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cypherpunks

@[email protected]

cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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cypherpunks , (edited )
@cypherpunks@lemmy.ml avatar

One group- memes or something is wholly controlled by Chinese state actors.

As one of the moderators of [email protected] i encourage OP to look at the sort of posts i make and tell me - do you really think i'm a "Chinese state actor"?

Do you think all these posts i make in, eg, [email protected] and [email protected] and [email protected] and [email protected]... these are all part of a carefully-crafted cover, and I'm actually being paid by China to delete totally-not-racist posts depicting their president as a yellow cartoon bear?

And for this service, to maintain my cover, they also pay me to create memes like this and this and this and this and this and this (and defending that one against less informed nerds) and this and this and this (a small sample of my OC here)?

And do you think China paid for this understandable explanation of asymmetric cryptography using high-school level math, because someone asked, deep in a thread about a service which I'd also already debunked the snake-oil privacy claims of?

Really?

TikTokers Flock to New Palestinian Social Media Platform Following Purchase by Pro-Israel Larry Ellison ( qudsnen.co )

Washington (QNN)- TikTok users are flocking to a new platform founded by a Palestinian after Trump ally and pro-Israel Larry Ellison officially took over the app. The move follows TikTok’s announcement of a deal to create a new US entity, giving Ellison control over content policies and the power to shape an anti-Palestinian...

cypherpunks , (edited )
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good disclaimer. also, they aren't open source, and from the tech background of the founder who self-funded it i doubt that he plans for it to ever be. in fact, among other cringe things on Issam Hijazi's linkedin i see that he's even worked for, enough to become an expert in the proprietary technology of, (checks notes) the very same zionist billionaire (paywall bypass) who just bought TikTok 😢

Also, one their FAQs is "Where does UpScrolled operate its servers and store data? Does it use Big Tech?"... the answer to which includes:

We do rely on some large-scale cloud providers at this stage — not because it’s our ideal, but because building fully independent infrastructure takes time. We’d rather be transparent about that than claim otherwise. Over time, we plan to reduce reliance on these providers and move toward greater independence.

... but We do rely on some is as far as their attempt at transparency took them - they aren't actually saying which cloud providers they're using or for what. (given the founder's expertise i'd guess it's probably AWS and/or Oracle.)

cypherpunks Mod ,
@cypherpunks@lemmy.ml avatar

Does anything provide a similar experience to Arch’s amazing AUR

I am not aware of any software distribution service with a comparable experience (massive userbase with zero vetting for uploaders) as Arch's amazing AUR - if you are looking for a way to distribute malware to many unsuspecting people (who's friends think they're hackerman), it's really unparalleled. (😢)

To your primary question, yes, many people do successfully daily drive various Linux distros without ever opening the terminal. 🙄

cypherpunks ,
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cypherpunks ,
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time for this classic again:

0 ✊

1 👍

2 ☝️

3 👆

4 🖕

cypherpunks ,
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reposting my comment from the thread yesterday:

reposting my comment in a thread last month about this:

in b4 haveibeenhaveibeenflocked.

they have a list of their current collection of 239 .csv files but sadly don’t appear to let you actually download them to query offline

they now have 519 sources, some of which are downloadable from muckrock but many aren't.

i still don't understand why this website isn't open source and open data, and i strongly recommend thinking carefully about it (eg, thinking about if you'd mind if the existence of your query becomes known to police and/or the public) before deciding if you want to type a given plate number in to it.

cypherpunks , (edited )
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the fact that they know your plate number is different than knowing if you (or someone) queried a website about which police queried flock about it

cypherpunks ,
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paywall bypass: https://web.archive.org/web/20260113155013/https://www.404media.co/police-unmask-millions-of-surveillance-targets-because-of-flock-redaction-error/

also, reposting my comment in a thread last month about this:

in b4 haveibeenhaveibeenflocked.

they have a list of their current collection of 239 .csv files but sadly don’t appear to let you actually download them to query offline

they now have 519 sources, some of which are downloadable from muckrock but many aren't.

i still don't understand why this website isn't open source and open data, and i strongly recommend thinking carefully about it (eg, thinking about if you'd mind if the existence of your query becomes known to police and/or the public) before deciding if you want to type a given plate number in to it.

cypherpunks , (edited )
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This is what the radical far right wing of the US establishment is thinking

No, it isn't. They are thinking and doing plenty of horrible things, but not what is on that website.

i didn't read very much of it because i don't suffer LLM outputs gladly, but to their credit at least the edgelords who created it were nice enough to put a troll face at the bottom to remove any doubts one might have about its lack of sincerity 🙄

Check their twitter and other projects if you still aren't sure, but after you realize what it is I hope you'll delete this post to stop spreading their slop.

cypherpunks ,
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Wow. Although I do still think it is written with some LLM assistance, and I don't think the authors sincerely believe the absurd alt-history they're espousing in this article, I am sad to say I think your assessment here is actually spot-on.

