/tech/ - Technology

Prove me wrong.

So apparently google is going to attempt force-feeding ads to everybody, including those who really really don't want it, and they will try to break ad-blocker functionality. Many people think that there will be a war on ad-blocking.
Here is a short recap from a tech-channel that's pretty black-pilled about the future of technical work-arounds to ads.
https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=oQL9dVsEXT0

I think it's unreasonable to accept adds because they represent a security risk, because ads load random executable code on your computer. Ads also tend to infringe on privacy by data mining and tracking people. Adds have become crazy intrusive which probably is bad for your mental health, and use too much bandwidth and compute resources. Going online without ad-blockers is the technical equivalent to having unprotected sex with a hooker in a failed state where 30% of the population is infected with an incurable STD.

The tech-porkies will want subscription for freedom from ads, but:
Subscriptions suck in general because it's paying without getting ownership in return, which is a bad deal.
It'll be too expensive for many people who can't afford the paywall and still need another way to protect them selves.
Those platforms are not politically neutral, you'd expect that if you have to pay that you get unfiltered access, but they probably won't do that.

Many fear that if this spreads beyond the googstuff like YouTube, it will become a nightmare to manage a bazillion subscriptions even for those that are loaded enough to afford it. It could create even more walled-garden type distribution monopoly platforms, because the average person probably can't manage more than a handful of subscriptions and that will cause consolidation into a few distribution gate-keepers.

My questions:
1. Will there be a new type of adblock as a technical-fix that will overcome all the attempts of undoing ad-blocks, and all the black-pilled people are wrong ? Will there be new programs that can separate the content from the ads, what will that look like ? ad-blocking is human species being and nothing can prevent it
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    #!/usr/bin/bash
    mkdir tmp out
    for i in {1..16}
    do
      p=`hexdump -n 3 -v -e ' 3/1 "%02X"' /dev/urandom`
      convert -size 32x32 xc:#$p tmp/${p}.png
      ffmpeg -loop 1 -i tmp/${p}.png -c:v libx264 -t 0.1 -pix_fmt yuv420p tmp/${p}_1.mp4
      ffmpeg -loop 1 -i tmp/${p}.png -c:v libx264 -t 0.01 -pix_fmt yuv444p -vf scale=15000:15000 tmp/${p}_2.mp4
      echo -e "file ${p}_1.mp4" "\n" "file ${p}_2.mp4" > tmp/${p}.txt
      ffmpeg -f concat -i tmp/${p}.txt -codec copy out/${p}.mp4
      rm tmp/*
    done
    rmdir tmp

Batch upload the content of ./out on gfycat.com, and paste the URLs in 4 lines (Discord will only display 4 images per line). In case your victim's client can handle the cursed video format change, each animation will consume around 2Gb of RAM and you have 16 of them.

Adapt the script to suit your needs. Enjoy the termination of your account and your newfound freedom!

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.

It's potentially possible to use modified low-yield fusion bombs for power generation.

It's definitely not the first choice for generating fusion energy, but since the technology has already been developed, and the production-facilities are build, one might as well repurpose military tech for civilian use. Weaponized bombs and energy-generating-bombs are similar but not the same, so the currently existing low yield bombs aren't directly usable for this but they could be modified or recycled for raw materials. Existing weapons-stock can be burned up in power generation.

The technical principle is that you put a low-yield thermonuclear device into the center of a giant hollow vacuum "filled" metal-sphere that is lined with led, and by detonating the fusion bomb, the big metal ball gets really hot, and you can use that as a high-grade heat-source for power-generation.

It might be useful to do this as a power-satellite in earth orbit, because space already has a gratis vacuum and you can use a mirror array to send infrared heat-energy to many different power-receiver stations which reduces the load on electrical grids. It can also be used to power container ships and huge water desalination plants.

This would use mostly off-the-shelf parts which would greatly reduce the engineering requirements, and could be build very quickly. As a parallel development high priority project, this could go online in a few years.

The economics on this are pretty good, even capitalism might be able to pull this off, because this is not a long term project and upfront capital costs aren't that high. The political aspect might be harder however, because mass-producing tiny h-bombs might ruffle some feathers.

A topic that was almost completely neglected in Marxist circles , was the privatization of online reputation systems. Most of the big tech corpo platforms just deploy some kind of algorithms or payed reputation badges. Technically this isn't a new phenomena the first privatized reputation system probably was something like banking credit-scores.

I think that maybe the toxic elements of social media like cancel-ism might have been the result of those privatized reputation systems.

I'm wondering why there don't seem to be any prominent non-commercial community p2p driven scoring systems ?
There seem to be very few people working on stuff like this, i only know of Ian Clarke the Creator of Freenet that is talking about this stuff.

Samsung is lobbying to get a general exclusion order against phone-screen imports in the US.
They claim it's because screens that are imported by the phone repair-shops do a muh-patent-infringerino.

The real reasons is because Apple wants to switch their screen supplier to BOE, and Samsung wants a monopoly on screens.
Samsung can't go after Apple directly because Apple has enough money to wage patent-warfare until the end of time.
Samsung can't go after BOE because that's a Chinese company, and patent-trolling doesn't fly in China.

The result is going to be the destruction of the repair industry, and a precedent for banning technology parts as a means for installing a monopoly. If you aren't allowed to get parts for fixing your stuff, it's more corporate shit encroaching on personal possessions.

here is a video from Rossmann going into more details
https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=HD8Y4xS7fMU
His take is to make Samsung a dirty word.

My questions:
Would it not be a better strategy to bypass this by (legally grey) relabeling tech parts and importing them anyway. So that Samsung gets cut out completely ?
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What's your take on linux software distribution ?

There's a lot of buzz around flat-pack and flat-hub atm, they are currently implementing a monetization feature. And for some reason Eric Schmidt the google-guy is involved somehow.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/27/flathub_app_store/
flathub isn't calld flub
I'm worried that once money is involved it will attract scammers and litigation for a payout type people. Also the payment processor they want to use is stripe, that's probably not anonymous

Ubuntu has removed flat-pack from it's official releases, to push it's snap package manager instead, i wonder if they have other reasons than "we're going to make our own pack-manager with blackjack and hookers" to yeet flat-pack from their system.

I think the best package manager in the end might be NIX

Is going from distro repositories to this type of stuff going to improve software distribution on linux ?

Recommend a virtual phone number, to register on Telegram

What would a video conferencing application that can support multiple billion users look like?

Can it be made decentralized with guaranteed high availability?

How can moderation be organized in such an application? I guess some aspects can be programmed in, like speaking time limits, and speaking order could be randomized. Also considering all users would be authenticated could muting or kicking be organized on a voting basis?

I honestly was thinking about VR chat based assembly but that seems far more cumbersome.