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Elon Musk’s rocket company relies on federal contracts, but years of losses have most likely let it avoid paying federal income taxes, according to internal company documents.
Questo è una specie di annuncio: “PlusBrothers il mondo positivo” si è iscritto a “Blind LGBT Pride International”, @BPI un’organizzazione nata in America e presente in tutto il mondo, che si occupa di LGBT+ e disabilità visiva.
Io sono @elettrona la responsabile di burocrazia e pubbliche relazioni per il blog PlusBrothers; il polo (HIV) negativo dell’atomo.
Insieme a @gifter il polo (HIV) positivo e autore di molti racconti su questo sito, abbiamo colto l’opportunità di iscriverci a questa comunità che sembra l’unico punto di riferimento per persone LGBT+ cieche e ipovedenti, in tutto il mondo.
Io da sola, o tutti e due, faremo del nostro meglio per discutere e mettere in atto azioni concrete per contrastare lo stigma su HIV, molto più pesante se hai problemi di vista, perché intorno ci sono un sacco di ostacoli.
Li ho vissuti personalmente in passato, essendo stata partner di un uomo che vive con HIV. E una di queste barriere è il test che, se hai una disabilità visiva, non è così anonimo come lo è per gli altri. Sei, inevitabilmente, osservato.
La nostra speranza è di lavorare in sinergia con un’intera comunità, perché prendere iniziative da soli non porta da nessuna parte.
Come primo ma non unico esempio, ci sono i test HIV fai da te.
Sembrano molto difficili da fare senza aiuto di un vedente, e i risultati soprattutto, sono disponibili solo visivamente – causando un importante problema di riservatezza.
Ogni persona, indipendentemente da condizione sensoriale o identità, ha il diritto di vivere la propria salute riproduttiva e sessualità in modo sicuro e appropriato.
Andiamo avanti, e vediamo come questa realtà potrà aiutarci ma soprattutto come noi potremmo aiutare loro.
Per maggiori informazioni sull’associazione, visita Blind LGBT Pride International (pagina inglese) ed effettua l’iscrizione.
The road to artificial general intelligence spans three key developments: current AI capabilities, the path to AGI, and the potential leap to superintelligence.
Today's artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) excels at specific tasks but fails at simple problems humans solve easily. As Sam Altman of OpenAI notes, AGI-like properties are "coming into view," while Dario Amodei of Anthropic predicts some form of "powerful AI" could emerge as early as 20261.
The path to AGI involves three main approaches: reverse engineering the human brain, simulating evolution through genetic algorithms, and creating self-improving AI systems. Hardware advances are keeping pace - by 2025, affordable computers may match human-level processing power of 10 quadrillion calculations per second2.
Once AGI emerges, an "intelligence explosion" could quickly follow through recursive self-improvement, potentially leading to artificial superintelligence (ASI) thousands of times smarter than humans. This superintelligent AI would have unprecedented capabilities, from controlling matter at the atomic level to potentially solving humanity's greatest challenges2.
Unfortunately we have seen the disappearance of one of the LibGen forks. We don’t have further information about what happened there, but are saddened by this development.
Really concerning since CloudFlare won't let me get past the human verification screen.
This is a shot in the dark because I admittedly have absolutely no idea, but did you try 3rd world vpn servers? I noticed I'm subjected to less bullshit overall if I choose servers in countries that aren't considered 1st world.
.is domain is kill, but .li is still fine, as well as Z-lib, you can download there - Anna's Archive provides a link whenever available, under external links.
As for Cloudflare, I sometimes have problems with it on Firefox, it likes to get stuck in a loop. Try opening it in incognito, without extensions, to see if any of them might be causing the issue. If that doesn't work, try opening the link in an another browser.
The cloudfare issue is currently the biggest reason I cannot recommend base Firefox to anyone. Maybe it's a me thing, but no amount of turning extensions on or off was able to fix it on my end
I can at least confirm, though, that the forked Mullvad browser is able to get around this issue, but I can't speak for any other forks.
Maybe it’s a me thing, but no amount of turning extensions on or off was able to fix it on my end
It's not just you. For me, for whatever reason, it used to get stuck regularly, for months on end, regardless of the extensions. Then it suddenly started working almost perfectly, maybe half a year ago. Now it works fine like 75% the time but still gets kind of stuck from time to time.
Just came across Anna’s Archive this week and it’s awesome!
My wife stopped reading a book half way since she’s pregnant and could not get comfortable while holding the book. Five minutes later I had a downloaded copy loaded onto her eReader and she could continue lying down.
It will be worth doing a bit more research to check if there's something we can do to improve the results we're getting from Postgresql but I have a strong suspicion that our needs are well beyond the capabilities of Postgresql.
I'd like to explore Manticore Search as an optional extra service that we can use. It's like ElasticSearch except less RAM hungry.
The US blocks exports of advanced GPUs to China to protect national security
NVIDIA GPUs are highly sought after in China for AI processing
Our timeline chronicles the US export controls, NVIDIA's responses, and reports of GPU smuggling
This is a comprehensive timeline of the GPU bans, smuggling, and export controls on NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and other high-tech semiconductor products. We are publishing this as part of our stretch goals for Black Market AI GPU — a viewer-funded film made possible through support on our store, including our new “Blind Eye” T-shirt. The below timeline accompanies our Black Market AI GPU investigation, our biggest project yet. We spent three weeks in Asia to uncover this story, including two weeks in China and one in Taiwan. We found smugglers, middlemen, and users of so-called “AI” GPUs that the United States government has banned for sale into China.
GPUs News TIMELINE: GPU Export Controls, NVIDIA GPU Bans, & AI GPU Black Market August 18, 2025 Last Updated: 2025-08-18 We’ve compiled a comprehensive timeline of the GPU bans, GPU smuggling, and export controls that impact NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel Th…
Seriously, do an internet search for Sirius coupons. I cancel every year and then renew for 5 bucks per month. If you know someone with an account, you could ask them to share their creds and you can use the app. Only one listener at a time is allowed on the app. My gf has the app and I use the radio, same account.
We cancelled this year (for Canadian reasons) and they keep sending us snail mail offers (in the CAD$6/month range). It's amazing how much money they'll spend to try to get you back.
In the past you could get 3 month trials for the streaming service by “stealing” VIN numbers from used cars on autotrader, not sure if that still works.
I'm curious as to why you'd want to? The audio quality is pretty atrocious due to the compression they use, and—last time I tried, anyway—all their channels are full of obnoxious interruptions for self-promotion.
Not sure if this still works but get the Sirius XM dealer app and reset using your vehicles vin when at/near a dealer lot, or just spoof your gps location.
most likely, yes. It's shocking how shitty the security measures are on so many things.
There was a game a few years ago where the DRM was so insanely aggressive it wouldn't accept a legitimate key, and it only took about 2 minutes to break the DRM
Ever wonder why big tech companies go through data-breaches constantly? but 0% of privacy friendly things ever have that problem?
That's because your data on those privacy friendly services is encrypted with its own key so anyone who wants to break in and steal data would need to break into each account one at a time...so that's why facebook, google and amazon have databreaches all the time. because of a combo of shitty security and social engineering
privacy friendly services don't allow their workers to have the ability to give away the goods
Visible is a data plan that offers unlimited data for $25/month. If you pair it with Pandora and Blokada 5, you can get internet radio for free anywhere you have service.
You need to download and install Blokada 5 manually from their website, because screwgle banned the app from its app store for being too effective at blocking ads in apps.
Detailed data that US government agencies collect and make available has underpinned research about people, medicine, science, crime, jobs, housing, climate and the economy.
Yet more cool tech from NASA, a great example of international cooperation with the fast rising India space Industry, to track information action vital to modern life on earth. A real contribution to humanity
We will fire a bunch of workers while delusion nepo babies try to figure out why an autocomplete bot can think critically or do any complex tasks, then they will close their buisness or rehire people after a few years of failure, and it won't impact the owner's quality of life in any way because they have more wealth then they will ever need
We should absolutely have a UBI that's funded by taxing 100% of wealth over a set number and redistributing it perpetually.
Agreed for the most part, but I disagree about the 100% taxes thing. I think we should instead cap inheritance/gifts, not income. You can be as wealthy as you want, but once you die, it all goes back to the common pot.
