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Submission + - Meet the Secretive US Company Building an 'Unbreakable' Internet Inside Russia (vice.com)

An anonymous reader writes: As Russia makes preparations to possibly disconnect from the global internet in a bid to control the narrative around the invasion of Ukraine, one secretive U.S. company is rushing to lay the final pieces of an unbreakable network that the Kremlin won’t be able to take down. The company is Lantern, which says it has seen staggering growth inside Russia in the last four weeks for its app that allows users to bypass restrictions the Kremlin has put in place on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But now the company is building something even more robust, an internal peer-to-peer network that will allow dissenting voices to continue to upload and share content even if the Kremlin pulls the plug on the internet.

Within the next week, the network will be fully operational, allowing opposition voices to use the Lantern app to post content like videos from protests or updates on the war in Ukraine directly to the Lantern network. This would allow users to share it with other Lantern users without fear that the content will be removed or blocked. [...] Lantern was founded in California in 2010 with the goal of keeping “the world’s information, speech, expression, and finance uncensored.” The free version of the app has a data cap of 500MB, but the pro version, which costs $32 a year, has no data cap. It has become hugely popular in China because of its ability to stay one step ahead of the government’s censorship efforts, spreading mainly via word-of-mouth as it’s not available via the Google or Apple app stores inside China. n Russia, like all new markets it enters, Lantern removed the data cap for all users. Despite this, some users still paid for the pro version.

Submission + - Nestle: Anonymous Can't Hack Us, We Leaked Our Own Data (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A hacker group claims to have stolen and leaked a trove of Nestle’s data. The company says that can’t possibly be true. Why? Because the data was actually leaked by Nestle itself several weeks ago. In emails to Gizmodo, a Nestle spokesperson disavowed allegations from the hacktivist collective Anonymous, which claimed this week to have stolen and leaked a 10 gigabyte tranche from the global food and beverage conglomerate. Anonymous said it was punishing Nestle for its reticence to withdraw from Russia, as a host of other major companies have done. The data, which Anonymous said included internal emails, passwords, and information on Nestle’s customers, was posted to the web on Tuesday.

But, according to Nestlé, Anonymous is full of it. A spokesperson told Gizmodo, “This recent claim of a cyber-attack against Nestle and subsequent data leak has no foundation.” The spokesperson explained that the trove of data floating around the web was, in fact, the product of a mistake the company made earlier this year: “It relates to a case from February, when some randomized and predominantly publicly available test data of a B2B nature was made accessible unintentionally online for a short period of time." [...] In a follow-up email, the same company spokesperson explained that the data, some of which was already public and some of which was not, had been accidentally published to the open internet for multiple weeks. According to the spokesperson: "Some predominantly publicly-available data (e.g., company names and company addresses and some business email addresses) was erroneously made available on the web for a limited period of time (a few weeks). It was detected by our security team at the time and the appropriate review was carried out. The data was prepared for a B2B test website to perform some functionality checks."

Comment Re:Uh huh (Score 1) 24

I don't think this is "insightful," rather, funny. It's clearly a joke, something someone would stay that failed to distinguish context. Regardless, this is a scary move. Twitter will be the new AOL (do you still have a friend with an @aol.com email address?). Twitter is talking about the "conversation layer" as activity pub in this context, not censorship. However... it's scarier.

Twitter will not gain a significant number of users with this move, it will simply prevent more people from leaving based on a promise they can tweet to their banned friends on brighteon. A promise that will take forever, that they will promote to keep from losing users. But there is something to look out for...

In the United States, Twitter is going to have big 47 U.S. Code 230 problems, and Canada now, many countries and lawsuits to follow. This is both a defensive tactic and an offensive tactic. Twitter will argue the content is shared, not controlled, they provide only an interface, and the platform irrelevant. They will argue that there are far more egregious offenders using the same protocol and they are being harassed out of political bias. (poor arguments, but they will try anything)

They are trying to keep from losing users, and ad revenue, while setting up legal arguments. They are not doing this out of the kindness in their heart and love for open platforms. And, so"

"standard for the public conversation layer of the internet." If you agree with everything we say.

Actually, very funny, but just thought it was worth pointing out the context...

Comment Let it go (Score 1) 582

If things get bad enough for infrastructure such as digital phone and data to go offline then we've got greater problems that POTS couldn't handle anyway. If maintaining POTS is slowing adoption of faster internet infrastructure then it should go. It was fun and I have fond memories of modem connection sounds but... the 1K chunks of files coming over were excruciating to endure.

Fiber Optic right to the home firewall/router is what I'd like to see.

Comment Re:I don't think encoding/decoding are fundamental (Score 0) 182

I used to adhere to the Theory of Entropy. Made sense at the time kinda like the flat world and Earth being the center of everything.

With a greater understanding of Physics and Cosmology, I've come to realize that the Earth is not flat nor the center of everything. With the realization that Energy is neither created nor destroyed only converted - the Theory of Entropy is disrupted in my mind and therefore proven false.

Now, discounting Entropy doesn't mean I deny that systems have a tendency to reach a Steady State where a perceived equilibrium has been established.

Comment Re:Well, I have a theory (Score 1) 182

To me, there are only four primary dimensions.

Length, Width, Height and Time.

The L*W*H dimensions ARE space. No need for a space dimension.

Time is a measurement used to delineate Frames.

I would say, do not limit yourself to only thinking in 2 dimensions as you cannot live in them. It takes 3. I will say that it also takes a bit more thought to see the world or understand it in 3 dimensions. One should try.

Comment Universe does compute - per se. (Score 1) 182

I think whether or not the Universe computes is relative.

What is it you're trying to compute? If you are trying to compute the dynamics of the Universe then the Universe does compute. It computes itself better than any other model.

If you are talking about abstractions then probably computers do very well give proper instruction and dataset.

To get a computer to compute the universe is like trying to force a very large round peg into a very small square hole.

Comment Re:Learn some terminology (Score 1) 106

You are correct. Access in it's simplest form is NOT a true database in that it is not a first class server of data per se. It can be used in a multi-user fashion though. You have multiple users running Access and a client program which is linked to a common Access database file on the network. All the intelligence except for data validation is implemented in the client. Back in the old days (the 90's), Access did not have row-locking but locked chunks of the database. Concurrency was a major issue and required code to bulldoze it's way into a record pessimistic lock so it could store data without stomping on someone else's update. The trick was to pad out the chuck to be one record in size. Wasteful of space but good for performance. These days, the ability to lock an actual row means less space wasted in the database - potentially saving gigabytes in a table with millions of records.

Access is more a Swiss Army Knife type of user database tool than a mission critical system. I wouldn't dream of using it for anything but data analysis of smaller sets of data, reporting and prototyping of client frontsides.

Comment Database efficiency considerations (Score 1) 106

Let's see - proper RDBMS considerations:
Proper normalization of data
Efficient keying for relating data. Compound keys can be difficult to work with.
Use of simplest possible recordset type for working with data.
Understanding of boolean logic and sets. Needful for creating efficient SQL queries.
Understanding of a particular RDBMS's optimization techniques/order of operations.
Data validation to prevent GIGO.
Record locking schemes to prevent inconsistent updates - transactions should be used to minimize impact.
Learn those things which your chosen RDBMS does NOT do well and find a way to optimize or work around them.

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