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1827162on The GTK+3 port of GIMP is officially finished

And it was a huge step back from GTK2 at the time, taking ages to mature. Yes, the GNOME project is stagnating rather badly. Compare that with Qt, which is much better by comparison.

1827162on The GTK+3 port of GIMP is officially finished

This is something I was actively resisting. It turns out that for me, I find GTK3 to be less aesthetically pleasing than GTK2. There are far fewer themes for GTK3, and they aren't as nice as the GTK2 ones either. Sad to see a step back in user interface design, in my opinion at least.

It won't be long before all the distributions catch up and start removing the GTK2 builds, which are likely to be deprecated.

1827162on Robot dog surveys damage at Lower Manhattan parking garage collapse

They were warning of this for a long time, due to modern cars being so much heavier than in the 1970s and 1980s, when these garages were built. And this is especially so for electric cars due to the battery pack.

https://www.businessinsider.com/heavy-weight-electric-cars-c...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/04/08/old-car-parks-co...

1827162on Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness

I think the pendulum will swing towards that way eventually. It's cyclical. Once the novelty of social media wears away, as it has done already, and the harms start being worse than the benefits.

However not being on social media can have real-world consequences in the classroom, the child could be treated as an outcast and mocked or bullied for it.

There is a middle ground, which is to use a pseudonym and ensure anonymity. You can then selectively disclose this pseudonym to people you trust. It might be safer for the children that way and also make it more difficult for adult authority figures to interfere with their lives.

1827162on Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness

It's the same intuition that tells me something's wrong when I read things that end up being conspiracy theories or pseudoscience.

I trust it, because for me, it seems to have a track record of being correct in the end.

Well everyone has the right to their own opinions, and I might be completely wrong.

And I have every right to be a heretic, and not subscribe to things I think might be orthodoxies. That might be arising from bandwagon effects and social conformity. Which is what I suspect when it comes to climate change doomsaying.

And that's strictly my own opinion only, which can be simply disregarded by other people. But it still adds to the discussion. And such things can be proven wrong too, which might strengthen the case for catastrophic climate change actually happening?

1827162on Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness

Yes, I'm likely wrong there....

As a side note, one important change in the modern times is the ability to cross check information from a wide range of sources easily.

1827162on Child sexual abuse: leading MEP sceptical of technical limitations

But I think it's the primary way the state finds out what we are doing, so it then can exercise it's violence, if it finds us doing something that it doesn't like.

The first thing police do nowadays is check social media accounts when there's a crime, whether it's a thought crime or not? So by reducing our reliance on online services, we can diminish the ability of the state to police our lives?

Or maybe I'm wrong here (tired, and need a rest, so I don't end up spamming HN)?

1827162on Hands-On with the Inmos Transputer Part 1: Introduction

I used to play around with these (ST20 core) when I was younger, they were embedded into the STMicroelectronics STi5518 set top box chips, which I happened to have the full datasheet to. A weird stack based architecture, each instruction was a single byte if I remember correctly. And it had a hardware scheduler. Because of the stack based architecture, the task switch was very fast indeed.

There also was an ANSI C compiler (from the 1980s) with source code available, and I managed somehow to get this to build on a Linux machine at the time.

I got most of the peripheral hardware working, could even display MPEG-2 still images and play MP3 files streamed over the JTAG interface. But I never got full video decode working. You could also overclock it to 180MHz, which is much faster than it's specified 81MHz clock rate.

https://www.datasheetcatalog.com/datasheets_pdf/S/T/I/5/STI5...

The last chip that STMicroelectronics manufactured which featured a transputer core is STi5119ALC. It runs at over 200MHz and supports VGA RGB progressive scan output. You can get it from AliExpress, so it shouldn't be too hard to get a board made with the chip and a DDR SDRAM for experiments. I think the STLink (which is a modified transputer link) even works, so you can chain the chips together.

1827162on Child sexual abuse: leading MEP sceptical of technical limitations

It might actually get better over hundreds of years, the current problems are decline over a couple of decades, which will likely result in a backlash eventually.

We abolished slavery, torture, blasphemy, heresy, witch hunting, etc. over the centuries. And made huge roads into tackling racism and the persecution of homosexuals, etc. So no reason to think it will get worse over the very long term, I think?

Unrelatedly one pressing issue we haven't yet fixed is the systematic cruelty and mistreatment of children by parents, which probably has religious origins in prior generations. And instead the government focuses on sexual abuse, which is a drop in the ocean by comparison.

We are also in the midst of a revolution - AI might shift power back to the individual - because it can be run locally, and the government has a much harder time monitoring that. And it can reduce our dependence on online services which are the primary means for state control over our lives?

