NateNate60
@NateNate60@lemmy.world
- Comment on Tesla loses Autopilot wrongful death case in $329 million verdict 1 day ago:
Please read the article. I hate when people upvote bullshit just because it says things they like to hear. I dislike Elon Musk as much as anyone else, but the jury’s findings were this:
- The driver is ⅔ responsible for the crash because of his negligent driving.
- The fact that the driver did in fact keep his foot on the accelerator was accepted by the jury.
- The jury accepted that the driver was reaching for his cell phone at the time of the crash.
- Evidence in court showed that the speed of the car was about 100 km/h. Keep in mind that this incident occurred in the Florida Keys where there are no high-speed expressways. I couldn’t find info on where exactly this happened, but the main road in the area is US Route 1, which close to the mainland is a large four-lane road with occasional intersections, but narrows into a two-lane road for most of the distance.
- The jury found Tesla ⅓ liable because it deemed that it had sold a faulty product. For international readers, in the US, a company that sells a product which is defective during normal use is strictly liable for resulting damages.
- Obviously Tesla plans to appeal but it is normal for everyone to appeal in these sorts of cases. Many appeals get shot down by the appellate court.
- Comment on UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill 4 days ago:
Wireshark can’t but there are other methods, such as checking for the known OpenVPN protocol opcodes in the headers:
- Comment on UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill 5 days ago:
I don’t know how they update their IP list. My university is an American university which I believe has no ties to China, but I can’t say for sure. According to friends who use the clandestine OpenVPN services, they pay about 20 CNY a month and every month they are issued a new OVPN configuration file. Only occasionally do their servers get blocked before this, and then they have to issue new config files to everyone.
As for myself, I have been to China two times using the OpenVPN server that I deployed on a US-based VPS I rented from a German hosting provider. Each trip lasted about one month. So far, the IP has not been blocked. The government’s philosophy regarding the firewall and VPNs seems to be “make it as annoying as possible for the average uninformed layperson to bypass and go after people selling illegal VPNs, but otherwise, we don’t give a shit”.
Both times I was there, the firewall didn’t apply to cellular data because they do not apply the firewall to holders of foreign SIM cards using their cellular service. I purchased a SIM from a Hong Kong carrier (SoSim) with a few gigabytes of data in both Hong Kong and mainland China for 100 HKD. It worked fine, though I do note that surveillance laws meant that I had to upload my passport to activate the service. I’m not a big fan of that, so I kept the VPN connected at all times, though normally-blocked websites did indeed work on cellular data even without the VPN. I checked on my cell phone’s settings, and I know it connects to China Mobile towers when in mainland China. Note that China Mobile is owned by the Chinese state.
- Comment on UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill 5 days ago:
Attached below is a Wireshark trace I obtained by sniffing my own network traffic.
I want to draw your attention to this part in particular:
Underneath “User Datagram Protocol”, you can see the words “OpenVPN Protocol”. So anyone who sniffs my traffic on the wire can see exactly the same thing that I can. While they can’t read the contents of the payload, they can tell that it’s OpenVPN traffic because the headers are not encrypted. So if a router wanted to block OpenVPN traffic, all they would have to do is drop this packet. It’s a similar story for Wireguard packets. An attacker can read the unencrypted headers and learn
- The size of the transmission
- The source and destination IP addresses by reading the IP header
- The source and destination ports numbers by reading the TCP or UDP headers
- The underlying layers, up until the point it hits an encrypted protocol (such as OpenVPN, TLS, or SSH)
- Comment on UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill 5 days ago:
Take China for example. There is a common misconception that all VPNs are illegal in China. That’s not fully true. In China, VPNs are legal and must obtain a licence from the Ministry of Public Security, like all other online businesses. This also means that they have to agree to monitoring and censorship from the Government, so you can’t use legal VPN services to bypass the firewall in China.
- Comment on UK households could face VPN 'ban' after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill 5 days ago:
The Great Firewall doesn’t block by protocol. If you set up your own OpenVPN server, you can still connect to it. I’ve done this many times in my trips to China, and it’s worked fine. That being said, they still do seem to throttle connections to international servers, though this happens to all servers, even those that are not blocked. There are many clandestine VPN operators in China who spin up their own VPN servers and sell the service. They are mostly OpenVPN-based.
My university used Cisco AnyConnect, and I was able to successfully connect to the university VPN servers as well.
The limited experimentation I have conducted seems to indicate that the Great Firewall blocks by IP and not by protocol.
- Comment on Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors 1 week ago:
Most of the large ones only take bank transfers and cryptocurrency now.
- Comment on Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors 1 week ago:
How’s this confusing? They’re a Puritanical group. They do Puritanical things. Literally nothing deep about it.