I don't care about rich people, I mostly just care about generational wealth.
You can be as wealthy as you want, but once you die, it all goes back to the common pot.
So that 18-year-old that loses both his parents will inherent nothing? So he would have to live on the street or something? Or that women who lose their husband, so inheriting the other half of their combined income? Which will cause her to lose the house etc?
Inheriting a couple 100k or even a mill isn't really the issue. Do tax it, yes, but 100% tax on anything is unreasonable, or at least if that happens at once. That's why we have multiple different taxes.
I think we should instead cap inheritance/gifts, not income.
The cap wouldn't be zero, it would probably be in the low millions. If your parents were wealthy, you'd have a head start, but you would still need to work. There could be a separate exclusion for spouses, where maybe they keep half of the wealth or something as a one-time transfer (i.e. if they get remarried, that wealth wouldn't transfer to the new spouse).
As part of this, I also want to rework corporations and trusts. Basically, the only legal entity that gets special tax treatment are corporations with low valuation, once you go public or report net income or revenue over some amount, the legal protections go away. So mom and pop shops would get bankruptcy protection and whatnot, but large corporations wouldn't.
But all of that overcomplicates what I wanted to communicate, which is that generational wealth shouldn't be a thing. Property should be community owned and exclusivity agreements should be temporary (i.e. real estate should be owned until death).
You still wouldn't want to do any taxation at 100%, make it 70 or 80% sure, but 100% is just bullshit and 70-80% will be enough. The way to get people to accept higher taxes is to explain it to hem. People will also do everything in their power to not pay that 100% tax, including just stopping their Dang business for that year if corporate income would be taxed at 100%
The spousal thing is generally solved in the world by giving an exception, in NL it's like the first 800k is tax-free when your legal spouse dies.
Money inside companies is just money that will be taxed at a later date, the issue is that billionaires in the US put their stocks up as collateral taking out loans. It would be taxed again if they dividend it out or pay themselves somewhat of a wage.
The issue with companies is that evaluating them is something that you just cannot easily do every year for the tax report, unless you just go look at the equity = company value. We do have some designation for small, median and large companies based on revenue, balance total and FTE count, well at least in NL it is based on those 3.
Small companies need some tax breaks and larger companies don't, but a lot of companies are split up to multiple different companies to be able to benefit from tax breaks.
Property should be community owned and exclusivity agreements should be temporary (i.e. real estate should be owned until death).
Owning a single property is not the issue, every family should be able to own one. It's the fact that people own multiple properties. You want to make it so it is not a good financial decision to own multiple properties, either you as a business or you as a person.
generational wealth shouldn’t be a thing. You mean massive amount of generational wealth, but in my example that kid that lost his parents should still inherent that house right?
Just increase the inheritance tax for everything after a mil or so. It's still a couple taxation, but hey
The idea is rooted in the same ideas that Georgism is based on, which is the idea that people should own the value they create themselves, whereas things like property should be communally owned. Inheritance money isn't created value, so I think there's a good argument that it should be capped, and any excess should go to the people..
I don't believe in inheritance tax to fund the government though, it should merely be redistributed either as cash or donations to unaffiliated charities. The only tax used to fund governments should be land value taxes.
Again if you want more income for those at the bottom you want efficient tax methods and 100% is not an efficient tax method since people will do EVERYTHING they can to avoid it. If people can accept a tax rate, they will pay it. Well a lot more people will pay it.
Yes, it goes through the government and is technically a tax, my point is that it's not funding the government.
The point isn't to be an effective way to redistribute money, the point is to ensure the winners earned it as much as possible. When someone "succeeds" entirely because of their parents' wealth, we run into the same issues as we had under kings where those at the top feel like they "deserve" to be there without actually earning it. If rich people decide to donate it all to causes they support instead of having it be redistributed, that's totally fine, because the point isn't to help the poor, it's to prevent generational wealth from determining winners and losers.
It's not an issue to actually tax the rich, but the first x schould be tax free and after that a bracket should be low tax until y and then you can charge z percentage above that, but it cannot be 100% tax.
Sure, if you recognize generational wealth as being legitimate, taking that away is stealing.
I'm arguing that you only own the value you create. Inheriting wealth doesn't create value, so it's not really yours. I do think there's a legitimate argument for taking care of your family after you die, hence why I believe in some amount of exclusion for gifts (say in the million to tens of millions), because there are absolutely cases where it's necessary (i.e. if you have a special needs child or something) and that's not really the government's business. However, I do think the excess should be returned back to society, either through charitable donations or a direct redistribution.
Here's how I see it happening:
upon death, all wealth is tabulated, and all real property is given a valuation by the local tax authority
taxes are evaluated to determine how much gift tax exclusion still remains, and the will is consulted to determine how much each heir gets
heirs get first dibs on real property from 1, and then the rest is handed out as the estate is liquidated (real property is auctioned)
any remaining real property after the gift tax exclusion (or the will's terms have been meted out, whichever is less) goes to the state for redistribution; none of this money can be used for funding the government, it can only be used for direct costs of redistribution
I don't see permanent ownership of real property as being legitimate, and I don't think inheritances are legitimate, because that promotes dynasties. The average person will be well below the gift tax exemption, so children of wealthy parents will absolutely have a step up over other people, but they won't automatically be filthy rich.
I believe in some amount of exclusion for gifts (say in the million to tens of millions),
You don't need to gift away millions of euro's let's be honest.
Like I explained to you, if you want taxes to be effective they have to be based on something and be kinda fair. If you inheritence tax is 100% that means that every euro is taxed for a lot more than 100%.
Gifts just before deaths are often considered to be inheritance as well in some tax systems like NL fyi.
local tax authority You realise that most tax authorities have a lack of staff to be able to do it? Most people wouldn't want to work at a tax office anyway
Basically how it works in NL currently: 1. Every asset is valuated 2. Based on the existing (or non existing) testament everything is distributed 3. the receivers or the personal responsible for distributing everything does a tax filing 4. Within 3 years of receiving the tax filing the government sends out a letter for the tax to be paid which is calculated with certain percentages depending on who is the receiver and the first x is also free from tax. Here you check the percentages etc: consumentenbond.nl/erven-schen…
There is also a special occasion when one of the parents die, then the remaining parent is in debt to the children until they die.
And exception for anything more than 1m euro is absolute bullshit. 140-150k is more than enough for most. Again taxing anything for 100% is stealing, you can do 60-70% though.
Most rich people don't deal with a lot of inheritence tax anyway. Most of the companies and very expensive assets will be passed down before they die. This will become even more if a 100% tax is introduced.
I don’t see permanent ownership of real property as being legitimate Why shouldn't somebody be able to own their house? There are people who have legally bought the ground (or they pay rent for it) and they bought their own house. Why shouldn't they be able to own that and why shouldn't the childeren be able to live in that?
I don't sign up for the extreme taxation people like you want to introduce, because it will give people more incentive to do everything to not pay it. it will also get people to push more against the system. I have seen it time and time again with different taxes, considering I work at an accounting firm.
Instead we should have a good system of social security which means everybody has a basis income which should allow them to properly survive and thrive a bit. You will still have some people struggling one way or another with something like a universal basic income, but there is basically no way of stopping it but it will be vastly reduced.
Edit: there are a ton of ways of passing on wealth from one generation to another and with absurd levels of wealth is basically always goes in the form of passing companies down and there will always be at least one country where this is possible in a way you pay very little to no tax over it. Even if you keep it in the same countries you can often easily pass the company down, especially if the person who is inheriting it is working in that company. Why would not be actual value that somebody is allowed to inherited There is a real issue with that people keep pushing their taxes forward. Like Musk being able to take loans with their stocks as collateral instead of dividing money out, paying taxes over that and using that. There are ton more of examples like that, that are a way bigger issue.
Again taxing anything for 100% is stealing, you can do 60-70% though.
Sure, if you start with the assumption that things like property and wealth can truly be owned. I personally think 60-70% tax is stealing under that assumption, and that inheritance (and gifts) should be treated like any other income.
But I'm starting from a different assumption that property is leased from society generally, and you only really own the value you create personally. When you die, there is no longer any legitimate owner so it must be redistributed.
