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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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    • Not providing a platform for activities that harm society (e.g. scams, disinformation).
    • Not providing a platform for activities that will get you sued or prosecuted (e.g. piracy, child porn).
    • They had to pay a considerable amount for the service.

    On social media, putting the burden of blocking on a million users is naive because:

    • Blocks can be worked around with bots, someone has to actively fight circumvention.
    • Some users don’t have the time to block, simply conclude “this is a hostile environment” and leave.
    • Some users fall for scams / believe the disinfo.

    I have once helped others build an anonymous mix network (I2P). I’m also an anarchist. On Lemmy however, support decentralization, defederating from instances that have bad policies or corrupt management, and harsh moderation. Because the operator of a Lemmy instance is fully exposed.

    Experience has shown that total freedom is a suitable policy for apps that support 1-to-1 conversations via short text messages. Everything else invites too much abuse. If it’s public, it will have rules. If it’s totally private, it can have total freedom.


  • perestroika@lemm.eetoFediverse@lemmy.worldSlrpnk.net outage
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    23 hours ago

    Thanks for the info, a healthy amount of real life awaits then. :)

    I knew it was running on solar energy and old hardware so I guessed something like this had happened. :)

    If you need fail-over to awaken a backup system when the primary fails, things can be designed. :)








  • How to make Saudia Arabia a normal society?

    • deny it income
    • deny it access to advanced technology
    • deny it legitimacy and cooperation

    Most importantly: stop using oil and natural gas sooner rather than later.

    Reasoning: the king stays in power by paying cops, security officials and prison guards - and paying people to shut up and tolerate the regime. Once the system runs low on money, things may change.

    Note: women in Europe made rapid progress at getting civil rights at a time when they were needed to run ammunition factories.

    It doesn’t have to be a world war - any development that makes it economically unavoidable that women start going to work outside their home, will change the role of women in society.



  • how did you do it?

    In the BIOS options of that specific server (nothing fancy, a generic Dell with some Xeon processor) the option to enable/disable ME was just plainly offered.

    Chipset features > Intel AMT (active management technology) > disable (or something similar, my memory is a bit fuzzy). I researched the option, got worried about the outcomes if someone learned to exploit it, and made it a policy of turning it off. It was about 2 years ago.

    P.S.

    I’m sure there exist tools for the really security-conscious folks to verify whether ME has become disabled, but I was installing a boring warehouse system, so I didn’t check.


  • please read up on intel management engine

    I’m already familiar with it. On the systems I buy and intall, if they are Intel based, ME gets disabled since I haven’t found a reasonable use for it.

    Oh yeah, ARM also has something similar.

    Since this is more relevant to me (numerically, most of the systems that I install are Raspberry Pi based robots), I’m happy to announce that TrustZone is not supported on Pi 4 (I haven’t checked about other models). I haven’t tested, however - don’t trust my word.

    Who would you buy from in this case?

    From the Raspberry Pi Foundation, who are doubtless ordering silicon from TSMC for the Pico series and ready-made CPUs for their bigger products, and various other services from other companies. If they didn’t exist, I would likely fall back on RockChip based products from China.

    https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/nsaant/firewalk/index.htm

    Wow. :) Neat trick. (Would be revealed in competent hands, though. Snap an X-ray photo and find excess electronics in the socket.)

    However, a radio transceiver is an extremely poor candidate for embedding on a chip. It’s good for bugging boards, not chips.


  • The first and central provision of the bill is the requirement for tracking technology to be embedded in any high-end processor module or device that falls under the U.S. export restrictions.

    As a coder with some hardware awareness, I find the concept laughable.

    How does he think they (read: the Taiwanese, if they are willing to) would go about doing it?

    Add a GPS receiver onto every GPU? Add an inertial navigation module to every GPU? Add a radio to every GPU? :D

    The poor politician needs a technically competent advisor forced on him. To make him aware (preferably in the most blunt way) of real possibilities in the real world.

    In the real world, you can prevent a chip from knowing where it’s running and you can’t add random shit onto a chip, and if someone does, you can stop buying bugged hardware or prevent that random addition from getting a reading.



  • Don’t let the facts slow you down, eh.

    Attributing the existence of a country to an agency the country built, is a bit on the fast side, I think. The agency was born 1 year after Israel and built from scratch.

    Israel exists because millions of people didn’t have a place they could call their home country.

    Sadly, what has become of that country is not cheerful. Its war in Gaza seems to intend making life impossible in the sector (making a population’s life impossible in their homeland has a definition: genocide) and prime minister Netanyahu is grabbing for more power, likely with thoughts about “staying a bit longer”.

    Mossad (role: foreign intelligence) is an agency directly subordinated to the prime minister of Israel (unlike some others, e.g. Shin Bet (role: internal security and counterintelligence), which recently had its chief fired because he wouldn’t swear personal allegiance to Netanyahu). So, in the current political situation, there is credible suspicion that Netanyahu is creating a precedent and subordinating all intelligence agencies to his person - if not directly then indirectly.

    Mossad’s cooperation with foreign agencies has been punctuated by episodes of non-cooperation.

    I can point out several moments in history where the interests of Mossad contradicted, for example, the interests of the CIA. Threats were made, negotiations were held, some Mossad guys got caught and were imprisoned in the US.

    However, during less tense periods, agencies have also been trading tips. Mossad has built a highly successful “business” of assassinating people. It logically follows that if agency A knows that person X is on Mossad’s “hit list”, and they find out where X lives, then A won’t need to send a killer, but tips off Mossad. Intelligence agencies may sometimes (not cheerfully) share part of their technical networks with each other, but human networks - almost never. It can get their own agents killed or imprisoned, if another agency is careless.







  • Since this is an opportunity to educate people about health, I will not discuss politics here. :)

    • If you’re a guy, your urinary tract is stupidly complicated from a medical viewpoint and there’s a prostate beneath the bladder which hydrogenates testosterone (T is produced by the brain) into dihydrotestosterone, produces fluid to mix the seminal fluid with, and generally supports fertility and gender specific phenotype.

    • With progressing age, the prostate enlarges, gets infected with HPV (nearly everyone gets it) and may get bacterial infections (typical ones are E. coli). It may also develop calcinations.

    • Risk is reduced if you live in Asia and eat a traditional menu containing much soy bean products which enables guys in those regions to enjoy several times less prostate cancer.

    • Risk is increased with nearly every urinary tract infection, especially if not conclusively diagnosed and treated.

    • After the age of 40, regularly have PSA (prostate specific antigen) measured from a blood test. It tells how much disintegration and immune reaction is occurring down there.

    • Regularly have ultrasound check-ups done. If there are UTI symptoms, treatment must not occur blindly, but must be followed by observation.

    • If you are young and your home country has medical insurance that covers HPV vaccination, get it while it’s free (because it costs 150 € a dose). If you’re rich enough, there may be a point in getting it later too, especially if you’ve not had unsafe sex (it doesn’t protect after infection). The majority of people get HPV during their lives and approximately 9 strains cause cervical cancer in women and raise the risk of prostate cancer in men. By getting vaccinated against HPV, you protect both yourself and your partners from drawing a ticket in a quite nasty lottery.

    • As long as prostate cancer is androgen dependent, it can be suppressed with an androgen blockade.