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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The short version is that the creators of this API are doing something more secure than what the client wants to do.

    A reasonable analogy would be trying to access a building locked by a biometric scanner vs. a guard looking for a piece of paper with a password on it. In the first case, only people entered into the scanner can get in (this is the cookie scenario). In the second case, anyone with a piece of paper with the right password on it will be let in (this is the Bearer token scenario).

    More technical version: the API is made more secure because the “HttpOnly” cookie - which, basically, means the cookie’s contents can’t be read with JavaScript in the browser - is used to hold the credentials the server is looking for.

    By allowing a third party to access the application, this means you have to allow methods that can be set “client-side” (e.g. via JavaScript in a browser). The most common method is in the “Authorization” HTTP Header - headers are metadata sent along with a request, they include things like the page you’re coming from and cookies associated with the domain. A “Bearer” token is one of the methods specified by the “Authorization” header. It’s usually implemented via passing the authorization credentials prefixed with the word “Bearer” (hence the name) and, often, are static, password-like text.

    Basically, because this header has to be settable by a script, that means an attacker/hacker could possibly inject malicious code to steal the tokens because they must, at some point, be accessible.



  • I would fully expect Linux content on any community dedicated to technology (i.e. programmerhumor); the rest is totally understandable. Though, I have to agree with @CarbonIceDragon, I really don’t see as much Linux content as you seem to - granted I use kbin, not lemmy.

    I’ve read that Lemmy is a bit more personally curated than kbin, is it possible you’ve just accidentally built yourself a Linux bubble?


  • I won’t lie. I mostly don’t engage with content I see here. I didn’t do that when I was on Reddit either and mostly for the same reason: I don’t really have much to say and, even when I do have an opinion, I don’t usually want to engage in what’s often a protracted debate about something that will probably just end up being frustrating.

    That’s not to say I haven’t had positive experiences on the Fediverse - I’ve had more here than anywhere else - I’m just not particularly motivated most of the time.


  • Israeli settlers have, for years now, been slowly encroaching into territory officially recognized as Palestinian lands. These people absolutely have the choice to move back out of those areas and into lands officially recognized as belonging to Israelis. On the other hand, very few people can “just move, lol” and I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel specifically chose settlers that would be burdened economically if they attempted to leave.

    To be clear, Israel has continuously acted in bad faith against Palestinians and, along with its allies, destroyed the peaceful (or, at least, less militant) groups that sought to unite the Palestinians. This is absolutely a problem of their own making and I would be surprised if there was a peaceful path forward with the current political climate in the region.



  • Parade raining time: https://feddit.de/comment/3373323

    1. I believe flags are sorted alphabetically by how they are internally represented. All flags are a combination of two special letter-symbols. For the UK flag, these two symbols are “GB”, therefore the UK flag should be much earlier.
    2. 🇺🇸 (Flag of the USA [code: US]) ≠ 🇺🇲 (Flag of the US Outlying Islands [code: UM])

    Yes, the first US flag, which most people pick, is actually the flag of the US Outlying Islands. Whenever you see someone use the US flag emoji, check whether they accidentally used the " wrong" one.



  • Put simply, yes. Without explicit help to those that have less now, future generations simply lack the means to access those opportunities.

    Take, for example, the situation ultimately presented in the article: if the person/people that are doling out the money have even a small amount of bias against a class of people, the result is that - outside of forcing investors to make what they see as bad investments - they will categorically invest less in that class of people. It doesn’t actually matter what class it is.

    These laws might prevent us from codifying our biases into contract or other law, but they do absolutely nothing to solve the problem the bias itself causes.



  • My (limited) understanding of ActivityPub is that it functions on a publish-subscribe model. If you and I both ran instances and federated with each other, every time a message was posted to my instance I’d send a message to you and vice-versa. Now, let’s say a new person comes along with their own instance and they want to federate with us, but they have 1000x more users than we do. If we federate with this new instance, we now both have to handle 1000x more traffic.

    This is effectively a Denial Of Service attack.

    Threads currently (supposedly) has 70 million users. If only 0.001% of those users are interacting with federated content every second, that’s still 1000 messages every second. Smaller instances are likely not configured or tuned to handle this level of traffic on top of their existing traffic.