users is following mastodon_admin_yggwe on a single-user instance mastodon.tinynews.org. One can look at the 924 followers of this admin and they all are named yqqwe and they are all on servers I've been getting #spam from. #fediverse #moderation #administration

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I love how you can see on Yusra Mardini's face how much she feels at home at a swimming pool. She stopped competitive swimming a while back, but she's here now in an ambassador role.


#YusraMardini




I'm starting to think no remote content should be stored at all, just maybe cached, but I understand how, currently, received text of posts can be stored similar to an email inbox.

But do I understand(*) correctly that Mastodon stores remote media as well, in their own media storage, even when from unsolicited sources? That can't be right.

(*) It is cited as a side effect of the spam wave that some are running out of media storage.




From my perspective the spam wave seems to have subsided, or maybe this post brings it in again... What I did:

On Pleroma put the discord invite url and the hashtag in MRF as blocks. On Friendica I don't have MRF, so I unsubscribed from guppe groups. That seems enough, I haven't had to block any domains yet, may do so later if needed.

The hashtag should probably not be blocked forever, as it is the Japanese name of a legitimate business which may be the target not the source of the impersonation/defamation attack, as is the discord. But since I have no Japanese contacts, that's ok for now.

I always have private messages blocked from people I don't follow, and I recently started hiding followers/followed accounts, which I think also helps a bit to limit such waves.

in reply to Gidi Kroon

Forgot to unsubscribe from relays on my Pleroma... So that had still a few posts coming in. On Friendica I see that the gup.pe group I unfollowed, still keeps forwarding me the spam posts...
in reply to Gidi Kroon

By now any server still having fully open registrations and sending spam is clearly running unattended, I've checked some and there seems to be no local activity other than the spam, sometimes with the last local or admin post in 2022. So I've started blocking domains that still come in.


I think the fediverse is still in their naive era, like email and the internet used to be. Still too many ways to do spam multiplication and ddos, too much trusting what other servers do. Too little tools to handle the effects.


Pleroma's MRF feature proved to be really useful in the recent spam wave.


Hardly a 'crafted payload', more like a completely normal payload, just at another address...

Alice: hi, I'm Bob
Mastodon: hi Bob, you look different
Alice: never mind, I'm Bob, and I have changed my security keys. Please use these new ones when you validate a message from Bob, I mean me
Mastodon: will do
Alice: and by the way, if your user Carol sends a private message to Bob, send it to me instead, since I am Bob, as i said
Mastodon: fine, nothing suspicious there

(My simplistic summary of the recent disclosure. What is not stressed in the released details is that it doesn't change the profile of the impersonated user, Bob in the above, as its profile at the source is unaffected.)



It's that day again, the birthday of Stephanie Leonidas!

I choose Crusade in Jeans from my 'Watch for Stephanie' letterboxd list for the birthday rewatch. A long time ago I only knew her sister Georgina Leonidas and knew she was a very talented actress. I saw that her older sister Stephanie was also an actress and thought that even if she only had a fraction of the talent of her younger sister, she would still be worth watching. So I took a punt buying this dvd. That was a very lucky punt... Stephanie turned out to be one of the best actresses ever and I since try to watch everything with her in it!


#StephanieLeonidas #CrusadeInJeans #BirthdayRewatch

https://letterboxd.com/gidikroon/list/watch-for-stephanie/

in reply to Gidi Kroon

Later of course she was more obviously brilliant in things like Defiance and Mirrormask... She should be the lead everywhere.
in reply to Gidi Kroon

A boy plays and loses a football match with the national team, then drops in on his mother who's building a time machine. He goes back in time trying to win, but ends up in the middle ages and meets love interest girl (winning after all) Jenne in a children's crusade.

The story acknowledges that the crusades as we know them were wrong. This children's crusade is strictly nonviolent.



Lotus: everything is a database table
Exchange: everything is an email
Tcl: everything is a string
Windows: everything is a folder
Linux: everything is a file


Apparently in Windows 11 you need to shift-right-click instead of right-click to keep your sanity.
#NoMoreShowMoreOptions


Today is the birthday (+44 years) of Christina Ricci. I'll be rewatching a film from my 'Watch for Christina' list to celebrate. The top ones I all saw recently and since I quite like to rewatch Sleepy Hollow, that one it is. I think it may also be the first film I saw her in.
#ChristinaRicci #SleepyHollow #BirthdayRewatch

https://letterboxd.com/film/sleepy-hollow/

in reply to Gidi Kroon

The year is 1799. I didn't know they could already record moving images back then. What do you mean, films aren't documentaries? They aren't real?
in reply to Gidi Kroon

A village populated mainly by the Dutch. Horror.


When you make DNS changes and nothing breaks. Did the changes even persist?

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Is it time for my big show? Wait... is this not about me??! #SuperbOwl #Superbowl

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I would be remiss if I did not post at least one #SuperbOwl today, and this is the most recent superb owl photo I have.

Taken in El Atteuf, Algeria. I suspect it may be a Pharaoh (or Egyptian) eagle owl, possibly a young one.

