litchralee

@litchralee@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I made a way to remotely control my homelab without any internet access required⁩ ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Obligatory mention: !keming@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why is the beginning on the left and the end on the right?⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Approximately 90% of people are right-handed. In European writing systems that use quills and pens, left-to-right makes more sense so that you can hold the pen in your right hand and drag it rightward, not into the ink you just laid down.

  In East Asia, before writing on paper was a thing, they wrote using inscribed bone, but then eventually moved to vertical wood boards, bound together by string. Each character on the board would be ready from top-to-bottom, and then move to the next board. The most logical choice for a right handed person is to stack the wood pile on their left, and use their right hand to draw the next board to meet their gaze, then set it down on their right. For this reason, the historical writing system common to China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam for centuries was read right-to-left. But the native Korean script is left-to-right, as is the modern Vietnamese script. And Chinese and Japanese in the 20th Century switched to left-to-right. And yet, Japanese books are still ordered “backwards” so that the title page is what Westerners would say is the back of the book, and manga panels are read from the right side toward the left.

  It all boils down to right handedness, but it depends on whether your hand is moving, or the page is moving.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I made a way to remotely control my homelab without any internet access required⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Are ham radio operators in the EU able to use LoRa radios and be exempt from duty cycle limitations?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I made a way to remotely control my homelab without any internet access required⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Admittedly, I haven’t finished reflashing my formerly-Meshtastic LoRA radios with MeshCore yet, so I haven’t been able to play around with it yet. Although both mesh technologies are decent sized near me, I was swayed to MeshCore because I started looking into how the mesh algorithm works for both.

  And what I learned – esp from following the #meshtastic and #meshcore hashtags on Mastodon – is that Meshtastic has some awful flooding behavior to send messages. Having worked in computer networks, this is a recipe for limiting the max size and performance of the mesh. Whereas MeshCore has a more sensible routing protocol for passing messages along.

  My opinion is that mesh networking’s most important use-case should be reliability, since when everything else (eg fibre, cellular, landlines) stops working, people should be able to self organize and build a working communications system. This includes scenarios where people are sparsely spaced (eg hurricane disaster with people on rooftops awaiting rescue) but also extremely dense scenarios (eg a protest where the authorities intentionally shut off cell towers, or a Taylor Swift concert where data networks are completely congested). Meshtastic’s flooding would struggle in the latter scenario, to send a distress message away from the immediate vicinity. Whereas MeshCore would at least try to intelligently route through nodes that didn’t already receive the initial message.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I made a way to remotely control my homelab without any internet access required⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Very interesting! Im no longer pursuing Meshtastic – I’m changing over my hardware to run MeshCore now – but this is quite a neat thing you’ve done here.

  As an aside, if you later want to have full networking connectivity (Layer 2) using the same style of encoding the data as messages, PPP is what could do that. If transported over Meshtastic, PPP could give you a standard IP network, and on top of that, you could have SSH to securely access your remote machine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What powers does the Secret Service have and exhibit to protect the POTUS?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve only heard bits and pieces of this from friends and strangers through some specific events so far

  Can you tell us what bits you’ve heard, so that we don’t have to give redundant answers?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would we be seeing these emails involving Epstein if they were all using E2EE email service?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The catch with everything that implements E2EE is that, at the end of the day, the humans at each end of the message have to decrypt the message to read it. And that process can leave trails, with the most sophisticated being variations of Van Eck phreaking (spying on a CRT monitor by detecting EM waves), and the least sophisticated being someone that glances over the person’s shoulder and sees the messages on their phone.

  In the middle would be cache files left on a phone or from a web browser, and these are the most damning because they will just be laying there, unknown, waiting to be discovered. Whereas the techniques above are active attacks, which require good timing to get even one message.

  The other avenue is if anyone in the conversation has screenshots of the convo, or if they’re old-school and actually print out each conversation into paper. Especially if they’re an informant or want to catalog some blackmail for later use.

