Continuing my journaling every 10 years or so, you dirty, dirty fuckers at slashdot. You just started an ad that put itself in picture in picture separated from the browser and I had a hell of a time closing it.
Dirty dirty fuckers.
So it is done, this world has gone more mad than I could ever imagine. I just tried leaving a few comments on some videos on youtube and all of a sudden all of my comments were deleted and I got a popup warning that youtube will not only delete my comments but it will delete my account if I make more comments on the topic. What topic is that? It is the war against civilization, the war that the Islamists started against Israel but it is now the war of the collectivists, who are on the side of terrorists against civilization itself.
Hamas, Islam, Muslims, to me there is no difference, there are 2 billion of them on this planet and we are at war at this point, I am certain that this war will be the bloodiest yet and the biggest problem is that the left, the collectivists of all sorts are now dead set against their own interests. It is hilarious to think how all of these gays, lesbians, transgendered morons would be treated in a place like Palestine, like the Saudi Arabia or Rwanda. They would be stoned to death at best.
AFAIC we are now in the worst possible situation, where the people who should be on the side of civilization have lost their collective minds and are ready to give the world up to the animals that are ready to destroy the very civilization that allows these collectivist idiots to exist in the first place. This is the new low for this pathetic society. They are now on the side of terrorists and yes, I call all Islamists and Muslims terrorists and I don't apologize for it, religion is a choice, it is not the color of anyone's skin and Islam is the religion of terrorism, of murdering children, women, men, anyone who is not a Muslim is a target. This war will be global, it will be local, it will be everywhere, with morons like the collectivists are showing themselves to be I doubt very much that the Western values will be able to survive this.
https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23032388&cid=63785372
It's Crap. My Adaptations... (Score:2)
by Voyager529 ( 1363959 ) Alter Relationship on Mon Aug 21, '23 11:22 AM (#63785372)
0. Use Rufus (https://rufus.ie/en/) to create a bootable Windows 11 installer that handles steps 1-3 for you if desired; run through the Windows install process.
1. During the initial run, hit Shift+F10, then type "oobe\bypassnro". This will cause a reboot. Also, disconnect from the internet.
2. During the second run, state that you 'don't have internet', and you want to 'continue with a limited setup'. This will allow you to set up a local account.
3. During the customization screen, select 'no' to all of the options.
4. When you get to a desktop, open Edge. Each of the initial setup screens has a low-contrast close button; use them. Go to www.ninite.com and download Chrome/Firefox, maybe 7zip and Notepad++ or whatever other things are needed (.net frameworks are also helpful if running older software).
Open Chrome/Firefox and go here: https://community.spiceworks.com/scripts/show_download/4378-windows-10-decrapifier-18xx-19xx-2xxx . It works on Windows 11 and still gets rid of most of the core annoyances and appy-apps, needless scheduled tasks, and so on. Reboot.
5. Download this awesome application, run it as admin, and click through the desired checkboxes: https://www.w10privacy.de/english-home/ .
6. You'll probably need to set Windows Defender to exclude the Hosts File from detection; it'll reset it by default based on the telemetry blocking from step 5 if you implemented it.
7. Go to Settings->Apps->Default Apps and set your preferred default browser and PDF reader.
8. If you're adventurous and loathe the Windows 11 Taskbar and Start Menu, install ExplorerPatcher: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher . Classic Shell and OpenShell also work to bring back a useful, ad-free start menu. NOTE: some recent Windows Updates have caused issues with EP; it's a bit of a cat-and-mouse game that is fixed with an uninstall/reinstall, but it is a pain to resolve if the need arises.
It's absolutely abhorrent that it requires third party utilities and shell scripts to make Windows 11 vaguely tolerable...but this config has been viable for me thus far.
When someone says "Black lives matter" I generally assume good faith* and assume they really mean something like:
"All lives matter, but recent events show that at least a few people think that some lives - specifically Black lives - matter less than others. Rather than taking the time to say 'Hey dude, yes, you Mr. Cop who shot a Black man without a good reason, you need to treat Black people with the same respect as non-Black people' I'm going to use the much shorter, fits-on-a-bumper-sticker phrase 'Black Lives Matter'".
* As with just about all human behavior, there will be the rare case where the assumption of good faith was not warranted. But this is rare.
The normie Right is a fallacy. The underground Right seems obsessed by National Socialism and Christianity. Beyond both of them is the actual Right which is based on realism and pursuit of the good.
This is not my day job, and it makes no money. However, it is the best I can do to represent reality, even if I do not particularly like the conclusions at which I arrive.
