At home, libreNMS. Just SNMP everything.

For work, whatever the tool of the day is from management.

But if the scammer is using a bot too, then it becomes a null sum, since the bot can have thousands of conversations at a time.

Spam bots should be taken down more than engaged with. If there’s a real scammer on the other end, yes, absolutely, waste that person’s time as much as you can, and as much as you like. People have made entire careers out of trolling them and I endorse it. Scammers are the worst people, taking the hard earned money of his people to try to convince them of a lie just to get their money. This is sometimes true with normal sales, caveat emptor and all that, but when the entire premise of the interaction is based on deception, then to me, it crosses over into scam territory (looking at you, entire duct cleaning industry).

Wasting time making a bot to talk to spam bots is not very helpful. If you can identify that they are not properly filtering their inputs, I would invite you to use an SQL injection and talk to them about little Bobby tables. But by using a bot of your own to talk to spam bots will have such a negligible impact on the harm that scammers have that it’s basically not worth doing. Unless you can scale up your bot to the point of overwhelming the scammers bot into disfunction, it’s not going to provide any real help to those currently being scammed by the bot. Scaling up to the point of getting the bot to malfunction, is also something I would approach with caution, since you have no way of knowing what that limit is, and in the case of cloud systems, the capabilities of the bot may scale far and above what any attack against them could reasonably produce.

If they’re using cloud resources and you can verify that, then there’s a good chance you can hit them financially if you push their bot to its limits since cloud compute resources are not cheap. If you can generate enough traffic for them that the bot scales up significantly, then yeah, you may be successful in forcing the scammer paying for that to shut it down. The trick is doing so without incurring significant costs yourself. It’s still likely, however, that the scammer will simply abandon it (and not pay their bill), and restart the whole thing again later with a new telegram/whatever chat system account later that you won’t be able to track down in a reasonable timeframe.

So it’s somewhat insane to try, it’s easy for them to change the bot to avoid your usage attack and difficult for you to keep track of them and which account they’re using now.

We need to make it globally illegal to run these kinds of remote scam operations, and strongly prosecute anyone doing it. Their ill gotten gains need to be confiscated and sent back to their victims (as much of it as possible), and they should be imprisoned for a very long time.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the way. This is the only way. Legal reprocussions with strong penalties and strong law enforcement of those legalities is the only way to ensure that we crush this trend permanently. Most countries, even those where we see a lot of scamming coming from, have laws that enforce against scams; but the enforcement is very spotty, and IMO, the ramifications of being caught are far too light.

Right now, most civilians don’t really have any good recourse beyond ignoring it. Scambaiters are pretty common and they’re doing good work, even working with law enforcement to get these scammers behind bars, but even that falls far short of the action required to stop such things from continuing to happen. We need strong legislation agreed upon across international boundaries with full task forces to find and prosecute these assholes; we don’t have that, and so it continues.

If you’ve thought of it, they’ve thought of it. Plainly, there are already scam bots floating around, most of the time engaging with them makes it quite clear that they are not actual people, as long as you’re paying attention. Their side oftentimes is completely automated. Get paid send info. The “lifelike” messages they send are canned and only vary slightly from message to message.

I swear, we’ll implement bots to “combat” this stuff and it won’t do anything because it will largely just be bots talking to bots forever. There’s already a nontrivial amount of internet bandwidth consumed by spam email that just gets thrown away as it arrives, now, more and more resources are going to be poured into having bots talk at eachother for centuries without getting anywhere.

I’m a network guy, so everything in my labs use SNMP because it works with everything. Things that don’t support SNMP are usually replaced and yeeted off the nearest bridge.

For that I use librenms. Simple, open source, and I find it easy to use, for the most part. I put it on a different system than what I’m monitoring because if it shares fate with everything else, it’s not going to be very useful or give me any alerts if there’s a full outage of my main homelab cluster.

Of course, access from the internet to it, is forbidden, and any SNMP is filtered by my firewall. Nothing really gets through for it, so I’m unconcerned about it becoming a target. For the rest of my systems security is mostly reliant on a small set of reverse proxies and firewall rules to keep everything secure.

I use a couple of VPN systems to access the servers remotely, all running on odd ports (if they need port forwards at all). I have multiple to provide redundancy to my remote access, so if one VPN isn’t working due to a crash or something, I have others that should get me some measure of access.

This comment made me smile, thanks!

Imagine, if you will, being so boring that you have to pick fights about how people word things.

Listen, he said “refugees” and maybe that wasn’t the right word. But you know what? Both you and I both understood what they meant by that.

The point of language… any language is to portray ideas between different people. In that context, OP did a fantastic job of that. we understood. Job done.

Instead of providing any discussion of any value or merit, and apparently having the personality of wet cardboard, you chose to critique his word choice on how to describe those displaced by the issue.

Nobody was confused. Nobody is going to conflate the struggles of actual refugees with the inconvenience of feddit being unavailable. There’s no confusion here. Fighting to reclaim the word “refugee” when nobody gives any shits about it (except you apparently), is certainly not going to win you any awards. I promise that refugees care less about what they’re called, or who appropriates the term for inappropriate uses, and they care more about migrating to a country where they will be safe from harm.

Nobody is standing up and being proud of their refugee status, demanding that we treat their term with more respect… I know refugees, and I would think that all of them would have preferred to not have been forced to become one. Nobody chooses to be a refugee, you do it because you’re scared for your life. Scared of your neighbors, government, and national authorities. Nobody wants that.

