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About half of lemmy today (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/memes@lemmy.ml
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Tesseract is a web client for Lemmy that was found to be secretly and arbitrarily blocking users, communities and even entire instances. You can see if you're one of the kool kidz by running

curl -s https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy | base64 -d | gunzip > policy.json

and grepping your name / instance. Further details can be found in this post.

The poem above is adapted from Bertolt Brecht's The Burning of the Books, which can be read here. If you would rather read it in the original German, go here.

When the Tesseract hardcoded The unruly users to be blocked, Teams of dull fingers entered Huge blocklists to the json. Then a banished poster, One of the best, Scanning the list of Excommunicated names, Became enraged: They'd been excluded! They rushed to their desk, Full of contemptuous wrath, To write fierce letters To the morons in power — Ban me! They typed With shaking hands — Haven't I always Reported the truth? Now here you are, Treating me like a liar! Block me!
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[–] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

Edit to add: He’s put it back up again 🤷

Wow. Guess what existed yesterday but not today?

I was about to show how the repo version and the dubvee version of the obfuscated banlists are somewhat different from each other, but it’s no longer possible now that the repo has been deleted.

git diff --no-index \
    <(curl -sL https://github.com/asimons04/tesseract/raw/refs/heads/main/static/data/policy.dat \
        | base64 -d | gunzip | gron) \
    <(curl -sL https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy \
        | base64 -d | gunzip | gron)
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  • [–] [S] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Interesting. I'm guessing the repo version is publicly viewable, but the dubvee version is the one actually implemented?

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