Me: searches for an article with the name of a victim killed at Joe's Crab Shack.
Both Bing and Google: here are four pages of results about how to find your local Joe's Crab Shack and 4,096 competing restaurants, and there's a new article hidden in there somewhere.
The spammers took over the internet. They now work at big companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.
Google specializes in indirectly promoting standards like HTTPS, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, and AMP that do nothing but raise the cost of hosting. This centralizes content by forcing content producers to go to big sites like substack, medium, and social media.
That allows them to spam further.
Bing just imitates whatever Google does. MBAs do badly at thinking outside the box; repeating, reciting, and recombining textbook knowledge is how they got to this point, after all.
Turns out Eternal September took almost thirty years to kick in, but when it did, it trashed the Wild West and School of Athens that the internet was, and replaced it with daytime television but now with twice the number of ads.
Consider the possibility of nihilism:
Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.
For two glorious weeks, I was a Twitter user again. Having succumbed to the ideological purge five years ago, my account had languished in "verification ban" territory, where Big Tech insists that you enter a phone number and jump through hoops so the DOJ can track you. I declined to do that, since they already have an email address which is perfectly functional, and so they kept the account in limbo.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter and mass panic ensued, I momentarily left my Mastodon account and moseyed over to Twitter where I applied for an exception, and was reinstated. It was kind of anticlimactic, as was my response to social media with The Algorithm for the first time in years; it was cool to have constant spicy content scrolling past, but very little of it was informative, more clever quips between people fighting for their simps, stan, and social or political team.
Just as I was getting bored, however, the account went back into verification ban because someone complained about my standard riff on how to fix human civilization, which you can read in its full form on a free speech host, Gettr, or if you want Twitter, although you will have to click around the "This account is temporarily limited" verification ban notice (Facebook used the same technique on me years ago, now that I recall it).
The best part was seeing how rules are selectively applied, not that I would censor this particular image. The comedy got compounded with Germany and Europol getting into the action too.
In looking back, Twitter feels dated now. There is not enough of a culture of goodwill and trying to communicate to shout over the din of all the influencers, griefers, spammers, repeaters, and hipsters. It was nice while it lasted, but in the end, my sanity and health -- as well as my ability to communicate with the few other remaining sane people -- seem better served by avoiding Twitter.
Roe v. Wade was recently overturned in the United States. This means abortion laws are pretty much left up to the individual states.
Some states outlaw abortions and do not provide exceptions when the pregnancy is the result of rape.
Here's a thought: Should a rape victim who becomes pregnant be entitled to sue the rapist for "9 months of involuntary servitude" under anti-slavery laws?
If the rapist cannot pay or is unknown, should the victim be allowed to sue the state for compensation under anti-slavery laws for the several months between the time the victim would have had the opportunity to end the pregnancy under Roe v. Wade and the actual end of the pregnancy?
--
Notice that I am not advocating requiring that states allow abortion for rape victims. Weighing the morality of abortion vs. the morality of slavery is a discussion for another time. I AM advocating that enforced pregnancy be seen as a form of slavery and that all parties that contribute to this condition should be held financially responsible for the damages inherent in being enslaved.
--
I have turned comments off on purpose. Slashdot is not the forum for this type of discussion.
Instead, I invite everyone who reads this to think about it and discuss it with their loved ones, their religious leaders, and their political leaders.
Some of us write "the further Right-wing opinion on the Net" here:
We have a Reddit/Lemmy style political news channel here:
* https://ruqqus.com/+Conservative
You can find me posting on the following:
* https://freespeechextremist.com/amerika
* https://www.gab.com/alternative_right
* https://slashdot.org/~alternative_right
I also write about heavy metal music on deathmetal.org, and have a personal site at brettstevens.org for those who want to keep track of my freelance activity.
Thanks for reading
[If this hits the Slashdot Firehose, my apologies, it is not intended as a submission. Please don't vote it up or down, just let it scroll off the screen over time.]
In this day and age where fake pictures and videos are so good that anyone can cast serious doubt on a real picture or video by calling it "fake," should cameras include the option to create a "digital signature" or similar authentication?
If I were a journalist or even a citizen-journalist, I'd want to have a time-stamped, possibly location-stamped digital signature on every photo, video, and audio-recording I made in the course of my work.
I'd want to get these signatures or at least a "signature of today's signatures" published in a non-repudiate-able way ASAP, so if I later publish my photo I or my employer could quickly prove it was authentic.