  In short, opsec is hard to do 100% of the time. And it’s the 1% of slip-ups that can give away the game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can you help me adapt the Signal TLS Proxy to be used behind NPM?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Sadly, I’m not familiar enough with Nginx Proxy Manager to know. But I would imagine that there must be a different way to achieve the same result.

  BTW, when I read “NPM”, I first think of Node.JS Package Manager. The title of your post may be confusing, and you might consider editing it to spell out the name of Nginx Proxy Manager.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can you help me adapt the Signal TLS Proxy to be used behind NPM?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll take a stab at the question. But I’ll need to lay some foundational background information.

  When an adversarial network is blocking connections to the Signal servers, the Signal app will not function. Outbound messages will still be encrypted, but they can’t be delivered to their intended destination. The remedy is to use a proxy, which is a server that isn’t blocked by the adversarial network and which will act as a relay, forwarding all packets to the Signal servers. The proxy cannot decrypt any of the messages, and a malicious proxy is no worse than blocking access to the Signal servers directly. A Signal proxy specifically forwards only to/from the Signal servers; this is not an open proxy.

  The Signal TLS Proxy repo contains a Docker Compose file, which will launch Nginx as a reverse proxy. When a Signal app connects to the proxy at port 80 or 443, the proxy will – in the background – open a connection to the Signal servers. That’s basically all it does. They ostensibly wrote the proxy as a Docker Compose file, because that’s fairly easy to set up for most people.

  But now, in your situation, you already have a reverse proxy for your selfhosting stack. While you could run Signal’s reverse proxy in the background and then have your main reverse proxy forward to that one, it would make more sense to configure your main reverse proxy to directly do what the Signal reverse proxy would do.

  That is, when your main proxy sees one of the dozen subdomains for the Signal server, it should perform reverse proxying to those subdomains. Normally, for the rest of your self hosting arrangement, the reverse proxy would target some container that is running on your LAN. But in this specific case, the target is actually out on the public Internet. So the original connection comes in from the Internet, and the target is somewhere out there too. Your reverse proxy simply is a relay station.

  There is nothing particularly special about Signal choosing to use Nginx in reverse proxy mode, in that repo. But it happens to be that you are already using Nginx Proxy Manager. So it’s reasonable to try porting Signal’s configuration file so that it runs natively with your Nginx Proxy Manager.

  What happens if Signal updates that repo to include a new subdomain? Well, you wouldn’t receive that update unless you specifically check for it. And then update your proxy configuration. So that’s one downside.

  But seeing as the Signal app demands port 80 and 443, and you already use those ports for your reverse proxy, there is no way to avoid programming your reverse proxy to know the dozen subdomains. Your main reverse proxy cannot send the packets to the Signal reverse proxy if your main proxy cannot even identify that traffic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there any reputable cybersecurity experts that I could just email them to ask for free advice?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The simple answer is probably no, because even where those experts aren’t driven solely by the pursuit of money – as in, they might actually want to improve the state of the art, protect people from harm, prevent the encroachment of the surveillance state, etc… – they are still only human. And that means they have only so much time on this blue earth. If they spend their time answering simple questions that could have been found on the first page of a web search, that’s taking time away from other pursuits in the field.

  Necessarily then, don’t be surprised if some experts ask for a minimum consultation fee, as a way to weed out the trivial stuff. If nothing else, if their labor is to have any meaning at all when they do their work professionally, they must value it consistently as a non-zero quality. Do not demand that people value their labor at zero.

  With that out of the way, if you do have a question that can’t be answered by searching existing literature or the web, then the next best is to ask in an informal forum, like here on Lemmy. Worst case is that no one else knows. But best case is that someone works in the field and is bored on their lunch break, so they’ll help point you into the right direction.

  Above all, what you absolutely must not do is something like emailing a public mailing list for cryptography experts, gathered to examine the requirements of internet security, to look at your handmade data encryption scheme, which is so faulty that it is caused third-party embarrassment when read a decade later.

