Dæmon S.

- Wait until midnight.
- Turn on the computer using the foot’s thumb finger.
- Clean the mouse’s trackball while you hear the Windows XP’s starting song “trunn trun trunnn, trun-trunnnnnnn” in your bedroom, followed by some cracking noise foretelling an incoming cellphone call in your Nokia 3310.
- Dial the ISP using the Windows XP’s “Dial-up connection” dialog
- Spin up a Winamp playing the same “Numb” by “Linkin Park” (or “Bring me to life” by Evanescence, or “Fireflies” by Owl City, or several other classics) over and over again.
- Spin up MSN Messenger and see that “Numb - Linkin Park” (or whatever song) as both your status message and your contacts’ as well.
- Spin up Internet Explorer 6 and go to Orkut.
- Oh, a new testimonial and two new scraps.
- Also a new discussion thread in the community “Eu odeio acordar cedo”.
- Got tired of Orkut communities, check if there’s anything new in “Buddy Poke” and “Happy Farm”.
- Got tired of Orkut altogether, but Jake, my colleague from school, just made my MSN window to shook and sent me a Wink, inviting me to a match in Counter Strike. I plug it to the living room’s CRT TV using a convoluted connection.
- My grandpa starts complaining about how I’m damaging the CRT TV with the pesky Computer-to-TV adapter.

This won’t be coming back. Like, ever. The Alpha Gen and most of the GenZ will never be able to truly know what I’m taking about.

So, please MySpace, don’t try to fool me with illusory hopes. Yahoo Messenger isn’t coming back. Limewire and E-mule’s “Every-Linkin-Park-album-ever-released.exe” aren’t, either. And it won’t be MySpace the one to bring that to life (pun intended). Since Harambe died, the world has never been the same. In the end, it doesn’t even matter.

!technology@beehaw.org

Good to see it’s not just me. I kept receiving heat (pun intended) whenever I criticized these “Proof-of-work anti-bot solutions”, now I finally know I’m not alone.

Like an unskippable Youtube ad, we’re supposed to sit three minutes while these “solutions” dangerously burn our CPU regardless of whether it’s an old CPU, and without asking our consent beforehand (!!!). At least Youtube ads don’t (usually) burn the CPU the same way.

And, no, it’s nowhere close to being infuriating to the supposedly intended targets of Anubis. OpenAI and the alike are likely laughing of Xe Iaso while they all burn more coal and increase the hyperscale data centers, with Anubis being just a pesky, insignificant pebble inside businessmen shoes. Meanwhile, we, the human users caught in this crossfire, including me with my poor decade-old Acer ES1-572 laptop, we can’t afford a new machine should Anubis, Cloudflare and other similar “anti-bot solutions” end up “weighting” our CPU too much it finally makes its way to the underworld with no one being legally liable for the physical damages caused by such algorithms.

If only Anubis, supposedly “different” from Cloudflare’s corporate nature, had a “Proceed or Leave” button or checkbox to start the “weighting your heart” thing, I wouldn’t be complaining or actively boycotting websites using “PoW anti-bot solutions” (I made myself a Firemonkey userscript to speedrun a window.close() for pages whose title is one of the “Just a moment…” or “Making sure you’re not a bot!”, because neither Xe Iaso nor Matthew Prince nor the webmasters using their “PoW anti-bot solutions” would buy me a new laptop if mine eventually died from facing heavy cryptographic computing while my CPU was already struggling with a Blender rendering process in the background). But, no, it’s no different than the corporate they swear to be fighting against (“something something one who fights with monsters should be careful lest they thereby become a monster themselves”)…

!mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world

Anubis, tho the transaction is so quick I can’t 100% confirm that, but I think they do

The amount of time which Anubis and other PoW-based algorithms take to solve a cryptographic challenge will depend on several factors, namely: the challenge level (depending on the webmaster’s settings, the level can be increased if site traffic has increased), the CPU clock speed and amount of CPU resources available for your browser (and, by extension, for Anubis’ ServiceWorkers), as well as… luck. It’s dealing with randomness, after all.

retro-fitted two pretty powerful, not your standard, fans in the old PC to mitigate some of that heat, along with the stock fans that I used to build it

Not to mention how a desktop CPU, even when old (and especially when old, as it likely means a standard big ATX rather than a mini-ITX), has lots of surface area to dissipate heat, and a metal PC case built for radiating the heat away while allowing for better internal circulation of air (contrasted with the non-conductive plastic case from cheap laptops such as the one I own).

Whereas your laptop generally utilizes one fan

Yeah. And in my case it’s a very inefficient, old fan. One that makes louder noise (akin to a car engine idling or cranking) as soon as it gets faster trying to keep up with the CPU heat… Oh, and I forgot to mention this in my previous replies: I also know when my CPU temps raised because the cooling fan becomes more noisy.

I don’t know, but it intrigues me so I’ll keep a closer eye on it just out of mild curiosity.

