You can’t seriously be saying that in the comments of a post linking to leaked internal documents showing that one of these companies is aware of the dangers they pose and damage they are doing. Did nazis falsify internal documents and this leak?

Did you somehow miss the Cambridge Analytica scandal with Facebook, where they manipulated the emotional content of users’ feeds and gathered scientifically significant measurable responses in the emotions of the manipulated users?

Have you missed where each of these companies has had many public job postings for positions requiring applicants have psychology degrees?

People like to think of 4chan as the website that drove people to suicide, but every single one of the major social media sites has a fucking body count at this point, and almost every one is in the double digits.

Beyond all that, lemmy’s userbase trends older. I saw the tail end of the satanic panic into the moral grandstanding about the dangers of violent video games. I’d wager most of the users here lived through it.

I know firsthand what a moral panic looks like. They didn’t have the amount of research papers (that hold up to peer review) and leaked internal documents we can point at. They didn’t have body counts even remotely similar.

Keep on fighting for opressed teens to have more ways to get away from opressive parents. To have access to factual information that their parents don’t want them to have. It’s a good cause with not many people fighting for it.

That doesn’t mean though that anything you think challenges or opposes it is a nazi plot.

Teens are resilient and have astounding amounts of time on their hands. They’ll find a way to communicate, ways to make their own underground social platforms if they need to. The cat’s out of the bag. It’s the fucking internet. Corpos, government boots, no one can truly stop the signal. They couldn’t back in the days of dial up BBS. Good fucking luck now that you can get a device orders of magnitude more powerful for $50.

Don’t bother replying for my sake. I’m blocking you so I don’t get increasingly shitty towards you. Your mind’s made up on this, and so is mine. No point going back and forth if we’re just going to get more frustrated and exasperated at each other. Best of luck in your endeavours.

Some important context on this user before anyone else gets dragged into a discussion: check their post history, multiple to a “Youth Liberation” community.

No shade meant by calling it out, but I think that makes it much more clear how strong your opinions are on this. There’s nothing to be gained in trying to talk to you about this when your opinions are set so strongly. You aren’t going to see the dangers that the rest of us see because your focus is on allowing freedom from oppresive parental figures.

Edit: they also “won’t give an inch on this”

Teens and children, and the pushback you’re seeing is because a lot of people, even terminally online people, believe that limiting or preventing children (and teens) from accessing social media as they currently exist is part of making that happen.

You have to slow the bleeding first. You can’t just ignore the broken leg and start physical therapy.

Teens vary wildly in maturity and are likely to be unfortunately caught up in rules for children. There’s no easy cutoff age before 18 for when one can be trusted to be online without guard rails. I can speak from experience that teens will find a way whether its legal or not, so I’m not really super concerned about the ones who need access. They’ll find a way.

And for every person like you that says they are still alive because of unrestricted internet, there’s another one who is dead because of it. 4chan, tumblr, reddit even (remember when they “totally figured out the boston bomber”?), and more direct cyberbullying all claim lives. There were 3 suicides in my highschool growing up, two determined to be cyberbullying caused and the third just rumored. I almost lost one of my younger cousins to cyberbullying as well.

Decade and a half ago I torrented all the time and didn’t get caught until I stupidly downloaded something from the top 100 torrents on pirate bay.

Not sure how safe torrents are now.

Never have had any issues with direct downloads and streaming. Just use your head, adblock, and virus scan your downloads (knowing that keygens or cracked exes may show as viruses).

For safest option and free: Use an up to date web browser with a good adblocker (ublock origin is the current best), stick to direct downloads using a download manager to manage the 12+ parts, and virus scan everything that you download. Download from trusted sites from the megathread. Direct download is generally safe, unless you live in one of the few countries cracking down on fitgirl repacks specifically. Then that site is off limits for you.

You can use torrents without a VPN, it’s just not safe. You could be caught and the penalty will vary based off of what you’re downloading, where you live, and who you use for an ISP.

Most 365 mail admin work doesn’t end up touching the routing stuff, domains, or DNS records too often, so I’m by no means an expert. Last year I got rid of the last on-prem exchange servers in our environment. Here are my thoughts anyway, for what its worth.

At my workplace, domain as internal relay was used as part of our hybrid exchange setup, where we still had an on-prem exchange server largely for recipient management (for stuff connected to AD objects and thus mastered on-prem instead of in the cloud) and for a mail relay for internal recipients so that automated emails coming from legacy systems bypassed all filtering. I’m not familiar with other use cases.

Stuff that may not apply (minimize the lift)

I would approach this by using it as an opportunity to raze those hundreds of redirects. Surely the recieving systems have other ways to categorize incoming email than destination address. Stuff like system to system you could probably add shit in the body text and change the filters on the recieving end. So each external system would only have one destination address. That’s ideal world though and probably touches a lot of shit outside your control.

Second thing is that I would look into setting the destination email addresses directly in the sending system. It takes management out of your hands, but why does any of this need to hit your infra in the first place? Again, that’s ideal world and also probably touches shit you don’t control.