  You were in fact lucky that they paid any attention at all to your proposal, and they’ve already given you many hundreds if not thousands of dollars worth of free consultancy between them

  Don’t be the person that causes someone to be have to write this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If the government raided your house and found a bunch of .mkv files but you insist its all legally obtained, how do they ascertain if they are actually pirated or not?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There are separate criminal and civil offenses when it comes to copyright infringement, assuming USA. Very generally, under criminal law, it is an offense to distribute copyrighted material without the right or license to do so. Note the word “distribute”, meaning that the crime relates to the act of copying and sharing the work, and usually does not include the receiving of such a work.

  That is to say, it’s generally understood that mere possession of a copyrighted work is not sufficient to prove that it was in your possession for the purpose of later distribution. A criminal pprosecution would have to show that you did, in fact, infringe the copyright by distributing a copy to someone or somewhere else.

  Separately, civil penalties can be sought by the copyright owner, against someone found either distributing their work, or possessing the work without a license. In this case, the copyright owner has to do the legwork to identify offenders, and then would file a civil lawsuit against them. The government is uninvolved with this, except to the extent that the court is a branch of the federal government. The penalty would be money damage, and while a judgement could be quite large – due to the insanity of minimum damages, courtesy of the DMCA – there is no prospect of jail time here.

  So as an example, buying a bootleg DVD for $2 and keeping it in your house would not accrue criminal liability, although if police were searching your house – which they can only do with a warrant, or your consent – they could rip-off the copyright owner and you could late receive a civil lawsuit.

  Likewise, downloading media using Megaupload, usually also doesn’t meet the “distribution” requirement in criminal law, but still opens the door to civil liability if the copyright owner discovers it. However, something like BitTorrent which uploads to other peers, that would meet the distribution requirement.

  To that end, if officers searching your home – make sure to say that you don’t consent to any searches – find a running BitTorrent server and it’s actively sharing copyrighted media, that’s criminal and civil liability. But if they only find the media but can’t find evidence of actual uploading/distributing, and can’t get evidence from the ISP or anyone else, then the criminal case would be non-existent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Before social media/internet/cell phones/landlines/payphones; how would 2 friends living across the same city arrange in person meetings and stay in touch?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If this is about that period of human history where we had long-distance transportation (ie railroads) but didn’t yet have mass communication infrastructure that isn’t the postal service – so 1830s to 1860s – then I think the answer is to just plan to meet the other person at a certain place every month.

  To use modern parlance, put a recurring meeting on their calendar.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why there is no clock that displays time 4:20:69 ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It can be, although the example I’ve given where each counter is a discrete part is probably no longer the case. It’s likely that larger ICs which encompass all the requisite functionality can do the job, at lower cost than individual parts.

  But those ICs probably can’t do 4:20:69, so I didn’t bother mentioning that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why there is no clock that displays time 4:20:69 ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I should point out that for the hour counter, it’s only a 5 bit counter, since the max value for hours is 23, which fits into 5 bits.

  So 566 is not quite the devil’s work, but certainly very close.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why there is no clock that displays time 4:20:69 ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  (I’m going to take the question seriously)

  Supposing that you’re asking about a digital clock as a standalone appliance – because doing the 69th second in software would be trivial, and doing it with an analog clock is nigh impossible – I believe it can be done.

  A run-of-the-mill digital clock uses what’s known as a 7-segment display, one for each of the digits of the time. It’s called 7-segment (or 7-seg) because there are seven distinct lines that can be lit up or darkened, which will write out a number between 0 to 9.

  In this way, six 7seg displays and some commas are sufficient to build a digital clock. However, we need to carefully consider whether the 7seg displays have all seven segments. In some commercial applications, where it’s known that some numbers will never appear, they will actually remove some segments, to save cost.

  For example, in the typical American digital clock, the time is displayed in 12-hour time. This means the left digit of the hour will only ever be 0 or 1. So some cheap clocks will actually choose to build that digit using just 2 segments. When the hour is 10 or greater, those 2 segments can display the necessary!number 1. When the hour is less than 10, they just don’t light up that digit at all. This also makes the clock incapable of 24-hour time.