1827162on Child sexual abuse: leading MEP sceptical of technical limitations

A totalitarian police state in the making there. Yes, with ChatGPT (and its successors) they will be targeting politically subversive conversations that threaten state power, in 20+ years time.

It's happened before and we are already showing all the signs of early stage fascism[1], and there is no reason that it won't happen again.

1. Yes I am using the word fascism, instead of authoritarianism, because that is what I think it is, it is that severe, when you consider what is happening already (mass Internet surveillance, protesters being criminalized).

1827162on Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness

It's quite shocking when you think about it, that your "friends" here are in effect not allowing you to be yourself. And will potentially socially ostracize you (i.e. punish you) if you do something, that is harmless, but is not accepted by the group for some reason. Dystopian stuff indeed.

1827162on French publisher arrested in London for refusal to tell police his passcodes

What about spoofing IP addresses (bittorrent DHT / IPFS / deliberately faked Tor IP leaks / etc.) or a combined technique, so that the police think illegal material was shared from that IP, and when they come to investigate they find large quantities of random data, which they think is encrypted?

1827162on Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness

Yes, quite possibly overgeneralization there. Thinking on it....

1827162on Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness

It appears to me that fears over catastrophic climate change are yet another moral panic. Amplified by social media this time.

As with other moral panics (e.g. child abductions, pedophilia), the problem exists, but is blown way out of proportion by the media.

In reality, I believe there of course will be changes in the weather patterns due to a relatively small increase in temperature, but it's not going to be the end of the world and there certainly won't be any mass drought or famine from the change.

I kind of intuitively know this, and mostly disregard the opinions of those saying that there is impending doom. As I have likely seen this type of hysteria play out before in my life many times already.

It will be interesting to see if I'm right about it or not, over the coming decades...

1827162on Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness

And in order to compete with the other channels, news started becoming more and more sensationalist. Those channels contributed to the moral panics behind "Stranger Danger" and "Satanic Ritual Abuse", which resulted in parents becoming overprotective towards their children, stunting their development. When these children grew up into adults, they carried this "safetyist" worldview with them, where freedom is traded for security. And we know from history where that path leads to in the end, if it's not stopped somehow.

1827162on Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness

Likely because that generation was raised to believe everything they were told, starting from an early age with school, religion, then with television and newspapers, etc.

The younger generation were raised with media that spread obvious untruths such as conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, etc. and they learned to think more critically about what they are reading.

1827162on Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness

I think it's the total visibility that's causing mental illness. There is no space where you can be with your friends, screw up, and not have it become known to everyone in your peer group. There's little space to make mistakes. No space to be yourself. You are under the watchful gaze of your friends, i.e. peer surveillance, nearly all of the time. Which induces stifling conformity.

Everything's under constant scrutiny. And your friends end up exerting social control over your life through social media.

So your "friends" in essence, force you to use these platforms. If you don't you will be treated as a social outcast, a pariah. It makes you wonder what these "friends" really are in the first place.

On top of that, parents are on there too, and can more easily find out what their children are up to, thus allowing them to be helicoptered and coddled even more than ever before, thus stifling childrens' development, because in order to learn responsibility, they need the freedom to be able to make mistakes, and be exposed to the natural consequences of those mistakes.

1827162on French publisher arrested in London for refusal to tell police his passcodes

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/10/29/sending-the-thought...

Yes, the Scottish Hate Crime bill. And as expected, they are trying to expand it to cover misogyny. So someone's going to end up serving time for a silly joke they made in a pub.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/scots-give-backing-to-mak...

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/09/11/why-misogyny-must-n...

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/03/16/dont-make-misogyny-...

1827162on PSA: Upgrade your LUKS key derivation function

Yes, if used as a root filesystem. My computer is setup to have immutable read-only root filesystem, any changes go to RAM. Except for the home directory. There is no swap either.

It shouldn't be a problem if you use it to store infrequently accessed material, e.g. the entire copy of Library Genesis (2.5 million ebooks). The double encryption will make sure absolutely that you cannot be prosecuted for possessing forbidden books (in countries where there is no mandatory key disclosure law). That way your reading habits are none of the government's business, period. As it should be.

1827162on French publisher arrested in London for refusal to tell police his passcodes

And they'll just infiltrate your open source project, in the name of preventing petty "harassment" of developers. That way they will allow weaknesses in the protocol to arise, due to attrition of the best developers. And there you go, everything has been handed over to intelligence agencies, who can now easily break its security.

1827162on French publisher arrested in London for refusal to tell police his passcodes

Yes, the Murdoch owned newspapers use moral panic to get these draconian laws passed. And it's been going on for decades. That is how our civil liberties are destroyed here in the UK.

It's an almost symbiotic relationship with the government.

