MangoCats
@MangoCats@feddit.it
- Comment on Deepfake porn is destroying real lives in South Korea | CNN 1 day ago:
55 years: www.imdb.com/title/tt0720250/
- Comment on Sales of Hard Drives for the End of the World Boom Under Trump 2 days ago:
I hear you, but especially in scavenger mode, even pounded flat copper sheets aren’t going to have the capacity to store the wiring diagram for an EV you find that you want to fix up and rig for solar charging. Particularly when you don’t know which year or model of thing it is you’re going to be wanting to scavenge.
the one option we can’t even get to work when everything is working.
While I agree that laser printers are finicky, once I get one working if I have enough paper I can generally print until I run out of toner. And printed paper isn’t forever, but I do have laser printouts from 40 years ago that are as legible as they ever were.
Where I disconnect with you is: why even bother with Terabytes of knowledge when you’re just going to collect the “most important” 100kB or so on your copper sheets at a rate of one sheet per hour, or less? There’s a reason Moses only had ten commandments instead of the full Talmud.
- Comment on Sales of Hard Drives for the End of the World Boom Under Trump 3 days ago:
We can start growing our own food within weeks, not reliant on ancestors
Having watched a neighbor “farming commune” with 12-15 adults on 80 acres who had nothing better to do than play Gilligan’s Island building their huts and trying to grow their own food, for two years with full internet access, enough money for tools and fertilizers, electric pumps for irrigation, they seemed to shy away from using the tractor in the field to work the crops but they had a working tractor… after two years they were only growing about half of their calories.
In other words, In my opinion a “real prepper” already has a “Victory Garden” going and producing enough food that they can easily scale it up to meet 200% of their calorie needs, some to store for hard times, some to barter. If you haven’t actually done that, you’re probably in for a surprise when the raccoons eat your crops in the middle of the night.
All that time can be used to make hard copies of essential information.
If you have a working printer, toner, paper… and don’t forget: a laser printer uses more than10x as much power as an efficient computer. A couple of years would be required just to figure out what you think might be essential information, and after the printer dies you’ll find new essential things based on changes in your situation.
Having said all that, yeah, I’ve got the big offline copy of Wikipedia setup with a reader on a laptop…
You can learn how to salvage wire and build new energy sources. An average 2100²ft empty house has almost 200 pounds of copper wire in the walls. 3000 cycles to learn.
This will the the real resource people use for probably 50+ years after TSHTF - scavenging from what’s left over. As you say: 90%+ dead by next Spring, that leaves a LOT of empty houses to scavenge. Food won’t be there, but wire in the walls, lumber to burn for heat, glass, water pipes, there will be used mattresses available for decades.
thanks for telling me who I am and what skills I already have.
Speaking in general about the 10% who do survive the first three months, the skills required to make it through that chaos are very different from the sustained scavenger/farmer phase.
- Comment on Social media sites should have 'reverse' Parental Controls; where adult children can block their boomer/senior parents' accounts from viewing conspiracy and radicalizing content. 3 days ago:
You don’t prevent trolls and shills, you block them - whitelist style. Communicate with people who have established a good reputation with you, or one or two or three degrees removed from you. Spend time with anonymous when you feel like it, maybe turn some of those identities into trusted friends, but always communicate with some kind of secure ID- even if that ID only lasts for a 10 minute back and forth exchange.
A major not completely solved problem with cryptographically secure anything is: key management. Ultimately you might carry some kind of switchable RFID key with you, switched off until you’re ready to authenticate for some reason.
one person can open multiple accounts in multiple networks.
No problem with that, unless you’re expecting to count heads accurately. If one person is creating the content of ten using ten accounts, is that a problem?
Facebook forces people to have phone numbers and there’s still so many bots and shills there.
I don’t remember giving FB my phone number… with burner phones that seems to be an intentionally lame approach.
I think there’s so many ways for bots to happen that it’s like playing wack a mole.
