Comment Good for them. Roughly 20 years to late ... (Score 1) 65
... for my taste but good for them.
Comment Just give me an affordable vehicle ... (Score 4, Insightful) 38
... that is robust, efficient and that I can maintain and repair myself if the need be. No?
Ok then, get lost. Thank you.
Submission + - Alan Turing developed a portable voice encryption device (popularmechanics.com)
smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording.
“Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack,” Copeland summarizes, “Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.”
Turing’s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes “was a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.”
The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well.
This is the part of the story where one might say “Well, I’ve never heard of Alan Turing’s voice encoder, so the experiments must have failed.” But remarkably, they didn’t. Turing and Bayley actually did create their Delilah, and even demonstrated it using a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, “successfully encrypting, transmitting, and decrypting it.”
Instead, the reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isn’t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasn’t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turing’s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turing’s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.
“Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack,” Copeland summarizes, “Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.”
Turing’s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes “was a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.”
The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well.
This is the part of the story where one might say “Well, I’ve never heard of Alan Turing’s voice encoder, so the experiments must have failed.” But remarkably, they didn’t. Turing and Bayley actually did create their Delilah, and even demonstrated it using a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, “successfully encrypting, transmitting, and decrypting it.”
Instead, the reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isn’t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasn’t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turing’s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turing’s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.
Comment Wrong. Stanford as an industry ... (Score 1) 37
... is doomed.
Comment It's not "social media" it's a global ... (Score 1) 147
... mental illness. Commercial "social" media is a thing that really shouldn't exist. Especially since they're just glorified versions of already existing protocols. Limiting access to these for youngsters is a good thing. The teenies won't listen of course, but that's beside the point. It's about being able to sue those corps into next wednesday if they choose to target minors. And that's a good thing.
Comment The modern Web is basically unusable ... (Score 3, Insightful) 161
... without (ultra)powerful ad- and trackblock setups, media buffers and stream-rippers. I currently use Brave and that works pretty well, but the amount of big guns I have to whip out in order not to be bombarded like some sorry-ass regular browser user has gotten ridiculous in the last five years. I wonder how further this can go on before a notable portion of us just get's fed up and redoes the Web entirely.
When I'm on a regular browser on some other machine and I see ad-trash or cookie popups clobbering the screen and my eyeballs, I usually just close the tab and do something else. I'm sick and tired of this garbage and it's simply not worth my time or cognitive load. Same with youtube ads.
Maybe it's time us nerds retreat to a new type of protocol and service, like some fully encrypted and signed WebFS thing where this garbage simply doesn't exist. It feels somewhat overdue to be honest.
Submission + - Trump's "Made in the USA" Phone is just a reskinned HTC U24 Pro 1
necro81 writes: The heavily promoted, $499 T1 "Trump Phone" was originally said to be "Made in the USA" and ship in September 2025. Later, that was downgraded to "Assembled in the USA". Given the Trump Organization's lack of engineering or supply chain expertise, many assumed the "T1" would just be a private-label phone made by someone else. After a number of delays, the first phones are finally shipping.
iFixit has performed a teardown and concluded that the T1 is a just gold-painted 2024 HTC U24 Pro — a device from a Taiwanese company, probably using mainland China design and supply chains. In collaboration with NBC News, the iFixit team examined both phones using CT scans, side-by-side teardowns, and even reassembled a working T1 using a U24 Pro main board. As for "assembled in the USA", that may be true, in the same sense that your phone's repairman can "assemble" a phone from a handful of subassemblies sourced from someone else. Or it may have been assembled in Guangdong, China like the other U24 Pros.
iFixit sums it up: "What you have is not an 'American-Proud Design', but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I’m failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I’ve certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time."
iFixit has performed a teardown and concluded that the T1 is a just gold-painted 2024 HTC U24 Pro — a device from a Taiwanese company, probably using mainland China design and supply chains. In collaboration with NBC News, the iFixit team examined both phones using CT scans, side-by-side teardowns, and even reassembled a working T1 using a U24 Pro main board. As for "assembled in the USA", that may be true, in the same sense that your phone's repairman can "assemble" a phone from a handful of subassemblies sourced from someone else. Or it may have been assembled in Guangdong, China like the other U24 Pros.
iFixit sums it up: "What you have is not an 'American-Proud Design', but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I’m failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I’ve certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time."