- Comment on Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share In USA 2 weeks ago:
Agreed. Gamers are probably one of the demographics which are most likely to care about the enshittification of their operating system, while most other users who only want Microsoft Office and their Web browser could not care less. The former can be swayed to endure a small amount of temporary inconvenience to switch while the latter will not.
- Comment on Uber Eats or something idk 4 weeks ago:
So what did you mean when you began your comment with “actually it’s the inverse”? Inverse of what?
- Comment on Uber Eats or something idk 4 weeks ago:
I’m a bit confused by what you’re trying to say here. It seems non sequitur if you are trying to say “borrowers of higher interest rate benefit less from inflation”.
- Comment on Uber Eats or something idk 4 weeks ago:
Your maths is not right. Inflation, in absolute terms, is a larger benefit to people with higher interest rates.
Let’s consider the scenario where inflation is 10% for simplicity, and two borrowers who each borrow $100, but Borrower A at 5% annual simple interest and Borrower B at 25% annual simple interest. Both borrowers borrow the money at the beginning of Year 0.
Borrower A owes $105 in Year 1 dollars at the beginning of Year 1. This is equivalent to $95.45 in Year 0 dollars.
Borrower B owes $125 in Year 1 dollars at the beginning of Year 1. This is equivalent to $113.64 in Year 0 dollars.
Compared to a 0% inflation rate, Borrower A saved 9.55 Year 0 dollars and Borrower B saved 11.36 Year 0 dollars. Borrower B saved 1.81 more Year 0 dollars than Borrower B due to inflation (but paid 17.55 Year 0 dollars more overall because of interest).
- Comment on Uber Eats or something idk 4 weeks ago:
Inflation reduces the real buying power of the money used to repay the loan by the inflation rate each year, regardless of your loan interest.
In absolute terms, inflation is better the higher your interest rate is, because the number of dollars it saves you goes up.
- Comment on ChatGPT 'got absolutely wrecked' by Atari 2600 in beginner's chess match — OpenAI's newest model bamboozled by 1970s logic 1 month ago:
One of my mates generated an entire website using Gemini. It was a React web app that tracks inventory for trading card dealers. It actually did come out functional and well-polished. That being said, the AI really struggled with several aspects of the project that humans would not:
- It left database secrets in the code
- The design of the website meant that it was impossible to operate securely
- The quality of the code itself was hot garbage—unreadable and undocumented nonsense that somehow still worked
- It did not break the code into multiple files. It piled everything into a single file
- Comment on TIL a single 25kg bag of flour now costs $1000 in Gaza. 1 month ago:
This seems strange to me. If everyone has accounts with the Bank of Palestine, then why did it turn into everyone demanding cash versus just paying each other with bank transfers through the Bank of Palestine?
But seeing that the Israelis are now trying to just starve the Palestinians out of Gaza, this just sounds like inflation with extra steps.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
I think one other factor that people have not considered is the monitor. To run all games at 4K maximum settings, yes, this type of PC might be required. But at lower resolutions, such as 1080p or 1440p, this is overkill and one would be able to run any game as maximum settings even with a computer costing a third as much.
- Comment on TIL a single 25kg bag of flour now costs $1000 in Gaza. 1 month ago:
What is “the app” that they are talking about?
- Comment on YSK that after leaving power, Margaret Thatcher became a lobbyist for tobacco companies 1 month ago:
Let me put it this way. Lemmy infamously only has four topics that people post about:
- Politics
- Linux
- Star Trek
- Porn
Any community that isn’t about topics 2 to 4 will eventually become one about topic 1.
- Comment on YSK that after leaving power, Margaret Thatcher became a lobbyist for tobacco companies 1 month ago:
I’m not speaking for anyone but myself. I view this post as an example of a very persistent problem with Lemmy as a platform. Namely, that it seems only have four topics that people ever post about:
- Politics
- Linux
- Star Trek
- Porn
There’s nothing inherently wrong with posting about these topics but it really seems like whenever there exists a community isn’t about topics 2-4, people will make it about topic 1.
- Comment on YSK that after leaving power, Margaret Thatcher became a lobbyist for tobacco companies 1 month ago:
Yeah, okay. But anger doesn’t make my life better. If I’m browsing this community I expect tips that can potentially improve the quality of my life, not just finding out about more mud on a dead 20th century dirt bag politician to be angry about.
- Comment on YSK that after leaving power, Margaret Thatcher became a lobbyist for tobacco companies 1 month ago:
Why are you posting this in YSK? How does this information improve anyone’s life in any way?
There is literally no-one here who doesn’t already think Thatcher was a piece of shit.
- Comment on Catbox.moe got screwed 😿 2 months ago:
You’re being downvoted because your assertion that hosts are responsible for what users upload is generally false.
(1) Treatment of Publisher or Speaker.—No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2) Civil Liability.—No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in [subparagraph (A)].
