3-2-1 backup is important. I’ve been burned with lost files before, so I now make sure they’re available in multiple places.
I also encrypt everything. My laptops can’t be unlocked by anyone except myself: Apple Filevault on my Apple laptop, LVM on LUKS on my Linux laptop. If something happens to me, my laptops must be wiped completely to be useable as a used device.
My NAS keeps my backups of all my documents and media (and as a hobbyist photographer, I have over a terabyte of photos and videos I’ve taken). It’s encrypted, but I’ve written the key down on paper and put it in my physical documents. If something happens to me, someone who goes through my physical documents will have access to my digital files.
I pay a cloud service (Backblaze) for cloud backups. I trust the encryption and key management to not actually give the service provider any access to my files.
I sync if I have a good Internet connection, like from my hotel room or whatever, by VPNing into my home network where my NAS is. There are distributed DNS type solutions for a lot of the big NAS brands, where they’ll let you access your data through their service, but I never set that up because I already have a VPN. So my NAS and firewall are configured not to allow outside connections to that device.
But if I haven’t synced laptop to NAS yet, then copies exist on both my camera SD cards (redundant double SD card) and my laptop.
Oh I actually know this one. Mostly historical accident and path dependence.
In medieval England, kings wanted to make sure that taxes and fines to the crown were properly paid, so they had their own officials in each county, who reported to the King rather than to any local officials. Sheriffs were responsible for tax collection, law enforcement (both arresting people before they could be tried and carrying out the rulings of the court). But they’d have to wait for the king’s courts to actually come to town and hold trials and what not, so in the meantime the king’s financial interests weren’t necessarily aligned with the sheriff’s.
So coroners were appointed to watch over county matters and represent the king’s financial interests whenever the courts came to town.
When someone was convicted of a capital offense, their property escheated to the crown. That was an important source of revenue for the crown, so coroners would determine whether a dead body was the result of a crime or not, in order to make sure the crown wasn’t missing out on some convict money.
Both the Sheriff and coroner positions survived the transition into American governance, but independence and democratic reforms meant that these previously crown-appointed positions needed to become elected positions. Most states kept Sheriffs and Coroners as county officials, and preserved some of their traditional roles and duties. Many coroners offices were renamed to “medical examiner” but basically still preserved the role of keeping stats on deaths. And without appointment by the crown, most states just chose to make these elected positions.
Wi-Fi-based Positioning Systems (WPSes) are used by modern mobile devices to learn their position using nearby Wi-Fi access points as landmarks. In this work, we show that Apple’s WPS can be abused to create a privacy threat on a global scale. We present an attack that allows an unprivileged attacker to amass a worldwide...
Got my bloods done and my Testosterone levels are LOW. I’m working out a lot and kind of pissed Ive been doing it on “hardmode” for god knows how long, but before I take the doc up on the script I’m doing my due diligence on the realities. It seems like every article I find is either written by a trt clinic or is a one...
So I gotta ask: what’s your plan for addressing your stress levels and your lack of sleep? A prescription from your doctor doesn’t squarely address those issues, and they should probably be addressed.
Title reads like at ad, but this is a new way to reach energy independence. I actually have a small EcoFlow device and it’s pretty good for the price....
I’m still a skeptic of the Nova system into the 4 categories (1: unprocessed or minimally processed, 2: processed ingredients, 3: processed foods, 4: ultra processed foods), because it’s simultaneously an oversimplification and a complication. It’s an oversimplification because the idea of processing itself is such a broad category of things one can do to food, that it isn’t itself all that informative, and it’s a complication in that experts struggle to classify certain foods as actual prepared dishes being eaten (homemade or otherwise).
So the line drawing between regular processed food and ultraprocessed is a bit counterintuitive, and a bit inconsistent between studies. Guided by the definitions, experts struggle to place unsweetened yogurt into Nova 1 (minimally processed), 2 (processed culinary ingredients), 3 (processed food) or 4 (ultra processed food). As it turns out, experts aren’t very consistent in classifying the foods, which introduces inconsistency in the studies that are performed investigating the differences. Bread, cheese, and pickles in particular are a challenge.
And if the whole premise is that practical nutrition is more than just a list of ingredients, then you have to handle the fact that merely mixing ingredients in your own kitchen might make for a food that’s more than a sum of its parts. Adding salt and oil catapults pretty much any dish to category 3, so does that mean my salad becomes a processed food when I season it? Doesn’t that still make it different than French fries (category 3 if I make them myself, probably, unless you count refined oil as category 4 ultra processed, at which point my salad should probably be ultra processed too)? At that point, how useful is the category?
