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Cake day: March 6th, 2026

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  • That wouldn’t detonate a claymore.

    The more I look at the image, the more terrifyingly genius it becomes.

    The laser tripwires in video games are a visual stand-in for good ol’ boring metal tripwires which a claymore can actually use. The tripwire moving around it’s housing changes the circuit state inside the electric blasting cap and off comes the wall of deadly balls.

    But you don’t need to tripwire. You can remote detonate.

    Or for the purposes of the meme, Alexa can time when to detonate. Just needs a little camera to see when and wire leads into the claymore’s blasting cap to deliver the electric triggering…

    This isn’t a meme. It’s theory…

    Does anyone know an old appliance salesman who used to sell other things back in old country? Asking for a friend.


  • That is illegal under GDPR, if true

    This statement is unfortunately doing a lot of work with the word “that”, even if I dearly wish it wasn’t so. Like, I really wish it were that easy, it would even the playing field back to the non-corporate webmaster almost instantly.

    But alas.

    The GDPR doesn’t have some special category where data only becomes data once you hit Submit. Article 4 literally defines “processing” to include collection, recording, and storage. So yes, depending on what the site is actually doing, it can absolutely be processing what you type before you submit anything:

    https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/art_4/oj/eng

    But that does not get you from “they captured it” to “therefore illegal.” GDPR doesn’t prohibit processing personal data; it regulates how and why you can do it. Article 6 gives six possible lawful bases for processing, including consent, contractual necessity, and legitimate interests (and it is bastardizing the spirit of how these six interconnect that these companies use to skirt intent of the law):

    https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/art_6/oj/eng

    The actually interesting question is what they’re capturing, why, how long they retain it, what they do with it, whether they disclosed that processing, and what lawful basis they’re claiming.

    That’s where you can potentially have a GDPR problem.

    Article 5 requires, among other things, fairness/transparency, purpose limitation, data minimization, limited retention, and appropriate security:

    https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/art_5/oj/eng

    And Article 13 requires the relevant information to be provided when the personal data is obtained. There isn’t a magical “well technically the user never clicked Submit” exemption from transparency:

    https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/art_13/oj/eng

    There’s also a separate ePrivacy issue if we’re talking about storing or accessing information on the user’s device. Article 5(3) generally requires consent unless the storage/access is strictly necessary to provide a service the user explicitly requested:

    https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A62017CJ0673

    And this is where the details get important again, because regulators have explicitly recognized things like short-lived, first-party “user-input” session cookies for multi-page forms as potentially falling within that necessary-function exemption. See WP29 Opinion 04/2012:

    https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinion-recommendation/files/2012/wp194_en.pdf

    That is a very different animal from silently retaining abandoned form contents indefinitely, sending them somewhere unexpected, profiling somebody with them, or reusing them for advertising.

    So if somebody actually wants to know whether their abandoned input was retained and what happened to it, GDPR gives them tools for finding out instead of having to speculate from browser behavior. Make an access request to the controller and ask what personal data they hold, the purposes/legal basis, recipients, retention period, and the source/context of the collection.

    They normally have one month to respond under Article 12:

    https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/art_12/oj/eng

    If they don’t respond, or the answer establishes something questionable, then you have something concrete to take to the relevant supervisory authority under Article 77:

    https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/art_77/oj/eng

    The EDPB has the list of national authorities here:

    https://www.edpb.europa.eu/contact_en

    GDPR is leverage, not a magical force field that prevents a server from receiving bytes. The useful part is that it gives you a mechanism to make the controller explain what those bytes became, why they kept them, and what they did with them—and a regulator to complain to if the answers suck.


  • Nothing can. Not for any website. It never has.

    Even if the site’s platform wasn’t set up with a simple and trivial to implement function(s) to undo posted changes on the front/back end interfaces, and even if it does allow the delete button to actually delete the entry from the database (to my knowledge, this wasn’t even the norm before the corpo takeover of the web)…

    It’s like, 2-3 simple SQL queries to pull a backup pre-the changes, and merge back in whatever form you want into the live database.

    This was always possible, since the day we started using DBs to better serve dynamic content.

    Again, this applies to pretty much any web property.


  • It’s stupidly common and easy. Practically any text field can be made to capture and cache “unsent” data, because it’s not actually a standard text field that only does POST when you submit, but rather something that is continuously polled (usually AJAX) and the data saved to whatever database tables they got set up for it.

    Wonders of scripting.

    NoScript will stop it, but then the platforms that rely on this bullshittery for ill, usually are the kind to try to force you into having JavaScript or worse enabled.

    Some examples of this I’ve seen/used in the wild:

    When I worked at a credit union, the last upgrade to the “online banking” towards Lumin(link to their marketing site in case you want to see their screenshots, almost no CU/Bank who uses them bothers to customize it) the then “hot and new” vendor platform that was hot then amongst digital banking solutions for small to midsize institutions, uses it on every text field.

    E.g. the search omnibar input from atop the accounts where you can search help topics, and the input from the fields around the FAQ sections (input meaning both sent queries and anything typed but not submitted) were all visible to the call center folks, with strings like “user typed ‘how do I hide my 10k deposit through mobile banking’ into [field name] but did not submit”, as these were expected to be data for the reps to use in their servicing or whatever.