We often underestimate how much computing power the Web have been demanding from our personal devices. Web browsers have became full-fledged Operating Systems inside whatever Operating System the user uses, and some websites are massive in terms of CPU and RAM requirements. I mean, nowadays we have video editors, graphic suites, 3D suites, even 3D games, running entirely in browser…

!selfhosted@lemmy.world

however, as someone who watches temps closely on my server and especially on my old PC, I can’t confirm that a site causes a dramatic rise in temps

I use a KDE widget (System Monitor sensor) seen in the screenshot. It’s kept on my primary screen, right next to the clock, so I can watch the CPU temps as closely as possible. I also have a secondary widget at the drawer, displaying the CPU usage, as well as RAM and swap usage.

Notice, in the screenshot, how I’m running Blender and, yet, my CPU temps are somewhere around 35-40C. Partly because it’s currently winter here in Southern Hemisphere (and it’s quite cozy-cold around here where I reside), partly because it’s just Blender and a couple of lightweight websites opened in Waterfox. Even Catodon, the Misskey-fork platform I use for interacting with the Fediverse, is quite lightweight, especially because I turned off heavy JS animations.

But this scenario would change if I was faced with a sudden Anubis or Cloudflare. Because I watch the temps and they update each second, I can readily notice the temps increasing as Anubis/Cloudflare do their shenanigans.

Sometimes I’m browsing the Fediverse while awaiting for Blender to finish the rendering of an animation/scene. The rendering itself doesn’t warm my CPU too much, as I can adjust the thread count for Blender, but SharedWorkers in JS can take as much cores as they want because they can be instantiated multiple times, e.g. one for each CPU core. So, if Blender is opened, the temp increase can be higher, because there would be two simultaneous heavy computations competing for CPU cores. And, as I mentioned in my previous reply, the situation gets more dangerous during summer (although I avoid putting my laptop into heavy computing situations during summer).

!selfhosted@lemmy.world

is there a reason people dont like cloudflare

I hate Cloudflare especially because it’s slowly becoming a monopoly (if it didn’t become already). Webmasters are giving too much power to a single corporation to rule over who can access online content and who can’t. Old browsers and privacy-oriented browsers (e.g. Librewolf) are known to be more likely to be refused by Cloudflare, and this is a form of prejudice.

Also, and bringing Anubis to the loop too, there’s the lack of user consent. As a guest/user, I’m unable to consent with the heavy computations (and potential damage to my decade-old laptop from overheating) before these happen.

What I mean about “lack of consent” can be better illustrated by the “This site uses cookies” message: it often offers buttons so the user/guest can choose to either “accept” or “reject”. Have you wondered why every website must give these options nowadays? Because it’s a literal law. Neither Cloudflare nor Anubis have a “we’ll need to validate your browser, do you consent? Proceed with verification / Leave the website”. Something tells me Cloudflare, and Anubis as well, are literally illegal pieces of code in European Union, given the lack of user consent, although this wasn’t tested in courts yet. I’m not European (I’m Brazilian), but it would be quite entertaining to see this tested on an European court.

Finally, these things can cause literal harm to a device. Yes, because when any kind of computation happens, the CPU gets a little warm, and when said computations involve cryptomining-like behavior, CPU temps can raise a lot. And for devices such as mine, an i5-7200U laptop whose fan isn’t good (and I can’t afford a new one), the CPU can easily get to 90C, to the point of damage, if the computations take long enough. Given a PoW relies on randomness, there’s a literal chance that a challenge would kill my laptop if it took several seconds during a Brazilian summer (>42C almost wet-bulb). And I doubt the webmaster would be liable for the material damage their website caused to my personal device, so I’ve been speedrunning my way to close websites as soon as I see “Just a moment” or “Making sure you’re not a bot” as their title, I even made myself an userscript for doing so.

!selfhosted@lemmy.world

the very forum you posted to utilizes Cloudflare

The difference (and the bright side of the Fediverse) is that Fediverse is decentralized so, while some instances can have Cloudflare or similar algorithms (e.g. Anubis) in place, other instances without said algorithms can still interact without having to go through said algorithms. The OC’s instance does neither use Cloudflare nor Anubis (lemmy.ml used to use Anubis, but the admins seem to have turned it off).

!selfhosted@lemmy.world

!memes@lemmy.ml

My practical advice would be to buy an eSIM with a new number, there are very cheap options (like one used for travel)

OP would also have to buy a new smartphone and activate it in a cafe or anywhere not their current location (due to both the GPS/AGPS and wi-fi hotspot MAC address), otherwise whatsapp would straight up lock the new account, too, given how these PII (geolocation, wi-fi hotspot and, especially, the device) are tied to an account that got suspended earlier (and this goes against most of plafforms’ terms regarding “ban evasion”). Hard resetting the smartphone doesn’t work, as smartphones have unique identifiers (such as the phone’s wi-fi adapter MAC), and using the same wi-fi may add to the factors leading to automatic locking of the account.

!mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world

If you check who’s the topmost billionaire with a Brazilian nationality, you’ll likely find out part of why. Hint: he is portrayed in “The social network” film.

!mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world

I’m not the person who you’re asking to, but my “honorable” mention goes to Gov.br, which is the Brazilian state-issued app for most citizen-related affairs (driver’s license, public healthcare, income tax declaration , etc). Even though Gov.br can be accessed from a computer, it requires 2FA through its Android or iOS app, where it’ll do face recognition in order to authorize the access. Even turning on the Developer Mode in a stock Android makes gov.br refuse to open.

!android@lemmy.world