Comment Yeah, closing in on this too. (Score 2) 172
A complete redo of lifestyle design and moving 'sitting at screen, doing computer stuff' to some side-task level cultural technique rather than my actual day job is due for me too. AI does 90%+ of coding now and way better than me and I'm just shooing it around and double-checking the diffs and commits in case something goes haywire. Which it doesn't happen that often compared to the output.
I'm clearing out my stuff and preparing to do more human things. Coding is still fun, but so is hiking, biking, travelling, social dancing, boardgaming, etc. We're at the brink of a post-scarcity economy. Might as well get on with it.
Comment Botsitting _is_ the new work. (Score 4, Informative) 49
If the bot is 30x better than me on a bad day, botsitting is my new fucking main task. Obviously. In the last 6 months me and my AI metasubscription have grown to become a 10 head pro devteam with me at the helm. I've basically mutated into a chief senior lead and a full crew at zero extra cost and _ less_ effort for me. It would be irresponsible for me not to botsit and hold up everything by hand-coding myself. My current productivity would drop 10x instantly.
Bottom line: The bots are here and they've taken over. Get out of the way you slow-ass bipedal meatbag.
Comment Disclosure! (Score 2) 102
Soon we will discover that "covfefe" is the Grey's greeting that is the equivalent of Vulcan's "life long and prosper."
Comment I get it. (Score 1) 45
Modern smart devices offer awesome quasi-magical advantages over my very first computer which was a mobile pocket handheld computers I brought when I was 16, sporting Basic and 1.2kb RAM.
However, the distraction and mental load that comes with these devices and services these days is larger than any single human can reasonably consume in their life. The idea of ditching the smart devices and going back to paper notebooks and dumbphones the size of which I can _actually_ handle has been quite enticing to me too for the last decade or so. And I might actually do it some day.
Then again there's Google Maps, Communications, Notes, an ultra high end Digital camera, automatic sync and Backup, times and alert, notes, checkliste, calendar, groupware and a full blown VM with programming environment (I do Web) right there in my pocket. Star Trek is bronze Age compared.
Maybe it's just best to use these devices but work on the discipline in using them. A thing I'm equipped for better than anyone as an 80ies computer kid. The best way is probably some combination of both.
Comment Yeah, no shit. (Score 3, Informative) 226
Brexit happened on lies upon bloody lies by populist douchebags like Nigel Farage. The British people were once again screwed over epic style by the political class. Which made things even worse after Brexit, ironically.
We all knew Brexit would hurt, but holy cow, as much as we like to make fun of the Brits for doing Brexit, this is painful to watch. We feel you guys.
Comment He is actively working on ... (Score 1) 315
... a post-cyberpunk post-scarcity economy. If he only achieves half of what he's pushing for that wealth won't mean that much. It's precisely that he's acting that way that puts him in a position to be this wealthy. The final goal of capitalism is to make itself obsolete. We might actually be getting there just now. Musk being a trillionaire is just an intermediate step on that scale.
Comment Re:He should fix his old-space rocket company firs (Score 1) 67
Yeah, the rocket that looked like the "flying cock and balls" out of Austin Powers.
Comment Back in the global Pokemon Go craze ... (Score 4, Interesting) 44
... Moscow was clogged with Pokemon Go players, just like any other big city on the planet back in the summer of 2016. It was insane. Gorky Park, Victory Park, Arbat clogged with young people running around with their phones, collecting their Pokemons. I was surprised seeing the same crazy stuff going on just like in my homestates capital of Duesseldorf.
That such data is enough to program homing drones with ultra high precision is of no surprise. The sheer amount of data is enough to get all the accuracy you need.
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