  Fortunately though, to implement your idea of the 69th second, we don’t have this problem. Although it’s true that the left digit of the seconds only goes from 0 to 5 inclusive, the fact remains that those digits do actually require all 7 segments of a 7seg display. So we can display a number six without issue.

  Now, as for how to modify the digital clock circuitry, that’s a bit harder but not impossible. The classic construction of a digital clock is as follows: the 60 Hz AC line frequency (or 50 Hz outside North America) is passed from the high-voltage circuitry to the low-voltage circuitry using an opto-isolator, which turns it into a square wave that oscillates 60 times per second.

  Specifically, there are 120 transitions per second, with 60 of them being a low-to-high transition and the other 60 being a high-to-low transition. Let’s say we only care about the low-to-high. We now send that signal to a counter circuit, which is very similar to a mechanical odometer. For every transition of the oscillating signal, the counter advances by one. The counter counts in binary, and has six bits, because our goal is to count up to 60, to know when a full second has elapsed. We pair the counter with an AND circuit, which is checking for when the counter has the value 111100 (that’s 60 in decimal). If so, the AND will force the next value of the countet to 000000, and so this counter resets every 1 second.

  This new signal is a 1 Hz signal, also known as 1PPS (pulse per second). We can now feed this into another similar counter that resets at 60, which gives us a signal when a minute (60 seconds) has elapsed. And from that counter, we can feed it into yet another counter, for when 1 hour (60 minutes) has passed. And yet again, we can feed that too into a counter for either 12 hours or 24 hours.

  In this way, the final three counters are recording the time in seconds, minutes, and hours, which is the whole point of a clock appliance. But these counters are in binary; how do we turn on the 7seg display to show the numbers? This final aspect is handled using dedicated chips for the task, known as 7seg drivers. Although the simplest chips will drive only a single digit, there are variants that handle two adjacent digits, which we will use. Such a chip accepts a 7 bit binary value and has a lookup table to display the correct pair of digits on the 7seg displays. Suppose the input is 0101010 (42 in decimal), then the driver will illuminate four segments on the left (to make the number 4) and five segments on the right (to make the number 5). Note that our counter is 6 bits but the driver accepts 7 bits; this is tolerable because the left-most bit is usually forced to always be zero (more on this later).

  So that’s how a simple digital clock works. Now we modify it for 69th second operation. The first issue is that our 6-bit counter for seconds will only go from 0-59 inclusive. We can fix this by replacing it with a 7 bit counter, and then modifying the AND circuit to keep advancing after 59, but only when the hour=04 and minute=20. This way, the clock works as normal for all times except 4:20. And when it’s actually 4:20, the seconds will advance through 59 and get to 60. And 61, 62, and so on.

  But we must make sure to stop it after 69, so we need another AND circuit to detect when the counter reaches 69. And more importantly, we can’t just zero out the counter; we must force the next counter value to be 10, because otherwise the time is wrong.

  It’s very easy to zero out a counter, but it takes a bit of extra circuitry to load a specific value into the counter. But it took can be done. And if we do that, we finally have counters suitable for 69th second operation. Because numbers 64 and higher require 7 bits to represent in binary, we can provide the 7th bit to the 7seg driver, and it will show the numbers correctly on the 7seg display without any further changes.

  TL;DR: it can absolutely be done, with only some small amount of EE work

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does capitalism differ from crony capitalism?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  as someone has to lead

  At this particular moment, the people of Minnesota are self-organizing the resistance against the invasion of their state, with no unified leadership structure in place. So I wouldn’t say it’s always mandatory.

  Long live l’etoile du nord.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are super-computers used for ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  An indisputable use-case for supercomputers is the computation of next-day and next-week weather models. By definition, a next-day weather prediction is utterly useless if it takes longer than a day to compute. And is progressively more useful if it can be computed even an hour faster, since that’s more time to warn motorists to stay off the road, more time to plan evacuation routes, more time for farmers to adjust crop management, more time for everything. NOAA in the USA draws in sensor data from all of North America, and since weather is locally-affecting but globally-influenced, this still isn’t enough for a perfect weather model. Even today, there is more data that could be consumed by models, but cannot due to making the predictions take longer. The only solution there is to raise the bar yet again, expanding the supercomputers used.

