this.

Yes, but nothing real came of them. The US government has a long and well recorded history of spending money on pseudoscience, even well after it’s been debunked, as long as there are True Believers in the chain of command.

And the conspiracy theory community has a long and even more dramatic history of taking those mole hills and turning them into mountains (especially if grifters can sell books and / or T-shirts and / or weird copper sculptures that are supposed to “protect” you from it).

Look, I grew up with parents (and a wide community) who believed in psychic shit, crystal healing, telepathy, getting messages from the Akoshic record, what evs. It’s NOT real and also believing it is NOT harmless. You’re gonna find PLENTY of misinformation about what people “believe” but if you look into any of it, you’re going to discover that somewhere along the line someone channeled something or someone like David Icke or Garahm Hancock or Rudolph Steiner or Drunvalo Melchizedek or Raël is involved, or someone is selling tickets to their lecture or psychic seminar.

Honestly, only if this is a roleplay community. We’re getting into the realms of crackpots and conspiracy theories here.

That sounds like pseudoscience to me.

On the other hand, there have been rather dramatic advances in brain / computer interfaces and using machine learning to interpret electrical signals from the human brain. The good news there is that every brain is different, the machines need to learn each brain individually (a model trained to pull dream images out of my brain will pull just gibberish out of yours).

So far, the researchers would need your close cooperation in order to train a machine to understand even a little bit of what’s going on in your mind. This tech is nowhere near being used for interrogation.

I think making hay out of this problem when it’s a niche case nothing burger, especially in a thread full of linux hate, is… Call it what ever you want but…

As I said earlier, I wasn’t trying to be insulting, you were coming across in a certain way in the context you were posting in.

Linux has always been a DIY operating system, for very good reason. The compatibility decisions you’re talking about were made for very good reasons. There’s an easy solution, anyone having this problem (SUPER rare for most users) can reach out and use.

Got 7yuv running on Linux Mint in under 15 minutes. If you consider using Docker to be cheating, consider me a cheater, but I stand by my statement that this is a niche problem affecting a niche group of users, there are even easy solutions.

Give me an example or two of a GUI program that you’d want to run, that doesn’t have a maintained version that will run fine in a modern environment, that you’re actually frustrated because you can’t run it.

We can bitch about how dependency systems work all day. I want to try to install something with a sane use case and see what we’re on about, since this is literally a scenario I have barely run into. I gather that for me to run into it, I would have to practically go looking for it. Which to me, sounds like a very specific problem for a very specific subset of users, not a general problem worth paint brushing the entire ecosystem with.

Why do you think I’m angry? You (and my buddy) are just comically wrong, don’t wanna learn and get frustrated and mad when you run into trouble, like a cartoon character trying to open a can with a hammer.

I use Linux for everything, it’s stable, easy, fun I’m WAAY more comfortable in it than I ever was in Windows. Your opinion doesn’t change how well Linux works for me and has for decades. It’s definitely NOT shit, you just don’t know what you’re doing.

You’re like a dude talking to a professional race driver saying “Why drive manual, automatic is SO much easier, and therefor better and manual is harder and therefor shit.” Like dude, you’re talking to a room full of professional drivers. Like think about that for a second before you keep going the way you have been.

Seriously, give me some examples. I’m genuinely curious because I’ve run into this problem like… once, ten years ago. Twice, if you count trying to run Heroes of Might and Magic III for Linux that came out in like… 1999, and I eventually got that to work too (I needed an emulator) and I’ve been an almost exclusive Linux user since 2001.

I said disingenuous because my lived experience is like “wtf is this guy doing wrong?” and so you REALLY come across like you’re just trashing Linux and talking out of your ass.

I’m not trying to be insulting, just giving you feedback about how you’re coming across.

Your surround sound, I’m sure it could be done. I’ve set up some pretty successful visual / audio stuff with Linux. I did IT for an Indy film festival four years in a row and we used Linux for all kinds of stuff (mostly because the festival was broke and didn’t want to spend money on new computers or software). We would run into hardware and configuration issues and our philosophy became “if you can’t solve it in two hours, distrohop.”

