From e1c7eb047b98cce708b98f1184021db3955d7258 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Lethe Beltane Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2022 07:37:54 -0600 Subject: [PATCH] New post: It's insane, the things you can get simply by asking --- blog/2019/august/consumption.html | 5 + blog/2019/december/death-of-a-gopher.html | 57 ---------- blog/2019/may/REWRITE_gender-critical.html | 35 ------ blog/2019/may/gender-critical.html | 41 +++++++ blog/2020/april/vow.html | 7 +- blog/2021/september/not-harmful.html | 7 +- blog/2022/april/blood.html | 5 + blog/2022/november/asking.html | 126 +++++++++++++++++++++ blog/2022/october/yggdrasil.html | 2 +- blog/index.html | 2 +- feed.ass | 1 + img/hidden/lethe.png | Bin index.html | 6 +- 13 files changed, 193 insertions(+), 101 deletions(-) delete mode 100755 blog/2019/december/death-of-a-gopher.html delete mode 100755 blog/2019/may/REWRITE_gender-critical.html create mode 100755 blog/2019/may/gender-critical.html create mode 100755 blog/2022/november/asking.html mode change 100644 => 100755 img/hidden/lethe.png diff --git a/blog/2019/august/consumption.html b/blog/2019/august/consumption.html index 904fe2b..b75c1b9 100755 --- a/blog/2019/august/consumption.html +++ b/blog/2019/august/consumption.html @@ -29,5 +29,10 @@

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander

+ + diff --git a/blog/2019/december/death-of-a-gopher.html b/blog/2019/december/death-of-a-gopher.html deleted file mode 100755 index ef04861..0000000 --- a/blog/2019/december/death-of-a-gopher.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,57 +0,0 @@ - - - - - Death Of A Gopher - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios - - - - - - -
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Death Of A Gopher

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published: 2019-12-14

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The wire bars of the golden cage bend open just a little farther, enough for me to stick my head out: I have a job now! A part-time job, I should clarify, so I won't be able to move out anytime soon, but the tiny sprout of something is better than the black hole of nothing.

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The new revenue stream means that, unless something catastrophic happens like a mass deplatforming or getting fired, MayVaneDay can stay on its own stable VPS indefinitely.

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Thanks to college payments, my bank balance dropped below a comfortable amount sometime in October, so I moved everything to the Raspberry Pi on my desk in my room for the following two months since it would be free. Surprisingly enough, even though IPv4 was blocked to hell, IPv6 was completely open, so I could run whatever the hell I wanted!

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Except for pygopherd. Because pygopherd only supported IPv4. So my Gopher mirror was shot to hell, and because there's no point in updating a mirror that nobody can use, I let the whole thing fall into disrepair. Everything else I struggled to keep online since the router at home likes to periodically disconnect every device and refuse to let them back on for hours on end, so I put a line in the crontab to reboot the Pi at midnight every night to force it to reconnect and crossed my fingers that the ZeroNet mirror would finally get some seeders.

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Which it did, thanks to a little exposure! And it was easier to maintain than Gopher, since all I had to do was change all the absolute links to relative links, as opposed to Gopher where I had to also strip out all the images and CSS (since most everyone views Gopher in a terminal, and what would be the point of transmitting things they couldn't see?) That would be "bloat". And everyone hates "bloat".

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Why? Why should I care about bloat? Who even defines "bloat", anyway? Some authoritarian jerk who can't even be fucked to use proper grammar? Is "bloat" defined by lines of code, or megabytes of RAM used, or the mental strain required to remember how to use the program? Sure, most of us can agree that Windows 10 with all the spyware options enabled with five browsers and seventeen autostart-on-boot programs and one of those unironically being Discord is bloat, but where do we draw the line from there? Where does the red side of the spectrum line officially turn blue? At the beginning, where it's no longer pure #FF0000? Only when it's pure #0000FF, and we've devolved into cavemen using stick figure pictures to communicate with each other? But aren't pictures bloat? Or is it language? Speaking? Writing? Thinking?

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It can't be being dead, for part of decomposing is intestinal bacteria producing gases, which makes one rather... bloated.