So even someone like me, who does believe that nutrition is so much more than linear relationships between ingredients and nutrients, and is wary of global food conglomerates, isn’t ready to run into the arms of the Nova system. I see that as a fundamentally flawed solution to what I agree is a problem.
In the end I don’t think internet users in rich powerful countries are the users most likely to benefit and invest their time into in the fediverse. They might be the ones with the most free time, money and privilege around computers which makes being on the leading edge of niche technologies far easier, but I don’t think...
Our data centers and backbone internet/Tier 1 internet providers are basically the best in the world. The US Department of Energy maintains a network with 46 Tbit/s connections between its labs.
Yes, but an absence of a proof of the positive is itself not proof of the negative, so if we’re in the unprovable unknown, we’re still back at the point that you can’t prove a negative.
Apple’s huge database, which usually records the locations of Wi-Fi base stations to the nearest metre, has apparently been exploited without hindrance: With little effort, attackers are able to create a ‘global snapshot’ of all the location data of the WLANs recorded there. This allows them - over a longer period of time...
They’ve got beacon location data, yes, but Apple is the only one that gives up that information without first conforming that the query is coming from someone who sees that BSSID. As OP notes:
In this respect, Apple’s Wi-Fi database also differs fundamentally from other Wi-Fi databases, such as the one operated by Google.
If you click through to the paper, it describes 2 approaches for using BSSIDs to identify location:
Client submits a query listing each BSSID and its signal strength, and the server calculates position and returns where it believes the query is coming from.
Client submits a query listing each BSSID it’s interested in, and the server responds with the location of each BSSID so that the client can calculate its own position.
See the problem there? Approach 2 gives more raw information away, by outsourcing the positioning calculation to untrusted clients.
And the paper outlines how Apple goes even further than that:
Apple’s Wi-Fi geolocation API [4] works in the latter manner, but with an added twist: In addition to the geolocations of the BSSIDs the client submits, Apple’s API opportunistically returns the geolocations of up to several hundred more BSSIDs nearby the one requested. These unrequested BSSID geolocations are presumably then cached by the client, which no longer needs to request the locations of the nearby BSSIDs it may soon encounter, e.g., as the user walks down a city street.
It goes on later:
Apple’s WPS API is free and places few restrictions on its use. It requires neither an API key, authentication, nor an Apple device; our measurement software is written in Go and runs on Linux. Moreover, Apple appears to make no attempt to filter physically impossible queries. The BSSIDs submitted to the WPS need not be physically proximate to each other nor to the device submitting the query; Apple’s WPS will respond with geolocations for BSSIDs on two different continents in the same request to a querier on a third.
That’s the discussion here. Apple keeps a large database, like many other big tech/mapping firms, but does nothing to keep that database hard for strangers to scrape in bulk.
In contrast, Google uses the first approach and keeps the information a bit more restricted by performing the location calculation at the server:
Han et al. reverse-engineered Google’s WPS’s method of operation [17]. Google’s WPS functions differently than Skyhook’s and Apple’s insofar as Google’s service attempts to geolocate the device submitting the query, providing it with only the device’s computed position given a list of BSSIDs from the client.
So it’s possible to run this type of service with this type of database, without sharing BSSID locations with anyone else who asks.
It seems that Apple may be interested in at least requiring authentication that the query comes from an Apple device (or even an Apple-approved API key), which would go a long way in alleviating the security flaw.
I can see some value in the server returning BSSID location data directly (especially with risk of intermittent or slow data connections), but the combination of all the factors seems sloppy.
I’m having a hard time seeing why one is fine but the other isn’t.
I think the law says that neither is fine, in the context here. The law allows celebrity impersonators to engage in parody and commentary, but not to actually use their impersonation skills to endorse products, engage in fraud, and pretend to be that person being impersonated.
I’m mostly going off of this article and a few others I’ve read. This article notes:
Celebrities have previously won cases over similar-sounding voices in commercials. In 1988, Bette Midler sued Ford for hiring one of her backup singers for an ad and instructing the singer to “sound as much as possible like the Bette Midler record.” Midler had refused to be in the commercial. That same year, Tom Waits sued Frito-Lay for voice misappropriation after the company’s ad agency got someone to imitate Waits for a parody of his song in a Doritos commercial. Both cases, filed in California courts, were decided in the celebrities’ favor. The wins by Midler and Waits “have clear implications for AI voice clones,” says Christian Mammen, a partner at Womble Bond Dickinson who specializes in intellectual property law.
There’s some more in there:
To win in these cases, celebrities generally have to prove that their voice or other identifying features are unregistered trademarks and that, by imitating them, consumers could connect them to the product being sold, even if they’re not involved. That means identifying what is “distinctive” about her voice — something that may be easier for a celebrity who played an AI assistant in an Oscar-winning movie.
