Also, the first five digits were the same between the two numbers. Meta is guilty, but they’re guilty of grifting, not of giving a rogue AI access to some shadow database of personal details… yet? Lol

happy to help!

An example of this:

Bitcoin mining started on cpus, then moved to gpus, and now exists on dedicated asics.

A $200 GPU vs a $200 ASIC, the ASIC is going to be a faster sha256 calculator

A $2000 GPU vs a $200 ASIC, the GPU is going to be a faster sha256 calculator

A $200 GPU from today vs a $200 ASIC from 10 years ago vs a $200 CPU from today?.. You get the idea.

There’s no way to know without specific details which will be faster. You could be running software encryption on a raspberry pi from 5 years ago or the drive could be running an encryption ASIC from 10 years ago, etc

The short answer is that: all other things being equal, it will always be faster and cheaper to do things dedicated in hardware. Comparing one implementation to another, however, is always going to be an “it depends”

It’s almost certainly related to cloud-init, (the canonical tool for handling deployment automation) or Ubuntu pro (extra long support for backporting security packages to older distros, plus some conveniences). They’re pre installed as a convenience to paid users of those services, that’s the (IMHO, quite reasonable) model they use to fund the distro. I would expect that some or all of that traffic would disappear if you disable/remove those two services.

https://cloud-init.io/

https://ubuntu.com/pro

I think that holds true in this case… but I’ll be damned if the ltt screwdriver isn’t the best hand tool I’ve ever owned.

The difference is I (the contributor of content) have the same access as anyone else to the data, and could use it for my own purposes if I wanted to.

On a platform like reddit, access to the raw data is controlled and cannot be format shifted / used in any way I wanted to.

*privacy from everyone except us, which conveniently makes our ad revenue line go up.

That’s a good word. I always love learning new words. Thank you!

It’s like they think V for Vendetta was a blueprint for how to run a utopia.

I have to imagine that most of these data brokers don’t have automated ways to remove information, it’s probably designed to be as annoying as possible to prevent people from doing it en-masse. If someone on mozilla’s end has to fill out a form and mail it and deal with ~200 brokers worth of constant intentional subtle constant changes (designed to break automation) to try and make services like this harder, the $9/mo seems almost reasonable.

Context/region blocking is a very quick and inexpensive path to basic security. At work I have sets of iptables rules to block regions by country code and by context (i.e VPN provider, datacenter provider, etc). I’ve found that some services will go from tens of thousands of brute force attempts per day to 1-2 per month. It really is crazy the amount of routine attacks that come through VPN providers if you host services in the professional world.

Does this mean that legitimate users can’t use a VPN to access our services? Yes, but we also don’t sell any data to any third parties so I don’t feel so bad about it.

We could certainly un-depricate it. It’s not like we need to reinvent the wheel here as a society on this.

Nobody knows your workflow better than you. The best answer anyone can give you is “experiment and figure out what works best with the hardware you have and the software you want to run”.