I got a slop vibe after reading just a little of it, and then clicked away and skimmed their other article titles ("Based International Law", "The GIGACHAD Approach", "Shitposting as a National Asset", etc). then clicked to the homepage and saw their "Generated Affairs" (thisforeignaffairsarticledoesnotexist.com) LLM thing under Special Projects, and I naively concluded that the whole thing was merely an edgelord trolling project.

Looking at it a little closer now (and seeing that their other link under Special Projects https://rickovercorpus.org/ is actually a serious thing which links back and thanks them for funding) I am also horrified.

I still think it is an edgelord trolling project, but it is one with a likelihood to be seriously influencing actually-powerful people 😱

cypherpunks ,
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Use Ctrl-Z

followed by jobs, kill %1, etc

cypherpunks ,
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Luckily it was just a chmod

that can still render a system unbootable 😅

cypherpunks ,
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How commercially-available phone location data is used by ICE (and other law enforcement agencies)

screenshot of text: The material does not say how Penlink obtains the smartphone location data in the first place. But surveillance companies and data brokers broadly gather it in two different ways. The first is from small bundles of code included in ordinary apps called software development kits, or SDKs. SDK owners then pay...

screenshot of text: The material shows Webloc users can search its databases of mobile phone data in various ways. Users can perform a single perimeter analysis to search a specific area for mobile phones across a certain time period. They can draw the target area with a rectangle, circle, or polygon. They then select the maximum number of results the system should display, and the maximum number of devices to return. Once a Webloc user has identified a device of interest, they can get more details about that particular phone, and, by extension, its owner, by seeing where else it has travelled both locally and across the country. Users can click a route feature which shows the path the device took. The material suggests that if users look at where the device was located at night, they might find the person’s possible home, and during the day, the person’s possible employer. The software can also do a multi-permiter analysis, which monitors multiple locations at once to see which devices have been present at two or more specific places.
ALT
cypherpunks ,
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Just… don’t connect them to the internet? Or if you must connect them for dumb shit like system updates, put them behind some access control where the only access they have is the server they get updates from.

I regret to inform you that preventing devices from getting online is getting more difficult: three years ago Amazon began allowing other companies' products to use their BLE-and-LoRa-based mesh network to get online via your neighbors' internet-connected devices.

cypherpunks ,
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How to remove the bot flag ?

In the web interface, click your username, then settings, then uncheck the "bot account" checkbox, and click save.

Maybe because I use VPN. Reddit doesn’t allow VPN and lemmy too

the lemmy instance you're using does allow VPNs.

cypherpunks ,
@cypherpunks@lemmy.ml avatar

easier to create a “guest” network to connect those appliances to

I guess you missed my earlier comment in this thread; to reiterate: some devices will now get online via your neighbors' devices even if you don't give them wifi access.

cypherpunks ,
@cypherpunks@lemmy.ml avatar

just post it on lemmy world as a meme, copypaste a comment that makes the code better along with the original code into the AI agent

I'm curious if you succeeded with this approach here - have you gotten your LLM to produce a bash function which you can use without needing to understand how to specify an ffmpeg filename pattern yet?

btw, if want to try learning the old-fashioned way, have a look at man ffmpeg-formats where you can find perhaps-useful information like this:
   segment, stream_segment, ssegment
       Basic stream segmenter.

       This  muxer  outputs  streams  to  a number of separate files of nearly
       fixed duration. Output filename pattern can be set in a fashion similar
       to image2, or by using a "strftime" template if the strftime option  is
       enabled.

       "stream_segment"  is  a variant of the muxer used to write to streaming
       output formats, i.e. which  do  not  require  global  headers,  and  is
       recommended  for  outputting  e.g.  to  MPEG transport stream segments.
       "ssegment" is a shorter alias for "stream_segment".

       Every segment starts with a keyframe of the selected reference  stream,
       which is set through the reference_stream option.

       Note  that if you want accurate splitting for a video file, you need to
       make the input key frames  correspond  to  the  exact  splitting  times
       expected  by  the  segmenter,  or  the segment muxer will start the new
       segment with the key frame found next after the specified start time.

       The segment muxer works best with a single constant frame rate video.

       Optionally it can generate a list of the created segments,  by  setting
       the   option   segment_list.   The   list  type  is  specified  by  the
       segment_list_type option. The entry filenames in the segment  list  are
       set by default to the basename of the corresponding segment files.

       See  also  the hls muxer, which provides a more specific implementation
       for HLS segmentation.