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Maybe I want decadence! Maybe I want lavish websites with pleasing color schemes and little image icons as buttons! (Given that the buttons have alt text, of course.) Maybe I want reflowable text and custom fonts that won't break the UI! Maybe I want pages with a thousand faces that reinvent themselves every page load! Maybe I want websites that I can zip up in a single archive and throw wherever I damn please, instead of asking permission from some purposely convoluted database!

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Maybe I want the crazy and macabre, the spirited and alive!

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And maybe I want transport security too, which Gopher seems to have a little problem with. And the proposed fix, which I must admit is the best fix to Gopher possible without scrapping the whole thing and reinventing HTTP, can't be easily implemented because of all those ancient machines bogging everyone else down. And heaven forbid we leave them out. Seriously, a protocol with absolutely no transport security- what kind of a braindead idea is Gopher? Are you okay with having every word thrown down the pipe accessible to your ISP to log and peer into and inject whatever they want into it? And signing every post with PGP won't help, since your key would also be transmitted in plaintext: if your government really wanted to fuck you over, they could just make your ISP reroute all requests to that particular Gopher server to their own and substitute their own PGP keys, and you'd be none the wiser. There would be no possible trust that a specific post was written by a specific person, unless you'd received their keys through a different, more secure channel. In which case: what's the point?

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Security through obscurity is no security at all, and I've lived enough of my life as an insecure sniffling little imitation of a human being.

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In tangentially related news, I'm deleting my Github and Keybase accounts.

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I've already known of the Microsoft acquisition for some time now. But the main problem with Github is the network effect: without an account, one can't easily submit bug reports or pull requests. My Github page has mainly sat abandoned since that one Python class I took last year at college, the exception being the aforementioned bug reports.

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I signed up for Keybase at the start of October of 2018, right after the explosive aftermath of the Lucine saga, where I was worried that one of the Tumblrites I'd pissed off would start impersonating me in attempts to get me in trouble with the law. My line of thought was that, if I had some kind of centralized official service where I could prove exactly what websites and social media accounts I was in control of, the likelihood of someone else to successfully put on my personage like a meat puppet would be effectively zero.

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So why leave now?

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Long story short:

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  • Keybase made a big deal about their Stellar airdrop. Woo! Everyone gets up to $500 in free cryptocurrency! I wake up one morning, and suddenly I'm $20 richer.
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  • A shitton of spam bots sign up for Keybase, Github, and Hacker News. The latter two complain to Keybase, who cancels the October airdrop and changes the requirements to receiving an SMS from a relatively short list of countries, notable for essentially saying "fuck you" to anyone living in Canada.
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  • Stellar, the cryptocurrency they were giving out, peaks for a few days (around $0.08) and then plummets (to $0.05).
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  • The spam bots get worse, sending unsolicited messages and requests for payment. Yours truly got a few spam followers, but no weird messages.
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  • Keybase, feeling the heat, says "fuck it" and cancels the whole airdrop so nobody gets anything after 2019 ends.
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Which would be all fine and dandy if Keybase had asked users if they had wanted to participate first, instead of automatically adding a Stellar wallet to every account the first month of the airdrop. Keybase took the private keys of its users and automatically signed a payment address onto their profiles without their consent, which they themselves define as a backdoor. And there is currently no way to remove the Stellar wallet from one's profile.

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And while Keybase technically lets you have the secret keys to the Stellar wallet, meaning one could theoretically use a different wallet app, the issue remains that none of this should have happened without the users' consent- and that Keybase violated it for a glorified promotion.

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If they have the ability to do this, even if it's for (disputably) benevolent purposes, what's to stop them from getting malicious in the future?

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There are smaller issues with Keybase as well. The desktop app doesn't work on Tails, for one. The FUSE filesystem mounts automatically and doesn't seem to be removable, which can mess up df -h counts, even though technically Ubuntu's Snap system has the same problem. And, the most egregious one in my eyes, is that it's centralized.

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There is no further reason for me to be using Keybase or Github, and the upcoming new decade is the perfect excuse to do some spring winter cleaning.

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CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander

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- - diff --git a/blog/2019/may/REWRITE_gender-critical.html b/blog/2019/may/REWRITE_gender-critical.html deleted file mode 100755 index cb51198..0000000 --- a/blog/2019/may/REWRITE_gender-critical.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,35 +0,0 @@ - - - - - So I guess I'm gender-critical now - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios - - - - - -
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So I guess I'm gender-critical now

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published: 2019-05-23

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I am biologically female.