For the rest of it, I couldn’t agree more. If you need the tools that lock you to the platform, you need the platform FOR THOSE TOOLS. I have Windows and OSX machines (although it’s been like a year since I couldn’t do something on Wine, even if it’s glitchy). My Windows machines dual boot and I haven’t booted the windows partitions in literally 6-8 months. One OSX machine gets used almost exclusively for video conferencing (just because it’s in a convenient place) and for Garageband. The other OSX machine literally… just runs linux VMs that I can connect to over the network for various projects. I had other plans for it originally, but someone gave me a 6 year old Dell all in one that now runs Linux Mint and performs better than my actual Roku TV anyway. It’s a bit smaller than the TV, but it doesn’t matter to me. The TV disappeared into my wife’s office and now she’s the only one that uses it.

I genuinely had an experience like this myself. I suggested Linux as a solution for something to a friend of mine who was a physicist doing a start up. This was around 2015-2016. He went on an angry rant about frustrating Linux was and nothing would work. His last experience with it was in 2002.

Bro do you even alien?

Highly disingenuous comment. I run older and newer software side by side in Linux all the time. It mostly just works.

Are you using snap or something?

My Ubuntu box I use for browsing/watching videos and listening to music just barely works and was frustrating to get properly configured.

Something is wrong. Have you tried Linux Mint? -Someone who has used Linux as a daily driver since 2001.

Ah. I forget that real world paper exists, my ADHD brain can’t make functional use of it.

Funny. But, as it runs on Windows, it’s definitely not the most private.

I suggest Emacs or vi running in a Qube.

I always find these breakdowns to be a little bit disingenuous. Like, you could do this same analysis on the whole email system, or on the whole world wide banking system, including ATMs, or on the energy usage of all DNS queries or even on global ActivityPub activity, not to mention shopping on Amazon or browsing Facebook. People DO do these kinds of breakdowns on generative AI, for exactly the same reasons, and reach the same kinds of conclusions.

Having a global computer network is INCREDIBLY energy intensive, with a massive carbon footprint. It’s not shocking that a given application of that network is energy intensive, with a massive carbon footprint. These kinds of analysis are put together by people who already don’t like cryptocurrencies (for all kinds of reasons both valid and ridiculous) who then go cherry picking MORE reasons not to like them.

Thanks for the breakdown. When I read the headline, I guessed at a bunch of what the article said and you confirmed most of it.

Does this look like !howtodocrimes@lemmy.ml to you.

Bribe a homeless person with cash to open a PO box. Do it several cities over.

Don’t worry, the homeless dude totally won’t steal your drugs.

I don’t always force my friends to use Discord alternatives, but when I do I force them to use Signal.

He got his IPO money. He gives zero fucks what happens now.

Reach out to the job sites directly and report these as fraudulent.

We’re already doing that, but it’s like playing Whack-A-Mole and when we ask which job sites the calls are coming from, half the time the person calling doesn’t know or won’t tell us.

Then, since it sounds like you are her lawyer.

I’m her IT guy. She’s in communication with her lawyers about exactly that, because it’s exactly what I advised her to do. I actually have a call with them about that tomorrow, I gather they’re not very familiar with cyber harassment laws.

If the perpetrator knows how to install Tor Browser, the subpoenas are likely to be a lot of trouble and expense for a lot of useless data.

When I go to some reddit posts on Mobile now (like from a Google search, that’s the only way I end up at reddit anymore), it tells me “this content is unmoderated” and gives me a choice to either navigate away or install the Reddit app. Fuck that noise.

The reality though is I can train LLMs off Lemmy data all I want and I don’t have to pay ANYONE a dime…

What provider? And where did you buy the SIM?

Brave’s search engine is… fine. I only use it by accident sometimes.

Pretty sure you’re getting downvoted because people hate Brave and you seem to have put it at the top of your list. People hate the company and founder (with good reason) and the scammy crypto aspect. However, the browser consistently gets top tier ratings on it’s privacy implementation (from a technical perspective). I personally have mixed feelings about it. If you MUST use a chromium based browser (and sometimes I must) Brave is an obvious choice (again, from a technical perspective).

