r00ty

You either die a hero… Something something.

Not sure what you mean. I just saw asterisks.

Hmm. Gonna put a few euros on my auction servers. I would complain but the price has been static for 2.5 years.

And it would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for that darn pesky judge!

I think my least favourite thing about AI is when customers tell me something won’t take as long as I say, if I use AI. Look, if AI can do it why do you need me?

The fact I’m not out of a job (yet) is because apparently AI cannot do everything I can. The very second it can I’ll be long gone.

So I am on the side of the lawyers here. For the first and only time.

Maybe even Microsoft don’t want us to use windows any more?

I’m old enough such that when I was at primary school (this is years 5-11 for non UKians) there was a computer. Not in every class, no. A computer, on a wheeled trolley that could be moved around. Well actually I think there were probably three. Because there were three floors and no-one was going to move that trolley up and down the stairs. But still it definitely was not one per class.

It was barely used. In fact, the teachers didn’t really know HOW to use it. They actually just let me go at it, because I did know how to work it.

In secondary school (11-15/16), things were somewhat different in that there were slightly more modern computers, most classes had one and there was a dedicated room where there was a classroom number of computers available. This was where we were taught “ICT” which, was essentially showing how to use word processors and spreadsheet software. Again teachers of the time were quite far behind and I’m not exaggerating here, I used to help the teacher, teach this class. But there was no programming, or any advanced use. It was very basic tasks with specific software. All of our written work, even for this class was written with a pen, in an exercise book.

Now, budgets were still terrible. I can be pretty sure about this because I remember that because we DID still do everything on paper, photocopies were handed around the room. Oh they weren’t any flash laser photocopy (well sometimes in secondary school it was). No, these was the kind with the fuzzy purple ink that was hand rolled to make a copy. But we got by.

Now, there’s no doubt we live in a digital world and computing must be taught because we do everything on a phone or computer now and people need to know how to do it. But, there’s still surely a good reason to be doing work in exercise books with a pen and paper? Everything cannot be on a computer.

Well, as I added in the edit. I think they do a bit more and actually fool the verification site since they don’t send the whole image, they do the work locally (which is good, for privacy). So they fake valid looking metadata and then presumably get a signed result back which they dutifully pass on to discord.

Looks to me like they’re essentially redirecting the request from the normal api to do age checks to their own api, and just saying “Sure, they’re an adult” to discord (since that is all the “proper” api tells them). There are easy ways for Discord to fix this. So do not expect it to work for long.

What could be risky? Well it seems to be loading some libraries. What are they doing? Don’t know, didn’t check. Probably just keeping the line count of the actual code down. But, who knows?

The other thing (and they of course do need to do this). They pass the full URL that would be sent to the “proper” api to their own. So if there is some private info about you/your account they usually send on, these guys would have that data too.

Just a quick 5 minute look though. I didn’t look too much into it because, I’m not going to use it :P

EDIT: Looks like they actually detail what they do and it seems to involve actually tricking the age verification api too. Interesting stuff. Still not going to do it.

If you want to go super de-centralised. Just remove the internet and go for a mesh network :P

Wait this is still a thing? I remember writing a DCC download bot in arexx on the amiga, back in the mid 90s.

Yep. I also valid concerns. But those seem to be their next steps. I just wondered if there would be degradation. You wouldn’t even be able to tell until it reached the destination.

Definitely interesting stuff.

This is for communication, not computation or even cryptography. The point in transferring it this way is so as to maintain the unseen property of the photon.

I think my question on all this would be whether this would ultimately cause problems in terms of data integrity.

Currently most amplifiers for digital information are going to capture the information in the light, probably strip off any modulation to get to the raw data. Then re-modulate that using a new emitter.

The advantages of doing this over just amplifying the original light signal are the same reason switches/routers are store and forward (or at least decode to binary and re-modulate). When you decode the data from the modulated signal and then reproduce it, you are removing any noise that was present and reproducing a clean signal again.

If you just amplify light (or electrical) signals “as-is”, then you generally add noise every time you do this reducing the SNR a small amount. After enough times the signal will become non-recoverable.

So I guess my question is, does the process also have the same issue of an ultimate limit in how often you can re-transmit the signal without degradation.

Pretty sure this was made clear in the article but… I’ll outline the little I know on the subject as a complete layman.

Currently we have been able to use quantum effects to create single runs of fibre that cannot be intercepted. That is, if the data is intercepted by any known means the receiver will be able to detect this.

The shortcoming of this method, is that of course when you need to amplify the signal, that’s generally a “store and forward” operation and thus would also break this system’s detection. You could I guess perform the same operation wherever it is amplified, but it’s then another point in which monitoring could happen. If you want 1 trusted sender, 1 trusted receiver and nothing in between, this is a problem.

What this article is saying, is they have found a way to amplify the information without ever “reading” it. Therefore keeping the data integrity showing as “unseen” (for want of a better word). As such this will allow “secure” (I guess?) fibre runs of greater distances in the future.

Now the article does go into some detail about how this works and why. But, for the basic aspect of why this is a good and useful thing. This is pretty much what you need to know.

This is the world most of us want to live in I would think.

He is not the one to deliver it. He doesn’t really want that. If he did, he wouldn’t want $1t let alone fight to get it. Let alone all the other vile shit he has done, and will do.

So far I’ve mostly avoided the whole “things that don’t need to be on the Internet” situation.

Non smart TV (well that period when they started adding smart features but they’re all out of date now so not even connected to the Internet)

All kitchen stuff is just kitchen stuff. No Internet.

Car is still offline.

Only real exception is smart thermostat, and that’s just because when the boiler was installed that’s what they put in.

It’s as true today, as it was then?

Sure. But it’s to Mars, with Musk.

Then I suggest they use an XNOR pointer instead! Checkmate patent trolls!