senate.be is configured to push a broken CAPTCHA to Tor users.

Love the irony and simultaneous foreshadowed embarrassment of Elon denying availability and service as a way to be more efficient.

The irony

Cloudflare enables web admins to be extremely bloated. Admins of Cloudflared websites have no incentive to produce lean or efficient websites because Cloudflare does the heavy lifting for free (but at the cost of reduced availability to marginalized communities like Tor, VPNs, CGNAT, etc). So they litter their website with images and take little care to choose lean file formats or appropriate resolutions. Cloudflare is the #1 cause of web inefficiency.

Cloudflare also pushes countless graphical CAPTCHAs with reckless disregard which needlessly wastes resources and substantially increases traffic bloat -- all to attack bots (and by side-effect text-based users) who do not fetch images and thus are the most lean consumers of web content.

The embarrassment

This is a perfect foreshadowing of what we will see from this department. “Efficienc

A lot of gov services use the same shitty social networks. But it’s just a bit extra disgusting when the FCC uses them along with the not-so social platforms. It’s an embarrassment.

The FCC privacy policy starts with:

“The FCC is committed to protecting the privacy of its visitors.”

Fuck no they aren’t. And we expect the FCC in particular to be well aware of the platforms that would make their privacy claim a true statement.

In particular:

• MS Github (98 repositories and maybe a bit strange that they are hosting UK stuff there.
• MS LinkedIn: “Visit our LinkedIn profile for information on job openings, internships, upcoming events, consumer advice, and news about telecommunications.” ← At least it’s openly readable to non-members. But I clicked APPLY on an arbitrary job listing (which had no contact info) and I was ignored, probably for not having a LinkedIn ac

I wouldn't lump Github with Facebook or Twitter because, at its core, it's just a plain jane git server. If you stick to core features, you can exfiltrate your repos at any time in seconds and move them someplace else. And you can interact with Github's git server with open-source, fully documented tools.

It's the extended features Github offers that lock you in - the social media stuff and advanced git tools. So if you want to give Microsoft the finger, use Github only for basic services.

Me, I host all my repos there, and I use them also to host videos and as Linux distro repositories (apt and rpm) for my packages: I make it my duty to use up as many Microsoft resources as possible without paying them a dime and without giving them any edge to lock me in.

I am certain this community is not instantly popular. Even in the fediverse most people are fine with walled-gardens (we know this from Lemmy World). So just pointing out it’s interesting that 35 bots instantly monitor new communities as soon as they are created.

(BTW: “metapost” in the subject means it’s an off-topic post about the community itself. It’s not a reference to that shitty corp that has hijacked a generic word for commercial exploitation)

Facebook is used to make announcements to RUC students. The internal RUC website (outside of Facebook) is littered with FB references.

There are social events that are officially school-sanctioned which appear exclusively on Facebook.

Some might say “fair enough” because social events are non-essential and purely for entertainment. However, RUC has organized all the coursework around group projects. A culture of social bonding is considered important enough to justify having school-sanctioned parties on campus. The organisers have gone as far as to strategically divide student parties and to discourage intermingling across the parties so that students form more bonds with the peers they work with academically. Social bonding is an integral component of the study program.

Announcing these social events exclusively on Facebook creates an irresistible temptation for non-Facebook users to join. Students face an ultimatum: either become a serf of Facebook, or accept social isolation.