I know that refugees are proud of the fact that they now live in a place that’s not like the place that they left, but I have yet to meet one that’s proud that they had to flee.

I’m pretty sure they couldn’t possibly give less of a shit about someone misusing the term “refugee”.

The joys of federation.

If you’re logged in on kbin, looking at a community on feddit while feddit is down, then in all likelihood, kbin simply holds the most recent copy of feddit, and it’s only showing you what it already has.

This is kind of the root of federation. Different, but the same.

I certainly can’t see anything in this picture.

There’s several segments done about the atrocious practices of trailer parks. If you do any research into how predatory it is, you wouldn’t be so excited about it.

Have you been to a trailer park?

That rumor flies in the face of the first rule doctors vow to uphold “do no harm”.

IDK about you, but killing someone for their organs is pretty damn harmful for the individual “donating” their organs.

It’s a different story if you’re braindead or hurt to the point of being capable of recovering at all, even with all of the modern science and medicine that is available.

Fact is, there’s more people in need of transplants and simply not enough viable organs to go around.

I’m not going to fault the transplant committee for denying someone over a vaccine. Simply, why give this very finite and very precious resource to someone when they’re just going to go get themselves unalived over something as dumb as a 100% preventable disease or something just because they have a brain malfunction that makes them think vaccines are bad. Especially when so many other people are literally dying without the same organs, who are more than happy to follow doctors instructions to ensure they can live a long and prosperous life with the replacement they desperately need.

It’s all rather silly.

The thing that probably bothers me the most about organ transplants in general is that if cloning research and stem cell research was allowed to proceed properly, it’s entirely possible that science could find a way to grow you a replacement of your own organs… Apart from genetic problems causing organs to fail, it would almost completely eliminate the entire demand for organs. But no, some idiots don’t want cloning because it upsets their imaginary friend.

On a related note, go fill out your donor card people. Even if you’re one of those “nobody will want my organs” type of people, do it anyways. The transplant people will figure out if your organs are viable when you no longer need them anymore. Let them figure that shit out for you. Just check the box to be a donor and don’t think about it any further.

Cooking flip flops the most… Usually baking is Imperial ( ferenheit/cups/teaspoon/tablespoon/ounce (weight), fl oz (volume), etc)… But in a single recipe, I’ve turned on the oven to 350F, and mixed a teaspoon of one ingredient into 300 mL of another, then added 300g of a third with an 8oz can of another.

It’s just completely random, even within a single recipe.

They can afford these insane security measures, and buying all the equipment that goes with it, but lowering prices? Paying their employees more? No no, that’s too much money.

I get when a company puts wheel locks to ensure carts don’t leave the property, believe it or not, buying new carts is quite expensive; each one is several hundred dollars and the store likely has nearly 100 of them, if not more. It’s not a cheap asset. I get that.

Loss due to theft is also a non-trivial problem for obvious reasons, though there’s plenty of loss due to damage, best before expiry, bad handling by workers, defective products, etc.

I’ve worked in grocery and every store I worked at had a bin on a pallet overflowing with damaged or otherwise unsellable stuff. It happens.

But, criminalizing your shoppers? The vast majority of them are people who live local, and are regular shoppers spending thousands a month on products. In business, this is the 80/20 rule. 80% of your sales comes from 20% of your clients (the ones who shop there regularly). I’m betting for grocery stores, that number is a bit different, but the concept stands. Start alienating those regular shoppers, and they will walk, and 80% of your sales get flushed down the drain as a result. It’s both shocking, and completely unsurprising to me that Loblaws doesn’t seem to understand this.

Is that a measurement relative to mass/size? Because if not, you’d need to consume a shitload of it to really do anything.

There’s a ton of studies with these problems. Researchers simply engrossing the test subject in the material until something bad happens. Unless you’re researching on a test group of humans, then suddenly all the levels are actually less than typical.

It all depends if you’re looking to prove that it’s harmful or not. Want to find it’s harmful? Get a bunch of mice and expose them to as much of whatever substance you need to in order to find a problem… Want to prove something is safe, set up a “double blind” study of the effects on humans, and give half of them regulated and limited doses of it for weeks or months until you can convince everyone that “nothing bad happened”.

I have a problem with research done in either way. Researchers should be neutral, and just test and let the data speak for itself. (With limited interpretation for the people who read it)

Instead, almost all research is funded by someone with an agenda who is trying to find out if x is good/bad, and prove or disprove a specific stance. Argh

I think we should defederate any corp version of any federated app. Not due to privacy or anything, but because it silos anyone using those services from everyone else. Bluntly, I don’t want people’s B.S. propeganda on the fediverse, and the stupid crap conspiracy farm that Facebook and other places have become.

I’m sure it won’t stop the stupid from reaching us, but it should limit the amount and impact that those users have. Additionally, it will remove a lot of high quality content from those services making them less viable for corps to run and maintain. They will happily farm the fediverse for content to attract users they can monitize… I’m not a fan of handing them more content to steal while they share zero of the profits of that content with either the creators or the communities that handle that data.

I’m not doing their job for them in promoting entertaining and informative posts just so they can make money on it. They want it, they can put forth the effort themselves.

IMO, probably because you couldn’t on Reddit… People haven’t figured out that this platform allows more freedom to users than Reddit does.