       Options

       The segment muxer supports the following options:

[...]

From the image2 section, here is how the filename pattern works:

           sequence
               Select  a  sequence pattern type, used to specify a sequence of
               files indexed by sequential numbers.

               A sequence pattern may contain the string "%d" or "%0Nd", which
               specifies  the  position  of  the  characters  representing   a
               sequential  number  in each filename matched by the pattern. If
               the form "%d0Nd" is used, the string representing the number in
               each filename is 0-padded and N is the total number of 0-padded
               digits representing the number. The literal character  '%'  can
               be specified in the pattern with the string "%%".

               If  the  sequence  pattern  contains  "%d" or "%0Nd", the first
               filename of the file list specified by the pattern must contain
               a  number  inclusively  contained  between   start_number   and
               start_number+start_number_range-1,   and   all   the  following
               numbers must be sequential.

               For example the pattern "img-%03d.bmp" will match a sequence of
               filenames  of   the   form   img-001.bmp,   img-002.bmp,   ...,
               img-010.bmp,  etc.;  the  pattern "i%%m%%g-%d.jpg" will match a
               sequence of filenames of  the  form  i%m%g-1.jpg,  i%m%g-2.jpg,
               ..., i%m%g-10.jpg, etc.

And btw, the ffmpeg-formats manual does also include examples:

       Examples

       •   Remux the content of file in.mkv to a list of segments out-000.nut,
           out-001.nut, etc., and write the  list  of  generated  segments  to
           out.list:

                   ffmpeg -i in.mkv -codec hevc -flags +cgop -g 60 -map 0 -f segment -segment_list out.list out%03d.nut

       •   Segment  input  and  set  output  format  options  for  the  output
           segments:

                   ffmpeg -i in.mkv -f segment -segment_time 10 -segment_format_options movflags=+faststart out%03d.mp4

       •   Segment the input file according to the split points  specified  by
           the segment_times option:

                   ffmpeg -i in.mkv -codec copy -map 0 -f segment -segment_list out.csv -segment_times 1,2,3,5,8,13,21 out%03d.nut

       •   Use  the  ffmpeg force_key_frames option to force key frames in the
           input at the specified location, together with the  segment  option
           segment_time_delta  to account for possible roundings operated when
           setting key frame times.

                   ffmpeg -i in.mkv -force_key_frames 1,2,3,5,8,13,21 -codec:v mpeg4 -codec:a pcm_s16le -map 0 \
                   -f segment -segment_list out.csv -segment_times 1,2,3,5,8,13,21 -segment_time_delta 0.05 out%03d.nut

           In order to force key frames on  the  input  file,  transcoding  is
           required.

       •   Segment the input file by splitting the input file according to the
           frame numbers sequence specified with the segment_frames option:

                   ffmpeg -i in.mkv -codec copy -map 0 -f segment -segment_list out.csv -segment_frames 100,200,300,500,800 out%03d.nut

       •   Convert  the  in.mkv  to  TS segments using the "libx264" and "aac"
           encoders:

                   ffmpeg -i in.mkv -map 0 -codec:v libx264 -codec:a aac -f ssegment -segment_list out.list out%03d.ts

       •   Segment the input file, and create an M3U8 live  playlist  (can  be
           used as live HLS source):

                   ffmpeg -re -i in.mkv -codec copy -map 0 -f segment -segment_list playlist.m3u8 \
                   -segment_list_flags +live -segment_time 10 out%03d.mkv

It is actually possible to figure out how to do this and many other ffmpeg tasks even without internet access :)

cypherpunks ,
@cypherpunks@lemmy.ml avatar

it's not obvious but, i'm pretty sure this meme (and its creator's vehement opposition to rust) is in fact substantially motivated by queerphobia.

cypherpunks , (edited )
@cypherpunks@lemmy.ml avatar

I’m going to need you to drop a source that will take me less than five minutes to understand

that sounds like sealioning 🤡 but i'll bite, once:

are you asking for evidence that lunduke is queerphobic, or that the rust community has a disproportionate number of queer people in it?

or, do you acknowledge both of those things, and are actually suggesting that lunduke's vehement opposition to rust could maybe conceivably be entirely coincidental and perhaps he dislikes it for purely technical reasons? 😂

in any case, i'm not going to link to lunduke but i just checked and confirmed that (as i assumed) if you simply search his twitter for the word rust you can find many tweets (and i only went back a month) where he is in fact complaining about people being queer.

cypherpunks ,
@cypherpunks@lemmy.ml avatar

that little triangle means you need to click on the the text in the comment to read the rest of it, because it's wrapped in a spoiler tag. also fyi you can search twitter without a login using xcancel.com; it takes much less than 5 minutes to do so.

cypherpunks OP ,
@cypherpunks@lemmy.ml avatar

Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.