I believe everyone should have equal opportunity to succeed, and that doesn't work if kids can just ride their parents' coattails. There will always be some of that with parents using their connections to help their kids get ahead, but inheriting a fortune completely kills any need to actually compete to succeed.
Instead we should have a good system of social security which means everybody has a basis income which should allow them to properly survive and thrive a bit.
Agreed, but without the "thrive" bit. I think we need something like universal basic income to ensure everyone is above the poverty line, but that should be the extent of it. Along with this, I think we should eliminate the minimum wage and let the market decide what's fair.
However, this is completely separate from inheritance. I don't think the government should use that money for any purpose, it should strictly be redistributed if the person who died didn't choose any charities or whatever to donate to. The government should also give it to any survivors first if there's no will, up to the limit.
I don't see it as a tax because the government isn't taking that money, it's merely facilitating redistribution.
passing companies down
Passing down shares would be subject to the same inheritance rules.
The current tech/IT sector is heavily relying on and riding hype trains. It's a bit like the fashion industry that way. But this AI hype so far has only been somewhat useful.
Current general LLMs are decent for prototyping or example output to jump-start you into the general direction of your destination, but their output always needs supervision and most often it needs fixing. If you apply unreliable and constantly changing AI to everything, and completely throw out humans, just because it's cheaper, then you'll get vastly inferior results. You probably get faster results, but the results will have tons of errors which introduces tons of extra problems you never had before. I can see AI fully replacing some jobs in some specific areas where errors don't matter much. But that's about it. For all other jobs or purposes, AI will be an extra tool, nothing more, nothing less.
AI has its uses within specific domains, when trained only on domain-specific and truthful data. You know, things like AlphaZero or AlphaGo. Or AIs revealing new methods not known before to reach the same goal. But these general AIs like ChatGPT which are trained on basically the whole web with all the crap in it... it's never going to be truly great. And it's also becoming worse over time, i.e. not improving much at all, because the web will be even fuller with AI-generated crap in the future. So the AIs slurp up all that crap too. The training data gets muddier over time. The promise of AIs getting even more powerful as time goes on is just a marketing lie. There's most likely a saturation curve, and we're most likely very close to the saturation already, where it won't really get any better. You could already see this by comparing the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4 (big) and then GPT-4 to GPT-5 (much smaller). Or take a look at FSD cars. Also not really happening, unless you like crashes. Of course, the companies want to keep the illusion rolling so they'll always claim the next big revolution is just around the corner. Because they profit from investments and monthly paying customers, and as long as they can keep that illusion up and profit from that, they don't even need to fulfill any more promises.
Oh no, money will keep being money. We will just never see a penny and finally be doomed to be full slaves. As intended by the system and those that designed it.
Ever had an "AI" show up at 2AM on an emergency call to fix a gas leak? How about an "AI" to cook a breakfast sandwich? Maybe an "AI" is taking over babysitting while you're out of town...? No?
"AI" doesn't do anything. But if your job primarily revolves around words or pictures on a screen, maybe "AI" can help you with that.
I get what you're saying but an AI cooking me a sandwich (also what's "cooking" a sandwich) is like the easiest thing in the world. That could very easily be automated.
We all fight over resources that actually matter (like food, water, shelter and security) instead the previous things (money), for the enjoyment of our overlords.
Seriously, the people who have power to change the outcome of the future seem to either straight not be planning for this future scenario, or are planning for a horribly distopian version of this future scenario.
Ok great. He can go and live in there while we ignore him.
These bunkers are a boondoggle, what's the plan here, is he going to stay in there until civilisation rebuilds itself into a capitalist system. If so he's going to be waiting a while.
Money is a way to get people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do.
If you don't have automation you either have to have money or slavery. One of the other is required to keep society going otherwise no one's going to do the crappy jobs. Since someone has to do the crappy job you have to find a way to incentivise them and that's money or whips. Don't kid yourself into believing that money isn't necessary, it is.
I wonder how human societies survived without money, if this is so essential for the crap.
I wonder why people do crappy jobs for money? Is it because they need much money for things such as car, smartphone, playstation? For some food, you do not need much money. Actually you can grow it for yourself if you do not live in a big city.
Sure, if one got in this consumption trap, one needs a constant inflow of fresh money.
I think you've answered your own questions. Money doesn't have to be actual cash it can be bartering, I.e. I'll give you five carrots in exchange for your help to build this barn
But what if they don't need carrots right now, well you can give them a IOU for carrots whenever they want, and now you've invented money
The streets of Tehran have become a confusing maze for driver Farshad Fooladi amid widespread GPS disruption, still ongoing nearly two months after the end of Iran and Israel's unprecedented 12-day war.
Iran: GPS disruptions have continued for two months following the conflict with Israel, causing the suspension of ride-hailing apps, delivery platforms, and basic mapping services
The streets of Tehran have become a confusing maze for driver Farshad Fooladi amid widespread GPS disruption, still ongoing nearly two months after the end of Iran and Israel's unprecedented 12-day war.
Study shows 97% of developers believe gen AI is transforming the industry, with a focus on creating more dynamic worlds, intelligent nonplayer characters (NPCs), and more efficient workflows...
Study shows 97% of developers believe gen AI is transforming the industry, with a focus on creating more dynamic worlds, intelligent nonplayer characters (NPCs), and more efficient workflows...
TikTok Shop Sells Viral GPS Trackers Marketed to Stalkers
TikTok Shop is selling GPS trackers marketed with viral videos that have voiceovers explicitly encouraging secretly tracking a romantic partner. Some of the videos have millions of views, and TikTok Shop’s own metrics show that that more than a hundred thousand of the devices have been sold. One of the accounts 404 Media found “If your girl says she’s just out with friends every night, you’d better slap one of these on her car—no, it is not an AirTag, it’s a real GPS tracker,” one clip, which has 5 million views, begins. The video shows someone putting a tracker in various hidden locations in a car—a plastic bag in the trunk, magnetically attached underneath, or on the inside of the hood. “And, unlike AirTags, this thing doesn’t make a sound, doesn’t send alerts, she will never know it’s there. It’s tiny, black, magnetic, hide it under the seat, in the trunk, wherever. It’s got its own SIM so you can track her anywhere in the world, no wifi, no bluetooth, just raw location data whenever you want it.”
0:00 /0:40 1×
The trackers are advertised as undetectable by Apple’s FindMy system. Many of the videos encourage people to secretly install the devices in their partners’ cars if they suspect them for things like being “out with friends every night.” TikTok deleted the video mentioned above after 404 Media asked the company for comment, but dozens of similar videos remain online, and the trackers are still for sale.
“This is absolutely being framed as a tool of abuse,” said Eva Galperin, co-founder of the Coalition Against Stalkerware and Director of Cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Anything where the justification is ‘catch your partner cheating’ or ‘get peace of mind about your partner’ is enabling coercive control,” she said.
404 Media found a handful of accounts promoting these types of trackers, and there are several different versions on the TikTok Shop. Once a user clicks from the videos into TikTok Shop, the algorithm began to show us many more listings. One of the clips we saw has 86,500 likes, and links to a tracker that had 32,500 sales. Another from the same vendor currently has 97,900 sales, and there are several accounts offering the same products with similar branding and scripts. In the comments of one of the videos, a user says “I bought some and put it on cars of girls I find attractive at the gym.” The original poster responds with “Ok 😂.”
The TikTok content policy says that the platform does “not allow any violent threats, promotion of violence, incitement to violence, or promotion of criminal activities that may harm people, animals, or property.” We asked TikTok for comment about the videos that had been posted by one of the accounts we’d originally seen.
A spokesperson for TikTok said "We don't allow content encouraging people to use devices for secret surveillance and have removed this content and banned the account that posted it. We further prohibit the sale of concealed video or audio recording devices on our platform." However, 404 Media was able to findmanymorealmostidenticalvideoson the platform the following day, raising questions over how proactively the platform is monitoring to prevent content like this.