  Supercomputers are not super because they’re bigger. They are super because they can do gargantuan tasks within the required deadlines.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨2026 savings distribution feedback⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think you’ve listed what you (and your partner’s?) financial timeline is. The number of years you have until needing to draw upon the nestegg is crucial for any discussion that involves retirement savings.

  Also, I may want to also post to !personalfinance@lemmy.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I have two questions⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In the spirit of c/nostupidquestion’s Rule 1, asking two unrelated questions does not seem like it would accrue high-quality answers to either. And I see you’ve already added another post focusing on the first question.

  Since it doesn’t cost 50 cents to make an additional post, I would suggest giving each question its own post. It would keep the discussion more focused, and actual answers should result.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you think all monopolies should be split into different companies, and then given to the workers who would collectivize them?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Consider the following three types of monopolies:

  There are monopolies where a single entity has entrenched their position by having the categorically superior product, so far ahead of any competition and while no barriers are erected to prevent competitors, there simply is no hope and they will all play second fiddle. This type of monopoly doesn’t really exist, except for a transient moment, for if there initially wasn’t a barrier, there soon will be: as market leader, the monopolist accumulates capital that at best is unavailable to the competitors (ie zero sum resources, like land or labor), and at worst stands in the way of free competition (eg brand recognition, legally -recognized intellectual property).

  The second type is the steady-state scenario following the first, which is a monopoly that benefits from or actively enforces barriers against their competitors. Intellectual property (eg Disney) can be viewed as akin to the conventional means of production (land, labor, capital), so the monopolist that controls the usable land or can hire the best labor will cement their position as monopolist. In economic terms, we could say that the cost to overturn the monopolist is very high, and so perhaps it’s economically reasonable to be a second-tier manufacturer rather than going up against the giant. The key ingredient for the monopolist is having that structure in place, to keep everyone else at bay.

  The third type is the oddball, for it’s what we might call a “natural” or “practical” monopoly. While land, labor, and capital are indeed limited, what happens when it’s actually so limited that there’s basically only one? It’s a bit hard to conceptualize having just one plot of land (maybe an island?) or having just one Dollar, but consider a single person who has such specialized knowledge that she is the only such person in the world. Do we say she is a monopolist because she can command whatever price she wants for her labor? Is she a monopolist because she does not share her knowledge-capital? What if she physically can’t, for the knowledge is actually experience, honed over a lifetime? If it took her a lifetime to develop, then she may already lack the remaining lifetime to teach someone else for their lifetime.

  I use this example to segue to the more-customary example of a natural monopoly: the local electricity distribution system, not to be confused with the electric grid at-large, which also includes long-distance power lines. The distinction is as follows: the big, long power lines can compete with each other, taking different routes over terrain, under water, or sometimes even partially conducting through the earth itself. But consider that at a local level, on a residential street, there can practically only be a single distributor circuit for the neighborhood.

  I cannot be served by Provider X’s wires while Co-Op Y’s wires serve my neighbor, and Corpo Z’s wires serve the school down the road. Going back to the convention means of production, we could say there is only one plot of land available to run these distributor circuits. So at most one entity can own and operate those wires.

  Laying all that background, let’s look at your titular question. For monopoly types 1 and 2, it’s entirely feasible to divide and collectivize those monopolies. But it’s the natural monopolies that are problematic: if you divide them up (let’s say geographically) and then collectivize them, there will still only ever be one “owner” of the distribution lines. You cannot have Collective A own a few meters of wire, and then Collective B owns a few meters in between, all while Collective C is connected at the end of the street. The movement of electric power is amenable to such granular collectivization.

