/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.

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

So the EU wants to introduce software regulations (Cyber Resilience Act) that is probably going to harm FOSS pretty badly.

The politically stated goal is improving software security. However it's not likely going to achieve this, they are introducing costly security certification. Which to me appears more like a scheme to pay somebody to take responsibility, rather than actually improving engineering quality. It might also have a psychological factor like a secular version of asking a priest to bless your technology. And it kinda looks like a anti-competitive regulatory burden that favors large firms over smaller ones. It is unclear to me whether or not there is malicious intent behind this or not.

This process might make sense for large corporate software monopoly dinosaurs that still do proprietary release dumps. This legislation will probably give an unfair advantage to those business models. The irony here is of course that proprietary software lacks the openness that would allow for public code auditing, which is a vital part of modern software security. Proprietary trust me bro security/obscurity is low quality and a bit anachronistic at this point. The net-effect of favoring this could be decreased software security.

If you listen to the FOSS advocates they want to have exemptions for open-source so the C.R.A. would not undermine FOSS projects. This is reasonable because at least it wouldn't make anything worse. The security praxis of infrastructure relevant FOSS project has improved a lot in recent years and is comparably decent atm.

What would actually improve software security in the FOSS world is more code audits, you could have an EU wide census about which software is commercially deployed and then prioritize funding security-bug-bounty programs that specifically target these. This scheme is effective because the cyber-espionage-agencies do exactly that for their weaponized software exploit acquisitions. I don't understand why they wouldn't copy what already works.

I think that if they don't fix this it will lead to walling FOSS out of the EU, with the resulting brain-drain from FOSS projects looking for regulatory environments that aren't hostile.

more detailed information here:
https://news.apache.org/foundation/entry/save-open-sourcePost too long. Click here to view the full text.