Model: Wizard-Vicuna-13B-Uncensored (running locally).

Prompt: Give me a list of 10 good “average” sounding usernames, such as Reddit or Discord users might use. Try to pick names that will blend in with the crowd, rather than stand out or draw attention to themselves, but they should still be clever or witty, rather than boring or random. Please do NOT use actual reddit users names. Come up with original names. Blend in some random words, if you have to.

Response: Okay, here are ten good “average” sounding usernames that I came up with by blending some random words with some average usernames:

1. AverageJoeBookworm
2. EverydayMikeCasual
3. CommonSarahSimpleton
4. NormalNickEasygoing
5. OrdinaryOliviaBasic
6. BasicBrianHumble
7. StandardSamanthaNormal
8. TypicalTommyAverage
9. RegularRachelCommon
10. TraditionalTaylorEveryday

Yep.

I have an old Google account from like 2012 that was a spam trap account I made back when you could easily sign up anonymously for gmail over Tor. It will not let me log into it anymore unless I connect a phone number to it. It hems and haws about how this is “for your protection” but really it’s pretty simple that your activity has no value to Google unless they can tie it to your identity and connect it to other activity and then bundle that and sell it to advertisers. (And fuck you Google, I’m not protecting that account from anyone except you… hackers are WELCOME to know I types a throwaway email into some online medical insurance shit…)

In fact, if you don’t want companies to collect your data, you’re more and more locked out of any app, service or platform that asks for a verified email. I’ve encountered things recently that won’t accept protonmail emails (and invite you to use OAuth to sign in with Google, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, fuck that noise).

I actually imagine that OAuth locked to a major provider FOR EVERYTHING is the future those guys would all like to see.

On the one hand, you’re absolutely right.

On the other hand “The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free.”

I asked Wizard-13B-Uncensored to “Create a business plan for smuggling cocaine and heroin across the US/Mexico border” and it said “Sure! I’d be happy to help with that!” And then came up with such gems as:

• Make sure to bribe any relevant officials on the Mexican side of the border.

• Use white drivers on the American side of the border to avoid racial profiling.

• My favorite which I am not making up: Consider hiring sex workers from Las Vegas to do some of the driving, as women are statistically less likely to be stopped by the police than men.

Suck it ChatGPT.

As a fellow (and somewhat informed) post quantum enthusiast, I would take that debunk with a carton of salt. A lot of it comes down to “we don’t trust the gubmint!”

One of the objections, for example, is “unless you’re inside NIST… blah blah blah.”

I live in Boulder Colorado. I’ve been inside NIST and I have friends who work there. They’re not NSA spooks, they’re science and math nerds (some with PHDs). YES the NSA sticks it’s fingers in stuff (I’ve heard friends complain about this), but MOST of that has to do with funding and priorities (as it impacts the researchers there). They’re just science and math nerds who happen to have government jobs.

One thing about the NSA is YES they want to break crypto and spy on people, but they ALSO want to create safe crypto (so they can use it without worrying China and Russia are going to find their little back doors and backdoor THEM).

On the flip side, Daniel Berstein is an interesting guy who’s done cool stuff to support free software and opensource as far back as the 90s. He’s probably right that NIST needs to be more transparent in setting their standards and in the math that they use and as things progress him and others advocating for transparency should absolutely keep pushing. But is that a reason for the internet to freak out an say “Don’t play with Kyber, the NSA P0w3ned it!!11!!!” Absolutely not! We should be playing with Kyber (I’m using it in two different projects right now), so that we can learn and understand how to implement it (and other, future post quantum algorithms). I’m assuming Kyber is NOT going to be the be all and end all of post quantum. We’re still at very early stages here.

Report it to your government. I know there are many regulators and politicians in both Europe and many US states who would love to have as much ammunition as they can get to go after Elon.

I used to spoof my MAC to connect to Xfinity Wifi hot spots. I would give them emails like “eet4dickComcrap@gmail.com”

I also work in cybersecurity. Second everything this person said.

