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18 days agoIn our modern times, Ea-Nasir still has some bars of aluminum to sell you. Quite several, in fact. :)
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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 11th, 2023
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But who would buy such hardware? :)
so good luck hiding a VPN client.
In my imagination, there is no VPN client. The whole network is behind a VPN router and the internet gateway is where it needs to be.
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 (active management technology) > 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.
P.S.
I’m sure there exist tools for the really security-conscious folks to verify whether ME has become disabled, but I was installing a boring warehouse system, so I didn’t check.
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 since I haven’t found a reasonable use for it.
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 for the Pico series and ready-made CPUs for their bigger products, and various other services from other companies. If they didn’t exist, I would likely fall back on RockChip based products from China.
https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/nsaant/firewalk/index.htm
Wow. :) Neat trick. (Would be revealed in competent hands, though. Snap an X-ray photo and find excess electronics in the socket.)
However, a radio transceiver is an extremely poor candidate for embedding on a chip. It’s good for bugging boards, not chips.
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 concept 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 and you can’t add random shit onto a chip, and if someone does, you can stop buying bugged hardware or prevent that random addition from getting a reading.
2·27 days agoGood point. Biopsies can cause complications.
PSA is still recommended here (it’s cheap) but only its negative answer is considered reliable.
- PSA negative: all clear
- PSA positive: do a non-invasive scan and more blood tests, don’t immediately proceed to a biopsy
Since this is an opportunity to educate people about health, I will not discuss politics here. :)
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If you’re a guy, your urinary tract is stupidly complicated from a medical viewpoint and there’s a prostate beneath the bladder which hydrogenates testosterone (T is produced by the brain) into dihydrotestosterone, produces fluid to mix the seminal fluid with, and generally supports fertility and gender specific phenotype.
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With progressing age, the prostate enlarges, gets infected with HPV (nearly everyone gets it) and may get bacterial infections (typical ones are E. coli). It may also develop calcinations.
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Risk is reduced if you live in Asia and eat a traditional menu containing much soy bean products which enables guys in those regions to enjoy several times less prostate cancer.
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Risk is increased with nearly every urinary tract infection, especially if not conclusively diagnosed and treated.
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After the age of 40, regularly have PSA (prostate specific antigen) measured from a blood test. It tells how much disintegration and immune reaction is occurring down there.
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Regularly have ultrasound check-ups done. If there are UTI symptoms, treatment must not occur blindly, but must be followed by observation.
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If you are young and your home country has medical insurance that covers HPV vaccination, get it while it’s free (because it costs 150 € a dose). If you’re rich enough, there may be a point in getting it later too, especially if you’ve not had unsafe sex (it doesn’t protect after infection). The majority of people get HPV during their lives and approximately 9 strains cause cervical cancer in women and raise the risk of prostate cancer in men. By getting vaccinated against HPV, you protect both yourself and your partners from drawing a ticket in a quite nasty lottery.
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As long as prostate cancer is androgen dependent, it can be suppressed with an androgen blockade.
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In any self-respecting civil war, people use jets and warships against someone’s orders, and build as many drones as they can. Handguns are how it starts - a crew taking control of a ship will be fighting their ex-commander with handguns.
Note: I do not recommend a civil war to the US folks. Almost any other problem-solving method is guaranteed to give better outcomes.
Once upon a time, in a distant land, a person arrived near a police vehicle while a crowd surrounding the vehicle was argumentative and loud. They dropped a few caltrops and nudged them under the wheels with their toe.
Once upon a time, in a distant land, a guy with a cordless drill disabled some police vehicles in a speed-run. Sadly they had no RC car to mount it on (note: some cleanliness, testing and engineering skills required) or they could have called it a “rig” and proclaimed “drill, baby, drill”.
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. :)
From the article (emphasis mine):
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.
/…/
“It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” she says.
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.
I don’t know what large language model these people used, but evidence of some language models exhibiting response patterns that people interpret as sycophantic (praising or encouraging the user needlessly) is not new. Neither is hallucinatory behaviour.
Apparently, people who are susceptible and close to falling over the edge, may end up pushing themselves over the edge with AI assistance.
What I suspect: someone has trained their LLM on somethig like religious literature, fiction about religious experiences, or descriptions of religious experiences. If the AI is suitably prompted, it can re-enact such scenarios in text, while adapting the experience to the user at least somewhat. To a person susceptible to religious illusions (and let’s not deny it, people are suscpecptible to finding deep meaning and purpose with shallow evidence), apparently an LLM can play the role of an indoctrinating co-believer, indoctrinating prophet or supportive follower.
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 will suffer as a result
- 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.
If then, some eager redditors start sending death threats, that’s unfortunate. I would catalouge them, but not report them anywhere unless something actually happens.
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 worthwhile to know their background, think of several ways of how they might perceive the proposal, and advance your explanation in a way that relates better with their viewpoint.)
AI bots which take into consideration a person’s background will - if implemented right - indeed be more powerful at swaying opinions.
As to whether secrecy was really needed - the article points to other studies which apparently managed to prove the persuasive capability of AI bots without deception and secrecy. So maybe it wasn’t needed after all.
Even 1 TB is arduous. Don’t back up your movie collection, let the feds have it if they want. Back up your code, correspondence and encryption keys. :)
A well placed encrypted backup on two separately located microSD cards (in case mice eat the other), located within a few hundred meters of your actual residence, should be beyond the ability of common goons (ICE, cops, impatient FBI agents) to locate. They’d have to engage in long-term surveillance.
If curious kids find one, it’s still encrypted and you still have the other, and curious kids won’t take your primary data carrier by raiding your house either. You just replace the backup then and put it elsewhere.
I replied to your post of the satellite photo in another thread. See my reply here. In short, the strange spill and material has been present in the yard of that building for at least a month. If it’s permanent, it could indicate a washing facility or slaughterhouse. Jumping to conclusions is not a good way to proceed when you don’t check the context of a satellite photo.
Regarding Kilmar Abrego Garcia, see this post on Twitter, a US senator was able to meet him:
New court order: this power belongs to the legislative branch, order invalid. :)
Trump can issue an excecutive order and have them executed.
An “insane” ex-employee of a three letter agency can fire a wire-guided missile at his helicopter too, or someone may leave a drop of nerve agent on his door knob. I mean to say: possibilities for violence are endless. They’re an entirely different dish than legal possibilities, which are limited. With violence, imagination is the limit.
The supreme court however - I think they’re not bound by their previous rulings. If the court sees a justification, they can rule differently next time.
The week after that: the same or another person is again found in contempt, because the ruling of the court has’t been enforced.
Some legal interpretations say that contempt of court is not a pardonable offense. I don’t know if those are prevailing in the US.
State employees aren’t specifically beholden to the agency who hires and fires them.
The state has an executive, legislative and judicial branch.
If they follow an executive order but contravene a law, or contravene a court order that they know about (since only the courts make final interpretations of law) - my understanding is that they have no immunity.
On social media, putting the burden of blocking on a million users is naive because:
I have once helped others 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.