47 USC § 230c, a.k.a. Communications Decency Act 1996 § 230
- Comment on Catbox.moe got screwed 😿 2 months ago:
Hash matching is really easy to get around. Literally modify 1 bit of the image or just re-encode the video and you’ve gotten around it.
- Comment on Speak American 2 months ago:
I think you’re overthinking it slightly.
- French flag represents the language called "French"
- Spanish flag represents the language called "Spanish"
- Russian flag represents the language called "Russian"
- German flag represents the language called "German"
- Portuguese flag represents the language called "Portuguese"
- Japanese flag represents the language called "Japanese"
- Korean flag represents the language called "Korean"
- Chinese flag represents the language called "Chinese"
- Italian flag represents the language called "Italian"
- But somehow, the British flag doesn’t represent a language called “British”, but rather, one called “English”, despite there existing an English flag
- Comment on Speak American 2 months ago:
Scottish people having to click on a British flag knowing it will display English (there is a perfectly good flag for England that people refuse to use 🏴)
- Comment on Elon Musk Cuts Funding for Internet Archive 3 months ago:
- Comment on What is it about humans when society rewards individuals with the power of millions they want to use it to fuck up society? 3 months ago:
If the question is asking about Trump, Orban, Putin, or your other favourite dimwitted world leader, it’s because these people usually don’t actually want to fuck everything up. They want to make their country (or their notion of the groups of people they regard as their country) prosperous and glorious. But they’re just unable to take in the fact that their policies and leadership are actually leading them further away from this goal. It really is just a deadly combination of incompetence and inability to self-criticise.
In the case of Trump, who is a pre-eminent example of this, he really does think that tariffs will make the US richer. He is a moron, of course, but that’s what he thinks. He doesn’t “know” that tariffs will damage the American economy and America’s international reputation, because he doesn’t grasp the concept at all. Anyone who has observed his thinking for any period of time after he got into politics can observe that it is very feelings-driven and not very fact-based. And a lot of his government’s policy is also ego-driven, which explains why it is seemingly always falling for Russian propaganda and why he wants to be on good terms with Putin. Though Putin is no universal genius either, one thing that he is very good at, as a result of his KGB training, is manipulating others to get what he wants. It certainly does help Putin a lot that Trump is pretty easily manipulated. And as for Trump’s comments about wanting to take over Canada, take over Greenland, take over Panama, &c. &c., most non-US observers describe that as clear evidence of his mental decline. J. J. McCullough, a Canadian political commentator, described it as being “obvious” that Trump is “losing it”.
And ironically, since Joe Biden’s mental competence was called into question in the last US election, while Biden’s senility manifests mostly in the form of stutters, speech blunders, and random mostly-inert goofiness, Trump’s senility seems to manifest in a desire to take over the world and become God-emperor of Mankind, which is objectively more dangerous for a world leader.
- Comment on The uncensored library: The digital home of press freedom 4 months ago:
Yeah, I did. No good, unfortunately. Could not get TOR to work at all unless connected to a VPN or using a foreign SIM card.
If you have a foreign SIM card then you can get access to the unfiltered Internet in China. So if you’re planning a trip to China, I recommend doing that. I bought an eSim from SoSim which is a Hong Kong carrier (there is no firewall in Hong Kong—yet) and it was like 20 USD for the 14-day “Greater China region” pass. I think it had like 10 GB of data which was enough for my purposes. Extra data is pretty cheap anyway and they take foreign credit cards. No 5G or even 4G LTE though (you have to pay extra for that which sucks). You only get plain old 4G which is passable but disappointing. China throttles traffic to foreign IPs (even unblocked ones) so I don’t think 5G would be a huge benefit anyway.
While connected to WiFi, I was able to set up my own OpenVPN server and that worked as well. Their blocking seems to be DNS based. If you keep it to yourself and don’t share your server publicly, I think you should be good.
Since China is mostly cashless, all digital transactions are tracked and monitored, and selling access to an illegal VPN server will result in severe consequences. The Government doesn’t actually care about individual people getting around the Great Firewall.
But like I said, the idea is not to be perfect but to make it annoying enough to get around that ordinary people don’t bother.
- Comment on The uncensored library: The digital home of press freedom 4 months ago:
The only experience I have with countries that have censored Internet access is China, but I can say that all ordinary methods for connecting to Tor will not work and using commercial VPNs is really a game of whack-a-mole with the Chinese government.
The idea is not to be 100% effective, it’s to make evading the censorship hard enough that most people don’t really care to do so. Everyone in China knows how to evade the Great Firewall but most people just don’t care about the fact that their Internet access is censored.
- Comment on How come there is enough asphalt for speed bumps, but not enough to fill potholes ? 5 months ago:
It is not because of a shortage of asphalt that potholes exist. It is a shortage of attention and money to fill said potholes.
