Hacker News Reader

127361on Flipper Zero: Multi-Tool Device for Geeks

When I was a teenager I would pour Coca-Cola into the school computers after seeing a fellow student get into trouble for similar stuff. Never got caught for that. It's acid and worked especially well against powered up electronic equipment.

I wouldn't be surprised nowadays they would just start a rumor about the teacher's sexual misconduct or grooming of the students, in response, instead. And the accusation could spread and escalate, completely destroying the life of the teacher.

A certain percentage of the population will just make stuff up if they have the opportunity to do so, and "juicy" gossip can spread virally. So if they ask for "witnesses" to come forward, they will. Sex offenders are hated so much in society, they get beaten and abused in prison all the time, so it's essentially torture in the end.

127361on Flipper Zero: Multi-Tool Device for Geeks

It might be legal for them to call the cops, but it still does not absolve them from moral responsibility for their actions. Including all the distress it would cause the child's family, and the likely ongoing PTSD from the incident.

127361on Flipper Zero: Multi-Tool Device for Geeks

Because the f**ing human species is a predator, and we go after weakness.

127361on Flipper Zero: Multi-Tool Device for Geeks

And so do reinforced concrete walls, they block the signal and thus prevent emergency services from being contacted too. And so many other things. Radio communications are unreliable by default. Someone's prank should not result in criminal charges unless tangible harm has occurred.

127361on Flipper Zero: Multi-Tool Device for Geeks

Those are the actions of a de-facto police state.

127361on Cancer Is Striking More Young People, and Doctors Are Alarmed and Baffled

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/digestion-of-artificial-...

"Further, the team discovered that gut cells exposed to sucralose-6-acetate had increased activity in genes related to oxidative stress, inflammation and carcinogenicity. ‘It’s time to revisit the safety and regulatory status of sucralose, because the evidence is mounting that it carries significant risks,’ warned Susan Schiffman, the study’s corresponding author."

127361on Flipper Zero: Multi-Tool Device for Geeks

Flipper Zero was designed in Russia, the company moved since the start of the war.

127361on Tesla Employees Using Vehicle Cameras to Spy on 'Private Scenes;' Owners Suing (2023)

I wonder if law enforcement have access to the camera footage? This makes it every car a mobile CCTV on wheels?

How difficult would it be for Tesla to implement ANPR and upload every number plate spotted together with GPS coordinates, to a central server? The chances of them doing it are very low, but it's still interesting to consider such possibilities.

Maybe 20 years from now they could implement facial recognition? That would be an absolute nightmare scenario. If every car has that many cameras, essentially privacy is finished, it's worse than Orwell's 1984 book.

127361on Kids referred to counter-terror police amid crackdown on Palestine support

https://nitter.net/LBC/status/1738152668537696670

"A mum whose kids attended a school where a protest was held after claims that a boy was punished for wearing a Palestine flag badge, says the school threatened to contact Prevent if they heard of parents sharing info on the war in private WhatsApp groups."

Those are the actions of a police state. You can thank Tony Blair's government way back in 2000 for starting this. The laws enabling this should be repealed.

127361on The Reason the Office Isn't Fun Anymore

Absolutely agree, and I wonder what the open plan office has done to our economy, in terms of lost productivity and stress induced health issues?

127361on Fujitsu says it will pay compensation in UK Post Office scandal

From the article: "I wasn’t tech savvy at all back 20 years ago — they convinced me it was my fault,” she said, adding that the Post Office had "gaslit” her.

That is absolutely horrific.

127361on The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same

But older versions of Android prior to Material Design did not have excessive whitespace. So we had touchscreen devices in the past and we could still design good interfaces for them that were not dumbed down in this way.

I think it's probably a marketing drive to cater to as wide an audience as possible, to the lowest denominator of user. They probably made a rational decision to do this because it would increase revenue by simplifying the interface. So these devices went the way of TV in the end.

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22481602

127361on The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same

Material design came out right at the very beginning when this "hipsterism" started happening. Then everyone started copying it. I absolutely hated it, and still do to this very day, with so much passion.

It is the worst user interface design I have ever been forced to use in my life. It's like they designed it for children or something. And from then it spread to general Web design and to software including GNOME, with GTK3 and the Adwaita theme. Suddenly everything became low contrast and low density, with oversized buttons and excessive whitespace.

127361on The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same

I think this also applies to the scourge of "modern" user interface design, with its low contrast text, bland color schemes, monochrome icons and excessive whitespace. I was wondering for a long time if there was something going on behind the scenes (e.g. due to social media) to cause this mindless conformity and here we have an explanation for it.

127361on How a software glitch at the UK Post Office ruined lives

So does that mean guilty until proven innocent? If I'm correct here, then that's utterly sickening.