The videos skirt around the legality of what they are suggesting. One voiceover asks, over footage of the tracker being attached to a car, “it’s illegal to track people using this thing? I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure if you stalk someone using this GPS tracker, you’re probably gonna get in trouble.” playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… The majority of the videos, though, frame the trackers as a way to spy on a partner: “men with cheating wives, you might wanna get one of these,” one video in Spanish begins. “Not everyone who uses this is crazy, they just want answers.” “Guess what my girlfriend put in my car?,” another says. Other videos start with ”Don’t let what happened at the coldplay concert happen to you”, “She seriously didn’t trust me, so you know what, I put one in hers too”, or “You got a cheating girlfriend?”
Eleven states explicitly prohibit digital location or GPS tracking in their stalking laws, and a further fifteen states prohibit tracking a vehicle without the consent of the owner. “Showing people how to do something that might be illegal is not necessarily illegal,” Galperin said. But TikTok is still allowing people to make money by marketing the tech specifically for the use of spying on a partner. Alongside the trackers, the same creators are advertising secret audio-recording devices with similar abusive framing. “Your girl always stepping out to take calls? Want to know who she’s really talking to? Just place this AI recorder in her car—she’ll never notice”, says one post, tagged #husband, #wife, and #coldplay.
0:00 /0:32 1×
Video advertising a voice recorder as "the legal way"
Another video for the audio devices with 136,000 views describes bugging a cheating girlfriend’s car: “I heard everything she said with that guy.” Several videos claim that secretly recording audio is legal (“Think your girlfriend’s cheating? Want to know who the guy is? Then do it the right way—legally” and “Got a feeling something’s off? Then find out the truth—the legal way” and “Why the hell did I find a used condom in my car?”) However, recording a conversation without the awareness of the people involved can often be illegal.
Galperin also said that the TikTok videos reflect an extremely common attitude. “You would be amazed how many people think stalking, or recordings, or stalkerware is perfectly justified, as long as they think their partner is up to something like cheating,” she told 404 Media.
A 2021 Kaspersky survey found that 30 percent of 21,000+ respondents found “no problem in secretly monitoring their partner” under certain circumstances. The survey report also found that 29 percent of respondents who had been digitally stalked had their location tracked.
These devices are advertised and sold as undetectable. However, all the examples I found had high numbers of one-star reviews, many of which complained that the trackers did not work as advertised, and defeated “the point” by alerting people to their presence via Apple’s FindMy system. The Apple support site for FindMy-enabled devices says that “They should not be used to track people, and should not be used to track property that does not belong to you.”
Reviews for one of the trackers on TikTok Shop
In 2021, 404 Media’s Sam Cole reported on Apple AirTags being used to stalk women; in many cases, by attaching them to or hiding them in their cars. For that story, she reviewed 150 police reports of people who had said they were being tracked by current or former partners. After that story, Apple added safety features like phone notifications when an Airtag is nearby, but an ongoing class action lawsuit argues that the devices are still insufficiently “stalker proof.” Several of the videos were tagged #coldplay Earlier this month, WIRED reported that TikTok shop was selling stickers that could block the recording light on Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses. Again, many of the reviews found that the product didn’t work as advertised, but the platform did allow the stickers to remain available for sale.
Study shows 97% of developers believe gen AI is transforming the industry, with a focus on creating more dynamic worlds, intelligent nonplayer characters (NPCs), and more efficient workflows...
This is a reminder that we are fully removing support for OpenVPN on January 15th 2026, in six months time.
This means we will no longer have any OpenVPN servers in six months. Our apps have already defaulted to use WireGuard, with warnings about the usage of OpenVPN.
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It was possible to bypass the corporate login on an internal business card ordering website and exploit it to download the details of more than 270k Intel employees/workers.
An internal “Product Hierarchy” website had easily decryptable hardcoded credentials that provided a second way to download the details of every Intel employee. More hardcoded credentials made it possible to gain admin access to the system.
An internal “Product Onboarding” website had easily decryptable hardcoded credentials that provided a third way to download the details of every Intel employee. More hardcoded credentials made it possible to gain admin access to the system.
It was possible to bypass the corporate login on Intel’s SEIMS Supplier Site and further exploit it to download the details of every Intel employee (the fourth way). Additional client-side modifications made it possible to gain full access to the system to view large amounts of confidential information about Intel’s suppliers.
New machine learning framework bridges the embodiment gap between robots and humans and enables quadrupedal robots to perform versatile movements like pouring soda, organizing shoes, and even cleaning up cat litter.
I know this is the most ridiculous idea, but we need to pack our bags and make a new internet protocol, to separate us from the rest, at least for a while. Either way, most “modern” internet things (looking at you, JavaScript) are not modern at all, and starting over might help more than any of us could imagine.
Gemini is a new internet technology supporting an electronic library of interconnected text documents. That's not a new idea, but it's not old fashioned either. It's timeless, and deserves tools which treat it as a first class concept, not a vestigial corner case. Gemini isn't about innovation or disruption, it's about providing some respite for those who feel the internet has been disrupted enough already. We're not out to change the world or destroy other technologies. We are out to build a lightweight online space where documents are just documents, in the interests of every reader's privacy, attention and bandwidth.
I've personally played with Gemini a few months ago, and now want a new Internet as opposed to a new Web.
Replace IP protocols with something better. With some kind of relative addressing, and delay-tolerant synchronization being preferred to real-time connections between two computers. So that there were no permanent global addresses at all, and no centralized DNS.
With the main "Web" over that being just replicated posts with tags hyperlinked by IDs, with IDs determined by content. Structured, like semantic web, so that a program could easily use such a post as directory of other posts or a source of text or retrieve binary content.
With user identities being a kind of post content, and post authorship being too a kind of post content or maybe tag content, cryptographically signed.
Except that would require to resolve post dependencies and retrieve them too with some depth limit, not just the post one currently opens, because, if it'd be like with bittorrent, half the hyperlinks in found posts would soon become dead, and also user identities would possibly soon become dead, making authorship check impossible.
And posts (suppose even sites of that flatweb) being found by tags, maybe by author tag, maybe by some "channel" tag, maybe by "name" tag, one can imagine plenty of things.
The main thing is to replace "clients connecting to a service" with "persons operating on messages replicated on the network", with networked computers sharing data like echo or ripples on the water. In what would be the general application layer for such a system.
OK, this is very complex to do and probably stupid.
It's also not exactly the same level as IP protocols, so this can work over the Internet, just like the Internet worked just fine, for some people, over packet radio and UUCP or FTN email gates and copper landlines. Just for the Internet to be the main layer in terms of which we find services, on the IP protocols, TCP, UDP, ICMP, all that, and various ones and DNS on application layer, - that I consider wrong, it's too hierarchical. So it's not a "replacement".
IP is the most robust and best protocol humanity ever invented. No other protocol survived the test of time this well. How would you even go about replacing it with decentralization? Something needs to route the PC to the server
I don't want client-server model. I want sharing model. Like with Briar.
The only kind of "servers" might be relays, like in NOSTR, or machines running 24/7 like Briar mailbox.
IP. How would I go about replacing it? I don't know, I think Yggdrasil authors have written something about their routing model, but 1) it's represented as ipv6, so IP, 2) it's far over my head, 3) read the previous, I don't really want to replace it as much as not to make it the main common layer.
client-server model. I want sharing model. Like with Briar
Guess what
Briar itself, and every pure P2P decentralized network where all nodes are identical... are built on Internet Sockets which inherently require one party ("server") to start listening on a port, and another party ("client") to start the conversation.
Briar uses TCP/IP, but it uses Tor routing, which is IMO a smart thing to do
Just provide a full dump.zip plus incremental daily dumps and they won't have to scrape ? Isn't that an obvious solution ? I mean, it's public data, it's out there, do you want it public or not ? Do you want it only on openai and google but nowhere else ? If so then good luck with the piranhas
The problem isn't that the data is already public.
The problem is that the AI crawlers want to check on it every 5 minutes, even if you try to tell all crawlers that the file is updated daily, or that the file hasn't been updated in a month.
AI crawlers don't care about robots.txt or other helpful hints about what's worth crawling or not, and hints on when it's good time to crawl again.
Yeah but there's would be scrappers if the robots file just pointed to a dump file.
Then the scraper could just do a spot check a few dozen random page and check the dump is actually up to date and complete and then they'd know they don't need to waste any time there and move on.
