Every time people hear what it actually involves is outrage and opposition, at least all the way back to when Intel first announced that they wanted to hardcode identity numbers inside CPUs in 1999. But the corporations involved have been relentless, and have sunk countless billions of dollars steadily forcing it forwards, and building front organizations to obfuscate and whitewash it.

With Windows 11, Microsoft was finally able to FORCE Trusted computing hardware into every new computer. Not just every new Windows computer, but every computer.

Every new Intel PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new AMD PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new ARM PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. The only processor lines that DON'T have it are the microcontrollers.

There are some unlocked smartphones available, but as far as I can determine it's literally impossible to buy a smartphone that doesn't have hardware trusted computing built in.

I specified that enforcing Trusted Computing at the internet access level is still a long term goal, they couldn't get away with it today. However they are well on the way to success. Virtually all new hardware supporting trusted computing, all the front groups rolling out standards and systems, and as it gets incorporated into things everyone is going to increasingly running into situations where they get locked out of stuff if they're not Trusted Computing compliant. Streaming already restricts you to the worst quality if you're not compliant, and it's only going to get worse as pre-Win11 computers fade out and as more things require it.

I'd hardly call exact date of birth "low information content".

And yes this does reveal exact date of birth, regardless of the bullshit obfuscation that it supposedly only reports age range. The server simply tracks the reported result every time the user connects, and on some specific day the result CHANGES to announce their date of birth.

-

This is based on SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts), brought to you by the same fuckers making Trusted Computing and the TMP (Trusted Platform Module). It's part of the same shitstack to prohibit you from altering your software and to lock you out of your own files, and to send spy reports out over the internet so you can be cut off if you "fail" the Trusted Computing check.

The software can use a TPM's (Trusted Platform Module) Sealing function to encrypt your data such that it's impossible to access your own data if the software is modified. It can then pass control over that data only to software updates that carry a signed security certificate from Broadcom (or any other company using this system).

It is no longer open source, your system no longer works as you can no longer access your Sealed data if you change so much as a single letter of the code. Even recompile unaltered code won't work, unless you magically manage to get your build environment absolutely identical to the company's build environment and get byte-for-byte output. Even that may be impossible with the newer levels of non-deterministic compiler optimizations.

Also, with TMP's Remote Attestation feature can be used to transmit your machine's software configuration over the internet, so that you can be cut off if your system doesn't match Broadcom (or other company's) cryptographically signed certificate.

And then of course there's Network Access Control (NAC) / Trusted Network Connect (TNC). In the long term, the goal is for ISPs to use NAC/TNC to interrogate your computer for Trusted Computing compliance, and deny you any internet access whatsoever if your machine isn't compliant. Software with this sort of "security" certificate would pass inspection, while any attempt to alter the code would be detected as "tampering". You then get "quarantined". What "quarantine" means is that you are denied internet access - with the exception that you do get very restricted access which can only be used to download the approved software to "fix" your computer into Trusted Computing compliance.

That's really good. Big tech summarized in two sentences.

We MUST be able to inspect and age verify every AI slop porn image to protect the fictional children!

-

If you read the article carefully, they are talking about lenses THINNER than a hair. I see several of the posts here thinking the width/radius of the lenses is this small, a reasonable mistake given the way this was written. Having a radius that small would severely reduce their light gathering ability, requiring very bright light or very dim images or very long exposure times.

-

This will probably be the best primer on BTC+blockchain for generations to come, enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

After 2011 you pretty much had to join a public pool to produce any reward. There was a tiny window of about a month when the very first asics came out where my $150 Butterfly 5GH/s was doing almost 0.1BTC a day in Slushpool (early 2012 iirc). That was pretty high because of the low difficulty, then difficulty quickly skyrocketed as the asic (and gpu) floodgates opened. But adding your hash to a pool was still the only realistic way to get any reward, solo was dead at that point for the little guy.

Have I ever told you about that new programming language Apple created a few years back?

Think that's just referring to the Home assistant addon. Pihole is still going strong. It's overkill but I have a VM instance for Pihole running on my basement server under Proxmox providing a dedicated IP for serving local DNS. Then, as an backup, an old RPi under a secondary IP for the rare instance when the server gets rebooted (or the small downtime when nightly VM backups run). Simply point your network(s)' DNS on the router to those primary and secondary IPs and everyone in the house is covered. To keep things simple start with a RPi or spare machine then graduate to redundancy like above.

But these days the easiest way to do blocking is to use one of those ad-blocking DNS providers (e.g. NextDNS). Just point your router's DNS to them and done. But even with a paid subscription, like all the scummy VPN providers out there, I'd be wary of what browsing data any of those companies are selling for added revenue. NextDNS appears to be above board but caveat emptor.

True, but Community Notes has been working pretty well in the fight against mis/disinformation, imo. The ability for a volunteer group to quickly assemble an explanation and set of source links that directly rebut the offending tweet's content has been pretty powerful. Then it's up to the reader "to decide". That would have been unthinkable under Twitter's old regime of dealing with the problem exclusively through employees' banhammers+censorship.

Doesn't mean that community notes couldn't devolve into politically correct groupthink again but time will tell. Even with its flaws, the moderation concept has worked decently here for 20+ years.

Same, been fighting Honda's collision ghosts for a year now. It appears there are just too many corner cases for it to be reliable, mainly in the implementation of the detection algorithms, but also by adding in hardware variables (e.g. misaligned or dirty sensors, etc.). Albeit infrequent, it's been dangerous in some cases.

Can't speak to the math side, but he's a very good writer imho. For example, his ChatGPT post/book is an enjoyable primer on LLMs. Helps fill the void between articles that are too fluffy and those that assume too much.

Case in point, Mozilla's embarrassing lack of due diligence with this lowlife:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/20...