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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • Point of clarification: the article was semi-protected, and “locked” is an oversimplistic description of it (understandable, since a lot of people who report on Wikipedia don’t really understand how it works). Technically there’s a way to lock a page such that only the Wikimedia Foundation staff can edit it, but realistically, full protection (i.e. only administrators and those above them can edit it) is probably the closest thing to a proper “lock” that ever gets used.

    Semi-protection (the grey lock with a little person in it) just means that you need to be autoconfirmed (technically confirmed works too, but that system is basically disused). If you’re autoconfirmed, that means you’ve made at least 10 edits on Wikipedia and your account is at least 4 days old – an extremely low bar to clear that largely keeps out spam from IP addresses and sockpuppet accounts. The semi-protection on this article is set to expire in three days.

    There’s also extended protection (the blue lock with an ‘E’ on it) that you’ll generally see on highly contentious topics such as ultra-high-profile political figures, enormously contentious disputes between nations (Russia–Ukraine, Israel–Palestine, and India–Pakistan, to name a few), and then some miscellaneous ones like ‘Atlantic Records’ and ‘Whopper’ (the latter was because Burger King launched an ad which is designed to trigger your Android device to read out the first part of the Wikipedia article, making it red meat for vandals). This requires an account to have at least 500 edits and be at least 30 days old.




  • New bypass just dropped: not buying a single-player game that makes you create and log into a third-party service exclusively because that service wants money in the form of your data/wants to enforce DRM.

    Edit: the ‘Steam tho’ comments below are true and Steam’s DRM does suck (I use GOG when I can), but they miss the point I’m making, which is that if you’re buying a game through Steam, you already have the account set up to comply with the DRM. That’s just inherent to the steps of purchasing the game on Steam. Whereas for something like a Sony account here, you don’t necessarily have that, and unlike Steam for instance that at least has the value proposition of cloud saves, you’re getting fuck-all in return here. Additionally, this account is used for likely only one or two games, just introducing a needless logistical hurdle for account management. Think of how many dozens of essentially burner accounts you would have if every game publisher put this bullshit in.