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That's not hate speech. I was born female. I have female genitals. Had I been born a male, my parents would have had me circumcised, but instead I was a girl, so I was spared for the time being. I was raised female, with all the emotional trappings and socialization and enforced femininity that comes as such. I grew up with the societal expectation that I would get married to a man and have children and live a standard suburban life, an expectation that the vast majority of people in my life still operate under despite being quite vocal in recent years that I have no intention of reproducing.

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At the end of 2014, after my first girlfriend cheated on me (which I don't want to elaborate on), I came out as bisexual to my parents and slowly my friends (at the time). Starting the summer of 2016, as the sudden fluxes of puberty settled into something resembling the rhythm of womanhood and my dysphoria flared up in response, I toyed with the idea of being nonbinary.

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Labels are not intended to be permanent once first applied. Not to political positions, or religious affiliation, or things like gender or sexuality. Labels are for accurately describing experiences. One's loyalty should be to reflecting the truth of themselves, not clinging to labels as if they were the last lifeboats leaving the Titanic. If that means changing the labels one uses as shorthand for all the intricacies of themselves, then so be it.

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As my time at college draws to a close, I've been doing a lot of self-reflection. Who I am, where I want to go on life. And as it turns out, I'm... not attracted to men. All the men I've ever been attracted to have been fictional, far out of my social standing, or held power over me in some capacity. Either they had no capacity to actually hurt me, or they did, and my subconscous mind thought that, if I got close to them, I would somehow be "spared" from whatever danger it was picking up on. Not actual attraction, but a defense mechanism. Hardly something that could ever blossom into a healthy relationship.

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Even to one not knee-deep in the clusterfuck that is the postmodern gender theory sphere, it's obvious that a woman exclusively attracted to other women is called a... lesbian.

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An admission to which one might respond, "but what about fem-aligned nonbinary people? You can't tell what gender someone is by looking at them! And what about women who look like men?" To which I would respond, I am not attracted to male genitals. I am not attracted to the male physiology. A masculine woman's presentation will always have that undertone of womanness underneath it, which makes it special, what I'm attracted to, different from a masculine man or any other kind of man. (And there's a whole discourse on biological men who identify as female and are attracted to women and how lesbians should feel about that, and how trans activist rhetoric can get kind of rapey at times concerning this... but that's a post for another day.)

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And, as it turns out, I'm not nonbinary either. Because the idea of "nonbinary" genders has been historically used to oppress gender-non-conforming people, and given that there is no definite meaning of what a nonbinary person transitioning would entail, it's kind of a... useless designation. Not to mention that it implies that one could simply "identify" in or out of sex-based oppression: I can barely get the people in my college to address me with they/them pronouns, and they're supposed to be super liberal and accepting about that kind of stuff! Do you really think that some random attacker on the street prowling for his next rape victim is going to care about what a pronoun pin says? I look like a female. I sound like a female. Everything about me screams "female", and no amount of "identifying" as something other than female is going to change biological reality.

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Societal reasons aren't enough to get me to stop being something. If that were true, you'd still be reading this on a WordPress blog, and I'd have announced that this post went up via Twitter. As for personal reasons... I am still dysphoric. I still have dreams where I have a male body. But now I realize that most of it was because of these societal expectations that I so heavily resent being bound with. The technology side of the sphere on the internet that I inhabit (or used to inhabit, anyway) is heavily male-dominated. Back during the summer of 2018, when I was struggling through anhedonia, I spent a lot of time on chans, where the prevailing culture towards women is generally "tits or GTFO". And society in general, where I'm "too weak" or "too emotional" or "too-lighthearted". Being a man on the internet afforded me status, greater mobility, a greater likelihood of being taken seriously. And despite whatever book titles I use, I've never been great at the whole duality of spirit thing, so my brain took my mental reality and tried to apply it to my physical reality as well. And then, as a result, dysphoria.

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This isn't to say that I'm a radfem now. A lot of radical feminist rhetoric centers around women and men being two different social classes, collectivizing everyone and their experiences based on their biological sex. There are times when this is greatly useful, like examining religion's misogynistic influence on culture. But I believe in individual rights over all. They are extremely rare, few and far between, but there are genuinely good men in this world. And innocent individuals, no matter if they're male or female, should not have to suffer for the sins of the larger group that they did not personally commit.