If the image is likely to be cropped before publication, well, that can be handled too, by having the camera also store "standard crops" of every photo along with their respective signatures. A standard crop might be something like "divide the image into 5-10 strips on the narrow dimension and similar-sized evenly-spaced strips on the wider dimension, then treat each 2x2 rectangle as a "standard crop," saving it and its digital signature in addition to the main image.
For video, where the final published product is likely to be a snippet, still/screen-shot, or even a crop, do something similar with a still frame a few times a second. For the audio track, save overlapping staggered two-second snippets and sign each of them. This would be in addition to the signature on the whole video.
The important thing is that the signatures can be published in a non-repudiate-able way within minutes or hours of the photo or video being taken, even before a decision to publish the photo or not is ever made. This way I or my employer can prove a photo or at least the "standard crops" of it and "standard snippets of audio" in it have not been altered since the time the signature was published. For most photos where the motivation or ability to create a fake didn't exist at the time the photo or video was taken, this should deter anyone from screaming "fake, fake" since they know everyone else will know the photo, video, or audio is legit.
There are some obvious costs and other risks:
* This is a lot of work and will take a lot of energy, especially if it is done in real-time or very-near-real-time. At best this will drain the battery. There could also be thermal issues and issues with media that can't be written to fast or with many concurrent writes. This problem will take care of itself as technology improves.
* Assuming the camera's private key isn't in something like Apple's secure enclave, this will require a way to change and manage private keys. If the key is "baked in" to the device, it may reduce the resale value of a camera, since the new buyer's photos will have the same signature as previous users' photos. This may be a non-issue if the camera is used by its original owner until it is obsolete.
* This technology can be abused by authoritarian regimes by requiring it in all cameras. What else is new.
* If it becomes standard in smartphones, it can be abused by advertisers and others. Again, what else is new.
* If it becomes standard in cameras and "on by default," people who turn it off may be considered "suspicious" or "paranoid." Again, what else is new.
Note: Based on a response to this spam by a spammer whose only submissions were 3 recent submissions spamming basically the same thing.
--cut here--
Subject: How to abuse
New to Slashdot? Heard it's a great place to promote your product or idea? Well, maybe. Before abusing
1) Is the thing you want to spam technical in nature? if not, give up, your submission will not be accepted by a non-established editor if it's even remotely promotional. Yes, there are non-technical items that make the front page, but these are generally news items. In the rare case that a non-technical promotional item makes the front page, it's because it's already all over the news, it doesn't need your help to promote it.
2) Is your advertising time-sensitive? If you can't wait a few months to build up a good reputation, forget it, as a new submitter, your submission will not be accepted if it's even remotely promotional.
Still want to give this a go?
3) Take the time and effort to become an established editor with a "good karma." This takes months and dozens of qualitity replies. If you are at all a decent human being, at the end of this stage you will realize spamming Slashdot is bad. You may have abandoned your goal of spamming Slashdot, but you may regain your humanity in the process. It's a win-win for everyone, well, everyone except whoever wanted you to spam.
Still want to spam Slashdot? Is the item you want to spam technical? Is there still a market for it?
4) Find an article about it on a non-spammy reputable site. Mainstream news sites are best, but NON-BIASED, WELL-RESPECTED tech-related sites MAY be okay.
5) Is the article in any way promotional? Don't use it. If it's promotional it *might* be accepted but people will see your submission in your history and people will screen your future submissions more carefully.
6) Is the writer of the article known for being a "shill" for this or any other product, service, or idea? Don't use it, for the same reason as #5.
Okay, if you've reached this point, you've taken the time to earn a good
Now comes the hard part: Writing a summary that does not sound promotional.
If you can do that *despite* being bent on abusing
If it is not, do not re-submit any other articles on the same topic for several months and not until you've posted several dozen quality replies during that time. If you get in a hurry, people will figure out you are a spammer and your account may lose its reputation.
That's the long-and-drawn out way to abuse Slashdot to promote things.
There's a much shorter way: DON'T.
If too many of a user's submissions get modded "spam", the Slashdot system automatically bans the account. I've been posting a lot of political stories, and someone(s) went and marked them all as "spam", and I got banned.
This shows us the weakness of all user reporting and user flagging systems: they can be gamed, especially if one side is politically motivated and has multiple people, a.k.a. a brigade.
Spam seems to me an eternal problem, a variant of the free rider problem and the problem of people quality, but often the counteractions are as bad as the disease.
I seem to recall suggesting this to Tim Skirvin and his anti-UCE coalition back in the day on USENET, but people were maddened by spam at the time and did not want to hear it much.