Point is, I’d look to minimize how many of these things you actually have to deal with, because they’ll just keep being a problem and a pain in the ass to manage forever otherwise. That’s the real underlying problem, if you can do anything about it.

Stuff that more directly lines up with your ask:

If you can script routing rules you can probably figure out scripting the creation of contact objects in 365, and export of them to csv for verification.

PowerShell is going to be your friend with Exchange Online/365, and most things Microsoft. Exchange Online has a dedicated module (think library if you’re used to terminology for other languages).

You can make a csv with the internal email address, external destination address, internal contact name, display name, and whether or not it’s hidden from the address book (do end users need to send to it?). I’d reccomend using some clear prefix in the internal name to keep them obvious compared to any other contacts not related to this fuckery.

You could use full mailboxes and forwarding rules on each one but that increases complexity significantly.

In PowerShell, you’d connect to exchange, import the csv, then foreach over the csv contents throwing the values from it into New-MailContact.

If you want to be fancy you could wrap New-MailContact in a try/catch to spit failed ones out into an array and export that back to csv at the end for review.

While the ID shit is godawful, that’s not at all how it works in any implementation out there right now. There have even been multiple breaches of these systems, further demonstrating their issues, but you know what hasn’t been in any of the breaches/leaks?

Direct connection between ID and uniquely identifiable user information.

If I’m wrong about this I’d love to know, but as far as I am aware the ID leaks have not had shit like email address attached.

That’s the point, it doesn’t. Much like the argument about targeting marginalized people when you’re talking about children.

Edit: Yes, there are plenty of children and teens without access to information and the support structures they should have IRL. I was one of them and it’s fucking awful. The internet can help with that by offering exposure to different ideologies, evidence that you aren’t alone in what you’re feeling or going through.

But I don’t look back on everything I did and encountered online in mid 00s - early 10s era internet and go “that was overwhelmingly a great thing that I should have had the sort of unrestricted access to that I did”. And the internet has been even more corporatized and “skinner-boxed” since.

And with the benefit of hindsight, I can see a bunch of other ways that I could have gotten the good I got from the internet without all the bad, and through things in real life that I had dismissed in my youth.

If you watch a decent amount of twitch streaming it’s pretty obvious. I’m sure there are a ton of whales out there willing to dump >$1000 in one go on a streamer, but just watch something like a “subathon”, or a “hype train”. You’ll see more dollars than viewers they have move around in the span of like 30 minutes.

Or when streamers “bet” each other large amounts of gift subscriptions. That’s explicitly money, and abstracting it behind subs only masks how damn much a lot of these “bets” are really for.

I’m not going to claim that anywhere near all of it is straight laundering, but it’s pretty damn obvious just how fucking easy it would be to use it all for washing/tumbling of dirty funds.

Then call out the bullshit, don’t just call the whole thing bullshit with nothing to back it up. That just makes you look like a cynical asshat.

If I recall right it’s some weirdness with how the float bulb in gas tanks, which is used for that display, works.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an instance as extreme as what you’re describing myself, but there tends to be more actual fuel volume at the lowest and highest ends, so the gauge isn’t exactly linear. Not sure if it’s something that can be compensated for by the manufacturer in the design or not.

They forcibly replaced moderation teams on tons of major subreddits that went dark in protest too. No hesitation, tossed out the old teams entirely and replaced them with randoms, even on the former default subs. It was fucking chaos.

There was very obvious botting happening to push opinions in favor of the api-pocalypse in certain big subs, to the point where you could reply to the bots with some of the most basic ass prompt redirection/escape and get them to spit out cooking recipes.

People were getting banned for even mentioning lemmy. Reddit was reverting people editing their comments to try and scrub their history on the site, and banning the accounts, which is arguably a violation of GDPR’s right to be forgotten.

It was an absolute shit show.

I had already made a lemmy account by that point. If it had just been the api lockdown, I probably would have went back in at least a limited capacity using one of the patched third party clients (use your own api key) or the patched official official one (removes the ads).

But all of that shit together broadcast loud and clear that Reddit’s owners weren’t just passively stupid about what actually made the site worthwhile, they were actively antagonistic towards it.

It was no secret that Reddit had no fucking clue why Reddit “worked” and couldn’t be trusted to make good decisions. But all this shit demonstrated that the only thing they were interested in doing was intentionally killing it in a delusional attempt to maximize short term gains.

And every time I had even a smidgen of desire to go back, they pulled more bullshit.

Auto-generated language specific copies of popular subreddits, utilizing poor quality machine translation and literally stealing the top posts from the original subs with no attribution. Reddit disavowed that it was done by Reddit admins themselves, but there’s no way it could have happened at the speed and scale it did otherwise.

Mods still don’t have anything remotely equivalent to the old tools from before the api bullshit.

People getting permabanned over the most basic word filters imaginable (discussing the game Luigi’s Mansion after the CEO-cide), then getting IP banned when they created a new account to try and get in touch with support.

I still browse some of the subs related to my work passively (sysadmin, powershell, azure, etc) but the drop in quality and amount of bots is unignorable. Half the sysadmin sub posts are the most thinly veiled product ad setups.