  To that end, the practical result is the same no matter how you examine it: a natural monopoly is one which cannot feasibly be split up, even when there’s the will to do so. Generalizing quite a lot, capitalists would approach a natural monopoly with intent to exploit it for pure profit, while social democrats would seek to regulate natural monopolies (eg US State’s public utilities commissions), and democratic socialists would want to push for state ownership of all natural monopolies, while communists would seek to dissolution of the state and have the natural monopoly serve everyone “according to their need”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I feel comfortable/safe going outside by myself after being so used to have parent(s) be with me outside most of my life?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I grew up in a suburban neighborhood that was built to only encourage driving and discouraged everything else, so my parents also took me most places during my teenage years. The cul-de-sacs made it particularly hard to walk to anything interesting, even though such destinations were actually fairly close by, as the crow flies.

  What I would suggest is that if there aren’t many interesting destinations to start with, perhaps the walk itself can be of interest. Unless the walk to the mall is along a surface freeway with no soundwall – an actual occurrence in my hometown – you might start with an out-and-back trek to the mall, observing whatever architecture, people, or activities are visible. Think of it like people-watching, but less awkward because you’re just passing by, not stopping to stare.

  As another commenter wrote, getting comfortable with something is a matter of doing it, first in a controlled manner and then gradually broadening your horizons.

  But if this still isn’t a workable plan, then perhaps plan a day out to the 1-hour-away park, taking some time to explore what’s just outside that park. It’s not cheating to use a car to get to a more walkable area. The walk should be the adventure.

  I wish you the best of luck!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I feel comfortable/safe going outside by myself after being so used to have parent(s) be with me outside most of my life?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is there anything near your home that you can walk to, to start? A park, a convenience store, or even just a friend’s house? I would start with those destinations, and then work your way to farther journeys. My presumption is that there are at least sidewalks and crosswalks near you, as some parts of the USA are genuinely built in the most pedestrian-hostile way.

  Those farther journeys need not be on foot, but you could take a bus, a bike, or anything else that’s available to you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Options to Expand Sata HDD Drives on a Lenovo Computer⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I loaded True Nas onto the internal SSD and swapped out the HDD drive that came with it for a 10tb drive.

  Do I understand that you currently have a SATA SSD and a 10TB SATA HDD plugged into this machine?

  If so, it seems like a SATA power splitter that divides the power to the SSD would suffice, in spite of the computer store’s admonition. The reason for splitting power from the SSD is because an SSD draws much less power than spinning rust.

  Can it still go wrong? Yes, but that’s the inherent risk when pushing beyond the design criteria of what this machine was originally built for. That said, “going wrong” typically means “won’t turn on”, not “halt and catch fire”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm looking for the best free online storage site my files. That is heavily encrypted and respect people's privacy, what would you suggest?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “how I found about Harry Potter’s sex with Gwen from Spiderman…and broke aes256 in the process”

  Breaking open the S(ex) box lol

  Also, in the spirit of the season, that would 100% be a presentation at CCC; 39c3 just concluded, after all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm looking for the best free online storage site my files. That is heavily encrypted and respect people's privacy, what would you suggest?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Steganography is one possible way to store a message “hidden in plain sight”, and video does often make a seemingly innocuous manner to store a steganographic payload, but in that endeavor, the point is to have two messages: a video that raises no suspicions whatsoever, and a hidden text document with instructions for the secret agent.

  Encoding only the hidden message as a video would: 1) make it really obvious that there’s an encoded message, and 2) would not be compatible with modern video compression, which would destroy the hidden message anyway, if encoded directly as black and white pixels.

  When video compression is being used, the available bandwidth to store steganographic messages is much lower, due to having to be “coarse” enough to survive the compression scheme. And video compression is designed around how human vision works, so shades of color are the least likely to be faithfully reproduced – most people wouldn’t notice if a light green is portrayed slightly darker than it ought to be. The good news is that with today’s high resolution video streams, the raw video bandwidth is huge and so having even just one-thousandth of that available for encoding hidden data is probably sufficient.

  That said, hidden messages != encrypted messages: anyone who notices that there may be a hidden message can try to analyze the suspicious video and retrieve the payload. Encoding, say, English text in a video would still leave patterns, because some English letters (and thus ASCII-encoded bit patterns) will show up more frequently. But fortunately, one can encrypt data and then hide it using steganography. Encrypted data tends to approximate random noise, making it much harder to notice when hidden within the naturally-noisy video data. But bandwidth will be cut some more due to encryption.