    Another (much bigger) example: The omni bar at Google.com specifically (and I have no idea how many in their Android apps, but given that they have more control there than over your browser I’d just assume every single one…Google Keyboard included).

    If you get yourself through all the trouble and effort to somehow arrive at search site unknown (your customized FF privacy fork is really fucking good or something) and for some reason need or allow scripting on their page and type ad targetty helpful info but never search…it’s still gonna make it into whatever shadow profile they’re prepping for linkage to the real you ASAP, and eagerly wants to personalize those ads with your unsent data.

    My own community writing website:

    It came bundled with a Xenforo add-on I used for some stupid feature I wasn’t smart enough to do myself 5-7 years ago. I don’t run any sort of ads or tracking whatsoever on my site, so it’s pretty much useless.





  • Ugh. I’m so sorry and angry every time I think on this…

    …Full surveillance state. I do believe there is some end game these tech…on the horizon…matter of them making it come to fruition before reality crashes down on their heads

    We should bankrupt them faster because it’s what they deserve, and the progress needs to be slowed at all costs.

    But the reasons why all this is unfolding? Very clear to see, and you even referenced them without really pausing to consider.

    Fascism isn’t stupider this time around (in so far as being beyond the already astronomical stupidity required to believe it’s a solution to fucking anything).

    It’s desperate. They didn’t pivot away from their little spaceship dreams and into AI because it’s more profitable. They don’t care to come ahead in an economically sound world.

    I’m sorry. Time has ran out on the climate and our biosphere, as far as them retaining the properties that allowed us the ‘Modern World’.

    There is no longer an avenue that averts widespread desolation, and they’ve known it all along because they don’t actually all ignore scientific consensus, they just pay for the masses to ignore it.

    It’s going to be a gnarly and awful time, but humans aren’t wired to just give up and die.

    Hence the total surveillance state. Hence the mass casual cruelty with mass deaths. Hence the persecution of anyone who might oppose or see through it.

    The world as we know it will be reduced to ashes, in our lifetimes, and we’ll have to scramble to do whatever our species will do just to barely persist in some form, as that is just what we do.

    They dream of a techno feudalist dreamscape where each little Dragon has their manageable fiefdom composed of a diminished and controllable populace to continue to carry out their self-aggrandizing whims. They can burn all of the economy now, because they’re trying to trade it for straight power.

    Joke’s on them, they’ll die by the masses too, and those that don’t, will die by the masses. It’s not that hard for thousands of angry and with nothing to lose people to go after them.

    Their dream of Autonomous Weapon guardians is as laughable as the rest of the stupidity they’ve attempted and failed at throughout the years: It will be as imperfect a solution to what they’re attempting as anything else they’ve ever done.

    But we collectively let them have control of the playground while it was fresh and clean, so now we gotta deal with their bullshit king of the hill fantasies and the results of their evil stupidity.


  • Aqivex@fedinsfw.apptoComic Strips@lemmy.worldDitto
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    17 days ago

    Wait…

    They (TR) definitely were involved in the “creation” of Ditto. In the pursuit of Mew. Who already “was” every Pokemon, in a sense. But you don’t start that sort of research from scratch.

    You pick a likely candidate for trials that has whatever traits you’re looking for.

    How does a Team Rocket experiment get a lower number?

    If they did something to #132 that led to not just a lab specimen Ditto…but altered all instances of #132 in the wild also.

    Dear Arceus…they genocided #132 and rewrote the children’s history books. The monsters.

    /hj



  • Aqivex@fedinsfw.apptoComic Strips@lemmy.worldDitto
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    17 days ago

    The way I thought it all shaked down (and what I thought was established fan canon long ago), was that the Cinnerbar Mansion experiments were an attempt to clone Mew.

    Ditto was one of the first failures (and I bet the poor guys have it worse than no thoughts of their own, but rather their very thoughts are constantly trapped fighting shifting self-identity, if we want to go Grim Dark lol)

    And they never got to perfect a Mew, because the next stage in the experiment precluded that.

    That they achieved Mewtwo, after Ditto, and the scope of the project rapidly changed when the “benefactor” (sue me, there’s still kids picking up the games, I ain’t spoiling it, but we know who we’re talking about) bankrolling the project got the initial “power level readings”.

    So they pumped Mewtwo, their perfect IV monstrosity, with both forced and artificial EVs, until what happened, happened, and Mewtwo had to go hang out in that cave to get some peace.

    Meanwhile the Dittos suffer ;(


  • You entirely sidestepped the scenario and issue. In the example given, the copyrighted work is being produced directly onto a medium that obfuscates its provenance, literally. Yet, gives an opening for another to publish it in such a way, that they could claim it’s their copyrighted work. They would be lying, and they would be wrong, but then you would have to prove to a body composed of ancient mummies who uphold an ancient code, why one of the few ways they thought they understood technology and codified into their verification process, isn’t actually showing them the truth this time. Do you know how to defend a copyright claim?