I don’t think you ever stop them, you just ignore them like junk mail in your physical mail box, except with secure IDs you can automatically filter them without even a glance.
- Comment on Sales of Hard Drives for the End of the World Boom Under Trump 3 days ago:
The average hunter gatherer had food forests planted by their ancestors, wild herds of meat for the taking and a lifetime of knowledge transfer and physical training in living that lifestyle.
You may be adaptable and intelligent and have wikipedia by your side to tell you what to do, but Wikipedia is written by people living in today’s society, not that reality. 90% of today’s people will suffer horribly getting in the physical and mental condition required to do a hunter-gatherer daily routine in 6 hours or less.
But not you, you’re awesome and you get it done in 3, so that leaves you time to go mine copper ore, smelt it into wire and other such things - in reality, no, for the duration of your remaining life scavenging the wreckage will be more productive than DIY from the earth, but scavenging requires a lot of travel and even e-cars won’t be getting around very well.
- Comment on Sales of Hard Drives for the End of the World Boom Under Trump 4 days ago:
more than enough time to find or make a replacement even if society doesn’t rebuild.
If you’re living somewhere with enough easy food, water and shelter that you’re not spending all your time just handling that. Making groceries takes a lot of time and effort.
- Comment on Social media sites should have 'reverse' Parental Controls; where adult children can block their boomer/senior parents' accounts from viewing conspiracy and radicalizing content. 4 days ago:
That would then rely on any effective “Right to be forgotten” laws to erase unnecessary data.
Laws != effective, in my experience.
If you are attempting to deal anonymously, you need to go “burner phone” on a regular basis - throw the identity away and get a new one, or three. How often you do that depends on how valuable your anonymity is to you.
I think the main thing we need to teach the youth of today is: how to maintain a long term undeniable identity that they can live with their whole lives. Meaning: silly pictures with school friends -> anonymous. Master’s Thesis -> certified identity. In-between? That’s where the judgement calls come in.
People doing serious stuff are going to need to start depending on certified identity sources, and openly disclosing when they don’t really know the credibility or even identity of their sources.
As for “credible fake names” - like shell corporations? I think those are a bad idea altogether.
We had some land on a river. Somebody bought the neighboring piece of land through a shell corporation, county public records didn’t give any real names in connection with the sale and transfer of the deed. In 5 minutes on the internet I looked up the owner of that corporation in Nevada and found that it was beneficially owned by a has-been rock star. 5 more minutes and I found a newspaper article from the nearby town with has-been rock star quoted as saying “we bought 11 acres out on the river…” It’s really that easy, and for the people who “do it better” there are forensic accountants who “untangle it better” and the whole game is mostly a waste of time for everybody except the lawyers and accountants charging billable hours, unless you’re covering up something that most people probably don’t want hidden anyway - like money laundering or worse.
they’d be trusted that they’re not inventing people from thin air.
And that trust would be verified how?
a lawyer, or journalist’s office - somewhere they’d have established notaries, and show them a driver’s license or other notable documentation … would grant a cryptographic signature sourced from their office to express that their office has seen them.
So, Russian Troll goes on vacation in Amerika, visit 1000 notaries and obtain 1000 different cryptographic signatures sourced from their offices expressing that they have seen Russian Troll who borrowed U.S. identity card and swapped photo. Very nice.
A “cryptographic identity” is only as valuable as the material signed by it, and then only as long as the secret portion of the identity (you know, those bitcoin keys that guy is buying a landfill to try to find…) is known only to the person(s) controlling the identity.
They can work very well in blockchain form which makes it impossible to alter past records, again only so long as long as the true owner of the identity has control of the secret that signed the last block in the chain. “Right to be Forgotten” is actually somewhat compatible with blockchain, you don’t have to show all the photographs that were placed in the chain throughout history in order to validate the chain, only the cryptographic hashes of those photos. But… if anyone ever finds the bit for bit exact photograph that was in the chain, it becomes irrefutable that the photograph was signed by the chain owner as part of the chain…
This kind of logic should be being made interesting to fourth graders, implemented in practice by 8th graders, and practiced as easily as phone numbers and e-mail addresses by 12th graders. Maybe after kids educated with that kind of knowledge and awareness grow up, they can get a handle on this mess where: “people just trust me, dumb fucks.”