I think taken with the fact that the CEO made a direct reference to the movie she voiced an AI assistant when announcing the product, that’s enough that a normal person would “connect them to the product being sold.”
In a collaborative effort, Apple and Google have developed an industry-standard detection feature called “Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers” (DULT) for Bluetooth trackers. This standard allows users on iOS and Android devices to be alerted if an unknown Bluetooth tracker is monitoring their location.
The service already excludes any geographical tracker that is within range of its owner (as determined by whether the owner’s primary device is moving with the tracker).
They could probably use a few other rules, too, like excluding trackers that are moving with more than 10 other people simultaneously, so that some keys left behind on a bus, train, or plane don’t trigger the alert for a bunch of strangers.
users hand over over ownership to reddit the moment you post
Not ownership. Just permission to copy and distribute freely. Which basically is necessary to run a service like this, where user-submitted content is displayed.
And since there’s no such clause on Lemmy, they’d have to ask the actual authors of the comments for permission instead?
It’s more of a fuzzy area, but simply by posting on a federated service you’re agreeing to let that service copy and display your comments, and sync with other servers/instances to copy and display your comments to their users. It’s baked into the protocol, that your content will be copied automatically all over the internet.
Does that imply a license to let software be run on that text? Does it matter what the software does with it, like display the content in a third party Mobile app? What about when it engages in text to speech or braille conversion for accessibility? Or index the page for a search engine? Does AI training make any difference at that point?
The fact is, these services have APIs, and the APIs allow for the efficient copying and ingest of the user-created information, with metadata about it, at scale. From a technical perspective obviously scraping is easy. But from a copyright perspective submitting your content into that technical reality is implicit permission to copy, maybe even for things like AI training.
I’ve been wondering for a bit why during the time the Democrats controlled the legislature, executive, and judicial branches during Obama’s first term in 2008 more wasn’t accomplished. Shouldn’t that have been the opportunity to make Row V Way law and fix the electoral college? I understand the recession was going on but...
Lily Ledbetter Act made it easier to recover for employment discrimination, and explicitly overruled a Supreme Court case making it harder to recover back pay.
The ARRA was a huge relief bill for the financial crisis, one of the largest bills of all time.
The Credit CARD Act changed a bunch of consumer protection for credit card borrowers.
Dodd Frank was groundbreaking, the biggest financial reform bill since probably the Great Depression, and created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, probably one of the most important pro-consumer agencies in the federal government today.
School lunch reforms (why the right now hates Michelle Obama)
Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP or SCHIP): healthcare coverage, independent of Obamacare, for all children under 18.
Obamacare itself, which also includes comprehensive student loan reform too.
That’s a big accomplishment list for 2 years, plus some smaller accomplishments like some tobacco reform, some other reforms relating to different agencies and programs.
Plus that doesn’t include the administrative regulations and decisions the administrative agencies passed (things like Net Neutrality), even though those generally only last as long as the next president would want to keep them (see, again, Net Neutrality).
The agency’s manager sent me a background memo about the woman I’d be playing, a purported 21-year-old university student blessed with physical proportions that are in vogue these days.
In vogue these days? That just reminds me of how every generation thinks they invented sex. Or the Simpsons quote where Mr. Burns describes a past encounter: “We expressed our love physically, as was the style at the time.”
Are we talking about high fashion models doing runways and magazine shoots for glossy fashion magazines, or are we talking about porn?
The bodies that you’re talking about weren’t exactly featured in the leading porn magazines or studio films, or even lad mags like Maxim/Stuff/FHM that didn’t do full nudity.
For porn, erotica, and other risqué content, there’s been significantly less shifts in trends and preferences.
Well this article and line of comments is specifically about porn and women as objects of sexual desire, that would cause people to want to chat with OnlyFans models. I don’t think that’s changed over the years, if you look at the body types that were featured in Playboy, Hustler, Perfect 10, or lad mags like Maxim, Stuff, FHM, or even things like Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issues. Pretty much across the board, from the 70’s through the 2000’s, these types of magazines featured young women of what I’m assuming are the “in vogue” proportions alluded to in the article. And I assume aren’t that different from things like the Raquel Welch poster featured in the Shawshank Redemption.
Speaking of posters, the 90’s included Baywatch and Pamela Anderson, who was on a lot more dorm room posters than Jennifer Aniston (who, by the way, wasn’t that far off of what I’m describing as the standard across multiple decades).
Those small USB drives are too slow anyway, often limited to USB 2.0 interfaces or slow flash modules. I’ve switched over to an SSD specifically because of how slow booting and installation is from a standard 10-year-old USB stick.
