1827162's comments

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

It's an almost symbiotic relationship with the government.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From that Daily Mail article (2009):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time for some civil disobedience?

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

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

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

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

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

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

An apple tree, once infected, can colonize junipers and cedars as far as 6 miles away(!). Yes, a highly infectious and amazing organism.

https://portal.ct.gov/CAES/Fact-Sheets/Plant-Pathology/Cedar... "As many as 7.5 million spores may be produced in a single gall and these spores have been known to be carried as far as 6 miles."

One of those things is mainline kernel support the TH1520, which it may well end up lacking, at least for a considerable length of time.

From IRC:

<graydon> I think I named it after fungi. rusts are amazing creatures.

<graydon> Five-lifecycle-phase heteroecious parasites. I mean, that's just _crazy_.

<graydon> talk about over-engineered for survival

<jonanin> what does that mean? :]

<graydon> fungi are amazingly robust

<graydon> to start, they are distributed organisms. not single cellular, but also no single point of failure.

<graydon> then depending on the fungi, they have more than just the usual 2 lifecycle phases of critters like us (somatic and gamete)

https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/27jvdt/internet_archa...

I think that the medium shapes the resulting political characteristics of the system, yes the centralized network, where every user is easily traceable thus readily policed and censored, ends up creating totalitarianism, given how human nature works...

So we need to design a system that isn't easily traced, as an inherent property of how it operates, so that it's not possible for those who want to exert power over others, to do so.

Just as an example, using a radio/satellite data broadcasting architecture, where the receiver is untraceable, means that the government can no longer round up people for reading "forbidden" things anymore. That allows us to have a new darknet to replace Tor that's far more difficult for the government to police.

Again as an example, the content request can be transmitted anonymously using HF radio or LoRaWAN, being only a few bytes, and has no sender address. And the response can come down via satellite, broadcast to everyone, who also ends up storing it locally on their computer. That way we can reduce the number of retransmissions required. We already have a usable worldwide satellite data broadcasting network, you can see a list of recent transmissions at https://blocksat.info.

It's certainly enough bandwidth to support a text based darknet, which works in a similar way to how Teletext did, but with caching of content on your local hard disk. Which you can browse freely like the Internet.

China's T-Head TH1520 is coming close, it's RISC-V and supposedly faster than the Raspberry Pi.

And they have a 64-core version in the works: https://twitter.com/SipeedIO/status/1620011141639581698

What's surprising is that this unencumbered hardware is coming from a country that's a dictatorship.

And that is precisely what using the Internet in 2023 entails. Every single thing you do is being monitored and compiled by the government. Likely with CloudFlare acting as the universal man-in-the-middle.

https://theintercept.com/2015/09/25/gchq-radio-porn-spies-tr...

And you directly feel the chilling effect of it, no longer can you type whatever you want into that search box anymore. It's super creepy, and we're used to it. Only when it's gone, for example when we use a locally running AI chatbot, do we feel freedom again, and the difference is striking.

Thank God the next great thing in tech is AI and we have the option of running that locally. And because of that, I am looking forward to tech progress again. Where progress doesn't always mean expanding state control over people.

Yes, potentially over-reaching, because it's debatable whether it's overreaching or not.

And the manufacturers doing this, is a prime example of the law of unintended consequences. Where trying to solve a problem through legislation makes it worse in the end.

I almost can't believe this is actually for real, it reads like satire from TheOnion.com.

Welcome to America in 2023, where they are deliberately adding allergens to food, in order to comply with potentially over-reaching laws...

It's peanuts too: https://snacksafely.com/2022/04/company-will-add-trace-amoun...

And especially so in Ukraine, where feral hogs have been known to consume the bodies of dead russian soldiers. You can Google it, I don't want to link to it here...

By the way, I was thinking of something along the lines of a powerful FPGA with direct access to large quantities of very fast NAND flash, likely many chips in parallel, which will save having to load the model into RAM..... So it will be able to directly run from NAND flash, which opens up the possibility of using very large models???

Power consumption would not be an issue if it's used sporadically throughout the day, it's not like it needs to run continuously?

There is still the issue of NAND flash read disturb, which I haven't fully looked into yet.