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CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander

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- - diff --git a/blog/2019/may/gender-critical.html b/blog/2019/may/gender-critical.html new file mode 100755 index 0000000..f0cae1c --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/2019/may/gender-critical.html @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ + + + + + So I guess I'm gender-critical now - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios + + + + + +
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So I guess I'm gender-critical now

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published: 2019-05-23

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updated: 2022-11-20

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I am biologically female.

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That's not hate speech. I was born female. I have female genitals. Had I been born a male, my parents would have had me circumcised, but instead I was a girl, so I was spared for the time being. I was raised female, with all the emotional trappings and socialization and enforced femininity that comes as such. I grew up with the societal expectation that I would get married to a man and have children and live a standard suburban life, an expectation that the vast majority of people in my life still operate under despite being quite vocal in recent years that I have no intention of reproducing.

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At the end of 2014, after my first girlfriend cheated on me (which I don't want to elaborate on), I came out as bisexual to my parents and slowly my friends (at the time). Starting the summer of 2016, as the sudden fluxes of puberty settled into something resembling the rhythm of womanhood and my dysphoria flared up in response, I toyed with the idea of being nonbinary.

+

Labels are not intended to be permanent once first applied. Not to political positions, or religious affiliation, or things like gender or sexuality. Labels are for accurately describing experiences. One's loyalty should be to reflecting the truth of themselves, not clinging to labels as if they were the last lifeboats leaving the Titanic. If that means changing the labels one uses as shorthand for all the intricacies of themselves, then so be it.

+

As my time at college draws to a close, I've been doing a lot of self-reflection. Who I am, where I want to go on life. And as it turns out, I'm... not attracted to men. All the men I've ever been "attracted" to have been fictional, far out of my social standing, or held power over me in some capacity. Either they had no capacity to actually hurt me, or they did, and my subconscious mind thought that, if I got close to them, I would somehow be "spared" from whatever danger it was picking up on. Not actual attraction, but a defense mechanism. Hardly something that could ever blossom into a healthy relationship.

+

Even to one not knee-deep in the clusterfuck that is the postmodern gender theory sphere, it's obvious that a woman exclusively attracted to other women is called a... lesbian.

+

An admission to which one might respond, "but what about fem-aligned nonbinary people? You can't tell what gender someone is by looking at them! And what about women who look like men?" To which I would respond, I am not attracted to male genitals. I am not attracted to the male physiology. A masculine female's presentation will always have that undertone of femaleness underneath it, which makes it special, what I'm attracted to, different from a masculine male or any other kind of male. We can discourse all day about the defintion of the word "woman", but no amount of redefining "woman" as a misogynistic stereotype will make me attracted to a male.

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And, as it turns out, I'm not nonbinary either. Because the idea of "nonbinary" genders has historically been used to slot gender-non-conforming people into a "failed at assigned gender role" category, and given that there is no definite meaning of what a nonbinary person transitioning would entail, it's kind of a... useless designation. Not to mention that it implies that one could simply "identify" in or out of sex-based oppression: I can barely get the people in my college to address me with they/them pronouns, and they're supposed to be super liberal and accepting about that kind of stuff! Do you really think that some random attacker on the street prowling for his next rape victim is going to care about what a pronoun pin says? I look like a female. I sound like a female. Everything about me screams "female", and no amount of "identifying" as something other than female is going to change biological reality.

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Societal reasons aren't enough to get me to stop being something. If that were true, you'd still be reading this on a WordPress blog, and I'd have announced that this post went up via Twitter. (Or Mastodon, now that I'm rewriting this post in 2022 and Twitter is up in flames.) As for personal reasons... I am still dysphoric. I still have dreams where I've managed to get a double mastectomy and a perfectly androgynous body and nobody saddles me with the gender role of "woman". But now I realize that most of it was because of these societal expectations that I so heavily resent being bound with. The technology side of the sphere on the internet that I inhabit (or used to inhabit, anyway) is heavily male-dominated. Back during the summer of 2018, when I was struggling through anhedonia, I spent a lot of time on chans, where the prevailing culture towards women is generally "tits or GTFO". And society in general, where I'm "too weak" or "too emotional" or "too-lighthearted". Being a man on the internet afforded me status, greater mobility, a greater likelihood of being taken seriously.