Hey, it’s the reason I intentionally limit the amount of my news exposure. Efforts to overwhelm by those in power.

Feeling so overwhelmed in the face of all the horrors of the world that you’re frozen doesn’t help fix anything.

Lol yeah. I have a friend who started a movement to unionize a local botanical garden/performance venue years ago. They napkin mathed it out that roughly 1.5M has been spent on the union busters, as the execs have just kept them “on retainer” for like half a decade now, occasionally doing displays of force whenever murmurs start up again about unionizing.

Damn, I thought this artist was getting better with pacing. Guess not.

Only needed panels are 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 and I feel like panel 2 could easily be merged with another one.

More than 15 years ago I ended up with one of those in a C++ program.

I’m sure the real ssue was somewhere else in the code, but if I removed one specific comment (or maybe it was a print to console, it was forever ago) it would segfault, otherwise it ran fine.

Yeah, from the sort of cold, heartless, detached, and incredibly oversimplifying level that those sorts of governmental decisions happen at… selling sex is one of the few things just about anyone can technically do. It’s also the kind of thing that it would be hard to prove doesn’t have effectively infinite demand.

I can totally see bureaucrats going: “You’ve got working holes, go get to it.”

Let me say again, that’s a horrid oversimplification of reality, but one that I can easily imagine coming out of government organizations.

I put a few years into a Comp Sci BS at a “new Ivy League” University, realized I didn’t mesh with the teaching style at all (still have a massive chip on my shoulder and strong strong fucking opinions about how coding ought to be taught) and if I had to spend 8 hours a day coding I would kill myself. Also went through a deep depression and some life shit. Got placed on academic probation and effectively took that as my sign it was done.

A few years later I was having trouble finding employment, so I signed up for an Associates degree in Computer Information Systems at a local community college. I was able to transfer a good amount of credits from my first attempt, but the way classes were scheduled I ended up taking two years anyway just with a very light course load.

By the time I graduated I was already employed full time in IT support, with an obvious path upward. I didn’t bother going to the graduation ceremony.

Now I’m the best programmer/scripter on a sysadmin/infraops team, the majority of my workdays are spent scripting automations and shit that no one should ever have to try and do manually (sometimes coding a full 8 hour shift) and I love it.

I’m happy I went back and “finished” things. It was a wildly different and better experience with some more years under me and at an institution where I was actually treated like a human being.

Maybe I could have had the same at the first place with a lighter course load, but I don’t think I had the right mindset or the right teachers, even if I hadn’t been as overwhelmed.

At some point during my second attempt, I finally hit a point with programming where I was able to effectively split the concepts/theory from the writing of the code/execution of the theory. I developed my personal approach to programming that isn’t particularly unique, but I was never really guided towards it by any instructor or learning material.

I will never be a full on Software Developer, a true Computer Scientist. I don’t need or want to be.

I don’t program and script for the sake of it. For the joy of the art. I’m not going to argue CPU architecture, data organization schemes. Vim vs emacs. I program and script because I want to solve problems that no one should have to do manually, especially the fuck not me.

Programming, scripting, and automation are tools. Some of the most amazing tools humanity has ever created. Tools that open opportunities for increased quality of life, efficiency, and leasure time like nothing else. But they’re a tool. Not an ends to themselves. I love them for what they allow us to do.

I can appreciate the artistry, and I’m happy as hell that there are people out there arguing about how things get compiled or interpreted down to machine code.

I can automate the fuck out of things. Script together entire system integrations including full user account lifecycle automation when sales folk lies don’t match up with reality. I am the best programmer on my sysadmin/infrastructure operations team, and I’m the guy the boss puts on projects that we don’t have a failure option for.

I get to do things I’m good at, and that I generally enjoy, for enough pay that I don’t generally have to worry about money. I am immensely blessed and privileged in this regard.

As far as how much of my current situation is due to education? Really hard to say. If I did it again I think I’d start at the community college.

You can look this shit up you know. 3 yachts each retrofitted into marine research vessels and one under construction as another research vessel. Two “support vessels” whatever the fuck that means. The one under construction will house 75 scientists. His marine research company, inkfish, releases all findings publicly and for free.

But nobody knows this shit because he isn’t burning money on a fucking PR firm.

Two yachts for pleasure, which is entirely two yachts too many.

Look, he’s sitting upon an empire largely propped up by the fucking invention of lootboxes, the marketing of them to children and whales, and all the second and third hand markets and gambling sites that have sprung up around this shit. I’m not going to sit around and suck his dick.

But inkfish isn’t even the only “public good” organization he’s founded. And he’s also just directly donated money to existing things as well, such as considerable money into pediatric ICU in New Zealand.

On the scheme of ultra rich, he is one of the better ones.

Edit: Especially if we’re putting Gabe Newell up against Tim “banning Twitter because it allows AI generation of CSAM is gatekeeping” Sweeney

Re-read the title. considering halting plans to. They aren’t using them yet.

Lots of clutter, no trash. Maybe some of the papers in the coffee table that my toddler has scribbled on are trash, but I’m saving those for re-use until they get crumpled or I see her choose not to use them when she’a drawing.