Given that they already ignore robots.txt I don't think we can assume any sort of good manners on their part. These AI crawlers are like locusts, scouring and eating everything in their path,
Crawlers are expensive and annoying to run, not to mention unreliable and produce low quality data. If there really were a site dump available, I don't see why it would make sense to crawl the website, except to spot check the dump is actually complete. This used to be standard and it came with open API access for all before the silicon valley royals put the screws on everyone
Dunno, I feel you're giving way too much credit to these companies. They have the resources. Why bother with a more proper solution when a single crawler solution works on all the sites they want?
Is there even standardization for providing site dumps? If not, every site could require a custom software solution to use the dump. And I can guarantee you no one will bother with implementing any dump checking logic.
If you have contrary examples I'd love to see some references or sources.
The internet came together to define the robots file standard, it could just as easily come with a standard API for database dumps. But decided on war since the 2023 API wars and now we're going to see all the small websites die while facebook gets even more powerful.
Well there you have it. Although I still feel weird that it's somehow "the internet" that's supposed to solve a problem that's fully caused AI companies and their web crawlers. If a crawler keeps spamming and breaking a site I see it as nothing short of a DOS attack.
Not to mention that robots.txt is completely voluntary and, as far as I know, mostly ignored by these companies. So then what makes you think that any them are acting in good faith?
To me that is the core issue and why your position feels so outlandish. It's like having a bully at school that constantly takes your lunch and your solution being: "Just bring them a lunch as well, maybe they'll stop."
The solution is breaking intellectual property and making sharing public data easy and efficient. A top-down imposition DESIGNED to crush the giants back down to the level playing field of the small players into a system where cooperation empower the small and place the burdens on the big with the understanding that all public data is "our" data and nobody, including its custodian should get between US and IT. Something designed by actually competent and clever politicians who will anticipate and counter all the dirty tricks big tech would try to regain the upper hand. I want big tech permanently losing on a field designed to disadvantage anything that accumulates power.
I use Anubis on my personal website, not because I think anything I’ve written is important enough that companies would want to scrape it, but as a “fuck you” to those companies regardless
That the bots are learning to get around it is disheartening, Anubis was a pain to setup and get running
Okay what about...what about uhhh... Static site builders that render the whole page out as an image map, making it visible for humans but useless for crawlers 🤔🤔🤔
I wasn't being totally serious, but also, I do think that while accessibility concerns come from a good place, there is some practical limitation that must be accepted when building fringe and counter-cultural things. Like, my hidden rebel base can't have a wheelchair accessible ramp at the entrance, because then my base isn't hidden anymore. It sucks that some solutions can't work for everyone, but if we just throw them out because it won't work for 5% of people, we end up with nothing. I'd rather have a solution that works for 95% of people than no solution at all. I'm not saying that people who use screen readers are second-class citizens. If crawlers were vision-based then I might suggest matching text to background colors so that only screen readers work to understand the site. Because something that works for 5% of people is also better than no solution at all. We need to tolerate having imperfect first attempts and understand that more sophisticated infrastructure comes later.
But yes my image map idea is pretty much a joke nonetheless
We had a trust based system for so long. No one is forced to honor robots.txt, but most big players did. Almost restores my faith in humanity a little bit. And then AI companies came and destroyed everything. This is why we can't have nice things.
There once was a dream of the semantic web, also known as web2. The semantic web could have enabled easy to ingest information of webpages, removing soo much of the computation required to get the information. Thus preventing much of the AI crawling cpu overhead.
What we got as web2 instead was social media. Destroying facts and making people depressed at a newer before seen rate.
Web3 was about enabling us to securely transfer value between people digitally and without middlemen.
What crypto gave us was fraud, expensive jpgs and scams. The term web is now even so eroded that it has lost much of its meaning. The information age gave way for the misinformation age, where everything is fake.
I feel like half of the blame capitalism gets is valid, but the other half is just society. I don't care what kind of system you're under, you're going to have to deal with other people.
Oh, and if you try the system where you don't have to deal with people, that just means other people end up handling you.
The neat part is that anything bad that happens under capitalism is capitalism's fault, but anything good that happens is actually socialism happening in spite of capitalism, somehow.
You: “capitalism is the reason we have everything! And when people get sick of capitalism’s greed and form social policies to help the labor class because they continually get exploited in spite of capitalism, somehow that’s capitalism’s fault!”
Thanks for exemplifying the "CaPiTaLiSm BaD" person from my original comment so well! The total inability to engage with my comment to the point of inventing a whole new one to argue with was a really nice touch!
Optimise for maximum happiness and freedom and minimum suffering on a societal level, while making sure that a certain threshold of freedom-from-suffering is met for every single individual. (So that happiness for the majority is not reached via the suffering of minorities.) Obviously there can be arguments about where we draw the lines for the specifics of these.
Quite a few ways have been developed to measure happiness, wellbeing, flourishing, quality of life, whatever nuance you want to pick.
We have ample proof that it's a system that fundamentally undermines societal happiness by incentivising the accumulation of wealth at the expense of the wellbeing of people and ecosystems. It's decades overdue to radically change the way the world's economy works. (Which is of course not something those with the most power want, so unlikely to happen any time soon.)
The information age gave way for the misinformation age, where everything is fake.
and if there's one entity/person most responsible for that, it's Putin or the GOP. Most of it is political, and very little to do with capitalism itself. Except that capitalism surrounds and is intertwined with everything.
Still, if you get rid of capitalism, it doesn't get rid of politics. I'd argue that the root of the issue is the GOP trying to hoard power (money and otherwise), and power is going to exist with or without capitalism. Is North Korea capitalist? Do they have issues with disinfo?
This Christian Sharia Law movement doesn't exist for money.
Capitalism itself is political. But the point I was making was that capitalism was the driving force of enshittenfication of all our technology that could be used for helping us all but instead it’s only about profit. Which is capitalism..
Two of the largest drivers are religion, christians wanting their Sharia Law, and Russia taking political control of the US.
Capitalism is in the top three, sure. It's also part of the driver of that technology.
I don't think we should worship capitalism as we have, but I don't think getting rid of capitalism as a whole solves more problems than it creates.
Give me capitalism with heavy socialist controls and political separation please, thanks. The general idea of using money as a measure of what society owes you isn't terrible. It's allowing that measure to get so out of whack and have such inordinate control of everything that is the problem.
Anubis isn't supposed to be hard to avoid, but expensive to avoid. Not really surprised that a big company might be willing to throw a bunch of cash at it.
No, it's expensive to comply (at a massive scale), but easy to avoid. Just change the user agent. There's even a dedicated extension for bypassing Anubis.
Even then AI servers have plenty of compute, it realistically doesn’t cost much. Maybe like a thousandth of a cent per solve? They're spending billions on GPU power, they don't care.
I've been saying this since day 1 of Anubis but nobody wants to hear it.
The website would also have to display to users at the end of the day. It's a similar problem as trying to solve media piracy. Worst comes to it, the crawlers could read the page like a person would.
The streets of Tehran have become a confusing maze for driver Farshad Fooladi amid widespread GPS disruption, still ongoing nearly two months after the end of Iran and Israel's unprecedented 12-day war.
Iran: GPS disruptions have continued for two months following the conflict with Israel, causing the suspension of ride-hailing apps, delivery platforms, and basic mapping services
The streets of Tehran have become a confusing maze for driver Farshad Fooladi amid widespread GPS disruption, still ongoing nearly two months after the end of Iran and Israel's unprecedented 12-day war.
Detailed data that US government agencies collect and make available has underpinned research about people, medicine, science, crime, jobs, housing, climate and the economy.
If you try to launch or land a spacecraft anywhere close to another object on the lunar surface, that object will get sandblasted with rocks, dust and sand.
Survey shows students rapidly picked up chatbots, but perhaps surprisingly, they more often used it to augment their learning, rather than hand work off.
Agile has been a mistake for the software industry. It did nothing except to give executive more avenue to force changes to the software that are being developed and in the end it'll take a longer time to have production ready software when compared to traditional waterfall approach.
It depends on the use case. For incremental changes and validation of hypotheses in an uncertain or new product Agile is great. It allows for fast valuation and fast pivoting. I would not recommend Agile for systems that are mostly known and need a big upgrade, that's not what its for.
