/tech/ - Technology

Veritasium made a video about "airships"
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=ZjBgEkbnX2I

And it appears that he fell for the old airship-con. The con works by pretending that these things are analogues to ships floating on the ocean. But they aren't like ships at all. Ships sit between the boundary layer of two media, usually air and water. They're stuck in the vertical axis and can only move in 2 dimensions. That allows for a relatively simple control scheme and much optimization.

Air"ships" on the other hand should really be called Air-subs, because they behave more like submarines that move in at least 3 dimensions and usually only touch a single medium. They need a much more elaborate control scheme that leaves a lot less room for optimization. Why relatively intelligent people tend to get fooled by this is somewhat a mystery, even if you don't understand any of the physics. So called Air"ships" don't even look like ships, they look more like Submarines, and you don't need to fill ships with a special gas or liquid to make them float.

Submarines only have a few niche applications, like military, deep ocean research and suicide-cans for rich adventure tourists. Similarly Air-subs will also only have niche applications.

Veritasium says that there is potential for mass-cargo-transportation. But there isn't, all viable mass-cargo transportation methods have one thing in common, The ratio of cargo-to-vehicle skews very far towards cargo. Airsubs will never be able to do that. You'll always need a lot of Airsub for relatively little cargo. At least in earths relatively thin atmosphere. Maybe on Venus with it's dense atmosphere this would be viable, and Airsubs will have their day once we begin colonizing the upper atmosphere of Venus with sky-cities.

The reason why the idea of Airsubs is still so magical is because they promise "Free lift". Filling up lots of gasbags with hydrogen or helium probably isn't the way to get it. But there might be another way, that is derived from hot-air blimps. Hot-air-balloons and blimps use large fuel burners to heat up air inside a bag. Hot Air is lighter than cold air hence you get lift. Every airplane has a source of free heat, the waste heat from the propulsion engine. It might be possible to blend Air-planes and blimps in order to recover waste-heat and use it for free lift.Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

$10 GPUs for everyone!

The regime that is occupying the UK continues it's terror campaign against encryption privacy and democracy
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/07/uk-government-very-close-eroding-encryption-worldwide

TLDR:

They are trying to make impossible legal requirements like
<privacy respecting surveillance
<secure encryption with a backdoor
Which makes about as much sense as a freedom preserving prison.

This invasive democracy destroying "internet regulation bill" has not yet passed through the institutions, so if you're living in Bongland go yell at politicians ( more than 80% of UK citizens are on your side) Maybe that'll do something.

—

But I'm making this thread for another reason.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

Do you guys remember when you could have different shells on Windows? I 'member. They're all gone now.

So apparently big publishers want to kill the internet archive again.

They accuse I.A. of having done a copywrong by lending out books. I won't bore you with the legal technicalities because i think it's just a pretext for publishers trying to kill a library because it's a cartel that wants a monopoly.

I think the lessons here are if you pay these people money, they're going to use it to attack nice things like the Internet Archive, and "copy-right" is nothing but a heinous weapon.

People who build archives to preserve the memory of the past are like really rare flowers, it's an incomprehensible act of barbarism to try to burn down their archives.

https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/

Hexbear and Lemmygrad are now federated

Does anyone use Windows 10 Ameliorated/AME edition?

https://ameliorated.info/

so i'm motivated to planing to create a archive for threads and websites. thread and web writings that are important enough, have quality, and or can be used to counter western media and history naratives.

the archive i want to create for the threads is different from things like internet archive or things like that because i want to actually save all the file that is uploaded unlike regular archive where not every file and many that are uploaded in the thread were not saved in the archive.

if i can i want to make a website for this but i do not have any experience about creating website and coding nor can i do it. i also have special-ed mental that make me unable to learn coding like normal people so its hard.

my main plan is to use httrack and use every file format list from wikipedia and other websites, then copy that list to httrack file format selection thing

i want help from every people here, so if you can please send something

I'll start with a few examples:

>Proprietary Software can be secure
This is a slight of hand. In theory proprietary Software can of course be secure, but in praxis there is no way for you to find out which proprietary software is or isn't secure. So from the perspective of the user proprietary software can't be considered secure because there's no reliable way to tell.

>Proprietary Software is harder to hack because the source-code isn't open
This is a security by obscurity fallacy, that for some inexplicable reason is still in circulation. Exploitable software bugs are usually found by examining the behavior of executable binaries not the source code.

>Open source is secure
Not by default, there is no automatic security-magic in publishing code on git-hub/lab. However open-sourcing code means that it can be subjected to broad public scrutiny and hence it becomes possible for the users to know which software is or isn't secure.

>Security and privacy are not the same
This fallacy is widely parroted even by the security community. You, the human is a part of your computer security, without privacy, attackers can potentially learn enough about you to figure out psychological hacks to compromise your computer security by tricking you.

>Unbreakable cryptography
This is usually wrong in praxis because it doesn't factor in that most people will give up their cypher-key after the "low-tech-biological-deciphering-algorithm" broke their pinky-finger. Cryptography can only be considered secure if the encrypted-data-vault is obfuscated as random bits on a storage medium so that the existence of the encrypted data can be denied.

New attack on privacy is taking on a hole new dimension.

https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=BAiQnq6h6ao
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKegmu0V75s
TLTW:The US congress has proposed a law that would require rc-drone pilots to broadcast the location of their rc-drone and their own location.

Never mind the drone stuff, this would be a precedent of mandating a tracking beacon that broadcasts your location. Such a mandate so far only exists for convicted criminals that have to wear a tracking ankle-monitor.

I think this is so egregious, that surveillance has to be re-categorized as a form of attack or assault. We ought to grant people a right to self-defense to preserve their privacy, analogous to the right to self defense against physical attacks. People should be granted the right to use very assertive measures to protect their privacy. (Going beyond the current passive defense of privacy)

Obviously privacy means the absence of surveillance