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Endlessly

260 karma · joined March 16, 2020

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Endlessly··on Safeboot: Booting Linux Safely
My understanding is MicroSD “hardware” switch triggers a software based switch that not enforced by the hardware; that is, it is not designed security.

Even a “read only” CD-ROM if not verified on boot for tampering — might contain an attack, including: to just disable the disk from booting, among other things.

Endlessly··on The Fed Will Buy Bond ETFs Now
Anyone have a graph of the capital injections (or capital equivalent valuation at the time of actions) that the US and other countries have taken since 2020 started?
Endlessly··on Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
At some point, unless working onsite is (really) essential — employees & employers that have onsite unnecessary office space should have to pay tax to do so, otherwise, them having an office space just paid for by those who are willing not to have an office.

Having non-essential spaces for people is complete unnecessary — and it: contributes in less health eating habits, traffic, cars, HVAC related energy costs, wasted time commuting, rising real estate costs, economic lost during pandemics due to downtime, etc.

Same principle holds true for non-essential travel.

Endlessly··on Thank you for helping us increase our bandwidth
Since numbers are not 100% clear...

(50 petabytes * 0.2% = 100 terabytes)

[$0.005 ($/GB/Month) BackBlaze cost]

[(50 petabytes) / (1 gigabyte) = 50,000,000]

(50,000,000 * $0.005 = $250,000 US$)

—————

Meaning based on my numbers, that is $250,000 USD a month to host 50 petabytes of data on BackBlaze.

Endlessly··on Thank you for helping us increase our bandwidth
Not sure if you’re asking for:

(1) US coronavirus data in general,

(2) examples of sources that do not log prior days data, or

(3) source that “edit” prior data without noting the edits.

(4) something else

If (1) this page in the table under the column “sources” links to where the data came from:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

Endlessly··on Neurable Technology
OpenBCI ?
Endlessly··on Teensy 4.1 Development Board
μClinux is a variation of the Linux kernel, previously maintained as a fork, that targets microcontrollers without a memory management unit (MMU).

SOURCE: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ΜClinux

——————————-

How uClinux provides MMU-less processors with an alternative https://www.eetimes.com/how-uclinux-provides-mmu-less-proces...

Endlessly··on 4D Toys: how objects bounce and roll in 4D – paper accepted to SIGGRAPH 2020
Makes me wonder if the human brain if born into a 4D world would be able to function, or if fundamentally it is impossible for the brain to process a 4D word.
Endlessly··on Tell HN: Call Mom
For clarification, “the entry” appears to be the wiki page I linked to. The count of 96 countries appears to come from the list of countries per time of year.

My 40+ countries came from the same page, not sure why it says 40+.

Endlessly··on Tell HN: Call Mom
Worth noting while 40+ countries celebrate Mother’s Day — per country, the holiday’s actual date varies.

See the wiki page for more information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day

Endlessly··on Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font
Lol, like how when it loads you see the hidden text and then it disappears.

Another option might be better to process the text, swap out each letter with for example X — or even better a ID-key, then render the font you made.

If you used the ID-key, you could even encrypt each key, tag them by type (spoilers, swear words, personal info, etc) - though for obvious reasons that would require server-side code.

Endlessly··on Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com
Quick read of it and it is obvious that document likely cost millions for Facebook to produce and with the aid of countless hours of legal professionals who in sum likely have 1000s of years of legal experience.

Claiming the average person is able to understand scope of that document— and the likely 1000s of internal documents related to it, and the 100s of thousand pages of related legal code and case law is a stretch.

Document also does not disclose Facebook is subject to secret court orders, gag orders, etc.

— and that doesn’t even begin to cover the knowledge required to understand the related technology and the impact it might have on the users.

Endlessly··on In-person DEF CON 28 cancelled
Source for below text: https://blog.freeradical.zone/suspended/

————

Suspended sneak.berlin

TEK 9 MAR 2020 • 1 MIN READ

The sneak.berlin instance is a small or single-user instance operated by a software author who writes hostile instance-scraping bots. On the web page for that software, in the ironically named "ethics statement", he writes:

“Publishing your toots/messages on a server without marking them private or requiring authentication and thus making them available to the web is an act of affirmative consent to allowing others to download those toots/messages (usually by viewing them in a browser on your profile page). If you don’t want your toots downloaded by remote/unauthenticated users on the web, do not publish them to the web.

If you publish them to the whole web (and your home instance serves them to all comers), do not be surprised or feel violated when people download (and optionally save) them, as your home instance permits them to.“

This is an interesting take on online privacy, to be sure: "because you have not physically restricted me from harvesting your information, you are affirmatively consenting to it". This is much the same argument as "you shouldn't have let me hit you" and carries about the same moral weight with me.

By choosing not to talk to this instance, I hope we make clear that the Free Radical community does not wish to interact with the author or his software.

Endlessly··on In-person DEF CON 28 cancelled
Given they have picked a few platforms, but are leaving a lot of choices up to the individual organizers, presenters, etc — aside from having:

— burner hardware, — one-time network connections, — one-time user accounts, — one-time identifiers, — read-only OS builds, — physically disabling sensors, — (insert suggestions)

What else might be options for securely accessing the event?

Endlessly··on In-person DEF CON 28 cancelled
Reviewing the post, it is unclear what if anything this update by DEFCON means to those who had not intended to attend, but might since it is now appears for this year a real-time remote access event only is being held.

