Y U racist sucker no congratulate da stolen photo?

Have you ever seen posts like this one on the photo in groups, with such groups being totally unrelated to the post? There's a whole science behind it, that scam artists exploit. It evokes sympathy from gullible people, and then the latter post positive comments below for encouragement. And, religious bullshit in every comment. Eeuw.

An older version of the photo above, was to simply use a stolen photo of a pretty girl, with 'her' then saying via a bot that posted on several groups: "It's my birthday and nobody congratulated me." It's mind-numbing to see the birthday wishes stream in, thousands of it. When did people became so superbly retarded? 

The syndicate behind the scam uses a bot to make automated posts like these, and the bot then later scrape and screen the comments. Comments containing certain 'positive' words to determine the 'mood' of the comment, especially religious words, are marked as promising, with the commentators then proven to be gullible and ready to be targeted. 

Opera News Hands-down The Worst 'news service'

 

 

Ever heard of Opera News?  No, not the one that reports about news in the, well, opera music niche market. The Opera News that wasted half an hour of my day today is compliments from the well-known Opera browser, with its several innovative browsers and deemed to be one of the big players in the browsers niche. 

This particular company used to be Norwegian, and claims to still be. And somewhere the Snow Mexicans (Canadians) slips into the picture too, if my mind serves me correctly. But in reality, Opera is owned to a large degree by a Chinese company as stakeholder. 

What that means, is that all the data the browser collects about you – including those passwords you type in on various sites – goes  straight to the Chinese government. For real. It should creep you out.

Under Chinese law, any company owned by any Chinese entity have to hand over any and all data about all users without a warrant to the Chinese government. We all know what a big surveillance state China had become in the past 15 years, and the data they collect from apps and more is a tremendous amount. You think Facebook and Google is scary with their data collection? Try a browser, that collects even more. Don't let privacy statements fool you.

True, Norwegians are still involved in Opera, and for the most part they're an honest, decent people. But Chinese and Nigerians are involved too, and neither of those two nations can be trusted. I'm stating it as fact, although generalizing is never 100% accurate, of course. It's like saying all Russians are complicit in war crimes, which is only true for the 71% that supports their warlord Vladimir Putin.

 All Opera's software is proprietary, closed-source, meaning security analysts cannot review each product's code to check for spyware in there. Opera Mini, when in Extreme or High modes in the settings, first send all your data through their servers to be compressed, before passing it on to your device. Great idea, you save data, and thus money. A major selling point in poverty-stricken Africa, one of Opera's largest markets. 

But, that means Opera gets hold of whatever you have typed into a website, like your bank's site. Your passwords. Your messages on Facebook. That naughty pic you sent. And all data under those two modes are decrypted on their servers, Opera says so itself somewhere in their lengthy legalese, before being encrypted again. It remains in possession of Opera for some months, and under Chinese law with the Chinese government too.