Posts by smalldot 23 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Sep 2013
This topic has appeared in my social media repeatedly. It seems everyone is assuming Linux distros will implement something for all users. For the whole world. Instead of just adding a download for California, Colorado, et al. I don't understand their logic. Why would teams want to push their users away towards those distros that do not comply?
It could even be as simple as asking country location. If United States, then enable age verification.
Article mentions countries that ban WhatsApp, such and China and their re-education camps.
I'm pretty sure governments in those countries get a list of WhatsApp users directly from mobile operators. And that includes not just phone number, but name and billing address as well. And real-time location data.
When a government starts to spy on citizens who haven't committed any crimes, that's crossing the line. In that case it is ok to dox involved officials and people who work for companies building attack tools mentioned in the article. They, and their families, should not enjoy any privacy at all.
I am still experimenting on what specific tasks I even want to use LLM for. It has always felt quite wasteful for some simpler questions, even when it saves 30 seconds of time compared to finding the correct Stack Overflow answer. This made me expect pricing changes. I've no idea will the limits affect my use or not, I guess I'll find out.
Yes, the Winter War and Soviet occupation of Baltics 1940 likely convinced Finnish leadership that Soviet Union would attack again in any case. Thus pushing the border East was seen as an advantage, and Germany as ally better than fighting alone.
I have no major complaints with Windows 11 Pro. It works just as well as Win 7 or 10 did, as long as that TPM/hardware requirement is met.
I used to look for separate drivers when installing Windows. Motherboard chipset, CPU, audio chipset. Not needed anymore. Even HP Laserjet printer works after three clicks: add printer, select found printer, OK. Games run fine. Hyper-V virtual machine for banking tasks to keep them separated from other apps. Windows sandbox for opening suspicious links or meme sites found in Reddit. I encrypt my documents locally before syncing to Onedrive (there's an open source app for this).
For coding stuff my projects live in Ubuntu WSL that runs containers and linux apps, and VS Code integrates with them. Microsoft has done good work improving WSL under Windows.
Could I do all this with Mac OS or Linux? Yes, absolutely.
The US and UK may come to regret they didn't murder Assange. They could have poisoned him using some nerve agent, while tightening sanctions against Russia. Just to remind Putin who is the boss.
Seriously though, the number of people who have publicly called Assange a rapist shows how well the propaganda machine works in the West. Another example was how the media claimed Assange was paranoid and crazy in his Embassy prison. That he believed the walls had ears and everyone was spying on him. Next thing we know a Spanish court detailed how the Americans had paid the security firm responsible of protecting the embassy. They installed cameras and microphones everywhere, even the toilets. Assange whole life in the embassy was livestreamed into the US. Including confidential discussions with his lawyers on the court case against him.
I hope the five eyes force their technology companies to adopt this proposal. Maybe then more people would start to use open source alternatives. Or maybe then European companies would get a boost in their hopeless attempts to compete with giants who have unlimited cash to spend.
May I suggest a podcast called "Malicious Life". Ran Levi is an amazing host and the episodes contain his analysis of cyber security topics. In two latest episodes (season 3), Ran tells the story of the Great firewall of China. And how it was built. Ran Levi interviews people and tells what happened. He leaves it to the listener to make their own judgement based on facts.
Can you guess which companies competed against each other to get to build China's totalitarian surveillance system from ground up when China's internet market opened two decades ago? Who made lucrative deals to provide network equipment, engineered monitoring of every Chinese net user and connected Chinese police and authorities to the system? Who trained Chinese engineers to operate and continue expanding the system? Answer is Western companies of course. And Nortel made more deals than anyone else.
Yep, platforming was my only serious complaint with Doom Eternal. I just had to keep playing. After a few hours I learned the controls and could start enjoying the battles. Best part is there is no need to follow the story, kill anything that moves is still all that is needed.
I have seen many detailed and graphic videos from Afghanistan or Pakistan where an AC-130 or helicopter gunships kills people. In each case they take great care to kill everyone in the area. Doesn't matter if people were armed or not, trying to surrender, run away or hide. Everyone gets killed. The last alive are hunted down one by one. Bodies are fired upon one more time, to make sure they are dead.These videos were widely shared by media and the same internet companies. Lots of people cheering in the comment sections.
So is the Christchurch video any different? Yes and no. It's all subjective.
Your understanding is correct as far as the original ETSI/3GPP standards definition goes. But there are countries that have national legislation saying emergency calls will not be allowed unless the phone has a SIM card (and transmits the identifier of said card to network). A quick Google search says UK is a country where a valid active SIM is required.
I understand the need to reduce hoax calls by trying to identify idiots who makes them. But this can make a costly lesson for people from other countries who are used to having an extra phone laying around just for emergencies.
Where is the evidence that Kaspersky products are in any way more harmful than competing AV products?
I have understood that AV programs are risky because they 1) constantly download updates from the internet, 2) accept any type of code or binary input to scan, and 3) attempt to decode or uncompress the input binary or even run it in a sandbox to see how it behaves. It's not difficult to believe that a serious attacker could try to use the AV product to attack company networks.
But why would any AV company knowingly co-operate with government spies? That would be commercial suicide. Their whole business is based on trust. All the US has to do is to publish evidence on Kaspersky working with Russian spies, and the whole world will instantly uninstall Kaspersky AV. Or is it perhaps so, that soon we will learn about another NSA tool that uses Kaspersky AV to infect target machines?
I think all keyloggers need to hide from virus scanners. The AV companies cannot know whether a program is used legally or not, they will trigger an alarm for every keylogger they find. Not all users are clever enough to know how to set an exception (white-list) in their AV scanner tool.
I thought it is the telcos themselves who update SIM card contents using SMS commands. Is there something to prevent telcos from filtering SMS messages based on content? In other words, if SMS is an over-the-air command to SIM and it did not originate from operator's own server, delete it.
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