The article said surgery. Also common sense, they are reading individual neurons. Not feasible from outside.
Best we have is FMRI, and it is an amazing technology, but it absolutely can’t do that and never will because of how it works. And besides, it doesn’t fit in a doorway either, and would also be incredibly obvious: loud, super magnetic - requiring all metal to be removed for a long distance, requiring the target to sit for a long time and follow instructions, etc.
Surgery is absolutely the only way this is possible.
So you’re worried about governments forcing brain surgery on people, and think this one particular technology is going to be the big issue if that happens?
I think at that point ‘reading minds’ is no longer the major concern. Like the old statement about apocryphal airport security measures after 9/11 - “if you can take over the plane with fingernail clippers, then you don’t need the clippers”.
(clippers were never actually banned on planes in the USA, but for a short while the metal files on them were and that caused confusion)
This tech seems like a huge waste of money when if they are That authoritarian they could just shove an ice pick up the dissident’s eye socket or simply have them jump out a window with bullet holes in their back. Why bother with actually gathering evidence - if you’re willing to forcefully open their skull, then clearly it’s already beyond that point.
I suppose it could be used to find accomplices and crack passwords and stuff, but still seems like a very roundabout way of going about it and likely can be easily defeated by just thinking “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” in a loop. Or thinking of an earworm song. Or thinking of false statements.
C compilers (at least on personal computers) weren’t great at optimization back then and every kilobyte mattered - the user only got 640 of them, going beyond that required jumping through hoops.
Similar for MHz, hand optimization was important for performance since there was so little CPU time to go around.
Yes, ‘url parameters’ start with a question mark and then any after the first are separated with ampersands. Often some of them may be for tracking, but not always.