• 1 Post
  • 84 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 10th, 2023
  • asjmcguire@kbin.socialtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Have you ever gotten scammed, package stolen, or been a victim of fraud in any way?
    10·
    1 year ago

    Been the victim of fraud. Unfortunately - yes.
    When I was younger and Chip ‘n’ PIN was becoming popular, many smaller shops had a Paypoint machine that would print the entire card number and CCV on the receipt. I was so paranoid about fraud, especially given that there was sufficient information printed on the receipt that anyone could do an Amazon order with those details. I used to get a black permanent marker and scribble the details out before putting the receipt in the bin.

    Imagine my horror when a decade later, I learn that I have been the victim of fraud, and a type of fraud it was entirely impossible for me to prevent. In the UK fraudsters watch for new companies popping up on Companies House and then use the details to go on a shopping spree. The way it works is like this:

    They see my name, address and date of birth on the website. They are looking for a name that matches their surname and first initial. So for me that could be Alexander Jones for example. They go to a retail park and pop into Argos. They order several thousand pounds of stuff. When they go to pay, the person at the counter helpfully asks “Do you have an Argos credit card? If you apply for one today, we’ll transfer the balance of today’s purchases to the card” and armed with my address, date of birth and name, and a card that already has the same surname and first initial as me - they are accepted for an Argos credit card. Post nothing for the goods they just bought and leave the store. They go next door to JJB sports, and then whole process repeats. “Do you have a JJB sports card? If you get one today…”

    They visited 6 stores in an hour and repeated this process at all of them. And a week later I start receiving credit cards…

    It’s a surprisingly common scam (or it was), brought on entirely by the shops bring pushed to get people to sign up for credit cards…

    I had to be on a register for several years, so if anyone tried to open an account or take out credit in my name, I would get a phone call to check if it was actually me.

  • asjmcguire@kbin.socialto/kbin meta@kbin.social•Could we get official word on what Kbin's stance is towards federating with Meta?
    3·
    1 year ago

    Right… so - the long and short of it is -

    A company (any company) decides to integrate with ActivityPub, and the entire fediverse has a toys out of the pram moment every time that happens, gradually closing off into smaller and smaller federated circles, that stop federating with the rest of the fediverse.

    A reminder, Tumblr are supposed to be adding ActivityPub.
    Wordpress has.
    Discourse I believe now has.

    So who exactly is it that gets to decide which companies are and are not allowed to be part of the Fediverse?

    It’s all very very much like a dictatorship, whether you want to accept it or not - that’s exactly how it is being operated.

  • asjmcguire@kbin.socialto/kbin meta@kbin.social•Could we get official word on what Kbin's stance is towards federating with Meta?
    4·
    1 year ago

    Right…
    BUT -

    You aren’t going to see ANY of those 1.2bn users, until someone on THIS server follows someone on THAT server. That’s the point of federation. It isn’t like Twitter - you don’t just see everything that everyone over there posts. It’s no different on Mastodon - there has to be a social connection before posts start showing up here.

    Put another way, if hateful stuff starts showing up on the Fediverse from meta users, it is because someone on the Fediverse is following the people posting hateful stuff.

    When meta eventually starts federating - you aren’t going to see posts from @asjmcguire until someone here is following my account.

    As for if meta makes changes that makes federating hard, that’s not our problem. If they make changes that make federating with THEM hard, that’s their problem. There is no reason the rest of the fediverse needs to follow what changes meta make. It doesn’t hurt us if they break federation with the rest of the fediverse. Meta is in reality no different to mastodon in that regard, it’s just another platform - but for example Pixelfed isn’t going to bend over backward to make life easier for meta.

  • asjmcguire@kbin.socialtoTechnology@kbin.social•Twitter says it couldn't tell people about rate limiting in advance | Engadget
    2·
    1 year ago

    I mean I find it mind boggling that people aren’t noticing yet, that Elon has basically pulled a bait and switch. Especially now that it is becoming even more obvious. Take a product that everyone is using, and degrade the free aspects of it to the point that the only way for people to be able to continue using it - is by paying for it.

    His excuses are ludicrous, that he thinks that advance notice would let “bad actors” change the way they operate, as if those bad actors wouldn’t have just changed the way they operate as soon as it started being limited anyway.

    Hell there is a thread floating around somewhere which shows that you can just reverse engineer the app and get the API key that way. The bots and “bad actors” will therefore continue, and legitimate users will be the only ones impacted.