- Comment on Social media sites should have 'reverse' Parental Controls; where adult children can block their boomer/senior parents' accounts from viewing conspiracy and radicalizing content. 4 days ago:
inform people about what’s going on around them
I have lived all my life around retirees, people 50+ years old. I can tell you from that experience, you can inform them all you want, they’re not likely to change their opinions about anything.
- Comment on Sales of Hard Drives for the End of the World Boom Under Trump 4 days ago:
Point being, after 3000 cycles, it’s toast and there’s no fresh bread available.
Yes, you could construct something, but I think you’d be pretty amazed at how maintenance intensive a 1kWh gravity battery is.
- Comment on Social media sites should have 'reverse' Parental Controls; where adult children can block their boomer/senior parents' accounts from viewing conspiracy and radicalizing content. 4 days ago:
If there were good ways of verifying basic conditions of people you interact with online, without exposing personal details
The problem there is: seen and verified by who? What’s your “chain of trust” behind that blue checkmark or whatever signifies a “verified person”?
Even an “anonymous identity” if it runs long enough eventually gives away the person doing the writing under the pseudonym. They may refer to experiences indirectly, unconsciously even, and those narrow down the subset of who they could be, until eventually there can be only one person on the whole planet who fits all the available clues.
To an extent, the world needs to grow up and realize that anyone determined enough can hunt you down through your online footprint unless you’re being super careful with your identity creation, what you say, and how long you use that identity. They also need to realize that among the 8 billion+ of us, they just aren’t very interesting unless they seem gullible enough to authorize a transfer of funds…
- Comment on Social media sites should have 'reverse' Parental Controls; where adult children can block their boomer/senior parents' accounts from viewing conspiracy and radicalizing content. 4 days ago:
Give them a lollipop so they shut up?
- Comment on Social media sites should have 'reverse' Parental Controls; where adult children can block their boomer/senior parents' accounts from viewing conspiracy and radicalizing content. 4 days ago:
The first step in trustable networks is securely validated identity.
On the internet nobody knows if you’re a dog, a Russian Troll, or a corporate shill.
- Comment on Social media sites should have 'reverse' Parental Controls; where adult children can block their boomer/senior parents' accounts from viewing conspiracy and radicalizing content. 4 days ago:
Simpler still: disenfranchise senile boomers. Of course you don’t target boomers specifically, any old person with very little time left to live and severe disconnect from reality shouldn’t be allowed to vote on what affects the rest of the world long after they are dead.
- Comment on Sales of Hard Drives for the End of the World Boom Under Trump 4 days ago:
Sure, solar works. And batteries work - for about 3000 charge-discharge cycles.
- Comment on Sony Music Among Parties Pushing To Cut Off Internet for Pirating Customers — Supreme Court Asked To Intervene 4 days ago:
My Google account that I had for 15+ years got banned from YouTube when I let my 9 year old play around making edited videos. He’d mash up clips from PBS Kids and other places. Apparently PBS didn’t like this and after a couple of vague warnings, my account is banned from YouTube for life, no actual chance of appeal. Of course I could just ditch it and open a new account under another name, but I’m stubborn, over seven years have passed and they’re still silent on the issue. I can watch YouTube, but not comment or post videos. Oh well.
- Comment on Sales of Hard Drives for the End of the World Boom Under Trump 5 days ago:
Also society isn’t going to collapse overnight.
Not if it goes down like you expect it to.
In my experience, the real problems are the ones you weren’t planning for.
Even if we don’t end up nuking each other like we thought we would in the 60s-90s, we could still get a massive asteroid / comet strike with less than a week’s notice. That innocent looking star 23 light years away could have collapsed 22.99 years ago and zap us with a gamma ray burst next week.