What does this mean?

Endlessly··on Holocene Extinction
>> “ COVID-19 is affecting people right now. It, and other viruses like the flu, are just a giant rhythm game: if everyone could be isolated for 2 weeks, it would be over in 2 weeks, and we'd never have to deal with it ever again.”

Above claim includes set of assumptions that are unsaid and likely unaccounted for, for example:

- isolation occurs per person, not per household.

- 14 days is enough; research I’ve seen claims that only covers 97.5% of the population, which clearly is not 100% of the population; meaning that in 2.5% of the cases, it took longer than 14-days for the individual to become systemic; longest claim I have seen is 28 days, but that’s clearly an outlier may have been due to error of some sort.

- 14-days assumes you’re systemic on the first day of isolation, though mean time to becoming systemic in not zero days, it’s 5-days.

- assumes no latent environmental infection, wildlife based exposure, no bad actors intentionally reinfecting a population, etc

- simply put, no, 14-days is not enough, and few people understand the dynamics at play.

Endlessly··on Holocene Extinction
You’re taking the sum of my comment, extracting a singular phrase, and changing it’s meaning.

I clearly define the scope of what “humans” & “future” means via “humans lack the will collectively to avoid certain types of systemic multigenerational issues“ — and cherry picking examples beyond that to me is irrelevant unless there a clear reasoning linking those examples to the topic.

Endlessly··on Holocene Extinction
“Hive mind” as it relates to a singular species is a work of science fiction to my knowledge and barriers to such a systemic centralized existence appear to defy the laws of physics, information theory, etc.

Even the human mind in my opinion does not exist as a hive and at best described as an ecosystem that eventually experiences systemic failure.

Endlessly··on Holocene Extinction
Struggling to find a word for it, but it’s obvious that humans lack the will collectively to avoid certain types of systemic multigenerational issues.

Climate change is the most obvious, but there’s long list of issues like this that if suddenly every human on Earth magically expected to live 1000 to 10,000 years would become more pressing issues.

As a semi-futurist, this is the core issue, it’s not that humans don’t see the future, they’re unable to change... the issue is that humans simply do not care about the future.

Endlessly··on OpenCV in the browser using WebAssembly and web workers
How would one benchmark or compare running OpenCV from native code and non-native embedded code?

Ask since the intent of the code is not about embedding OpenCV in a browser, but offloading the computation workload from +1 users from a server to the endpoint user’s computer.

Might be wrong, but for a single user, this setup would likely not be optimal.

Endlessly··on Zoom Acquires Keybase
This is not a trend, it’s a long standing market strategy:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...

Endlessly··on Microsoft offers $100k to hack its custom Linux OS
Oddly, globally, Starbucks around the world are not the same; for example, the percent of fat in the milk differs from region to region.
Endlessly··on Microsoft offers $100k to hack its custom Linux OS
Using that logic, all tech with vulnerabilities should be removed.

While I understand the urge want to humanize the process, give people jobs, this is not the way to do it.

Future of human employees inside of Starbucks is clearly focused on what the baristas do best as humans, being friendly person that’s humanize the experience of getting coffee.

As for including humans in food safety procedures, what exactly are you referring too? Inserting 30-60 IoT continuous environmental and systems monitoring sensors into a store clearing makes more sense that paying a human to be in the store 24/7 and writing it down on paper. If I am recalling correctly, Starbucks has already saved millions by not letting the on site employees control the HVAC systems.

Endlessly··on Microsoft offers $100k to hack its custom Linux OS
(1) Food safety issues could literally kill Starbucks

(2) Starbucks business depends on having those measurements for quality control

(3) Starbucks gets lots of vendor deals from partner companies because they are a well know brand and having them on board helps land more deals

(4) Hacker using the machines might be able to sabotage the stories; food poisoning, fires, etc

(5) The smarter the tech in store — less training required per employee on site.

(6) Starbucks has other plans for it, such as enabling customers to use their network for IoT devices

(6) etc.

Endlessly··on New Zealand PM: No open borders for 'a long time'
Herd immunity is commonly not well understood in my opinion by the general public. All it means is the point where the spread is no longer “viral” — as in for ever person that’s infected, that person infects less than 1.0 people. People still get infected, die, etc.

Higher the true R0 value for the virus, higher the threshold for reaching herd immunity and the eventual point the infection rate reaching 0.0; globally, without a vaccine, very possible corona will continue to exist years, if not longer.

Endlessly··on Buttplug: An open-source software suite for teledildonics
Is there a public roadmap for the project? What aspects of the project currently have the most traction? Are there any plans to remove any existing parts of the project?
Endlessly··on UK centralised contact-tracing app probably won't work well, may be illegal
Palantir’s contract for this is £1.

Google [palantir £1 nhsx] to confirm.

Endlessly··on Popcorn Time repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown
What is PopCornTime?

It is the “Netflix” of pirated movies, learn more here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time

Endlessly··on US Navy Patent Antigravity Device
Appears the scientist [1] that filed this patent has a history of filing patents that “stretch the limits of science” — which to me increases the odds the only thing being stretched is the truth:

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvatore_Pais

Endlessly··on Malaria 'Completely Stopped' by Microbe
“IANA” being “I am not a” - commonly expressed as IANAL (I am not a lawyer).
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