perestroika

@perestroika@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Guardian and the University of Cambridge Computer Science Department unveil new technology to protect journalists⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Technical summary: it seems OK against an observer who can see the network traffic but hasn’t infiltrated the phone of the source or the computer of the news organization.

  Any real message is stored locally on the smartphone by the CoverDrop module and sent as the next CoverDrop message, i.e. replacing the dummy message which would otherwise have been sent. Consequently a network observer cannot determine whether any communication is taking place and CoverDrop therefore provides the potential source with plausible deniability.

  The CoverNode and each journalist has their own public-private key pair. These keys are published by the news organization and available to the CoverDrop module directly so the user does not need know about them. When the CoverDrop module is used for the first time, it generates a new, random public-private key pair for the user.

  All real CoverDrop messages sent by the CoverDrop module to the CoverNode include the text written by the potential source as well as their own public key. The message is first encrypted using the public key of the journalist who will ultimately receive the message, then encrypted a second time using the public key of the CoverNode. All dummy CoverDrop messages are encrypted using the public key of the CoverNode. All messages, real or dummy, are arranged to be the same, fixed length. Encryption and length constraints ensure that only the CoverNode can distinguish between real and dummy messages.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Signal – an ethical replacement for WhatsApp⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  He’s not joking, TOX IDs are like that. :) Mine is:

  CA9A4C1968AA38CC93CB32F31F3682AB897ABA42C90E6F0EA5E1FB541930FD64138B4CC09AD2

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Signal – an ethical replacement for WhatsApp⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You can use Signal with a different client.

  Can you advise, which one would be a good one? I have had endless difficulties with Signal forcing upgrades on me and requiring to sign in on the phone, under threat of deactivating my account (I use it on a PC).

  I actually use Signal, it’s just misbehaving a lot recently.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Operation Narnia: Iran’s nuclear scientists reportedly killed simultaneously using special weapon⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Commentary:

  You’re linking to the Times of Israel. Since the news outlet operates in Israel, it is subject to censorship by the IDF, and they have chosen to use their power to censor the article.

  If you want information about assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, get their list from Wikipedia and google each of their names, looking for descriptions.

  en.wikipedia.org/…/Assassinations_of_Iranian_nucl…

  My guess: guided missile or drone strikes. All the assassinations happened at a time of Israeli air strikes over Iran. Whatever weapon was used, was deployed from airplanes. Given the high profile of the targets, Israeli intelligence agencies did their job this time (in Gaza, they seem to be feeding their troops AI slop).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Signal – an ethical replacement for WhatsApp⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I will use the opportunity to remind that Signal is operated by a non-profit in the jurisdiction called “the US”. This could have implications.

  An anarchist option might be TOX. There is no single client, TOX is a protocol, you can choose from half a dozen clients. I personally use qTox.

  Upside: no phone number required. No questions asked.

  Downside: no servers to store and forward messages. You can talk if both parties are online.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for correcting. You’re right, I should have written something else about Israel under Netanyahu. :(

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Tankies are going to hate this comment.

  They already are. :) I didn’t quite expect this effect, but I welcome it. :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  How many times can you list russia/ussr? Give me a break with this lib imperialism.

  I may list it as many times as I need. I was born there and grew up there. As an archist, give me a break with this commie imperialism.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a book on the subject written by Srdja Popovic.

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueprint_for_Revolution

  Summary: protests that start (and try to remain) non-violent have a greater chance to succeed, because they can attract more people to their cause.

  Critique: with some regimes, it’s not possible to non-violently protest. For non-violent protest to work, the environment must respect a minimum amount of human rights.

  Case samples:

  • US in the sixties: yes
  • USSR under Gorbachev: yes
  • Serbia under Milosevic: yes (Popovic was there doing it)
  • Israel under Netanyahu: probably yes
  • China under Xi: practically no (not for long)
  • Iran under Khamenei: only if you’re doing a bread riot
  • Russia under Putin: no, don’t even hold a blank sheet of paper
  • Saudi Arabia: no

  …etc. In some places, you can’t organize. Then your only option is to fight. As long as you can publicly organize, definitely do so - it’s vastly preferable. :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
  • Not providing a platform for activities that harm society (e.g. scams, disinformation).
  • Not providing a platform for activities that will get you sued or prosecuted (e.g. piracy, child porn).

  On social media, putting the burden of blocking on a million users is naive because:

  • Blocks can be worked around with bots, someone has to actively fight circimvention.
  • Some users don’t have the time to block, simply conclude “this is a hostile environment” and leave.
  • Some users fall for scams / believe the disinfo.