Agile became a buzzword and shouldn't have been implemented as widespread as it has. It does have its use cases though.
Butbutbutbut Linux is not ready for desktop! I asked a stupid question in an Arch forum and they told me to RTFM! It does not support kernel level anti-cheat! Terminals are scary!
May I ask what's your job? I'm a web developer completely fine on Linux. I used windows for a long time, I tried mac for some month. Linux is the best.
developer is completely different from designer. I'm a graphic designer, and I also do animations and videos. I use adobe illustrator, photoshop, indesign, premier; affinity designer, photo, blender. I use figma too which is good for prototyping for web or apps, but not graphic design in general. and certainly not photo editing. inb4 gimp--completely unusable for pro work.
For 3D animations, Modo has linux-x86_64 binary. Blender is native also.
I've never been into 2D animations.
For compositing, The Foundry Nuke is native also. (If you've got the money, or you're willing to buy it from seejeepeers)
For video editing, most youtubers use DaVinci Resolve.
Inkscape is slow as it's using SVG for its backend and not as polished as an illustrator but it is feature-rich. Adwaita icons are designed in inkscape. It's not a big sacrifice.
I learned photoshop when It was the CS4 version. I know it's got a lot of AI features since then. Luckily, I left it before I could get used to them, so now I can use gimp. And btw, check gimp's new release candidate. It's a huge step forward. Everyone could give them their adobe cc subscription fees and we could see how they compete after that.
i like it much better than adobe. up until a recent update in illustrator it even performed better but now AI seems to have surpassed it. but i find affinity designer's tools much more useful, although there's been a bug that pisses me of with the contour tool for quite a while now. but i tolerate it because overall it still allows me to design icons much faster.
in case you're interested in specifics:
the pixel persona in AD allows me to work on raster images without leaving the program most of the time (not all affinity photo features can be used but still having a limited raster editor mode feels much better and smoother than switching between programs). AI simply doesn't have this in any capacity.
AD's corner tool instead of AI's corner rounding with the direct selection tool is much more capable and useful because it's nondestructive. you can change the original shape with the rounding still applied, which is something you cannot do on AI.
AD's contour tool, despite the bug that doesn't properly round corners when you expand, is still much more fluid to use than AI's extremely clunky, 1998-ass-feeling offset path. apart from not requiring entering fucking numbers into a fucking dialog box and instead allowing you to offset the path with simple scrubbing... it's also nondestructive so it can stay on an object even as you edit its original shape. so i still prefer to do workarounds for the bug rather than dealing with that terrible experience in AI.
gradients are so much better in AD than AI i don't even know where to begin. it's just easier to use and more importantly you can use transparency gradients separately from color gradients (but also can have opacity info on a regular color gradient as well). so you can have an object that goes from 100% blue on the left to 0% green on the right but also add transparency gradient that goes 80% from top right to 20% on the bottom left and see the combination as a result in one object.
AD has "erase" as a blending mode which is small but can be very useful if you're designing something to be exported to png. Has a couple more modes that AI doesn't have but this one's the most straightforward and useful imo.
It's nothing huge but I like the vector crop tool in AD, you can just crop anything without thinking about it.
consistency between programs when using affinity is a great experience you don't get to have when working across Adobe tools which even for the most closely related ones feel like they aren't being developed within the same company but different ... I wanna say planets? yeah it's like they're being developed in different planets instead.
one time payment for major versions only. i bought affinity 1.0, got all the updates for free up until 2.0, which i was able to buy on discount for upgrading. now i get all the updates on 2.x for free.
there are things that AI does better and i use it when i plan to use those, and sometimes use one and copy paste to the other to use the best of each. best highlights are repeat function (Ctrl+d). now there's also radial repeat which can be great. blend can be very useful... most of the time though i go with AD.
I've already played the game for 20+ hours. I loved almost every second of it, and some of the things I didn't have already been addressed. They're taking player feedback seriously.
Battlefield 6 is made by a whole new studio, not "EA DICE", helmed by one of the best in the history of the industry for these games - Vince Zampella.
Not everything by EA is bad, and anyone saying anything like that is immediately showing they shouldn't be listened to.
Again - I've already played the game via the beta. I know I'm going to have an absolute blast. I didn't like the last few BF games, so I didn't buy them. This one is a return to form from what everyone has seen and played.
You tell me to "cope away" while basing your entire opinion on a wikipedia article that's pretty much got nothing to do with the actual game that's being discussed lol. Who is "coping"?
lol "Battlefield 6 is corporate slop" is certainly a hot take (a great tag to give you too haha). I'm sure you only enjoy the finest of artistic games that are all anti-establishment and must be played on DIY hardware using solar power.
I didn't downvote you because I disagreed with you, I downvoted you because your comments add nothing to the conversation and are essentially pointless spam.
I think maybe you're the one who needs to go back to Reddit though, not me. That's 2 comments in a row you've brought it up without so much as a mention of it from me lol
Ok buddy, downvote whatever you want and get as tilted as you want but it's not going to change the fact that most Lemmy users don't give a shit about playing corporate slop games from EA.
It seems like it upsets you that we're all happy with the games we can run on Linux. Which is a weird thing to be upset about unless you deep down just resent the fact that we are cooler than you (I use arch btw).
You have very strong Reddit energy which is catching me off guard. Very strange to see someone defending microsoft/ea on the fediverse. Stranger yet to see someone basically rage commenting about it haha.
Get "tilted"? What on earth? Is that reddit slang?
it’s not going to change the fact that most Lemmy users don’t give a shit about playing corporate slop games from EA.
Only because they can't because they all use Linux. And again with the "corporate slop" rubbish? Really? lol. What about Battlefield 6 is "corporate slop"? I can't wait to hear this.
You have very strong Reddit energy which is catching me off guard. Very strange to see someone defending microsoft/ea on the fediverse. Stranger yet to see someone basically rage commenting about it haha.
You have to be a parody account, right? Right? Like there's no way a person actually says these things and thinks this way, even on here.......right? You just can't get reddit off your mind lol.
When my wife's grandparents had to get a new computer they got upset about the new windows interface and the fact their old games didn't work, so I set them up with Linux and a DE that resembled XP (it's what they were familiar with), and I was able to get most of their games going.
No sadly COVID lockdown isolation did them in. I've never seen minds and bodies decay so fast. I have another friend who developed full-blown psychosis from it too, and at this point it looks like he's never coming back. The lockdowns were harder on some people than we were/are ready to talk about I think.
Yeah, it's honestly crazy to me because I think lockdowns were a net benefit to me. I was able to spend more time with my SO and kids, I had time for exercise and hobbies since I didn't need to sit in traffic, and I didn't need to spend as much social energy making small talk (I'm introverted). I honestly thrived during COVID. Getting COVID sucked for the week or so I had symptoms, but that was honestly a small price to pay for solitude.
But then I see headlines of people literally going crazy, see a dramatic increase in road rage in my area (which didn't have lockdowns, only social distancing for businesses), and see my own extended family struggling.
I feel so bad for people like your grandparents that suffered. I just personally wish the COVID lifestyle was more accessible.
I just personally wish the COVID lifestyle was more accessible.
Same, it suited me quite well and I feel bad saying I missed it because so many others, including some of my own family and friends, suffered. Now that I'm back in the office 5 days a week, I lose >2 hours a day with my kids. I had my own parents say "i don't get why you're complaining, we got by before COVID" while refusing to acknowledge it's different because one of them stayed home with us, while my wife and I must both work to survive.
I grew up in a religious conservative family. These and other experiences drove me to the left in a big way. I see now that thinking we can solve systemic issues with individualism is bullshit. I want a world where my wife or I could stay home (or some communal solution) to raise our family right rather than having a bunch of latchkey kids and being stuck doing chores from the moment we get home until the moment we lie down. Some people say "well that's how I was raised" but it isn't right.
Why not ? I suppose that as long as a browser (and whatever else she need) is working, my grandmother would not need much more. And I could also install a windows11 theme on KDE, if I really want to. A icon is a icon
And in the end I think that my grandmother would be able to mantain neither a window machine, so I don't see the problem.
