If the online ad industry was just about serving ads you could say that I guess. Early Internet ads were usually placed pretty intrusively on websites, and very soon went from annoyance to security risk as ads became a disturbingly common vehicle for malware delivery. Today malware via ads is far less common but an ad isn’t just an ad – now ads are powered by, and an agent of, a surveillance network.

If an ad could just be an ad it would actually be safe to roll without an ad blocker; I would infact do so as well unless a site was really egregious with their ad placement, I want to support websites doing good work. The Internet ad industry forced us into blocking their ads. My adblock never turns off, even for sites I’d very much like to support, because ads are just a pile of malicious code. Ad blockers would have stayed niche techy things if the ad industry wasn’t scummy as hell.

So anyways, I feel I got a little rant-y. My point is that the ad industry themselves fed the demand for ad blockers. Ads themselves and website placement didn’t get egregious because of ad blockers, ad blockers became common because ads and ad placement got egregious.

As others have mentioned, video downloaders works. Personally, I would either use a VPN or proxy. I don’t have this problem in my state but when I traveled through Oklahoma I just used a VPN and it worked just fine.

The problem with downloading porn, I learned many moons ago before “tube” websites made it so accessible, is that unless you constantly hunt for new stuff it’s a waste of space as porn doesn’t have a ton of rewatch value (for me at least). So you amass a collection and then the collection gets boring after some watches/views.

If you happen to use a DNS-based ad blocking/security service such as NextDNS, ControlD, or whatever you can also often just have your DNS queries route out of another region. Doing that can get you around some regional stuff because you’ll get service URL’s and IP’s back from DNS for that other region, so you can skip the VPN and still get what you’re looking for. But that’s most useful for things like getting UK shows in your Netflix TV app. For your use case I would just VPN.

That said, if you’re set on downloading your porn, yt-dlp is the gold standard for ripping video off of the Internet. I haven’t tried it myself, but a cursory search seems to confirm that it’ll work with sites like PornHub (it’s apparently hit or miss depending on the site). You might still need a VPN for the content to not be blocked though.

I’m obviously not OP but the first thing that comes to mind are attacks like the one that targeted xz. Open source developers are generally overloaded between demands from the community and their regular lives, and they also lack the means and ability to check the background of everyone contributing code or vying for maintainer status. This creates the risk that somebody with bad intentions works their way into a position of some power over the code that gets merged. Bigger projects with strict governance and an active community of contributors (or funding for dedicated developers to maintain control and check outside contributions) have much smaller risk in this regard.

Likewise married into a Latino family. They acknowledge that “Latine” is a thing, but not a single one of them has heard another Latino use it in real conversation, let alone use it themselves. And they all roll their eyes extra hard, young and old, at “LatinX”. The family that speaks English all poke fun at it by pronouncing it “Latinks”.

I’m sure that some population of Latinos somewhere in the world cares about such things, but white people on the whole seem to be care a whole heck of a lot more.

It’s unfortunate that remote work is going away for many places, but it isn’t gone. There are remote work jobs out there, though the competition for them is fierce. Everyone has a different path, but let me share mine and hopefully it helps you. I

, too, work in IT, and when I got my start in IT beyond bench tech work there was almost nothing as far as jobs that could put me on a good career path. I had a GED, no certifications, but I’m a quick study and taught myself enough to combine it with a silver tongue and talk myself into a remote job. In the meantime I decide that I need to build up a network, so I start hanging in the r/msp Discord server and mostly lurk except to chime in to help when someone has a technical issue or needs help. Over time I get more active and establish a bit of a reputation with the regulars as a smart and helpful guy. So when I eventually put out there on the Discord server that I was looking for my next opportunity I got DM’d with 4 different job offers that same day. All but 1 required that I move to a higher cost of living area, and I made sure that the pay made sense for the area.

I took a job in a very expensive area with a lot of tech work available so that I have actual prospects around me, work it for almost 4 years, and then meet a guy who would be my boss for the next 3 jobs that followed. Now I’m very established in my career, and I can safely say that cultivating relationships with people did as much, if not more, for my career than the technical knowledge I’ve racked up has. Sure, my knowledge and experience were the reason I was hired, but I would probably still be a bench tech or help desk guy now if I had never made relationships with people who could help get me past the mountain of ATS-screened resumes and put me in front of an interviewer.

So the takeaway here is that, based on my singular experience, studying up and submitting applications aren’t enough in today’s job market. You need to get to know people, and you need to get to know people in different job markets in particular. My recommendation is to find a place where IT folk gather and just try to be friendly and helpful.

You seen to have missed that the one who posted this to Lemmy is not the same person that was banned from r/art. OP here isn’t the one arguing with the mod.

Most of such scanning would typically happen at the time of upload before it gets encrypted.

They have their own index on top of using Google’s. As such they do some of their own ranking like promoting the “small web” and surfacing more Internet blogs, for example. You can also customize results rankings by domain – for example, when I search for an image I’ve personalized it to block social media results, Pinterest, and AI-generated images (they tag AI images and they’re reasonably good at it).

The end really is that I can have confidence that my results will be relevant from the first result – no sponsored content, no ads, no unwanted AI slop (you need to purposely invoke AI summaries, for instance, by ending your query with a question mark), and no domains that I find give low quality results. There are even more customizations you can do and I could wax poetic about Kagi, but at the end of the day a good search engine helps you find useful information and gets out of your way, and I haven’t seen a search engine do that better than Kagi yet.

Google Authenticator is merely a generic TOTP token storage app. The person you’re replying to was pointing out that Google Authenticator, specifically, isn’t necessary. There are alternatives, and unless you’re using a company-owned device that restricts the apps you can use there is no way for work to dictate which app you use for TOTP tokens.

Duo, Okta Verify, and other 2FA apps that use push notifications and such, are a different beast altogether.

I don’t think it’s a normal expectation for services with variable labor and materials to have a flat price associated. Certainly not for businesses buying said services. But there isn’t a single “charge per seat” software company that has a valid excuse for obfuscating pricing. Every software company I’ve worked with (and I’ve worked with hundreds over my career buying software for corps) has a “list price” for their product even if they hide it.

Jimmy Kimmel made a comment about how the MAGA gang was spinning the shooting of Charlie Kirk as a politically-motivated assassination by “Democrats”, when the shooter themselves was part of said MAGA gang and was not, in actual fact, a Democrat.

In response, the FCC threatened ABC and encouraged TV broadcast stations to exclude their programming, and so ABC indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s show in response.

That just about sums it up briefly.

Love the idea! What if instead of stakeholders voting on everything you implemented a “steering committee” style model. Stakeholders meet/organize at some cadence to make larger decisions and decide the direction to “steer” the instance and the smaller decisions made in service of the direction decided by committee are left to the admins (decided/maintained by committee). The committee would have veto power over those decisions.

Just thinking of communication overhead and how the more is decided by committee upfront the less agile you can be.