  I have once helped build an anonymous mix network (I2P). I’m also an anarchist. On Lemmy however, support decentralization, defederating from instances that have bad policies or corrupt management, and harsh moderation. Because the operator of a Lemmy instance is fully exposed.

  Experience has shown that total freedom is a suitable policy for apps that support 1-to-1 conversations via short text messages. Everything else invites too much abuse. If it’s public, it will have rules. If it’s totally private, it can have total freedom.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slrpnk.net outage⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for the info. :)

  I knew it was running on solar energy and old hardware so I guessed something like this had happened. :)

  If you need fail-over systems to awaken a backup system when the primary fails, those can be designed. :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Geologists doubt Earth has the amount of copper needed to develop the entire world⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In our modern times, Ea-Nasir still has some bars of aluminum to sell you. Quite several, in fact. :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. inks bill to force geo-tracking tech for high-end gaming and AI GPUs⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But who would buy such hardware? :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. inks bill to force geo-tracking tech for high-end gaming and AI GPUs⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  how did you do it?

  In the BIOS options of that specific server (nothing fancy, a generic Dell with some Xeon processor) the option to enable/disable ME was just plainly offered. Chipset features > Intel AMT > disable (or something similar, my memory is a bit fuzzy). I researched the option, got worried about the outcomes if someone learned to exploit it, and made it a policy of turning it off. It was about 2 years ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. inks bill to force geo-tracking tech for high-end gaming and AI GPUs⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  please read up on intel management engine

  I’m already familiar with it. On the systems I buy and intall, if they are Intel based, ME gets disabled.

  Oh yeah, ARM also has something similar.

  Since this is more relevant to me (numerically, most of the systems that I install are Raspberry Pi based robots), I’m happy to announce that TrustZone is not supported on Pi 4 (I haven’t checked about other models). I haven’t tested, however - don’t trust my word.

  Who would you buy from in this case?

  From the Raspberry Pi Foundation, who are doubtless ordering silicon from TSMC and various other services from other companies. If they didn’t exist, I would likely fall back on RockChip based products from China.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨U.S. inks bill to force geo-tracking tech for high-end gaming and AI GPUs⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The first and central provision of the bill is the requirement for tracking technology to be embedded in any high-end processor module or device that falls under the U.S. export restrictions.

  As a coder with some hardware awareness, I find the notion laughable.

  How does he think they (read: the Taiwanese, if they are willing to) would go about doing it?

  Add a GPS receiver onto every GPU? Add an inertial navigation module to every GPU? Add a radio to every GPU? :D

  The poor politician needs a technically competent advisor forced on him. To make him aware (preferably in the most blunt way) of real possibilities in the real world. In the real world, you can prevent a chip from knowing where it’s running.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think Elon was having the opposite kind of problems, with Grok not validating its users nearly enough, despite Elon instructing employees to make it so. :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  From the article:

  Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.” The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software.

  From elsewhere:

  Sycophancy in GPT-4o: What happened and what we’re doing about it

  We have rolled back last week’s GPT‑4o update in ChatGPT so people are now using an earlier version with more balanced behavior. The update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable—often described as sycophantic.

  Apparently, people who are close to falling over the edge, can use AI to push themselves over the edge because it’s not critical of them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Sadly, my only invite code was recently used up for inviting someone who I encountered in real life… and I’ve only ever invited people who I’ve met in real life - because RiseUp has a policy of exacting vengeance from the inviter, if the invited person does meet local standards.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please consider supporting Lemmy development⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  As an Eastern European drone developer, I’m OK with donating even to tankies …if what they do is building Lemmy. :)

  As a side note, RiseUp need your donations too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen’ | The most persuasive “people” on a popular subreddit turned out to be a front for a secret AI experiment.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The University of Zurich’s ethics board—which can offer researchers advice but, according to the university, lacks the power to reject studies that fall short of its standards—told the researchers before they began posting that “the participants should be informed as much as possible,” according to the university statement I received. But the researchers seem to believe that doing so would have ruined the experiment. “To ethically test LLMs’ persuasive power in realistic scenarios, an unaware setting was necessary,” because it more realistically mimics how people would respond to unidentified bad actors in real-world settings, the researchers wrote in one of their Reddit comments.

  This seems to be the kind of a situation where, if the researchers truly believe their study is necessary, they have to:

  • accept that negative publicity will result
  • accept that people may stop cooperating with them on this work
  • accept that their reputation may not be considered spotless after the fact
  • ensure that they won’t do anything illegal

  After that, if they still feel their study is necesary, maybe they should run it and publish the results.