It turned out that spam simply went corporate and, thanks to Google controlling search and its competitors emulating it, advertising took over the internet legitimately and spam got slotted in with other abuse behaviors.
History is a long and winding river.
[Note: This is NOT a submission for the "front page" so if it shows up in Firehose, please down-vote it. Comments are welcome. The purpose of making this public is to get people to start thinking about it for areas that are under-served by wireless internet and to make it clear that the general idea is too obvious to be patent-able, or at least it would be for any reasonable definition of "obvious." I'm not a lawyer and I'm very well aware that in patent law, the definition of "obvious" is sometimes neither obvious nor reasonable.]
IP over SMS
IP over SMS should be relatively trivial to implement.
Simply take data from higher in the stack, prepend headers and footers, and divide it into packets of 140 bytes packets, leaving room for per-packet headers and footers as well. The SMS source and data destination are transmitted with each packet seperately so they do not need to be in the data stream.
The following is just one of many obvious examples of how it can be done, it may not be the best implementation.
Other implementations may include things like encryption, using keys that were previously exchanged using a reliable method, such as by photographing a bar code that contains the other endpoint's public key, then sending the other party a one-time number encrypted with that key.
Example: incoming data from an IP layer above:
Note: For each SMS message sent, the SMS external header would contain the same information as any other SMS packet, including the source number and destination number. From the point of view of the SMS network the data below, including the SMS internal header in each SMS message, is just another text message or series of text messages.
IP header: From: 1.1.1.1 To: 2.2.2.2 Data: Forscore and seven years ago
Divide this into several packets:
SMS internal header:
MAXMSGS, maximum messages at one time: variable length, 0 (1 bit) or starts with 1 and ends with 0: Take this number, add 2, and multiply by 128. 0=(0+2) * 128 = 256 simultaneous messages between SMS points A and B, 10 = (2+2)*128=512, 110=(6+2)*128=1024, etc.
Msg number (variable length, 1+ preceeding, with rollover). This allows up to MAXMSGS different communications to be going on between point A and point B at the same time.
Packet count within a message: (8, 16, 24, etc. bits) up to 6 bits followed by 00, OR leads with 0 followed by 6 bits followed by 1 followed by the same as many times as needed to hold packet count within message.
Number of packets left in message: same format as packet count.
Packet size 1 bit (0) OR 12 bits: 0 if the this SMS packet is "full," i.e. all 140 bytes are used, otherwise 1 followed by the number of BITS in this packet, including headers.
Data:
Remaining bits in SMS packet are devoted to data. Unused bits are not sent.
When this is practical:
Any time high-latency communication can be tolerated and a more efficient network is not available, this is practical.
This would be common in parts of the world where reliable internet is spotty or much more expensive than SMS, or in disaster situations where SMS may be much more reliable than other forms of Internet service.
However, practical does not imply useful.
Examples of when this is useful, given that it is practical in a given situation:
Group SMS, picture SMS, and other messages typically delivered over methods other than SMS (e.g. Apple's iMessages).
Email.
"Pushed" data such as weather, traffic, stock reports, banking alerts.
Exchanging authentication tokens or other small amounts of information.
Web browsing with a caching web browsing (compare with HoTMetaL, a circa-1993 caching web browser used for dialup), assuming the user is willing to put up with "page loading, check back in 15 minutes" messages, and assuming web pages that target this audience are designed to be used in an "ultra lightweight" mode.
Typical communication will be over UDP rather than TCP, with applications that are "high latency aware" managing things such as re-sending of data, etc.
The UDP layer or the application layer may manage encryption.
Patentability:
Most methods which is not unnecessarily convoluted would be obvious to anyone skilled in the art, and therefore it should not be patentable.
There may be some patent potential for some small efficiencies, but the difference between the "best engineered" implementation and a slightly-less efficient obvious one would be minimal and the benefit to using a non-patent-encumbered implementation far exceeds any small technical benefit of an optimized implementation in most cases.
A test - but not the only test - of obviousness would be to present the problem of "design an efficient method of solving the problem" to a large number of teams (more than 1000) of people trained in the field but who come from otherwise different backgrounds, and see if any of the solutions they arrived at are anywhere close to the solution you are seeking a patent on. If they are, it's probably obvious. The more teams that come up with a solution similar to yours, the more obvious it likely is. Include solutions the teams rejected for whatever reason, or solutions that they would obviously have found but for the fact that they rejected a particular line of inquiry because they thought it was a dead end or would lead to an inferior result.
One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor... is to discourage... from expecting too much from mathematics. -- N. Wiener