Thanks. I've edited the post to link to the same source's text article instead (and linked the corresponding video this post originally linked to in the post body)

cypherpunks OP ,
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did the US, just conquer a whole nation overnight?

if you only listen to US media you might think so; at the press conference today Trump said "we'll run it" as if they already control it, and he also claimed that Vice President (now acting president) Delcy Rodríguez told US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that "we'll do whatever you need". However, a few hours later:

The Vice President of Venezuela demanded the release of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores during the National Defense Council, reaffirming Maduro as the sole president and at the same time announcing the activation of the Citizen Security Agency and national power to defend independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, which they denounce as attacked.

so, no, although the US has kidnapped their president, at this point in time they have not actually conquered the nation.

cypherpunks ,
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i thought the photo in this thumbnail looked familiar, and then realized it's because I just saw a post from her a minute ago - one of many linking to a very old video of a large crowd in Venezuela falsely claiming that it shows people celebrating the US kidnapping Maduro today.

Anyone can track WhatsApp and Signal users' activity, knowing only their phone number: "Careless Whisper: Exploiting Silent Delivery Receipts to Monitor Users on Mobile Instant Messengers" ( arxiv.org )

This is a year-old paper but now there is an easy-to-use implementation of the attack: https://github.com/gommzystudio/device-activity-tracker...

cypherpunks OP ,
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those best practices don't mitigate the attack in this paper

cypherpunks OP , (edited )
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You can literally turn off read receipts in signal

But you can't turn off delivery receipts, which is what this attack uses.

cypherpunks OP ,
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But you can turn off sealed sender messages from anyone, so they’d have to already be a trusted contact

The setting to mitigate this attack (so that only people who know your username can do it, instead of anybody who knows your number) is called Who Can Find Me By Number. According to the docs, setting it to nobody requires also setting Who Can See My Number to nobody. Those two settings are both entirely unrelated to Signal's "sealed sender" thing, which incidentally is itself cryptography theater, btw.

cypherpunks ,
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Debianfest is in Argentina this year … 🍿

DebConf. Not to be confused with debconf.

cypherpunks ,
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cypherpunks ,
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They just need to say they are using the archive for AI training data. Then it’s legal.

"roll safe" meme, no text

cypherpunks ,
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look at their responses in the .ml cross-post,

that post is now deleted, but you can see their modlog here

cypherpunks ,
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I can tell you that the GitHub code isn’t the code that’s used

really? given that the license is AGPL and they do have some external contributors, they shouldn't be running an unpublished branch of the code!

When did Cory Doctorow stop thinking that Jeff Bezos was cool?

Many recent posts of his such as Keir Starmer appoints Jeff Bezos as his “first buddy”: Regulatory capture, right there out in the open make it clear that he isn't a fan of Bezos today, but he was once... as this post Cory Doctorow is wrong about the internet just reminded me, here is the opening of Chapter 2 of his 2008...

cypherpunks ,
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Will an anti advertisement movement ever materialize?

There are lots of cultural opposition movements online, like against work exploitation, consumerism, car culture, surveillance, intellectual property, etc. I can find communities on lemmy for all those topics. But regarding a more general opposition to advertisements and marketing, other than the occasional person telling others...

cypherpunks ,
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outdoor_advertising#Regulations billboards are banned in several cities and, surprisingly, in four entire states of the US.

Jolla announces "the other half" extensible backcovers as strech-goal to phone pre-order campain ( forum.sailfishos.org )

The Other Half (TOH) is a swappable back cover that does more than protect your phone — it transforms it. The original Jolla Phone (2013) pioneered this with open I2C interface and NFC-enabled covers that changed themes and behaviour just by snapping on...

cypherpunks , (edited )
@cypherpunks@lemmy.ml avatar

Thanks. Sorry to see my assumption was correct; that does indeed sound a lot like when they were called OSSO two decades ago.

Notably absent from the list of things they might open source soon is their current "Lipstick" UI, the graphical shell itself.

All of the stuff they plan to open source are things I didn't even figure out were still closed from my 5-10 minutes of research before writing my previous comments. It is difficult to estimate the number (do you know how?) of other small closed components which they can dribble out over the next years to maintain users' false hope that they will one day have an actually-open-source operating system.

we’ll see though

my advice is: don't hold your breath.

Sorry if this sounds bitter, but it's because I am - I naively believed that OSSO might actually ship a free OS one day (to be fair they didn't say they would either, but they helped us believe that they might... in effect saying "we'll see" for years while releasing bits here and there) and it was frustrating to realize that it was never a real possibility.