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If my dysphoria is the result of societal messaging saying that I'm inferior for being a female, then why the hell do I have to change? Why should I? Why should I take hormones and get surgery and make myself into a lifelong medical patient in search for a salvation that will never come? I stand alone in the wilderness, and my desired androgyny feels sterile, lifeless, out of place. I stand alone in the wilderness, and nothing hurts.

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CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander

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+ + + + diff --git a/blog/2020/april/vow.html b/blog/2020/april/vow.html index 605562b..5110ca2 100755 --- a/blog/2020/april/vow.html +++ b/blog/2020/april/vow.html @@ -23,7 +23,7 @@

But I bring you readers here today on my twentieth birthday, or whenever you read this (for the written word cares not about the linear aspect of time), to witness me make my own vow. I offer it to none other than myself, just as binding as those words spoken at the altar to hoped and hopeful.

It is said that a person who enters into association with any group, codified or not, will inevitably end up assuming at least some of their values. This happens regardless of whether or not the person wants this to happen, or if they are even aware that they are slowly being absorbed into the collective.

When I was with the Tumblr otherkin, I simped for the Tumblr otherkin. And they led me away from myself, ensnared in the promise of companionship and a shared pining for an inaccessible past.

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When I was with the chippies, I simped for the chippies. And they led me away from myself, ensnared in the promise of companionship and a shared hatred of software bloat.

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When I was with the chippies, I simped for the chippies. And they led me away from myself, ensnared in the promise of companionship and a shared hatred of software bloat.

When I was with the Gopher Gang, I simped for the Gopher Gang. And they led me away from myself, ensnared in the promise of companionship and a shared hatred for the excesses of the modern internet.

Over and over and over again, I find myself joining groups and communities in the vain hopes that they will augment myself, allow myself to be more than what I envision I can be. Sometimes I even do it on purpose out of boredom. I tittilate myself for hours on end with treatises and theories on the extreme fringes of the political spectrum, wandering from anarcho-capitalism to their communist-and-adjacent brothers to the rolling plains of nomadism, coming home to agorism, falling down a stone well into the underworld and anarcho-nihilism and accelerationism. I wander in the shadowy valleys of state-ambivalent egoism and I crawl in the harsh nigh-blinding light of the Kybalion.

But they are all as a spider inviting a butterfly into its web under pretenses of holding a lovely conversation. A beautiful guest enters a beautiful house, slowly being bound and prepared for annihilation all the while.

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CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander

+ + diff --git a/blog/2021/september/not-harmful.html b/blog/2021/september/not-harmful.html index f365694..422e303 100755 --- a/blog/2021/september/not-harmful.html +++ b/blog/2021/september/not-harmful.html @@ -20,7 +20,7 @@

But what does it mean to be "harmful", anyway? Let's open a dictionary (or just dictionary.com) and see:

harmful: adj. causing or capable of causing harm; injurious: a harmful idea; a harmful habit.

So a piece of "harmful" software would be one that caused the user harm or is capable of doing so. I specify the user because software meant to facilitate piracy might "harm" a corporation's profits, or a tool to break through firewalls might "harm" a control freak's attempt to filter the outside world, but I do not think a reasonable person would consider any of those programs harmful. The user in this sense must also be extended to the computer the user, well, uses, as impairing a person's tools would also impair their ability to complete whatever tasks they were using the tools for, thus harming the user albeit indirectly.

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Right and away, we can consider all malware and viruses to be "harmful" under this definition, for hopefully obvious reasons. If a program is so poorly written that it results in catastrophic data loss or leaks information to parties said information was not intended for, it is harmful because it has done tangible harm to the user. But much like trying to determine what's bloat and what's not, the waters turn murky from here. What makes a program harmful, if not for its actual capacity to do harm to the user? According to the types of people who unironically still use "considered harmful" in Current Year, some of the reasons include:

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Right and away, we can consider all malware and viruses to be "harmful" under this definition, for hopefully obvious reasons. If a program is so poorly written that it results in catastrophic data loss or leaks information to parties said information was not intended for, it is harmful because it has done tangible harm to the user. But much like trying to determine what's bloat and what's not, the waters turn murky from here. What makes a program harmful, if not for its actual capacity to do harm to the user? According to the types of people who unironically still use "considered harmful" in Current Year, some of the reasons include: