Ironically this war has worked out well for Russia—it draws media attention away from Ukraine while simultaneously expending supplies of Patriot missiles and other munitions, and the spike in oil prices has basically wiped out the benefits of crushing them with sanctions for the past four years.

These are just some of the 'miracles' you can accomplish when you let Bibi Netanyahu start another war so he can keep postponing the conclusion of his corruption trial...

My Kindle 3 died recently, and I replaced it with a basic Kobo Clara. The browser is a mixed blessing (very buggy), but certain familiar mods—custom screensavers and ssh are built in. It was very weird to buy a device that wants to be hacked! It literally comes with a file called "ssh-disabled" that contains the instructions "rename this file to ssh-enabled and reboot," no jailbreak required.

This has to be the weirdest conspiracy theory I have ever heard. He must really get under your skin. I do not usually mod rsilvergun up (posts are too long, often teetering on the edge of off-topic), but now I am going to start doing it just to mess with you jack-offs.

There was a time when the people who complained about soldered RAM (and I was one of those people) were a significant enough proportion of the community that manufacturers would pay attention. This was the age when gaming PCs were constructed from high end pieces from the wild-assed cases to the heavy duty PSUs to overclocked CPUs and next gen GPUs.

But overall, that segment of the consumer market has dwindled. Most folks just want to charge their new machine up, connect it to their WiFi network and get going. On the corporate end of things, save for pretty niche areas like engineering and R&D, a cube you can plug a keyboard, mouse and camera into and will last through a few upgrade cycles before it's sold back to a refurb outfit is all that is needed. Nobody in IT departments is pulling RAM chips anymore, particularly at RAM prices right now! Even the folks writing operating systems are starting to get it, and have rediscovered the glory of native apps that don't required bloated Javascript engines just to select a few radio buttons.

Yes, Windows 11 is really that bad. It's cluttered, slow, inconsistent. I've seen it on pretty high end hardware, and it's a dog. And that's before we even talk about how they tried to insert Copilot into everything. It's a shitty version of Windows and even Redmond acknowledges it. It was the impending EOL of Windows 10 that lead me to buy an M1 MacBook Pro, and I've never looked back. If I want to run Linux, I've got servers set up to do that kind of heavy lifting, but I have absolutely no need for whatever it is MS is trying to sell me these days.

According to the writeup; there are two methods: it is possible for an extension to mark some parts of itself as 'web accessible'; and linkedin has assembled at least one characteristic file for 6,1000-odd extension IDs and attempts to fetch it to confirm/deny the extension's presence.

The other is based on the fact that the whole point of many extensions is to modify the site in some way; but the site normally has largely unfettered access to inspect itself, so they have theirs set up to walk the entire DOM looking for any references to "chrome-extension://" and snagging the IDs if found.

Not exactly a 'declare installed extensions'; but it looks like, out of some combination of supporting the use cases where an extension and page actively interact by design and either not wanting the possibility or not wanting the complexity of trying to enable 'invisible' edits(presumably some sort of 'shadow' DOM mechanism where as far as the site and everything delivered with it knows only its unedited DOM and resources exist; but the one the user sees is an extension-modified copy of that one, which sounds like it could get messy), inferential attacks are fairly easy and powerful.

Where exactly does supporting 3 people on $133k/year count as 'upper middle class'? You could be doing a lot worse, and many are; but that's not just tons of money in a HCOL area; and that's also lower than twice the median salary for full time employees with bachelor's degrees; so you are calling either a single income household doing a bit better than median or a dual income one doing worse 'upper middle class'; which seems pretty ambitious.

It's hard to train a cow to keep its cellphone charged; so you can see why you need something to keep their tracking collars topped up.

Realistically, the status quo has arguably outrun the dystopia there. Your phone already does far more than anything you could get into the power envelope of a bracelet or embedded chip implant, and if for some reason you've raised enough eyebrows that you'd be hauled in for an RFID read DNA is a pretty indelible identifier.

It's not 100% ironclad; but penetration is broad enough that you've basically got the majority carrying highly fingerprintable RF beacons and the minority standing out for their relative radio silence and attempts to deal in cash. Expensive and uncomfortable ankle trackers are good business and feel nice and punitive, just to remind the wrong sort of people we aren't happy with them; but you don't really need to impose a surveillance society when it will build itself for you.

My (admittedly anecdotal from the totally unscientific sample of random stuff I've had reason to work on) impression is that some 'shared' BMC ports had oddities related to network controller sideband interface speeds, since NC-SI is what the BMC is depending on if the NIC is on someone else's PCIe root. It's not like the BMC actually needs a faster link for much(normal management traffic probably doesn't fill 10mb and mounting virtual media may be literally once-in-a-lifetime) so the actual speed of the NC-SI interface was not a burning priority; but it left things up to the NIC whether it would support remaining at gigabit speeds and just quietly slipping the trickle of shared traffic in(presumably slightly more complex; but seems to be what the newer ones do) or if it would knock the link rate down visibly to simplify the case.

You see little echoes of similar behavior elsewhere. The intel desktop and laptop NICs that support 'vPRO' will be GB or 2.5GB when the system is on; but quietly drop back to 10 or 10/100 when it is off and it's just the management engine listening. Some enterprise vendor USB docks do similar things; looks like a normal USB NIC when the OS is up; but drops to a lower speed and operates quietly over, I think, some sort of oddball vendor-defined messages if one of their systems is plugged in but off.