1827162on French publisher arrested in London for refusal to tell police his passcodes

I totally nuked my career in communications and networking as a result of Internet mass surveillance and the prosecution of Orwellian "thought crimes". It really is a modern day witch hunt. Had to do something else, and am so much happier now that it's gone.

Yes, I was so outraged and shocked from it, what the government was doing, specifically regarding Internet pornography, that I had "moral injury". A condition not dissimilar from PTSD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury

We are living in the 21st Century and we are still behaving, on some level like it's 1692. The year when the Salem witch trials were carried out.

And few people speak up about what's going on. They consider it normal. Because of how the Overton window works. How the frog has boiled so slowly over the decades.

1827162on French publisher arrested in London for refusal to tell police his passcodes

Also democratic backsliding, which I think "new" Labour really set into motion starting all the way back in 1997.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding

Apparently there was Soviet influence on the Labour party and it was going on for decades, and may explain its particularly nasty authoritarian streak. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1225637/How-Kremlin...

From that Daily Mail article (2009):

" The unpalatable truth is that many ministers in Government today rose through the ranks of a British socialist movement that was heavily influenced - and even controlled - by the Kremlin in Moscow. "

" As the Spectator says: 'Indeed, New Labour, which has governed since 1997, cannot be understood unless these communist influences are taken into account. 'Many of New Labour's characteristics - its deep suspicion of outsiders, its structural hostility to democratic debate, its secrecy, its faith in bureaucracy, the embedded preference for striking deals out of the public eye, and its ruthless reliance on a small group of trusted activists, result from the lengthy detente with the Kremlin.' "

So russia is not only causing trouble in Ukraine, it also seriously affected politics here in the UK. And it might be why we are living in such a precarious situation, when it comes to our liberties, here in 2023.

1827162on French publisher arrested in London for refusal to tell police his passcodes

And you can set someone up by just filling their hard drive with random data. Now all you need next is a fake tip off for child porn or something similar. The police will ask to "decrypt" it, but nobody has the key. Absolutely insane, yes the UK is probably already a de facto police state, because of this, the mass surveillance, "smart" CCTV everywhere and numerous other attempts by the government to strip us of our liberties.

Yes, because the Overton window has slipped so far, we are in a situation now, that in the 1970s people would easily class as a police state. Mass Internet surveillance, with complete dossiers on every web user being compiled by GCHQ, the criminalization of possession of data, which is a thought crime, yes prison for possessing certain books that are legal in the US. The list goes on and on.

All supposedly to protect us from some minor threat, whatever is in vogue as the latest moral panic (e.g. terrorism, child pornography, petty harassment, etc.). All while so many more people are killed or harmed in road traffic accidents each year than from all of those combined.

It really is nothing but excuses for authoritarianism. Yes, fascism, in disguise there. I don't even want to imagine what things will be like in 20-30 years time for now, if it continues at this rate.

1827162on Poland building electronic barrier on border with Russia

It works using a buried fiber optic cable, a technique known as Distributed Acoustic Sensing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_acoustic_sensing

1827162on Nintendo Is Taking Down My Videos [video]

Time for some civil disobedience?

1827162on PSA: Upgrade your LUKS key derivation function

Use the TPM as an additional layer of protection. In combination with other things as well, heck even the encryption built into an SSD. So if any one fails, it's still better than nothing. All with separate, uncorrelated passphrases.

1827162on PSA: Upgrade your LUKS key derivation function

In theory you could store it both offsite (using a hidden Micro SD card) and on your phone simultaneously, with a special key combination, e.g. pressing Vol Up + Vol Down + Power causing the phone to be rebooted, and the key erased from RAM... So in that case you would need to get the offsite copy, from GPS coordinates you have memorized, using a GPS receiver that is known not to leave any location information in it's EEPROM / Flash.

Of course all this info has to be double checked to see if it actually works, and forensic tools run against the phone to be really really sure the key's not being written to Flash in any way, or remains in RAM after a reboot.

1827162on PSA: Upgrade your LUKS key derivation function

Maybe using two layers of encryption, so if one fails, then we at least have another one to be bruteforced as a backup? Also two implementations, from different operating systems (!), e.g. why not store the data encrypted on a server running OpenBSD, which is then encrypted again using Linux LUKS. So then both the OpenBSD and Linux implementations would have to fail, in order for the government to be able to decrypt it. Of course, using different, long passphrases for each.

1827162on Booting Modern Intel CPUs

And that cost cutting is likely due to the rise of Chinese STM32 clones from companies most of us have never heard of such as GigaDevice, CKS, Geehy, MindMotion, APEX Semiconductors, etc...

Some die photos here: https://mecrisp-stellaris-folkdoc.sourceforge.io/clones-stm3...