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Comment Re:I assume you are joking, but ... (Score 1) 152

We are only a year out from the murder of a health-insurance executive, so the police are more on edge than usual.

Then we need to threaten such things much more often, so that the cops will eventually get used to it, and relax. ;-)

Debian never tried to kill me through my computer. I'd appreciate it if my car manufacturer made their car as safe as my computer.

Fuck it, I just want a Debian car. Then I won't need to extract bloody vengeance from beyond the grave, as my zombie revenant tracks down the CEO of Subaru, and the rotting flesh of my hands tightens around his throat as payment for the time a popup distracted me.

Comment There's no consensus definition of E2E encryption (Score 1) 89

Some people are busting out "definitions" of "End to End Encryption" but people were already using that as in informal descriptive term long before your formalized technical jargon was made up. Nobody should be surprised if there are mismatches. Have faith in our faithlessness.

I personally view the term as an attempt to call semi-bullshit on SMTP and IMAP over SSL/TLS. In the "old" (though not very old) days, if you sent a plaintext email (no PGP!), some people would say "oh, it's encrypted anyway, because the connection is encrypted between your workstation and the SMTP server, the connection from there to some SMTP relay is encrypted, the connection from there to the final SMTP server is encrypted, and the recipient's connection to the IMAP server is encrypted."

To which plenty of people, like me, complained "But it's still plaintext at every stop where it's stored along the way! You should use PGP, because then, regardless of the connection security, or lack of security on all the connections, it is encrypted end to end. Never trust the network, baby!"

Keep in mind that even when I say that, this is without any regard for key security! When I say E2E encrypted, it is implied that the key exchange may have been done poorly/incorrectly, mainly because few people really get to be sure they're not being MitMed when they use PGP. You can exchange keys correctly, but it's enough of a PITA that, in the wild, you rarely get to. You usually just look up their key on some keyserver and hope for the best. Ahem. And I say "usually" as if even that happens often. [eyeroll]

Indeed, every time I hear about some new secure messaging app/protocol, the first thing I wonder is "how do they do key exchange?" and I'm generally mistrusting of it, by default. And sometimes, I'm unpleasantly unsurprised, err I mean, cynically confirmed.

But anyway, if my E2E definition matches yours, great! And if it doesn't, well, that's ok and it's why we descend into the dorky details, so that we can be sure we're both talking about the same thing.

Comment Re:AV1 lacks hardware support compared with H.264 (Score 1) 31

> Meanwhile, H.264 has dedicated hardware decoders in world+dog devices, including ancient ones.

Ancient ones, yes, but most devices sold in the past five years have AV1 *decode* support.

Hardware with AV1 *encode* is still pretty rare but a fair number of up-market chips from the past few years have it.

What we mostly care about here is the $20 amtel or mediatek devices sold today, and those are fine.

Netflix can support the older devices with H.264 as long as it makes more sense to pay the patent license fees than to drop support for old devices.

It won't be long before there are no devices that the manufacturer still supports that can't decode AV1 in hardware. Not that most end-users even know their device went EOL and now a potential liability.

Given that Netflix has native apps on most of these systems it should be straightforward to serve the non-patented stream to any device that can play it well.

Comment Re:backups (Score 3, Interesting) 46

> They don't do backups at those outfits?

We really need Federal government backups to be centralized at the National Archives.

Both so one expert team can make sure it's done right, instead of hundreds of teams with questionable experience and track records attempting to do it right.

And /also/ so when one agency goes, "whoopise, I guess we deleted the evidence of our crimes!" there is recourse.

Right now, the prosecutor just goes, "shucks, I guess we don't have a case then. Better fire some leaf-node IT contractor."

Comment Re:Nasa wasting money again (Score 1) 42

Hi from Australia. Have you never tasted QLD cane sugar?

American Coke tastes horrible.

FWIW, there's a lot more to it than that. Here's some good info on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Some points from that:
* Sugar (sucrose) in an acid will quickly be split into Fructose and Glucose (about 50/50 ratio).
* Mexican Coke tested with near zero sucrose content (it had split).
* Corn Syrup is nearly the same ratio of Fructose and Glucose (about 55/42 ratio).
* No, you can't taste the difference between those sugars.
* Mexican Coke had nearly twice the sodium... something you can taste.

I thought I had wasted my time watching that video, but it really stuck with me. I love the idea of sugar instead of corn syrup in Coke, and I like the taste of a Mexican Coke a little more, but this broke my assumptions about why I like the taste of it.

Comment Re:Musk shut down Starlink in Ukraine (Score 1) 76

I'm flummoxed; Is the Starlink service incapable of authenticating terminals?

I'm sure these are authorized terminals being sold to Russia. They might even be coming from Russian sympathizers in Ukraine .

Why would you think that? The fuckin slashdot page title even says, "... Black Market Starlink Terminals ...". Starlink isn't even active anywhere in Russia.

Regardless, if they were authorized terminals, then they'd certainly be able to disable them and be well aware of what all terminals are connecting.

Comment Charge the man that hired them too. (Score 5, Insightful) 46

What possible reason could you have for hiring contractors that have a record of hacking your organization?

I could see hiring people that hacked somebody else.

I could see hiring hackers as direct employees so you can keep a close watch on them.

But hiring a hacking organization as contract employees?

That person was either a) Bribed or b) a Moron.

They need to be fired to prevent them from hiring the same people tomorrow.

Comment Re: Here we go (Score 3, Insightful) 48

By "in the 1940's" I assume you mean when the UN handed the region to the Jews? There were no "Palestinians" at the time, that ethnonym was invented by Yasser Arafat

There was Palestine. That's a distinction without a difference.

So, that initial "theft" was actually the rest of the world recognizing that the Jews needed their land back

And just look at the beautiful Genocide they've created there!

Congratulations! Look who you've sided with.

I'm not siding with anyone here. I dislike all religious ethnostates because they always go wrong at some point. The only thing I like is when they become more secular, like Iran was before the USA tampered with it. I am siding against genocide. If Israel can stop doing a genocide, I can stop disliking Israel for doing genocide and just focus on their religious oppression.

Comment Re:Hugs my 2000s car... (Score 1) 152

Honda is showing the beginning of the end by selling cars not designed by them, so maybe you won't have to wait too long for their come-uppance. Their only full sized EV is a GM product and they didn't even bother making any interior changes so it doesn't even look or feel like a Honda inside. It sounds like this can only be an improvement at this point.

It's so weird given that Honda was the undisputed champ of making a good simple reliable car in the 1990s. How did they get here? Did they hire execs from Sony?

Comment Re:vast demand for AI (Score 1) 87

Oh yeah, Gemini is great!

I finally just had to block the AI search results on Google because they are so much worse than worthless every single time. The "citations" linked never say what Google claims they say. Every time I search for information on something I know about already I can see that Gemini doesn't know shit.

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