More likely: something we don’t even know about comes along and makes life far more challenging than it has been for 100,000 years.
- Comment on Sales of Hard Drives for the End of the World Boom Under Trump 5 days ago:
the under valuing on steps we could just take to not have this future in the first place.
They feel helpless to change the current course of events, and they’re not far wrong as individuals.
What they also underestimate is how quickly they’re gonna die when somebody decides they should after TSHTF. All the prepping in the world isn’t gonna make living after a 20MT strike 20 miles away any fun at all. Living out in the boonies growing your own food? Whatever arsenal you have to protect it, all it takes is a band of yahoos with twice your numbers and firepower and your toast becomes their toast.
live in a fricking farming commune in the first place
Surprisingly difficult to do… we had a farming commune as neighbors for a couple of years, they never did reach food self sufficiency with 80 acres of fertile land and 16 people to work it. The Amish come close to making it work, but any Amish I have ever gotten to know tend to cheat, a lot.
Or, you know, voting for politicians who listen to scientists.
Yeah, they trust the “scientists” even less than you trust their politicians - and they’re not 100% wrong, just mostly wrong.
Don’t get me wrong: true science is the way to make progress, and we have built a lot on science in the past 200 years or so, but we have also got a lot of bought and paid for business tools running around in lab coats fooling the science community that they are just like them.
Anything beyond being self sufficient for a month is overkill in my opinion.
Disasters of my lifetime have been hurricanes. If you can hunker down for the storm and retain your ability to drive out of the devastation zone after the roads are cleared (usually in a couple of days), you’re good. Keep enough gas to run the generators until you can get more gas, keep enough food to last until you can get to a source of more. I’ve never had to abandon home, even with some pretty hard direct hits, but when it’s bad enough that’s what you do. Go somewhere that hasn’t been whacked.
If we politically screw up the whole planet, that’s harder to prep for than a mild nuclear winter.
- Comment on Sales of Hard Drives for the End of the World Boom Under Trump 5 days ago:
If the monitor draws even 20W, you’re gonna be tired of that eBike generator solution really quick.
- Comment on Sales of Hard Drives for the End of the World Boom Under Trump 5 days ago:
A single rooftop solar panel can do that, and charge a battery for a little after dark use while you’re at it.
A true prepper will get an eInk monitor and resist the urge to scroll until they read all the way to the bottom of the page, but even a normal monitor uses a small fraction of a solar panel. Keyboard? Near zero. Mouse? Near zero x10 but still near zero when compared with 200W. RasPi? less than a normal monitor.
- Comment on Trump’s Social Media Surveillance: Social Scoring by Another Name 1 week ago:
Basketball is a bad analogy. Life is not a game played for points where the “loser” is the one with just one less point than the “winner.”
I would lean in more on bankruptcy. Bankruptcy should not be used as a strategy in business: run 10 risky businesses and bankrupt 9 of them to stem your losses while getting lucky with the 10th. In one sense, your creditors are fools for continuing to deal with you after you have demonstrated a pattern of serial bankruptcy, but that doesn’t stop the harm you are doing to all the creditors of your bankrupt business (like: unpaid employees, suppliers, etc.) who didn’t get a whole lot of option to not do business with you, or opportunity to research your credibility before accepting your promises to pay.
Sociopaths would say: it’s a clearly precedented legal maneuver, it’s “smart business” to take advantage of bankruptcy laws, screw the creditors, they took a risk and it didn’t work out for them. I would say that bankruptcy laws need to become more aggressive about protecting creditors from harm, especially when dealing with “fake people” corporations.
- Comment on The Fairphone 5 price has been dropped to €499. The phone is designed to be the most advanced environmentally friendly smartphone. 1 week ago:
I typically pay US$250 for unlocked smartphones, and they are fine for me, my wife, my kids, friends and family…
If the screen is 100€ and the labor to install it competently (I suppose this is a DIY serviceable phone, but the screen?) is another 75€, that’s 80% of what I would be paying for a brand new phone.