  As for the question of whether a tailor-made response considering someone’s background can sway opinions better - that’s been obvious through ages of diplomacy. (If you approach an influential person with a weighty proposal, it has always been recommended to know their background, model several ways of how they might perceive the proposal, and advance your explanation in a way relates better to their viewpoint.)

  Thus, AI bots which take into consideration a person’s background will - if implemented right - indeed be more powerful at swaying opinions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How likely is it that Trump will be the first President assassinated since Kennedy?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A counterpoint: unmanned technology has developed really fast recently. In old times, one had to be motivated as hell, because taking a shot at a president meant likely death.

  In our days, for a technically capable adversary, an attempt costs only moderate amounts, escape is far more likely, and tools can automated with self-destruction mechanisms to considerably hinder evidence collection.

  I’d say that barriers are lower due to drones and robots. Then again, to get drones and robots pointed at oneself, one has to piss off people who have better things to do. That is, people who are unlikely to be desperate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anthropic has developed an AI 'brain scanner' to understand how LLMs work and it turns out the reason why chatbots are terrible at simple math and hallucinate is weirder than you thought⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wow, interesting. :)

  Not unexpectedly, the LLM failed to explain its own though process correctly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tired of dating apps?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A side note about dating apps: most of them aren’t much better than this.

  Their interest is keeping the user clicking, paying for services and coming back.

  If you find the right person for yourself, you will naturally do none of that.

  So:

  • they build awful card stack systems with no search function
  • they build superficial profile systems with no metadata about personality, habits or world views

  …and of course, with such systems, people fail to find suitable partners. They come back and pay, but society suffers, because someone needs to make money.

  I would vote for a politician who would promise that the ministry of social security will order a public dating site that’s built by scientists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Server-wide censorship cannot be allowed. / This eliminates every platform I know of.

  Within the I2P mix network there was an attempt, at some point, to build a system named Syndie where everyone would have to be their own censor, and servers would host content without the server operator really knowing or caring about what they host.

  It failed to take off, but I’m not convinced if the reason was architecture or the main developer leaving.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Indeed, forums are almost gone. In particular, I miss one forum about science fiction, one about aeromodelism, one about electric vehicles (another still exists) and one about anarchism. An interesting hold-out in the country where I live, is a military forum. Mods do a cursory background check, rules say that respectful discussion is the only kind of discussion accepted - ironically, the military forum has a peaceful atmosphere. But it could come crashing down much easier than a social media company.

  As for why forums disappeared - I think that people became too convenient. They wanted zero expense (hosting a forum incurs some expenses and needs a bit of time and attention), and wanted all their discussion on one place. Advertisers wanted a place where masses could be manipulated. Social media companies wanted people to interact more (read: pick more fights) and see more ads - and built their environments accordingly. Not for the public good.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Multiple Tesla vehicles were set on fire in Las Vegas and Kansas City⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not from the US, but I straight out recommend quickly educating oneself about fiber guided drones and remote weapons stations. Because the US is heading somewhere at a rapid pace.

  Trump’s administration:

  “Agency,” unless otherwise indicated, means any authority of the United States that is an “agency” under 44 U.S.C. 3502(1), and shall also include the Federal Election Commission.

  Vance, in his old interviews:

  “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

  Also Vance:

  “We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

  Googling “how do you remove a dictator?” when you already have one is doing it too late. On the day the wannabe Caesar crosses his Rubicon, it better be so that some people already know what to aim at him.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China announces plan to label all AI-generated content with watermarks and metadata.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As an exception to about 95% of regulations issued in China, this approach actually seems well considered - something that might benefit people and work. Similar regulations should be considered by other countries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google’s ‘Secret’ Update Scans All Your Photos⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In my experience, the API has iteratively made it ever harder for applications to automatically perform previously easy jobs, and jobs which are trivial under ordinary Linux (e.g. become an access point, set the IP address, set the PSK, start a VPN connection, go into monitor / inject mode, access an USB device, write files to a directory of your choice, install an APK). Now there’s a literal thicket of API calls and declarations to make, before you can do some of these things (and some are forever gone).

  The obvious reason is that there are a billion fools whom Google tries to protect them from scamers.

  But it kills the ability to do non-standard things, and the concept of your device being your own.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google’s ‘Secret’ Update Scans All Your Photos⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The countdown to Android’s slow and painful death is already ticking for a while.

  It has become over-engineered and no longer appealing from a developer’s viewpoint.

  I still write code for Android because my customers need it - will be needing for a while - but I’ve stopped writng code for Apple’s i-things and I research alternatives for Android. Rolling my own environment with FOSS components on top of Raspbian looks feasible already. On robots and automation, I already use it.