I assume that, as an exercise, getting 5 simultaneous introductions working makes for a better paper; but is there a reason why you would want that in practice? Especially if there is any wobble in the ratios either randomly, across generations, or in the presence of certain environmental conditions that tweak the plant's metabolism one way or another that sounds like it would be a real pain in the ass to have to re-balance (and, if different patients are deemed to need different combinations even a perfectly stable plant is going to need re-balancing of the outputs) vs. very specifically going for a specific target output per-plant(or e. coli or yeast or whatever is easiest to bioreactor) and then just mixing to taste after purification. Is there some advantage I'm not seeing?

I realize that there are cases where some plant-sourced pharmacological effect looks like it is actually driven not by the identified 'active ingredient'; but by dozens or hundreds of assorted things, and in that case you just have to live with the complexity if you get better results with that than with purified isolates; but if you are deliberately engineering for very specific outputs why a mix of 5?

Analogies with the human brain don't work that well. In our case, every time we remember we rewrite that memory, altering it from slightly, to a lot, to completely. AI systems' baseline memory is read-only; it doesn't change during reuse, so it can be equated more with the way saving a PNG into a JPEG is still a direct derivative copy of the PNG content, no matter whether one cranks the compression up so the resulting image becomes way blurrier than the original. Being blurry doesn't make it not a copy. And, in being a copy, legal copying rights apply.

Now, if AI memory startes changing globally every single time it receives a request from any source, no matter how many sessions or API calls are happening, so that any new subsequent call is dealing with that altered memory and in turn altering it, so that its entire memory space is in constant flux, and there's no snapshotting to roll its state back to previous configurations, so they don't act as mere static lossy compressors, then it becomes an analog of a human brain with human-like memory, at which point accusing it of simply making derivative copies cannot be done anymore without also accusing humans.

The problem with that, evidently, is that when they start working like that, since they're functioning exactly as real persons do, they too become persons, with legitimate claim to personhood and to personal rights. Which is a legal can of worms no one wants to deal with.

VPN usage can be detected via deep packet inspection, as China shows. In China, the government is aware of all VPN usage and lets it slip, or blocks it, as they see fit. In Xinjiang they even went after VPN users to demand look into their mobile devices to check whether they had forbidden content there, not due to need but as an intimidation tactic, an explicit "we know who you are, and where to find you" warning to all inhabitants so they wouldn't feel empowered by the mere fact the government is allowing them to use VPNs.

The UK and other countries are looking into regulating VPNs by demanding that VPN providers also age-verify users. Those who don't will be formally fined, as the UK is trying to fine 4chan despite being unable to collect, and blocked, which is feasible. Evidently, VPN developers keep improving their protocols to make them more and more indistinguishable, but DPI also improves in return. It'll be a cat-and-mouse game as the one I described in my answer to the other reply, until using an unlicensed VPN provider becomes so aggravating that most will give up.

And, important tidbit, China resells its Great Firewall tech to any country interested. Right now, only dictatorships and illiberal democracies buy it, but if VPN tech improves faster than national age-verification legal bodies can keep up with via their own locally developed DPI solutions, they too may start purchasing it.

What I think is happening is that governments all around the world are seeing Big Wars brewing on the horizon, and preparing by having extensive media control mechanisms in place for when those turn into reality.

See, one thing a country must do to have a chance of winning a war, or at least not losing it badly, is to have a population strongly aligned with the war effort. That alignment, in turn, needs the population to be fed, and to believe in, all the propaganda the government puts out about how the war is going. Conversely, the enemy country tries to undermine that with counter-propaganda to reduce the other side's morale.

Back when a small group of media companies produced information, it was easy to control the flow of information for propaganda purposes. With the Internet that doesn't work, both propaganda, counter-propaganda, and opinions that are neither and go against both, flow in all directions. That's great when things are peaceful, and everyone is just having fun, doing business with everyone else, and arguing about minor grievances, or even major ones but that don't lead to existential risks. But it's very, very bad when you need to win serious wars.

So my take is that everyone but the kitchen sink is using age verification to install the infrastructure needed for full-on control of information flow, using youth outrage to learn the bypass mechanisms the most engaged will find and use, and then closing those loopholes one by one, until only a tiny minority is able to do so. Then, if (when) the wars come, a flip of the switch will enable similar strict limits on everyone. And propaganda can then work as expected.

If that's the case, we'll see governments doubling and tripling down on it, no matter the costs to corporations. These will either adapt or adapt. Those who refuse, too bad for them, and for us who'd prefer otherwise.

The main ways age verification is being done are by following instructions while a video of one's face is recorded, by submitting a photo of a legally valid State or National ID the system knows how to process, or by submitting valid credit card data. A bot can do those, and it's relatively cheap for one-off cases, but it gets very expensive for any kind of mass use:

* Listening to instructions and generating a real-time video of an adult face that follows them requires a lot of processing power.
* An ID can usually be submitted only once per site, so one needs to purchase lots of valid IDs in the black market to generate fake ID photos, IDs that other people are also purchasing to do the same.
* And getting lots of valid credit data also requires purchasing it from black markets.

None of this is impossible to overcome for bot farms, but it increases their costs significantly, so they become less massive and thus less of a nuisance, especially for big sites that can afford layers upon layers of anti-fraud mechanisms for each of those methods. Also, using those methods would cause many such operations to move from being simple ToS violators into becoming full-on criminals, something that might discourage local bot operators who only want to spread spam, but don't want to become targets of the FBI or its international counterparts.