There’s a comment on one of the HN threads that gives a little more insight - basically it helps him combat abuse by routing requests to the closest server outside of the requesting ips area: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971650

Not sure how that argument really holds up to scrutiny but it’s something.

The reason I’m saying use a VPN is because you’re presumably visiting the site anyway, so leaking your full IP to them anyway. You can route your DNS lookups through what server you like, obviously. (Again, the privacy issue would be not that you’re leaking part of your IP to archive.is, but to everyone in the chain of recursive DNS resolvers). You could use TOR too, I think even in this thread someone posted a TOR url for it.

Cloudflare do make the DNS queries from 1 of their 180 locations, so there is some information being passed through about where the request is coming from in terms of load balancing.

I’m not arguing that Cloudflare are doing the wrong thing by omitting ECS data in general. Just that site owners have a right to do as they like WRT people using their website and if that includes blocking Cloudflare, so be it. What he is doing is not legal (or at least grey area) in many countries so anything that makes his life easier is understandable IMO.

Also, ECS leaking does not seem like a real concern for the vast majority of people surfing the net.

Lastly I don’t think Google own 4.4.4.4, did you mean 8.8.4.4?

JavaScript paywalls are not real paywalls. So no, Firefox can’t bypass real paywalls.

Unlucky for your company to have a CISO with such poor reading comprehension.

Archive.is can and does bypass real paywalls. That’s why it’s useful.

You literally called it a fake convenience in your previous comment. Do you have the memory of a goldfish?

Geolocation of users of course does not violate GDPR, don’t be ridiculous.

You have no idea what you’re talking about and clearly don’t understand the issue at hand, so yep, we’re done.

It’s way faster for one. It actively scrapes articles from behind paywalls, using a bank of credentials it has. Archive.org respects robots.txt and will take down copyrighted material on request. Archive.is doesn’t do any of that.

I would view it as complementary to archive.org. it’s more like sci-hub to me. A useful tool, run by one person who likes the idea of providing such a service.

What exactly do you think is being tracked by your ECS being sent along with DNS requests? All it means is that archive.is can’t load balance properly because they don’t know what their nearest server to your location is. If you’re so privacy conscious that leaking a portion of your IP to a DNS provider, then hardcode archive.is IPs into your hosts file or use a VPN. Not that your problem can really be with archive.is, because you’re visiting the site anyway, giving them your full IP.

It just seems like such a non issue to me.

Not really a paywall then, is it? I don’t know why you think it’s fake, it’s a very real convenience.

Violating my rights ? Is geolocating your users violating their rights now?

It might be terrible for you but it’s very handy for the rest of us.

If it’s so bad, maybe just pay to bypass all the paywalls that the site removes from your way. Having your local ISPs details sent through is a small price to pay for the convenience.

Speed of development. It could take months for a PR to get into Lemmy core and then a new release.

Things that get into Lemmy core have to be well thought out and the core Devs have to want them in there.

Running custom code is a way to make changes without having to get their approval, and if it proves popular enough, then maybe they’ll implement it upstream.

Your advice is applicable to your own original comment, so it seems you do agree with what I said, at least to some degree.

Anyway, in the interests of constructive discussion, let me ask you specifically. Do you think this WEI proposal is good for and why? Does the proposal mention at all what the downsides of this feature might be, or how it could be abused? Is it proposed in such a way that the dominant implementors can’t deviate later from the terms suggested in the proposal?

Seeing as you’re having such trouble with people’s reactions to this, maybe you should be the one in this thread to point out the specific reasons why individuals should be in favour of this.

FYI, whitewashing makes perfect sense to use there:

to deliberately attempt to conceal unpleasant or incriminating facts about (someone or something).

It has nothing to do with race in this context.

As an American, surely you should be much more concerned about what the US government can do with your information than what the Chinese government can do with your information.

So, don’t learn to code? If you don’t have any reason to and can’t find any motivation, maybe it’s just not for you.

But then you’ll have to learn the syntax of this instead.

I suspect that if you actually start using Melody you won’t find it as helpful as you think you might. Maybe I’m wrong. Let’s see in a year’s time.

But you can do that already in many languages using extended Regex syntax.This doesn’t add anything except more verbosity and another syntax to learn.

Who is this for? People who write lots of regular expressions won’t need it because they know what they’re doing and people who don’t write lots of regular expressions probably won’t find it anyway.

It just seems like a weird type of user who actually wants this.

I think this is not really inline with the philosophy of the main Lemmy devs. For this to happen, I think someone else would have to do the work of creating the random selection service. If it was popular enough, maybe they’d put a link on join-lemmy.org

There’s an XKCD for that: https://xkcd.com/810/

Easy, just create the equivalent of multireddits.

Can your instance not do that as is? Just spin up a bunch of fake users and make them all vote on something?