  TL;DR: it’s very real to hide messages in plain sight, in places people wouldn’t even think of looking closely at. Have you thought about the Roman Empire today?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨if all communication electronics died on New Year's day, how long would it take for other time zones to notice⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As immediate as the power grid falls apart without constant frequency synchronization, so probably seconds. I do consider North America’s Western, Eastern, and Texas power grids as a communication system, because it does convey the precise 60 Hz AC line rate to every part of the continent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where does the revenue gathered from taxes go and what is national debt?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For the benefit of non-Google users, here is the unshortened URL for that Bank of England article: bankofengland.co.uk/…/money-creation-in-the-moder…

  With that said, while this comment does correctly describe what the USA federal government does with tax revenues, it is mixing up the separate roles of the government (via the US Treasury) and the Federal Reserve.

  The Federal Reserve is the central bank in the USA, and is equivalent to the Bank of England (despite the name, the BoE serves the entire UK). The Federal Reserve is often shortened to “the Fed” by finance people, which only adds to the confusion between the Fed and the federal government. The central bank is responsible for keeping the currency healthy, such as preventing runaway inflation and preventing banking destabilization.

  Whereas the US Treasury is the equivalent to the UK’s HM Treasury, and is the government’s agent that can go to the Federal Reserve to get cash. The Treasury does this by giving the Federal Reserve some bonds, and in turn receives cash that can be spent for employee salaries, capital expenditures, or whatever else Congress has authorized. We have not created any new money yet; this is an equal exchange of bonds for dollars, no different than what you or I can do by going to treasurydirect.gov and buying USA bonds: we give them money, they give us a bond. Such government bonds are an obligation that the government must pay in the future.

  The Federal Reserve is the entity that can creates dollars out of thin air, bevause they control the interest rate of the dollar. But outside of major financial crisis, they only permit the dollar to inflate around 2% per year. That’s 2% new money being created from nothing, and that money can be swapped with the Treasury, thus the Federal Reserve ends up holding a large quantity of federal government bonds.

  Drawing the distinction between the Federal Reserve and the government is important, because their goals can sometimes be at odds: in the late 1970s, the Iranian oil crisis caused horrific inflation, approaching 20%. Such unsustainable inflation threatened to spiral out of control, but also disincentivized investment and business opportunities: why start a new risky venture when a savings account would pay 15% interest? Knowing that this would be the fate of the economy if left unchecked, the Federal Reserve began to sell off huge quantities of its government bonds, thus pulling cash out of the economy. This curbed inflatable, but also created a recession in 1982, because any new venture needs cash but the Feds sucked it all up. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration would not have been pleased about this, because no government likes a recession. In the end, the recession subsided, as did inflation and unemployment levels, thus the economy escaped a doom spiral with only minor bruising.

  To be abundantly clear, the Federal Reserve did indeed cause a recession. But the worse alternative was a recession that also came with a collapsed US dollar, unemployment that would run so deep that whole industries lose the workers needed to restart post-recession, and the wholesale emptying of the Federal Reserve and Treasury’s coffers. In that alternate scenario, we would have fired all our guns and have lost anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why aren't tall people also wider?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  From a biology perspective, it may not be totally advantageous to grow in all three dimensions at once. Certainly, as life forms become larger, they also require more energy to sustain, and also become harder to cool (at least for the warm blooded ones). Generally speaking, keeping cool is a matter of surface area (aka skin). But growing double in each of the three dimensions would be 4x more skin than before, but would be 8x more mass/muscle. That’s now harder to keep cool.

  So growing needs to be done with intention: growing taller nets some survival benefits, such as having longer legs to run. Whereas growing wider or deeper doesn’t do very much.

