With async communication, the expectation is that they can generally take as long as they need. You put your message and maybe they'll get back to you then or in 5 minutes or in an hour, etc, but they have all the information to orient themselves on their own time.

If you just go "hello" and have this synchronous chat, then there isn't time to orient yourself, because the expectation is to respond as if you're in a face-to-face convo.

Stuck on 0h 01m elapsed after 12 minutes.

Interesting. were you sitting on the tarmac for some time before takeoff?

No, I was already in the air and walking.

Can be fairly accurate perception of time on a plane.

> Asking users to email them with details of their OS, browser, IP address is just crazy.

It's surely to serve as data to help tell humans apart from bots.

> Changes made by IA shouldn't become my responsibility.

They're a free service. It's ultimately not their responsibility to service you either.

> They're a free service. It's ultimately not their responsibility to service you either.

They are a nonprofit with a mission and continue to solicitate donations based on that mission.

Imagine if Apple or Microsoft introduced a bug and said, ah yes we know about it we did that on purpose and we know it affects a huge number of people, if each of you could email us these details that'd be great. It's just such an insane request.

IA have broken it and have no real idea how to make it better so they are going to whitelist IPs or browsers or entire operating systems? Wild.

What is 'insane' here is the shear level of entitlement displayed here, including lumping a niche, free, volunteer supported service in with billion dollar, for profit corporations and demanding they pander to your inflated expectations.

Wild.

It doesn't matter who or what the service is, how much they have, or whatever else. They created a problem and now users have to pay for the inconvenience by emailing(!) specific details that could be captured automatically through web logs: OS, browser, IP address. It's ridiculous.

> details that could be captured automatically through web logs

You can't be serious. Are you ok? The entire point is that they're trying to tell bots and humans apart. They're trusting email (and how you write your email) as a good signal that you're human. What are you talking about getting it from the log? The point is to correlate. How do you expect them to know who you are in the log unless you give them that info?

> They created a problem

No, they're dealing with a problem, and compromised that some human users may unfortunately get blocked.

> and now users have to pay for the inconvenience

You don't have to anything. You can just not use them. They don't owe you their service.

Somebody is handing out free apple lollipops, they ran out, compromised on giving grape ones, and now you're complaining you're being forced to eat a grape one and you don't like grape. Don't eat it.

Lollipops?

No, it's more like you're requesting something from them and they're telling you they may need some technical, non-personally-identifiable info from you to fulfill your request.

Who do you think the Internet Archive is? They are not Google, they have very low funding, very high expenses and are constantly under legal pressure.

The fact you can even access the Internet Archive for free is a result of tens thousands of human hours striving for one goal. Digital Preservation. If you rely so much on IA, you should consider donating.

I do donate. But that doesn't mean I have to thank them before every meal or think that the service is perfect.

What do you expect them to do though? You have to be a reasonable person.

Data analysis would be a good start, better blocking heuristics, an off-the-shelf solution used by other organisations that don't have this problem, etc.

Which other organisation is as valuable to scrape as IA?

> It'd be great if I could request who sold them my data, then go to that entity tell them to stop selling (rinse and repeat)

There are a number of companies (e.g. Delete Me) that offer that service. They wouldn't have caught the subject of this post since it was a breach.

The problem here arose from ID verification where you need to show your ID to an entity that then has the opportunity to store it.

Most of these companies are themselves data harvesting scams. You have to give them all your data so they know what to delete. Then they sell that data.

This is true. I think Brian Krebs reported on a scam involving this. Some of those data deletion companies actually own the data companies...

> They tell me in a lengthy statement in part that the department would never issue an ultimatum of pay for the damage or your children will be charged. They tell me quote, "We simply don't operate that way." Rather, the department's approach was consistent among the five juveniles involved in the incident. The damage was divided equally and an opportunity was provided to address the matter through restitution rather than unnecessarily continuing juvenile proceeding.

Lol. The same thing, but obfuscated. It's not "pay for the damage"; it's "an opportunity was provided to address the matter through restitution". It's not "or your children will be charged"; it's "rather than unnecessarily continuing juvenile proceeding". Add extra fluff at the start to bury the lede, then avoid the trigger words and pretend it's something different.

"Your children won't be charged! They'll just be arrested"

It's interesting how the words can be ambiguous like that. If I think of the distinction in the context of e.g. clothes, there's likely more engineering in fast fashion and more crafting in bespoke clothing. With food, more engineering in the food items you'd find at a gas station and more crafting at a restaurant.

>> “artisanal” coders who value the experience of coding over the final product

I don't see "artisanal" as that. It may be more that they value the details rather than the experience of coding. They value the details of the final product. Details that most people will not care about. The details that are present in bespoke clothing but missing in fast fashion, the details that are present in a good restaurant's food but missing from a gas station food item.

I think this dissonance is because people currently equate the engineering with profit optimization, as were already pretty deep into the capitalism "endgame".

But in the first phase of industrialization, the quality went up - exactly because we suddenly had specific measurements and tolerances.

The markets however did what they do best: optimize for profit. And the public markets preferred cheap over quality... At least in the consumer space. Objectively quality has significantly improved across the board with every decade. Just not in consumer goods, because of their consistent spending habits

So in my mind a craftsman is something akin to an artist. Whereas an engineer provides solutions.

A craftsman differs from an artist in exactly this: an artist produces beauty while a craftsman produces an artifact that serves its purpose beautifully and robustly. The two can be combined, of course.

Don't know how modern this is, but I remember being disappointed that despite Google claiming it had billions of results, you could only see a few pages' worth.

Looking now, I've just noticed they no longer give a count of results.

Click on "Tools", you'll see the old number and search time if you so desire

Privacy-wise, it enables them to track the result you click on.

Also, though more niche, it would make archived search result pages (e.g. on the Wayback Machine) less useful.

I think they always knew what link you clicked on (when most of the web has a ga4 tag on the other side of the link)

You can block Google Analytics with your browser. You can't block needing to ask Google for the URL of the result you want to visit.

I have to anyway because google always gives me endless captchas, as my ISP frequently rotates IPs with people who can't behave.

That's just Google not caring about your ISP because you live in the global south. Everyone gets this. US citizens get the exact same problem but Google whitelists their networks.

Not just global south, happened all the time to me after first search page of the day until i stopped using them, northern eu.

> because you live in the global south

I don't, but thanks for confidently assuming.

At least Google thinks you do. And Google kind of has the power to decide where the global south is, at least as far as it pertains to captchas.

My responding to comments doesn't mean I use them.

Their point is that weekly downloads may have been on a constant rise for years due to a constant rise in popularity. It's not as constant as absolute number of downloads, but the point is that "breaking record" is still something that's likely happening frequently and doesn't need to be related to any statement they gave. They don't share any numbers, at least in the post.

> Don't use nomen as a variable name. Seriously. It's a macro for typedef

For all the warnings so far about not using nomen as a variable, wonder why not just do "typus_definire", since both "type" and "define" are Latin-derived...