127361on Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

"This paper presents a distributed model-parallel training framework that enables training large neural networks on small CPU clusters with low Internet bandwidth." Low bandwidth being <1Gbps. They've also tested it with GPUs as well.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.12667

Maybe there's the possibility of a completely new AI architecture that can still be efficiently trained when there are very low bandwidth connections between nodes? Specifically targeting this use case would make sense, given all the millions of underutilized GPUs out there in peoples' desktop computers.

Also https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.10207 ?

127361on Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

But if we have 100,000 people with RTX 4090s mining some new AI based cryptocurrency, that happens to train the model in the process, it's going to be a highly effective system. And we can do it anonymously over Tor or I2P.

127361on Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

The usual unelected control freaks, that try to police everything in life, from sex to drugs to what food you can eat. Every time a new technology comes out they start a moral panic over fears of safety or harm ("think of the children"). These morality police play on peoples' fears to increase their power and control.

127361on Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI

I guess distributed training BitTorrent style over the darknet will be the workaround for this?

Also the forbidden nature of illicit AI might drive demand for it. Especially if it's really good.

We're seeing the same thing as the War on Drugs, and the state will never succeed at stamping it out. In fact it might even end up encouraging it.

127361on Etherify: Transmitting Morse Code via Raspberry Pi Ethernet RF Leakage (2020)

It works with any device, as long as it's using TMDS over HDMI. I don't think it will work with DisplayPort as it uses data whitening.

I've been trying to dig up the code for it. It's somewhere on my system.

Update: Here it is: https://pastebin.com/rwtTvFRQ

127361on Etherify: Transmitting Morse Code via Raspberry Pi Ethernet RF Leakage (2020)

I did this with an animated GIF. It puts a specific pattern on the display that maximizes the EMI generated by the HDMI cable. You can hear the morse code on an RTL-SDR by tuning to ~300MHz or so.

The animated pattern in the GIF file is practically invisible (only 1 LSB color change). You can set the GIF as a tiled background for your Web site and detect if someone nearby is visiting it that way.

You could use it exfiltrate data that way, it's enough bandwidth for a password or crypto key. A fairly short piece of JavaScript is all that's required to do this. If you keep repeating the message periodically, you can vastly expand the range of the signal, by averaging it at the receiver.

127361on Inside the Steam Deck's APU

I personally find AMD GPU support under Linux to be absolutely excellent. Only thing I don't like is the "secure processor" which requires signed and sometimes encrypted firmware to run. The older cards don't have this.

127361on Inside the Steam Deck's APU

On older AMD hardware it's controlled by lockdown registers which are written to by the SMU (Lattice Mico32 CPU) just after reset is deasserted.

The SMU reads the eFuses to determine what to lock down. So you can interrupt this process via JTAG and re-enable all the locked down cores. There is a window of a couple of milliseconds after de-asserting reset to halt the SMU.

I have no idea if this still works on newer chips with the AMD Secure Processor. There was some mention of a JTAG password in the leaked AMD documentation on the Web.

I'm not into that stuff anymore, I'm playing around with FPGAs now. No more locked down security processors to get in your way.

127361on Developer receives 2-star review for using "race conditions" in app changelog

The inclusive terminology language police are at it again. Or it could just be plain old trolling.

This page from the Inclusive Naming Initiative would easily be considered satire 20 years ago: https://inclusivenaming.org/word-lists/

They haven't actually listed "race condition" as a forbidden term, yet.

127361on Update law on computer evidence to avoid Horizon repeat, ministers urged

So the Post Office scandal is likely another disaster caused by Tony Blair's government in 1999. Prior to that computer evidence was considered only reliable if the computer was used and operating properly.

That change in the law might have also created the Operation Ore scandal, where thousands of innocent people were arrested over false charges of purchasing child pornography. Which led to 33 suicides.

127361on "Magic Balls" installed by drones may revolutionize US power grid

Likely from the magnetic field from the conductor. They even have street lights that are powered this way.

https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/3005516/1/TPEL2436702%...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqbIhZO7SJc

127361on Why IT pros over 50 should switch their glasses to technology lenses

I'm near sighted. I've put my tablet computer on a stand, so it's right next to my face, so I don't need to wear glasses when using it. The keyboard and mouse are underneath it. I've noticed my vision has improved after making this change, likely due to reduced eyestrain.

127361on [dead]

Could this have something to do with recent SourceHut DDoS attacks?

127361on Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage

They developed their own proof-of-work system to rate limit requests, using SHA256, implementation details here: https://archive.is/dfBVN

They also have servers in multiple countries. Some of these servers being blackholed by Cogent, by the way.

127361on Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage

I suspect a possible DDoS attack from something Kiwi Farms related, it seems they really don't like the guy over there?

https://archive.is/yOObX