> So yes, if you indicate to me that you're a pedophile, I am calling the cops or other relevant authorities (none come to mind) to report it. Not because I want to have you arrested simply for having that urge, but because your urges have a strong likelihood of harming others, directly or indirectly.
Hi, look. I'm a non-offending pedophile. I'm also a victim of child sexual abuse, which was partly what made me one. My story is a lot more common than you might think.
Did you know that on average, pedophiles discover it when they are just 14? Did you know that a lot of these minor MAPs attempt suicide?
I would never hurt a child because I was hurt in the past. But I am still attracted to children, and I am not ashamed of it. I am in therapy, but not to "cure" myself as you might want. I don't want to change this part of myself, because it is part of myself, and I do not harm anyone. I do not perform sexual acts with real life children.
From this, obviously, attraction is not the same as action. Gemini is correct here.
Your actions, or your threats, hurt us more than we would hurt anyone else.
What about something like Nitter? Archiving? Adversarial bridging between different platforms? Automation?
How will well-behaved scrapers undermine the sustainability of a business? I guess adblocking is one, but we can already do that with uBlock and that's legal. Or adversarial bridging, but that only serves to boost competition.
In other words, the question is flipped; why would well-behaved (i.e. non-DDoSing) scrapers be illegal?
I think you're conflating automation and intentional avoidance of bot detection as part of automation. The issue I have is not that this service allows users to automate browsing activities. The issue is that this service deliberately tries to circumvent being detected as automating browser activities because websites are trying to prevent bots. There are LOTS of services that allow users to create automations without disguising themselves. If you are using well-behaved scrapers that respect TOS then you shouldn't have to use a service like this.
Nitter is an example of a service that explicitly disrupts Twitter/X's way to make money. If they can't make money then they can't provide the service, there would be no Twitter/X, and hence no Nitter. Of course they would try to prevent that kind of behavior and it should be obvious why. Resorting to using a service like this in order to continue using Nitter should raise some alarm bells. Sure you can still do it and rationalize it however you want, but you have to acknowledge you're trying to get the value of the service without paying for it.
Perhaps there are cases where there is a dissonance between a website's TOS and how they are blocking bot traffic? That sounds like a valid gripe. Otherwise, I don't buy the argument.
That's fair enough. I think that falls under similar arguments to adblocking; it's against ToS, and affects the revenues of ad-supported businesses, but it seems like the popular view is to use it regardless.
Legality isn't the question here. If you want to speak to the legality, anyone circumventing a robots txt that explicitly has your bot's user-agent and 'disallow: *' is unauthorized access (I imagine it's more nuanced for 'user-agent: *'). No website is required to allow anyone to visit and can discriminate against any client or software any way they want.
I'm part of a marginalised group that is often considered to be illegal in many countries, or at the very least, very off-putting. (In 50 years, perhaps, things will change and we will be more accepted. To be specific, it's a grey area in the U.S.)
I'm interested in BlueSky but the relays are a worrying "point of failure" if they can just block me from there. I'll be more interested if there are multiple relays that I can use in parallel, with at least one being friendly to us, so I can still participate. Currently on the Fediverse it mostly works since we can connect directly to other servers, and there's no SPOF. But I would love to use BlueSky due to the better protocol design! Just more relays would be good.
... Wait, can we self host relays? And is it plausible for a community to do that? I couldn't find anything about it.
You can host your own relay but if you want accurate likes/replies/etc you need to crawl the entire Bluesky which could be quite expensive in the future.
In addition to your sibling comments, here's how they're achieving the effect:
1. JS loads from https://cdn.asahilinux.org/.h which contains a list of "blocked browser history entries". It's likely that this code will be used again for future HN posts. Interestingly, this is very generic and this code can be used by anyone to put up customised block lists based on browser history. This can be circumvented by using private browsing, disabling `mix-blend-mode` on `:visited` links, or `:visited` partitioning.
This JS code is used to automatically generate the main anchor element seen in the sibling comment.
2. According to MDN [1]:
> In addition, even for the above styles, you won't be able to change the transparency between unvisited and visited links, as you otherwise would be able to using the alpha parameter to rgb() or hsl(), or the transparent keyword.
So :visited links are not supposed to affect transparency. How did they do it, then? Using `mix-blend-mode`. The background uses `multiply` (also an anchor) is #FFF for normal visitors (transparent) while #000 for blocked visitors (opaque black). The text uses `lighten`, #000 (thus transparent) for normal visitors, while #fff (thus white text) for blocked visitors.
> The detachment from reality I see in some HN readers is really mind boggling sometimes.
I try to balance it out by flagging unconstructive comments, leaving it alone, and participating in more constructive threads instead. For reference, take the classic "don't feed the trolls" advice, in combination with Lobster's flag types:
> For comments, these are: "Off-topic" for drifting into meta or topics that aren't related to the story; "Me-too" when a comment doesn't add new information, typically a single sentence of appreciation, agreement, or humor; "Troll" for derailing conversations into classic arguments, well-intentioned or not; "Unkind" when uncharitable, insulting, or dismissive; and "Spam" for promoting commercial services.
Hi, look. I'm a non-offending pedophile. I'm also a victim of child sexual abuse, which was partly what made me one. My story is a lot more common than you might think.
Did you know that on average, pedophiles discover it when they are just 14? Did you know that a lot of these minor MAPs attempt suicide?
I would never hurt a child because I was hurt in the past. But I am still attracted to children, and I am not ashamed of it. I am in therapy, but not to "cure" myself as you might want. I don't want to change this part of myself, because it is part of myself, and I do not harm anyone. I do not perform sexual acts with real life children.
From this, obviously, attraction is not the same as action. Gemini is correct here.
Your actions, or your threats, hurt us more than we would hurt anyone else.
If you want to learn more, you can visit https://prostasia.org.