I think most of the replies to my remark thought I was questioning Linux for grandma overall. I wasn’t. Just Arch. I don’t think grandma needs rolling releases.
In my opinion also Arch is usable on grandma desktop. True, it is a rolling release but I would suppose that on such machine there would not be that many packages installed and if the network is configured correclty (so nothing can connect from the outside) it would be not be a big problem, after all what grandma use is not updated on a daily basis.
But that means she’s not getting security updates and since she’s grandma she really needs them. On the other hand, if you’re automatically upgrading her Arch install then there will be breakage she is hopeless to fix.
So what advantage does Arch offer grandma over a traditional release LTS distribution which will be nice and stable, not breaking or changing unexpectedly on her but still remaining current with security patches?
But that means she’s not getting security updates and since she’s grandma she really needs them. On the other hand, if you’re automatically upgrading her Arch install then there will be breakage she is hopeless to fix.
True, but that would be the end result in any case where an update do something wrong or require some sort of manual intervention, it is not strictly tied to Arch. But you have a point here.
So what advantage does Arch offer grandma over a traditional release LTS distribution which will be nice and stable, not breaking or changing unexpectedly on her but still remaining current with security patches?
Only to have some newer software, but you can also update Arch every once in a while, the fact that it is a rolling release does not mean you need to update every day. The everything will depend on which distro normally uses the person who install the grandma machine
I used Arch for about 7 years. I still have it installed on an old PC but I haven’t used it recently. Every time I told pacman to update everything it felt like an adventure. Never knew if I was going to reboot to a working desktop or to a console printing cryptic error messages that take a while to Google on my phone before I get things back up and running. I wouldn’t wish that experience on my worst enemy’s grandma!
It all comes down to the maintainers of Arch putting all of the responsibility for breakage (especially due to old configuration files) 100% on the user. That’s not a system any normal person should use, that’s a system for Linux hobbyists. A LTS distribution where “don’t break the user’s install no matter what” is the rule is absolutely the only system I’d ever trust for grandma.
It’s fine if you want to assume all responsibility for updating grandma’s system and fixing breakage every time. I don’t have any interest in doing that. If I’m at grandma’s house I want to spend time talking to her, not fixing her computer.
I used Arch for about 7 years. I still have it installed on an old PC but I haven’t used it recently. Every time I told pacman to update everything it felt like an adventure. Never knew if I was going to reboot to a working desktop or to a console printing cryptic error messages that take a while to Google on my phone before I get things back up and running. I wouldn’t wish that experience on my worst enemy’s grandma!
The only times I got this kind of problems where when I didn't read some announcement or for some reason some packages (the kernel) were way too old, normally never had it on a normal update. But as I said, you have a point, even if in the end I would point out that a grandma would never be able to solve any problem caused by an update, irregardless of the distro or the OS.
It all comes down to the maintainers of Arch putting all of the responsibility for breakage (especially due to old configuration files) 100% on the user. That’s not a system any normal person should use, that’s a system for Linux hobbyists.
Only partially. Normally Arch put the new configuration file as a [something].pacnew and it is the user that should then do something, but as long as the software that use the new file could undertand that it is using an older file and it is able to handle the eventually missing new keys or removed ones there will be no problem. On my desktop I have a bunch of [some_program].conf.pacnew and everything works. Is it optimal ? Maybe not but it is not broke.
It’s fine if you want to assume all responsibility for updating grandma’s system and fixing breakage every time. I don’t have any interest in doing that.
Honestly, a grandma would just need Firefox with a couple of extension (uBlock Origin and really few others) and a network with all inbound ports blocked (so no one can connect from outside) and few outbound ports open (very few, just the common ones to use a browser). Maybe she need Openoffice, probably a DE (but a window manager could be enough) but she don't need a lot of software we all install on out machine. It is true that Arch could be a problem when updating but I think we are talking of a very small set of packages that need to be constantly updated and in my years of Arch usage, basic packages rarely break something while updating.
Yesterday I got into the process of installing Windows 10 onto my laptop because I am selling it tomorrow. I asked the buyer if he wanted it with an OS or not, and he replied that he wanted Windows 10 Pro. I downloaded the ISO and installed it to one of my M.2 SATA SSD drives with a USB adapter.
Before installing Windows over my Linux installation, I did a SecureErase to wipe out my drive with the Linux installation because that is the SSD I am selling with the computer.
After installing Windows 10 from the M.2 SATA SSD with a USB adapter to the SecureErased drive, I instantly got multiple error messages about SMART checks saying that the SSD was broken/corrupted. I had never seen this POST error message when booting that computer with a Linux installation.
Well, I obviously had to change the drive to another one where I got the Windows installation to work normally without the BIOS POST error message.
I really cannot be sure what caused that. Can SecureErase do that so SMART checks report the drive as corrupted? Or was it the Windows installation?
--trim-sector-range For Solid State Drives (SSDs). EXCEPTIONALLY DANGEROUS. DO NOT USE THIS OPTION!! Tells the drive firmware to discard unneeded data sectors, destroying any data that may have been present within them. This makes those sectors available for immediate use by the firmware's garbage collection mechanism, to improve scheduling for wear-leveling of the flash media. This option expects one or more sector range pairs immediately after the option: an LBA starting address, a colon, and a sector count (max 65535), with no intervening spaces. EXCEPTIONALLY DANGER‐ OUS. DO NOT USE THIS OPTION!!
I think the all caps warnings say it all. This is only for the trim sectors of the disk but I can't imagine it being much different overwriting a whole disk. Not to mention, as OP said, an old and very used disk. Quick formatting should be enough to prevent any normal user from extracting meaningful data from the flash storage as only the controller knows how to piece together the flash cells to a file. If the controller forgets it, the files are toast anyway. At best write some random data to a quarter of the disk or something lile that.
File recovery may only be possible if you give it to a drive recovery facility. But remember: Those ain't exactly cheap. A client paid some 4 figure price because an HDD died. Just for a small amount of files.
@zer0bitz@lemmy.world did a SecureErase, which is an entirely different function. It was exactly made to be used in this scenario: user is selling their laptop.
other than that, hdparm --trim-sector-range is most probably only marked dangerous because with a slight miscalculation you can wipe some of your data and you won't even know how much damage you did. I'm pretty sure the fstrim command relies on this, which is executed every few weeks on my system, by default. check systemctl status fstrim.timer, maybe on yours too.
Quick formatting should be enough to prevent any normal user from extracting meaningful data from the flash storage as only the controller knows how to piece together the flash cells to a file.
what do you mean by quick formatting? how do you do that on linux? I have only heard this term with te windows disk management tool.
on windows quick formatting only deletes the partition entry from the partition table. that's why it's quick. all the former data is there and can be easily recovered, given you know the former partition boundaries, which can also be recovered by tools. the ssd controller won't know a thing, it won't forget where it should look for each LBA address.
I use "incontrol" to stop feature updates. And I used win11debloat. Havent had a problem since. In dogshit bloat, no dog shit copilot, no forced updates, no privacy destroying telemetry. Just me and MY windows machine like the old days.
And I’m sure you’ll blame Microsoft/windows when things don’t work as expected and you get strange errors because you disabled core features using dodgy software that you don’t understand but think you don’t need them.
lol Another Reddit user, with nothing to offer but projection. Being in the game 20+ years, matey. If theres problems, I have skills to solve them. Just because you dont know your arse from your elbow, doesnt mean everyone else is the same. Go cry about MS's spyware some place else.
Im not crying about it, as I dont have any of it. Youre the one crying, and shilling, and painting anyone who doesnt bend the knee to them is going to cry without all those amazing core features... Absolute reddit moment.
Yet again - headline and article are massive overexaggerations, talking about an issue that a few people have had in very specific situations and saying it breaks everyones SSDs/HDDs and might corrupt their data to get people like you to get outraged and spread FUD.
Remember - if even 0.01% of people on Windows 11 get an error with an update, that is like 100k people. A 0.01% error rate is nothing. It's not even worth mentioning. It's not even worth investigating. Sure it sucks for those 100k people, and they'll be complaining to everyone that will listen - but it's not a big issue. That's this. That's this exact thing.
