Camera makers are pushing for Content Authenticity. Look for CAI and C2PA standards. Canon are Nikon are both on board, also some phone makers, including Samsung, see https://news.samsung.com/globa...

Idea is that the device captures the image and signs it with vendor's certificate. Then, when you edit it in your editor (Photoshop - unfortunately GIMP not yet), the editor saves in the metadata what exactly you changed and signs with their own cert (e.g. "I cropped this photo and adjusted lighting curves a bit to bring dark portions out a bit more"). This chain can then be followed.

Same would apply for video material too. If all you do is cut the original clip and normalize audio, very easy to trace.

Of course it's not foolproof and you are supposed to trust the certs and the devices, but there *are* efforts to combat deepfakes.

The big problem with this is the editing bit - I mean, assuming you trust Samsung or Canon to save the content correctly and sign it, how can you trust changelog signed with Adobe's tacked onto that? Well, here's where the TPM part comes into play. But you basically need to only allow locked-down hardware to be used for editing.

I'm still hoping that this goes mainstream and not just for stuff like crime investigations and the like where authenticity of the evidence needs to be clear. It's of course full of holes but it's definitely much better than nothing.

First movie was awesome as a tech demo. The plot was basically, as South Park put it, Dances with Smurfs. That was fine, as I went in expecting tech demo and some action. Good vs. bad with generally relatable characters despite being sort of archetypes (The Corporate, General Ripper, Disillusioned grunt who becomes hero, Native Girl he smooches over, the Mentor who dies...). But at least they had *some* depth into them.

Avatar 2 was...well, ok, fine, more finesse in the tech part (the water effects), but the rest was just...baad. Characters had become more cardboard cutouts, and the anvilicious plot was just really an excuse to make a statement about whaling is baad, mmkay. Not disagreeing with that - but Star Trek IV did that same statement 40 years ago and was much more fun to watch and didn't try to drive the point home with a sledgehammer.

The third - well, I guess when it comes to streaming I'll watch the special effect sequences and then the dialogue scenes can be sped over with 2-3x speed. I have very low expectations especially after the statements about Cameron wanting to make allegory to Gaza/Ukraine/Sudan about generational hatred or somesuch.

Cupra Raval / ID.Polo / Skoda Epiq sounds pretty much like one. I'm lined up to buy one next year, unless they have screwed up really badly somehow.

Last time I filled an ESTA form in 2023, the dropdown menu for social media accounts included "GitHub". That tells all you need to know. Of course, optional field so I just skipped it. But there was also "Other" field, which can pretty much mean anything.

There was tthe Astro Slide... I'm one of the lucky ones who actually got their device. Still using it, typing this post on it,, in fact. Unfortunately the company behind it are a clusterfuck so it only got one firmware update and they essentially ghosted Indiegogo backers after that. I'd like to get Lineage on it, but since there are proprietary Mediatek blobs involved I doubt it is going to be possible. So stuck with Android 11...

Linux has utilized - pretty much forever - all the available memory as cache/buffer, so you were bound to run into the problem much sooner.

The Win95/98/ME could run for long time without ever accessing particular physical memory chips.

Windows NT didn't have this problem, but on the other hand WinNT and successors also had better isolation so if a driver crashed due to memory issue, it recovered better (This applies really to WinNT 3.5 and perhaps 4, back when it was still going with the Dave Cutler's VMS-derived approach - WinNT 3.5 is almost a microkernel).

Did they test with multiple kinds of dyes? Do Maori (and other polynesians) that might have every part of their body painted use different kinds of inks than in the west?

The stupidest voting system for representational systems ever. Ok, it was the first - dating back to Magna Carta days - but why is it still being used today?

Pick almost anything else, and you get better results. My favorite would be Concordet, but any Single Transferrable Vote would probably work fine.

As everyone is quick to point out, uploading data to cloud costs nothing. However, downloading it back out costs potentially lots. I have sometimes been involved in setting up communications between multiple cloud providers and key factor has always been to set up some sort of bandwidth limits to make sure some process does not attempt to download the entire storage bucket from another cloud service.

So how is this going to be billed, if it's now officially supported? Especially if I have a working service on AWS and decide that hey, I'll add redundancy via Google. I'll just add a node there and sync up all my data...oops, just spent the entire department budget on the initial sync from AWS to Google.

In the EU, you can just click "enroll" and boom, Windows 10 is supported yet another year with security updates, and no need to worry about AI getting in the way (that much). AFAIK elsewhere you need to enable the stupid cloud backups, but with some tricks you can avoid that too.

I'm still running Win 10 Education, I got the license from my university via Dreamspark back when it was a thing, and now I enrolled also for ESUs for that. I should be covered until 2028.

(Migrated to Linux on most of my PCs, but using Windows for gaming. After 2028 I guess I'll migrate to Steam Deck).

https://bsky.app/profile/desig...

n/t

Related on reusing coax cables...

The original builders of our house had coax in every room (I guess they wanted to watch TV a lot). No Ethernet. Fiber comes to house technical room, but from that point onwards no network cabling. Would have been a pain to deploy a new set of fiber or CAT6/7 cable everywhere, so mostly surviving with Wifi. However, for "trunk" connectivity I got a couple of these:

https://www.gocoax.com/ma2500d

I'm just using them for point-to-multipoint connectivity - had to get a new splitter. I got one next to my router where the fiber comes in and I get a pretty sweet throughput. Even though the bandwidth is "shared", it's actually close to 3 Gbps total across all endpoints. For point-to-point you get 2.5 Gbps because the Ethernet port only supports that.

Well, VIX is +20% today and NVidia is down 3,5%. Did the bubble just start bursting, or is it just a temporary setback when ton of people waiting in the wings will now "buy the dip"?

I agree that full control is the ideal, but I also don't really get the appeal of 24 fps film effect. It seems more like a legacy limitation of the medium, than something that enhances the look. I like to see detail and enough clarity to understand what I'm looking at, and 24 fps on film seems to be the opposite of that.

Agree. We are running at hundreds of FPS in games. Should I suddenly have my GPU limit to 24 fps to create "cinematic" feeling for some weird reason?

When the Hobbit movies were shown with 48 fps in theaters I was thrilled, and was hoping that to be adopted further - but looks like it has fizzled. I sometimes understand that director might want to show things in technically inferior way - say black&white for flashbacks scenes - but that should be a specific effect for specific purpose. Keeping the 24 fps rate is just ridiculous. Granted, motion blur makes it better than it sounds, but just give me the choice.

Maybe this is just because I've been gaming with at least 60 fps for 30+ years, getting Quake I to run with 120 fps on a CRT was darn impressive at the time, and I had early interpolation on my TV with Philips NaturalMotion(tm) so I have never considered smooth motion as "soap opera" - it's just how things are supposed to be.

Grandma just wants to plug the thing in and watch.

Grandma either would have not cared that the UI sometimes freezes ("Oh, it's just one of these newfangled things"), would not have cared about the privacy implications of online requirement (so she would have gotten the update over Wifi anyway), or would have complained to the seller, and they would update the firmware using the USB stick method.