/tech/ - Technology

This is the place to share articles.

>Leaked Microsoft documents reveal effort to "Gender Transition" young children
https://conservativenerds.locals.com/post/5120067/leaked-microsoft-documents-reveal-effort-to-gender-transition-young-children


>Firefox Money: Investigating the bizarre finances of Mozilla
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla


>IBM / Red Hat whistleblower leaks internal, racist, anti-White presentation.
https://conservativenerds.locals.com/post/4996525/ibm-red-hat-whistleblower-leaks-internal-racist-anti-white-presentation


>Microsoft's growing control of Linux
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A video game that nintendo had a legal distribution monopoly on was leaked ahead of the official release. They got really mad about that and they are trying to take it out on the video-game emulation communities, by attacking emulation related software projects on github.

So the lesson here is if you give companies like that money they are going to use it to attack your hobbies. I think this legitimizes "pirating" games because you have no legal option to buy these games without also supporting nintendo's legalistic mafia-terror.

If copy"right" wasn't set up like a monopoly, and you could buy these specific games from any distributor not just nintendo, so that you could choose to buy from non-mafia sellers, it would at least be logically possible to make a case against "piracy". But as long as that's not possible "piracy" is basically just self defense. Keep in mind that nintendo doesn't make games, it's just a legal entity, and not the same as the people that make the games like for example programmers and artists.

Obviously there also is the hole deal with DRM which is total hypocrisy, it basically attacks the concept of personal ownership of your possessions. It's property-rights for me but not for thee.

If they were to reform copy"right" and remove the distribution monopoly aspect, so that everybody with the means to distribute copies was free to do so as long as they gave royalties (as a form of revenue sharing) to the people who actually created the stuff that is being copied. Maybe that would work.

But as long as they keep the monopoly part "piracy" is basically just competing distributors that were arbitrarily banned from participating in the market. Some times people make the strange argument that pirates gain from the work of others but that's also true for the capitalists that own nintendo, by that logic all of nintendo's profits are pirated.

I sometimes feel like the copy-monopolists take the most extreme ideological positions, while we don't and that's why this hole shit drifts ever more towards reactionary insanity where Nintendo gets to rape random software devs on github as some kind of bully-frustration release mechanism and it's a crime if you play with toys "the wrong way". Maybe we should redefine piracy as everything that keeps works-of-art outside the creative-commons/public-domain and drm as a product defect. Maybe that will create a counter-weight.

Here is a thought experiment about a hard problem in auditing computer security
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=sOeuYuvOcl0

if you didn't watch it here's the tldr:
In principle it's possible to compromise enough of the existing software and hardware stack so that a intelligent enough malicious security flaw could hide it self from you no matter how hardcore you go with your security audit. The conclusion being drawn is that the only solution to making sure you have a clean system, is to start from scratch with basic logic circuitry and then slowly build up a trusted software and hardware stack.

It's a clever argument, but there is a much easier way to get around all of this.

You can get to a trusted stack simply by scrambling the logic of a cpu. The only one that will be able to run logic operations on that cpu will be the person that can use the de-scrambler-key on the logic instructions given to that cpu. Malicious inserts into the hardware will return gibberish if they try to listen, and make the cpu produce logic errors if they try to inject code. It doesn't need to be a performant cpu either, something equivalent to 1985 era processors is good enough, as it's only necessary to bootstrap a trusted environment. A moderately sized organization can probably muster the necessary funds and technical sophistication to get a small batch of scrambled cpus produced.

The internet is dying, maybe it's actually already dead. This is a general thread about the dead internet theory. Share articles, first hand proof that the internet is dead, discuss etc. There is alot going on which indicates, that the dead internet theory is becoming reality.

So it appears that in Italy the IPmafia has infiltrated the state and issued a dictate dubbed "Piracy Shield". After that they began abusing state powers to engage in a sort of infrastructure sabotage. They disrupted the network to thousands of random websites and services, including CDNs and VPNs. It caused a huge political shitstorm. Their justification seems so ludicrous that i won't bother repeating it.

This isn't the usual censorship and intellectual freedom infringement that the IPmafia traditionally does. They upped their game. Disrupting lots of online services was a show of force. Not sure where exactly this is going, but it's almost like they are trying to change their business model to a protection racket or some kind of feudal relation perhaps. Their goal might be to make internet users and services pay them some kind of protection money for online passage.

Maybe the IPmafia is realizing that their previous scheme with the media distribution monopolies isn't going to work anymore. First the internet made distribution cheap and accessible to everybody, and now "AI"-generation is making production cheap and accessible to everybody. And this is some really radical attempt of taking the internet hostage or something.

Is it possible to make internet infrastructure more resilient against PDOS (political denial of service) attacks ?

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/27/italys-piracy-shield-creating-real-problems-as-vpns-start-turning-away-italian-users/
https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-shield-cloudflare-disaster-blocks-countless-sites-fires-up-opposition-240226/

In the early 20th century armies used search lights to find airplanes in the sky. They sometimes fitted shutters on these lights and used them for Morse-code. The light was pointed at the sky, sometimes at clouds. That enable transmitting "blinky-messages" beyond line of sight over significant distances. Armies eventually abandoned this method of communication for radios.