Doctors try to save everyone, even the 0.01%. Hell, the 0.01% are actually a huge focus.
In software a 0.01% affecting bug in a single one-off update, that needs very specific exact steps to happen, that is already released is at the bottom of the backlog, never to get fixed.
It’s you that clearly doesn’t get “it”. What is your software development background?
many have to - work from home, have to share data and programs with other workers. There are of course ways around it but I know literally thousands of people who are supplied with a company laptop with windows on it and they have to use it...
You realise that most companies still run on Windows don't you? I'm in the UK and there is around zero companies that use anything else... here they got rid of Macs because of the hassle of supporting them and windows. Plenty of companies won't let you use a Mac to work with either
You're in the UK, so you're not bound by GDPR... but a whole lot of places and orgs that are bound by GDPR realize that MSFT products indeed are a joke from a data security standpoint, and are actively transitioning to linux or at the very least FOSS software.
I am in the US.
I literally used to work for MSFT, a few of their different locations around Seattle.
They are a fucking insane mess, internally, organizationally.
I worked with people, old timers who'd just casually tell me:
'Oh yeah back before Desert Storm, I was out in Saudi Arabia flashing the BIOS of computer hardware that was bound to be installed in Saddam's C&C and Air Defense Radar networks, some months later when time came for the air sorties, somebody else just flipped a switch and down goes all their radars!'
Aka a supply chain attack.
Aka, unless your definition of 'data security' is 'the NSA has all my data', then MSFT products are rather dubious at providing data security.
For starters in the UK we ARE bound by GDPR...\ But it doesn't matter - you are assuming that companies care in the UK, they don't. You get Windows or Windows. As said a lot of software only runs on Windows, and this will continue until microsoft stop windows, corps don't care. Here in the UK Macs are rare, really really rare, in business. Heck in general use they are rare compared to Windows. Linux is nowhere, under 0.1%. You are literally forced to use Windows if you work for a company. My wife works for a charity and she has to use the company laptop, through the company VPN or else she gets warning and can be sacked... it really is that simple. The company controls what software is installed, even what updates are installed. Here in the UK the NHS buys around 5 million windows machines a year.... just imagine that
Much of what MSFT does isn't GDPR compliant, or violates other data security and privacy laws in the EU or elsewhere, or just generally throws privacy and security by the wayside, as a matter of course.
If you think MSFT gives a shit about actual data security and privacy, you're not following the just stream of lawsuits they just keep getting into, revolving around these issues.
Yeah if that means 99% of orgs have bad policy, by relying on a company with a terrible record on all this, the, uh then uh yeah, 99% of orgs are choosing to have the ability to blame someone else for their own bad decisions, over making better decisions.
The point is arguing about something when you plainly don't understand how the UK still has GDPR doesn't really validate your opinions in any way shape or form...\ The security doesn't matter, nothing other than Windows is used. To move to something else would cost so much that businesses simply cannot sustain that. We now have workers who have had 30 years of only working with Windows.... and new workers only get Windows. Doesn't matter what you or anybody else thinks, or says, it matters little. It is pretty much set in stone that you need Windows and Office in the UK, plus other software to make things like PDF's and documents. You can point anyone towards anything and it just doesn't matter... and here in the UK they don't care about lawsuits, we don't sue first and ask questions later - our legal system is just not setup that way. It is so difficult for other countries to understand, but that kind of approach just doesn't happen, and our legal system takes little notice of legal issues in countries like the US.
Cool, I don't care that its the industry standard, the industry standard is shit.
Adapt, Improvise, Overcome!
If a bunch of Boomers only know how to use Windows, and MS Office, its time for them to retire.
Its not that hard to switch daily drive office work to a stable linux distro, and libreoffice.
Yeah, it would be more difficult to switch over say, a full CRM solutiom, but uh, given how I've done exactly that at orgs I've worked at, uh, no, no, not impossible, quite doable actually.
You are still going? You really aren't a nice person are you forcing your "opinion" on people... it is not financially viable in the UK to retire early any more
I switched to Mac after my old Asus laptop went out. I figure why bother with a PC laptop, it’s not gonna game and let’s see what the fuss is about. Love my MacBook Air. So then our desktop dies and I give my wife 3 options. A Mac, a cheaper PC, and a more expensive PC. She’s Android, figured she’d want to stick with Windows, but she picked the Mac! So happy. I mostly game on Switch and Xbox these days so that’s fine.
I keep feeling like I left Windows at the right time.
I have been using Linux Mint for over half a year now, and besides gaming, I had no issues with a great experience. Had very bad experience with other Linux distros.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
TL;DR: Under Jobs, Apple focused on engineering products and the profitability and stock price followed. Under Cook, Apple focuses on stock price (dividends, stock buybacks) and is massively cutting R&D/Engineering costs to the point they did not release anything really new for years and their projects keep failing while also increasing prices. E.g. Siri that is unable to catch up to modern chatbots.
Sure, that's an argument for why the stock price is suffering, not for why macOS is in danger. Apple is still massively profitable, the stock price just reflects the market's perception that profits won't increase as fast as their competitors.
Again, why are you so over focused on stock price? As a consumer, how is the first thing you take away from lack of innovation and engineering failures that Apples stock price may suffer and not that the machine you are buying may be sub-par and overpriced?
I'm agreeing w/ you that stock price is irrelevant here, and that's what the video opens with. The market is unhappy w/ Apple because they're delivering essentially what people claim to want: a solid product with steady improvements w/o anything crazy. Microsoft, on the other hand, is delivering what the market wants, which is shoving AI into everything.
I guess I don't understand why the video is relevant to the average user, who doesn't really care about innovation and instead wants a consistent experience.
I highly doubt there is a user that truly does not care for innovation. If there is a better product for the same price, who wouldn't buy it.
More importantly, the impact is not just innovative features but security, price of ownership and reliability. Apple managed to "innovate" themselves into a position where they are obstructing data rescue on Macs and iPhones. That's the kind of thing you may not be thinking about when buying but may greatly regret not having when you need it.
One of the accounts 404 Media found
Several of the videos were tagged #coldplay
IllNess
in reply to Pro • • •Really concerning since CloudFlare won't let me get past the human verification screen.
Anyone know anyway around?
eee (they/them)
in reply to IllNess • • •Viking_Hippie
in reply to eee (they/them) • • •You mean like Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland?
eee (they/them)
in reply to Viking_Hippie • • •IllNess
in reply to eee (they/them) • • •semperpeppe
in reply to eee (they/them) • • •eee (they/them)
in reply to semperpeppe • • •ɯᴉuoʇuɐ
in reply to IllNess • • •.is domain is kill, but .li is still fine, as well as Z-lib, you can download there - Anna's Archive provides a link whenever available, under external links.
As for Cloudflare, I sometimes have problems with it on Firefox, it likes to get stuck in a loop. Try opening it in incognito, without extensions, to see if any of them might be causing the issue. If that doesn't work, try opening the link in an another browser.
IllNess
in reply to ɯᴉuoʇuɐ • • •AceFuzzLord
in reply to ɯᴉuoʇuɐ • • •The cloudfare issue is currently the biggest reason I cannot recommend base Firefox to anyone. Maybe it's a me thing, but no amount of turning extensions on or off was able to fix it on my end
I can at least confirm, though, that the forked Mullvad browser is able to get around this issue, but I can't speak for any other forks.
ɯᴉuoʇuɐ
in reply to AceFuzzLord • • •It's not just you. For me, for whatever reason, it used to get stuck regularly, for months on end, regardless of the extensions. Then it suddenly started working almost perfectly, maybe half a year ago. Now it works fine like 75% the time but still gets kind of stuck from time to time.
ɯᴉuoʇuɐ
in reply to Pro • • •Nice, it looks like they also mirror HathiTrust now?
Pity about .is, over the last year it's probably been offline more than online. It was the original one, but AA carries on the torch.
katy ✨
in reply to Pro • • •like this
Mordikan likes this.
toad31
in reply to katy ✨ • • •P13
in reply to Pro • • •Just came across Anna’s Archive this week and it’s awesome!
My wife stopped reading a book half way since she’s pregnant and could not get comfortable while holding the book. Five minutes later I had a downloaded copy loaded onto her eReader and she could continue lying down.