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Comment Re: doesn't seem to add up to anything real (Score 2) 114

It does not: TLS happens at a higher layer that isn't affected by routing or tunneling. The attacker can't break that with this attack, but they will be able to capture the TLS encrypted data (which they wouldn't, or would be harder, with a VPN), and any more importantly any unencrypted data (including, notably, most DNS requests). And if they *do* have a TLS-breaking attack (like a stolen certificate), they will then be able to MITM it, which they wouldn't if the VPN was working properly (not without also MITMing that, which would be a lot harder).

Comment Re: doesn't seem to add up to anything real (Score 5, Informative) 114

I don't think you quite get the problem. It isn't routing the encrypted VPN data, it routes the unencrypted packets at the OS level without ever touching the VPN at all. So traffic to, say, www.wikipedia.org you expect to be tunneled through the encrypted VPN instead gets routed through normal unencrypted routes (well normal except for the attacker-controlled gateway). That's why it's so prevelant: it has nothing at all really to do with the VPN itself, it's an issue with DHCP and TCP/IP at the protocol level. On the flip side, since it can't mimic the VPN, traffic that needs to be tunneled (such as a VPN-accessible server) can't be snooped, since data isn't routed through the VPN so the server simply can't be communicated with. The issue mainly affects people who use VPNs as a privacy tool against their ISP or nation state, or possible snoopers on a public WiFi, since it breeches that privacy.

Comment Re: Don't finance Experimental electronics. (Score 1) 148

OP didn't say "don't buy", he said "don't finance". Financing means taking a loan, putting yourself in debt, and almost always means you pay way way more for the product in the long run. It's how people end up stuck in debt for their entire lives, and it doesn't matter how much you enjoy something, possibly ruining your financial future for some fun (especially for a product that might be abandoned in a couple of years) is a really bad idea.

Comment Re: Business collusion bad, unions good? (Score 1) 67

No, the whole point of the suit is that the individual actors aren't looking at the market and judging supply and demand to set prices themselves, they are instead turning to a common third party who they use to set prices. If everyone in a market all asks the same common third party what price they should charge, it's not longer an open free market, the price is set by the third party. And that is a blatant violation of the Sherman act, even if none of the market members directly talk to each other. In fact no human needs to be involved in the process: for example you could have an algorithm that takes an average price and tells the supplier to set their price just slightly above that, but if everyone uses that algorithm, this results in everyone raising prices, causing the average to rise, so the algorithm in turn tells everyone to raise prices, etc. That isnt a far-fetched hypothetical example, by the way, that is almost exactly what is actually happening.

Comment Re: But could you do it with moonlight? (Score 1) 83

Once you make the moon the intermediary for the sunlight, you now have to consider the moon as the source for the thermodynamic argument.

No, you don't. Otherwise light reflected from a mirror wouldn't be able to make an object hotter than the mirror, which is obviously wrong. Technically speaking the constraint is more than just the frequency of the light: for example, a laser has "negative" thermodynamic temperature, which means a laser beam can heat an object to an infinitely high temperature (theoretically), despite being, for e.g. an infrared laser (although since the object you're heating up tends to radiate energy as it's temperature to the fourth power, you quickly need a really, really powerful laser to get to high temperatures).

Comment Re: But could you do it with moonlight? (Score 1) 83

You're misunderstanding the thermodynamics/optics a bit. You can't focus the black-body radiation from an object to heat something hotter than the object, but the Moon *isn't* a black-body. The moon, in fact, emits no visible light whatsoever (it doesn't get hot enough). The Moon reflects sunlight, so just as reflected light from a mirror can get an object hotter than the mirror, moonlight can heat objects hotter than the moon. How hot I don't know (because the thermodynamics of optics is really complex), certainly not as hot as the sun but certainly hotter than the moon.

Comment Re: What about 100% alcohol? (Score 1) 121

In principle you're correct, high purity alcohol is really good at displacing water. In practice though I wouldn't suggest immersing your phone on it: the electronics proper won't be damaged by the alcohol, but there are a lot of glues and adhesives that will be. It can also attack some rubbers and plastics, which (ironically) might damage the waterproofing.

Comment Re: Correction (Score 4, Informative) 43

No, it's the brightest object in the observable universe right now. "Observable universe" just means the universe as we see it from (or near) Earth, right now, and it's what is usually meant when people talk about "the universe" (at least in astronomy). Of course the universe as a whole is (probably) not just the observable universe, but we can't really say much about the unobservable parts (since they're unobserved we can't even be sure they exist), so it's usually not helpful or relevant to talk about them.

Comment Re: How can it be changing (Score 2) 110

I remember reading a story a few months back (on Ars Technica IIRC) about how the date apparently had an effect: literally changing just the date could result in getting better or worse results, and since a normal ChatGPT session passes in the date as part of the prompt, you can get changes like this to results even if the model and constraints are otherwise identical. Which to my mind just reinforces how unreliable and untrustworthy LLM "AIs" are.

Comment Re: Why only eyedrops? (Score 4, Informative) 177

No, homeopathic eye drops are often not just sterile saline (either not sterile, or more than just saline). That's literally the entire point of the story: those "medicines" lack the FDA safety reviews necessary to ensure they are what they claim they are, making them dangerous to use. Even FDA reviewed eye drops have had issues with sterility, imagine how bad an eye drops subject to no safety review is.

Comment Re: 15 pairs? (Score 5, Interesting) 30

No, the planetary resonance is between each planet and it's two nearest neighbors, so planet a is resonant with planet b, and b is resonant with a and c, and so on, making 5 pairs. So planet a and planet f (for example) aren't directly paired, their orbital resonance occurs because of the chain of resonances between them rather than a direct resonance.

Comment Re: Another reasons for VPNs (Score 1) 35

Most likely they are the one providing the video from a CDN (or from some partner that hosts the CDN, like Netflix or Youtube), so they simply default the stream they provide to 480p. That's how mobile providers offer "unlimited" video streaming as an addon to data plans. Videos watched from random (non-partner) sites won't be downgraded (though they may be data throttled), but would count against data limits.

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