But there might be cause to bring this idea back. Science has advanced quite a lot in the last 100 years and we can use light to make tiny low power plasma bubbles in the air that emit brief light pulses. Enabling over the horizon optical communication with minimal to no infrastructure costs.

Imagine projecting a tiny holographic blinking dot of light in the sky to transmit information and a photodetector+optic to receive information.

A communication link is configured in 3D space.
-The upside is that the available volume of sky is functionally unlimited, and you never again have to deal with network-collisions and interference from communication signals of others.
-The Downside, it requires a good deal of precision in mechanical systems, so it'll be fiddly for a while. Picture using Binoculars to look at a firefly floating high up in the sky, you need to get up-down, left-right and focal distance just right to see it. There is a technology upgrade path to a solid-state chip version, that works similarly to matrix array antennas, It needs Terra-hertz switching logic, which requires photon-based micro-controller (it exists but it's very bleeding edge)

The range can be tremendous, there is enough gas molecules in the stratosphere to make this work. It will enable hops over the ocean with a small number of relay buoys.

The military might want this technology because
- it's harder to triangulate the origin of a transmission (you need to intersect the light-beam, to find the source), relay-transmitter-stations, soldiers, planes and ships will suffer fewer attacks from signal homing weapons, making it very robust.
- it's very hard to jam, (you need to flood the sky with very thick smoke, usually associated with forest-fires and volcano eruptions)
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I graduated as a software engineer but all jobs and technology seem geared towards making the capitalist class richer, surveilling the people and overexploiting the resources of the earth even harder, should I switch careers and become a unabombing tech hater or can I actually get a job that is at least isn't in a corporation making the world infinitely worse than it already is?

attack on digital privacy of correspondence and secure encryption
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/full-chat-control-proposal-leaked-attack-on-digital-privacy-of-correspondence-and-secure-encryption/
heckernews thread
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39913946
got to the front page rank 1 and then soft-censorship kicked in: bam kicked it down to rank 40
https://hnrankings.info/39913946/

A year ago (give or take) there already was a chat controle law proposal, which got rejected by a number of countries, this is the same thing, zombie resurrected, just even more insane full spectrum mandatory privacy massacre. It's not just the surveillance rape, it's also expropriation of personal property. If you own your tech gadgets that means you can controle what they do and turn off all data collection.

it seems to be violating human rights too:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/european-court-human-rights-confirms-undermining-encryption-violates-fundamental

People have a right to sane privacy rules. Op-out telemetry for the sole purpose of fixing technical issues is OK. Any data collection beyond that is a privacy violation. Definitely no technical implementations that can be used for profiling, tracking or identifying people. Also people must own and controle their stuff so no client-side scanning crap or undermining of encryption. People also have a right to have unmolested digital correspondence. Enough with the dark age persecution culture.

I'm not so sure about this being a total attack on privacy by mad surveillance extremists or an attempt of de-legitimizing the EU regulator. Because it's neither compliance nor enforcement are even remotely plausible. The EU regulator has recently reduced the monopoly power of big tech, could this be a conspiracy to make the regulator appear crazy and lawless ?

Fuck imageboards. I want text. And if you do too, then hoo boy do I have the thread for you!
This thread is for sharing textboard links. Hard mode - No Clearnet.

(Yes, I'm begging. But come on, my mouth is open and the spoon is right there…)

The brain chip company has successfully implanted a brain chip into a person. It's a paraplegic and this allows this person to thought-control their wheel-chair and even do high fidelity computer inputs (good enough for playing games)

At this time the brain chip is one way communication only, only relaying thought-commands from the brain to external devices, but nothing flows back into the brain. But if this thing is going to become the tech that fixes most handicaps it will have to become 2 way communication. And there are serious worries about it becoming a attack vector for brain-hacking. If brain chips were free open source technology, protected by a very diligent community, and absolute brain privacy was vigorously enforced (as in death penalty for brain privacy violations), that probably would mitigate risks enough though.

For able people this promises hands-free computing. I suspect people would not undergo brain surgery to get this unless they need it to fix a handicap. Because of the medical risks and it eventually turning into obsolete e-waste rattling in your skull.

This thing uses thousands of wires connected to electrodes directly stuck inside the brain. So people who have this implanted, probably become vulnerable to electromagnetic fields. Getting an MRI scan is probably off the table. Humans generally are not affected by magnetic fields, even extremely powerful ones. Hence why there is lots of technological EM in the human environment. People who get the brain chip would have to be even more careful than those who have a pacemaker. Nukes produce a big EM pulse, so the brain-chipped people will die first in WW3. Safety wise this really would benefit from optical data links that electrically isolate the brain.

Whats the real world application going to be ?
My hunch is it'll get used for medical and military purposes (soldiers thinking what their shoulder cannon shoots at)
If the functionality can be replicated with a wearable headband/cap it might enter general use, but if it's surgical implants only, it'll remain a niche.

vid not related
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=d4po_OK_w4I