For those unfamiliar with the story, "The Emperor's New Clothes" is about an emperor who parades around naked, but nobody will point out the obvious for fear of being seen as ignorant. Idiomatically, it refers to something seen as true or widely praised, simply because nobody is willing to speak out against it.

I saw a rant about "blockchains" being the new overhyped hotness for tech companies, and it made me wonder what other "new clothes" are out there right now. What's something you have a strong takedown for that everybody else seems to love/support?

I volunteer with several small nonprofits. A few weeks ago, one of them got a spam message from a "volunteer" offering to create a free website for the organization and disclosing a connection to DonorComplete. There was no unsubscribe link. I hit Google, which eventually led me to a thread on TechSoup where I commented with what I had found to that date under the same user name: http://forums.techsoup.org/cs/community/f/24/t/43439.aspx This & other results showed that the "free" website is linked to historically very expensive hosting (historically , ~ $20-$40/mo, now showing about $10/mo) for a static website with very limited support or options.

My research continued intermittently, but there appears to be a network of over 100 domains (active, expired, dormant and/or returning server errors) connected to spam efforts over roughly the last 6 years, questionable marketing tactics dating back to ~ 1998, 4 overlapping corporations with one man as a central figure, several throwaway email addresses and a couple that seem to be dedicated & longer running, a handful of apparently dedicated servers and several shared servers with many connected domains hosted. The messages target nonprofit organizations and churches, with 4 textual variations posted via email, mailing lists, and comments. The first archived comments I found targeted FOSS project mailing lists. Based on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, many small nonprofits used their service years ago, but it looks like the spammers' services have been largely abandoned over the last few years - probably why the new campaign started ~ June.

I've filed complaints with two of the registrars, and at least one of the recently active domains appears to be in non-hosted status. Would there be any interest in my posting a thread with the details of what I've found so far (spreadsheets and mind maps in progress)? Would anyone be interested in helping me present the data in a more easily digestible format a la r/dataisbeautiful? Or can anyone recommend an easier way to report the registrant tied to the spam? I'm not trying to start a witch hunt, but these people seem to have flown under the radar for a long time, and I know many small nonprofits aren't tech savvy enough to recognize the warning signs these folks present.

So I was following this discussion on Reddit today about someone finding evidence of Russia trolls finding a safe haven on reddit and the admins not addressing it.

And then also this one on Tildes that clears up why the OP deleted his account and the Reddit admin's overall poor response.

So I was wondering...is there any way to fix reddit? I've all but left it, but I really wish it wasn't so horrible a place to be.

In one of the reddit threads, a user posted an idea of having many many redditors all refuse to log in to reddit for a single day as a protest against how the site is being ran. Would this be advisable or effective? What other things could be done to "wake up" the site owners to what has been going on for so long?

EDIT: Here was the reddit admin team's response to the incident.

I do the following:

• Use a VPN (NordVPN)
• Use Firefox with a tweaked about:config and the following security extensions:
  • uBlock Origin
  • NoScript
  • HTTPS Everywhere
  • Privacy Badger
  • Decentraleyes
  • Cookie Autodelete
  • Skip Redirect
  • CanvasBlocker
• Run Linux Mint (I know, Ubuntu-based distros aren't ideal but I'm a Linux beginner)
• Don't have any social media as of a year ago
• Don't use any Google services, including YouTube, Google Search, or Gmail
• Use a password manager (KeePassXC)

The next step would be for me to switch from iPhone to Android running Lineage OS, but money is a bit tight right now. As for day-to-day lifestyle choices, I try to use cash whenever possible and never sign up for things like store rewards programs.

What's your setup? Do you consider yourself a privacy-minded individual? Are you more concerned with protecting yourself from corporate or government entities?