  But idk mang, I’m in a food coma from holiday dinner, just shooting from the hip lol

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Disconnect wire to close a switch with a simple circuit⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In any case, pending your reply, I would suggest the following circuit for reliable operation. This will require a P-channel MOSFET, which is different from the two MOSFETs you tried earlier, which are all N-channel. This will also use two resistors. I am making an assumption that your speaker module simply requires two wires at feed it 4 volts, and does not care whether we add a switching circuit to either wire, the positive or negative wire.

  suggested circuit 1

  This type of circuit would be described as an inverting, low-side MOSFET switching circuit. The inverting part means that when the MOSFET is fed a lower voltage, that causes the transistor to become active, whereas a non-inverting circuit would require feeding the MOSFET with a higher voltage to make the transistor become active.

  Low-side switching refers to the fact that the load (ie the speaker module) is permanently attached to the higher voltage (the high-side) and we are manipulating the low-side. Not all electronic loads can be used with low-side switching, but this is the easiest mode to implement using a single MOSFET transistor. As a general rule, to do low-side switching always requires a P-channel MOSFET.

  As for why we cannot do high-side switching (which would use an N-channel MOSFET), it is because a typical N-channel MOSFET requires that the gate be a few volts higher than the source. But consider that when the transistor turns on, the drain and source become almost-similar voltages. So if the drain is attached to 4 volts, and as the transistor becomes active, the source rises to something like 3.95 volts, then what gate do we use to keep the transistor active? If we give 4v to the train, then the gate-to-source voltage is only 0.05 volts, which is insufficient to keep the transistor on. We would need an external source to provide more gate voltage, relative to the source pin. If we tried such a high-side switching circuit anyway, it would quickly oscillate: the transistor tries to turn on, then turns itself off, then back on, and so forth.

  The way that my suggested circuit works is as follows: when the tripwire (marked as SW3) is in place, then R4 and R2 will form a voltage divider. Given that the battery supplies 4v, we can show that the voltage at the MOSFET’s gate will be 91% of 4v, or 3.64 volts. This should be just enough to prevent the P-channel MOSFET from becoming active. Note: a P-channel MOSFET becomes active when there is a low gate-to-drain voltage, with 0v causing the transistor to become active. In this way, with the trip-wire, the transistor will not allow current to pass through the speaker.

  When the tripwire is pulled out, this breaks the connection to R4. That leaves the gate connected to only R2, which is connected to the negative side of the battery. Thus, any charge in the gate will seep away through R2, meaning that the voltage across R2 will equalize at 0v. This means the gate-to-drain voltage will be 0v, which means the MOSFET will activate. And that allows current to power the speaker module.

  Note: one end of the tripwire (labeled #1 in the diagram) will still have 4v on it. If the tripwire is cleanly detached from the whole circuit, using your loop-of-wire and nails idea, then there is no problem. But if the tripwire is still hanging onto the 4v side of the circuit, then be careful that the tripwire doesn’t make contact with another part of this circuit. The R4 resistor will still be there, so there won’t be a short circuit or anything bad like that. But if that tripwire reconnects to the gate, then the transistor will deactivate again, stopping the music.

  I wish you good luck in this endeavor!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Disconnect wire to close a switch with a simple circuit⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m going to try to answer your situation, but although time appears to be of the essence, I need to first understand exactly what you’ve already tried. So bear with me for a moment.

  The examples I found were very simple, involving an NPN transistor (2n2222), 10KΩ resistor, battery, and DC Piezo speaker.

  With my initial attempt, I wired +4V from the switch to the transistor’s collector and then separated the collector from the base with a resistor. I connected the emitter to the pin that, when the switch is engaged, would send 4V through and power the module.

  Does this diagram correctly describe what you tried as a first attempt?

  schematic diagram of attempt 1

  Someone suggested that what I actually needed was a MOSFET …

  I have the resistor connected between Gate and Drain, +4V going to drain, and the load from the module on Source.

  With an RFP30N06LE, I get about 2V output to Source. With an IRF840N, I’m only getting 0.9V.

  Do these diagrams match your circuits with each MOSFET?

  schematic diagram of attempt 2

  schematic diagram of attempt 3

  What I am not able to understand, in your last photo with the MOSFET, is where the blue wire is going.