#birds #BirdsOfMastodon

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Miranda Cosgrove / CBS's Mission Unstoppable for the International Day of Women and Girls in Science (no autocomplete, not 'in Scotland') on their Instagram, calling to 'Bridge the gap'. The amount of women in science is nowhere near 50% and that has to change.

(I can't post video here, so the link's it)
#MirandaCosgrove #Science #IDWGS



Loving the SuperbOwl news today, but for a little bit of some actual SuperBowl thing in between: Jenna Ortega is going to be in an hilarious advert for Doritos Dinamita, see here.
#JennaOrtega #Doritos


Happy Birthday Chloë Grace Moretz!

It's her 27th birthday and I'll be celebrating rewatching a recent film of hers, Shadow in the Cloud, from my 4k blu-ray. It's such a powerful performance!
#ChloëGraceMoretz #ShadowInTheCloud #BirthdayRewatch

in reply to Gidi Kroon

It's all Chloë Grace Moretz... This is such a thrill throughout to get such a masterclass acting performance...

Love the ending and what it says. (But telling would be spoilers)

in reply to Gidi Kroon

And she got to do her English accent again, which she so effectively used to trick the director of Hugo to hire her.

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Some people will have you believe that Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit is the most 90s song of all time, but they're wrong

The most 90s song is Mazzy Star's Fade Into You

Not up for debate, so don't even try it

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in reply to eric

@eric and people wonder why gen Z is really into 80s stuff
@eric
in reply to healyn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ5NxBnMnz4

Give You My Lovin’ was my favorite Mazzy Star which is quite similar but happier?

Very quintessential cross-over Fade Into You though



Apparently you can't cancel or change a preorder at Amazon even more than a month before release, despite what they suggest. Chat bot/human just says it already started shipping. I don't believe that, with an estimated arrival listed in April... Is it coming by snail?

Guess I'll have the blu-ray and the dvd then.


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I'm giving the keynote at Sunshine Cyber Con!
"Past, Present, Predictions"
A look into AI, psyops, deep fakes and the upcoming elections.
Hope to see you there!

@cybersecurityfl

Amazing Photo by:
@gabrielabarrantesphoto

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Open APIs and endpoints should not have side effects on other servers. Like retrieving previews from websites or referred-to (replied-to, boosted, quoted) posts from other ActivityPub servers. This should be limited to other parties you trust.


Jenna Ortega's book It's All Love will be released in a German translation on 15 February 2024. That's years after she wrote it and years after it originally came out in English. I guess we can thank Wednesday for that.
#JennaOrtega #ItsAllLove

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categorizing software based on whether it feels like it was written by people who read their email using a terminal client, a GUI client, or webmail

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There's a misconception in #photography that get's repeated a lot in everything from tutorials to gear reviews, even by experienced photographers:

"sensor size affects aperture" (meaning that the size of the sensor or film changes what for e.g. f/8 will look like in terms of depth of field")

This is not really true.

Think about it: If you change the sensor size and nothing else, it's the same as cropping the image later. That can't change how the optics behaved when the shot was taken.

There is an indirect connection though:

If you want to frame a subject the same way using a smaller or larger sensor, you need to use lenses of different focal lengths. This is why we talk about "equivalent focal length". A 35mm lens on an APS-C sensor is roughly equivalent to a 50mm on a 35mm sensor in its field of view angle.

And aperture size is dependent on focal length, that's why it's written like "f/8" (focal length divided by 8). And larger apertures will produce shallower depth of field.

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in reply to StarkRG

@StarkRG I get why people put so much attention to sensor size, it's what you commit to when buying a camera and a major tool of market segmentation for the manufacturers.

And in a ver pragmatic sense, yeah, it does matter a lot for certain types of photography. It's just that explanation that's usually wrong

in reply to Esther is in exam mode

I figure it was important historically as well since the final image *was* the photographic plate used and before 35mm became the de facto standard, there were a great many different sizes of film (not that the different sizes ever really went away). I was using "sensor" in a general sense as "the bit that absorbs light to produce an image", which includes film and plates as they are just chemical sensors rather than electronic (it'd also include the retina in an eye).


Jenna Ortega is going to be in a new film called Klara and the Sun.

Her film Beetlejuice 2 will be in the cinema 6 September 2024.

Both bits of news just shared by Jenna's mother.


#JennaOrtega #Beetlejuice #KlaraAndTheSun

feld reshared this.

in reply to Gidi Kroon

Though I guess the joke is that it isn't going to be called Beetlejuice 2, but Beetlejuice Beetlejuice...
in reply to Gidi Kroon

Apparently it's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice 2024 A.D. in full, according to this Deadline article. And this is the article about Klara and the Sun. Jenna plays a robot designed to prevent loneliness and when she finds that a little girl has a mystery illness goes on a quest which causes her to learn about human love. This sounds great!
#JennaOrtega #Beetlejuice #BeetlejuiceBeetlejuice2024AD #Beetlejuice2 #KlaraAndTheSun
in reply to Gidi Kroon

no way, that can't be the real name. Haven't they learned you can't use long movie titles like that unless the full title has significance?

Most recent offender I can think of is: Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn