Agreed. It’s essentially the same as someone showing their phone, with the conversation on screen, to a third party. Now, one can argue whether such “moderation” tools are something we want at all, as a society, legally, but as it stands it’s pretty reasonable for facebook to have it implemented this way.

No “Please do not” feature will ever work. Make sure something cannot be done, then bolt on an additional “well, here is a bone” opt-in feature (incl. the option to send fake data), if you really need to. Everything else is hoping, quite unreasonably, the “threat” of a lawsuit is sufficient to stop companies from violating your expressed preference. Hint: If they gave a damn they’d not do that shit in the first place.

Professionally I am an “Architect” and not much involved in system config (anymore), what I describe below is how I do things for my own, private, servers: Not a big fan of docker, it too often means “cobbled together by a dev not understanding security implications” aka “Institutionalized ‘works on my machine’” (of course there are exceptions!). Generally I like using Ansible, because it feels close to how I learned things (ssh, manually), while still making things reproducible (Infrastructure as Code). But, again, not too big a fan of using other peoples “roles”, because you never know how well they actually understand what they’re doing. I read them for a rough understanding, but usually opt to write my own, based on careful reading of a given software’s config manual.

That applies to science, hypotheses, experiments, etc. and there I fully and wholeheartedly agree. But being one of thousands to implement a Bubble Sort has marginal educational value unless you are truly surprised it’s not exactly efficient. It might very well differ between different universities; in mine the “science” in “CS” was mostly absent until you started working on your PhD, and the rest wasn’t even good engineering, just “trying to filter out as many students as possible, as quickly as possible, by all means necessary”. They openly admitted that, and in my case they succeeded, by killing the joy of understanding and burying it under ten feet of “now reimplement this thing that has been proven worthless sixty years ago”.

I dropped out of university (I couldn’t stand being one of literally thousands working on the exact same problem, at the same time, that thousands more had solved in prior years, for decades; I wanted to solve new and real problems). I registered as “looking for work” with the appropriate government agency and their first reaction was an exasperated “Oh my! You’ll need a good coach…”. Not the most encouraging reaction… Well, they did send me a bunch of local companies with internships, entry level jobs, etc. I applied for an internship starting next month at a really small shop that did “everything web” and during the interview they asked whether I could start tomorrow 😛 (Obviously they were a coder short for an important project, but they were very happy about my knowledge and skills). I seamlessly transitioned into vocational training with the same company, which was mostly pro-forma given my background (So instead of “university drop-out” I had something to put on my CV). Later I was on loan to another, mid-size, company (which didn’t know I was still, technically, a trainee) and they offered to hire me directly. I came clean about my trainee status, switched companies, finished my training, and was hired by that same company on the spot. Stuck with them a couple of years, until they didn’t promote me from “technical project lead” to “software architect” because they only had one opening and someone else was picked (Looking back I think I would have made the same choice, so I hold no grudge), and given the company’s size that meant there likely wouldn’t be another opportunity for some years, which irked me 😛

Looking is not always sufficient, there can be embedded subshells, newlines, etc. that’ll caise execution immediately. You need to inspect it in a separate program very carefully. Frankly, you probably shouldn’t ever copy and paste anything into a shell. Type it by hand. In a similar vein there are beautiful ways to hide malicious payloads in installer scripts (e.g. inspecting the user agent do it shows up as harmles when inspected in a browser) which are ever so popular with “hip” developer tools that can’t be arsed to go through the hassle of getting included in a distro properly, because releasing ten versions a day is “modern”…