- Comment on The Fairphone 5 price has been dropped to €499. The phone is designed to be the most advanced environmentally friendly smartphone. 1 week ago:
Yeah, that plus labor is 80% of what I typically pay for a whole brand new phone… I know why it is this way, but it really is this way and that makes it very hard for low volume players to enter the market.
- Comment on The Fairphone 5 price has been dropped to €499. The phone is designed to be the most advanced environmentally friendly smartphone. 1 week ago:
What’s the cost to replace a cracked screen?
- Comment on Zuckerberg’s 2012 email dubbed “smoking gun” at Meta monopoly trial 2 weeks ago:
Any coincidence that 2012 e-mails are finally coming to trial today?
- Comment on Zuckerberg’s 2012 email dubbed “smoking gun” at Meta monopoly trial 2 weeks ago:
They “trust” me.
Dumb fucks.
- Comment on My imaginary children aren’t using your streaming service – Terence Eden’s Blog 2 weeks ago:
If there ever is anything remotely competitive to Netflix, I’m gone like a shot.
Their “suggestive sell” interface is such garbage. We, the paying customers, should be able to default to a genre search without having to jump hoops every time. We, the paying customers, should be able to hit “not interested” and actually not see suggestions to watch the “not interested” title again. We, the paying customers, should be able to view the available catalog as we choose, not as their manipulative algorithms choose. The only reason we’re still with Netflix is because the ad-free version is still affordable, but their content selection system is heavy advertising in and of itself.
Honestly, folks, if you want to watch a couple of movies a week I bet your local public library has a better interface allowing you to choose from new releases and a deep catalog, all for free - you just have to drive by once a week to pick up / drop off your selections.
- Comment on My imaginary children aren’t using your streaming service – Terence Eden’s Blog 2 weeks ago:
When “parenting” consisted of making sure the rugrats were off the streets by the time the streetlights came on in the evening, it was a little lower maintenance than today.
Now, they have multiple global access terminals in the home, open 24-7-365, that can connect them to anyone/anything anywhere anytime. The physical threats of broken bones, abduction, etc. are less than in Beaver Cleaver’s neighborhood, but these days you don’t have to worry about the one drug dealer that got chased from the neighborhood last year, these days they can have anything delivered “in discrete packaging” if not to your home then to a convenient parcel pickup box not far from the school bus stop.
They can get into video-chats with law enforcement agents trolling for child-sex, they can access porn you didn’t know existed, and they can do it all from “safe mode” of their phone browser after “lights out.” Smuggling a porno mag to look at under the covers by flashlight has gone far far more more interactive and easily hidden.
My approach is to confront the challenges in the open. When the OnlyFans.com charge shows up on the bank card, sit down and talk about how paying for sexy things isn’t good for either party. Don’t take away the bank card, don’t take away the internet access, try to teach why the whole thing is a bad idea. I suppose if it gets to be a habitual problem then denying access is the next step, but with respect to internet problems, I don’t think we’ve had that issue yet (after 45 child-years…) Other habitual problems requiring access denial? Sure. All depends on your particular circumstances, but attempting to deny internet access seems like a seriously losing battle in today’s landscape.
- Comment on My imaginary children aren’t using your streaming service – Terence Eden’s Blog 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, I passed that suggestion into the “don’t show me content from the New York Times anymore” selection box.
- Comment on My imaginary children aren’t using your streaming service – Terence Eden’s Blog 2 weeks ago:
Just say yes, only use it to watch “Fireplace for your Home.” I think you can change the “Kids” icon to whatever character you want it to show.
- Comment on Have you tried Jolla phone? Is it really a good alternative to iPhones/Android phones? 2 weeks ago:
Subscription for the OS period, even if security updates were free, is pretty much the opposite of what I wanted a Jolla phone for back when I put a deposit on one. Are they actually delivering devices this time? Last time they got built but somehow were unable to be shipped to the people who paid for them.