I have many conversations with people about Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Copilot. The idea that “it makes convincing sentences, but it doesn’t know what it’s talking about” is a difficult concept to convey or wrap your head around. Because the sentences are so convincing....
Harry Frankfurt’s influential 2005 book (based on his influential 1986 essay), On Bullshit, offered a description of what bullshit is.
When we say a speaker tells the truth, that speaker says something true that they know is true.
When we say a speaker tells a lie, that speaker says something false that they know is false.
But bullshit is when the speaker says something to persuade, not caring whether the underlying statement is true or false. The goal is to persuade the listener of that underlying fact.
The current generation of AI chat bots are basically optimized for bullshit. The underlying algorithms reward the models for sounding convincing, not necessarily for being right.
The worry isn’t that HFT stops working. It’s that it causes a failure state that brings down the legitimate parts of the financial sector.
Like how we’re not worried about AI pilots malfunctioning and being grounded, the same way we’d worry about AI pilots malfunctioning and bombing humans.
How does SecureErase work? (lemmy.world)
👽
We found this old matchbook in our kitchen. It's for a coroner's election. The Democrat candidate is on one side and the Republican candidate is on the other. (lemmy.world)
Surveilling the Masses with Wi-Fi-Based Positioning Systems (arxiv.org)
Wi-Fi-based Positioning Systems (WPSes) are used by modern mobile devices to learn their position using nearby Wi-Fi access points as landmarks. In this work, we show that Apple’s WPS can be abused to create a privacy threat on a global scale. We present an attack that allows an unprivileged attacker to amass a worldwide...
Has anyone here been prescribed TRT? Or had a partner on it?
Got my bloods done and my Testosterone levels are LOW. I’m working out a lot and kind of pissed Ive been doing it on “hardmode” for god knows how long, but before I take the doc up on the script I’m doing my due diligence on the realities. It seems like every article I find is either written by a trt clinic or is a one...
EcoFlow’s $200 PowerStream is so clever, you might buy a $4,000 solar generator (www.theverge.com)
Title reads like at ad, but this is a new way to reach energy independence. I actually have a small EcoFlow device and it’s pretty good for the price....
“Deny, denounce, delay”: The battle over the risk of ultra-processed foods (arstechnica.com)
The countries with the most Fediverse servers are rich and former/current colonial powers. One of the best true barometers of the success of the Fediverse is how quickly we can turn that on its head. (sopuli.xyz)
In the end I don’t think internet users in rich powerful countries are the users most likely to benefit and invest their time into in the fediverse. They might be the ones with the most free time, money and privilege around computers which makes being on the leading edge of niche technologies far easier, but I don’t think...
how can I prove that phones are not listening to us for ads?
Apple's Wifi router database: Surveilling the Masses with Wi-Fi-Based Positioning Systems (www.cs.umd.edu)
Apple’s huge database, which usually records the locations of Wi-Fi base stations to the nearest metre, has apparently been exploited without hindrance: With little effort, attackers are able to create a ‘global snapshot’ of all the location data of the WLANs recorded there. This allows them - over a longer period of time...
The double sexism of ChatGPT’s flirty “Her” voice (www.vox.com)
On self-driving, Waymo is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers (arstechnica.com)
iPhones And Androids Can Now Warn You of 'Secret Trackers' (www.ibtimes.co.uk)
In a collaborative effort, Apple and Google have developed an industry-standard detection feature called “Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers” (DULT) for Bluetooth trackers. This standard allows users on iOS and Android devices to be alerted if an unknown Bluetooth tracker is monitoring their location.
OpenAI strikes Reddit deal to train its AI on your posts (www.theverge.com)
Why Didn't Democrats Do More When They Controlled Both Houses of Legislature, The White House, and The Supreme Court During Obama's First Term?
I’ve been wondering for a bit why during the time the Democrats controlled the legislature, executive, and judicial branches during Obama’s first term in 2008 more wasn’t accomplished. Shouldn’t that have been the opportunity to make Row V Way law and fix the electoral college? I understand the recession was going on but...
I Went Undercover as a Secret OnlyFans Chatter. It Wasn’t Pretty (www.wired.com)
Every time I search for a USB key, I end up finding the ones flashed with OS ISOs! I don't have a normal key anymore lol (sh.itjust.works)
What is a good eli5 analogy for GenAI not "knowing" what they say?
I have many conversations with people about Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Copilot. The idea that “it makes convincing sentences, but it doesn’t know what it’s talking about” is a difficult concept to convey or wrap your head around. Because the sentences are so convincing....
US races to develop AI-powered, GPS-free fighter jets, outpacing China (interestingengineering.com)