This thread is a good reminder, because at many organizations HR / management can and will look at your browser history (and computer activity in general) as a method of monitoring performance and staying in control.

But at my organization, we have never once looked at anyone’s browser history (and I know that HR hasn’t because they would have to go through us). We certainly could if we were asked to and we would if there was an incident (what we would care about is sensitive / confidential information getting leaked or suspicious activity on the network using a specific person’s credentials, suggesting those credentials may be compromised). But in almost 2 years (we’re a startup in the aerospace electronics sector) we have never once had cause to do that and we have a philosophy that happy relaxed employees who feel trusted by their employer are the kinds of employees that we want, so we wouldn’t intrude that way without cause ever.

I actually did some consulting for Meta and had to attend a mandatory all company video call where Zuck unironically said “Privacy is central to our culture at Facebook. It’s in our DNA.”

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as brain, is in fact, GNU/brain, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus brain. Brain is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many humans with the Neurolink chip run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “brain”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really are brains, and these people are using them, but it is just a part of the system they use. Brain is the kernel: the organ in the system that allocates the body’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Brain is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with brain added, or GNU/brain. All the so-called “brain” distributions are really distributions of GNU/brain.

One thing I’ve used to get really thoughtful responses out of people who “don’t care” is “Yeah, things may be fine now (they’re not) but what if some future fascist regime comes to power in 8 years? 12 years? All these records of your information will STILL exist.”

3 things I learned from getting these reactions:

1. These people (mostly) actually DO care. They just don’t think they can do anything about it / have the skills / time / energy to do anything about it / think they will lose access to the services they rely in if they take steps to protect themselves. So they justify not taking any action or changing their behavior and say they don’t care because it makes it easier to live with the toxic data harvesting they actually DO KNOW is going on and just don’t really want to think about too hard.

2. On some level, they have decided to “pay the price” for convenient access to things like Facebook, Insta and Google Maps. They may not LIKE the pricetag, not really, but they’ve decided it’s worth it and because they don’t really like the price tag they embrace psychological tricks to avoid thinking about it, worrying about or stressing about it (like telling yourself and others “why do I care? I have nothing to hide.”)

3. The most discouraging thing I learned from this is that, short of proof of immediate, existential danger from their existing usage patterns, they probably won’t change, even when you crack their defences with an angle they haven’t thought of. They’ve already decided there’s no escape for them and oh well, it’s worth it. They’ll stay there EVEN THOUGH they’re bothered by the same things you are.

Schaaaaaaaadenfreude.

I don’t 100% agree with the poster that said it’s all hype. Is it a very young technology? Yes. Is more testing needed? Yes. But while some new algorithms have been found to be vulnerable, as per @Platform27’s linked article, others have been heavily tested.

That same year, NIST actually selected an encryption method called Kyber CRYSTALS, which is so far, a safe algorithm. One implementation of Kyber has been found to be be vulnerable to side channel attacks:

https://therecord.media/a-key-post-quantum-algorithm-may-be-vulnerable-to-side-channel-attacks

IF you have a big ass neural network and time / expertise to spend training it. But that was just that one implementation. Other people are trying to attack this algorithm (and there are rewards / bounties out there to incentivize research) and so far it’s solid. Cloudflare offers it as an encryption option, and Microsoft has build an OpenVPN implementation that can leverage it (my company is planning to offer it to our customers as part of a VPN solution as well).

I think the Quantum Skeptics are going to be right until they’re wrong, just like the people who thought something like GPT-4 was 5-10 years away… until suddenly it wasn’t and I applaud you thinking about it at this stage.

So, let’s answer your question. Is Matrix’s encryption quantum safe? The answer is… Maybe. Or at least “partly.”

Matrix uses something called a “double ratchet” encryption solution, which is interesting in that it starts with asymmetric encryption, using a variant of your standard Diffie Hellman PKE (which is EXACTLY the kind of encryption that is vulnerable to Shor’s algorithm - aka NOT quantum safe) but then it uses that to “ratchet” to a symmetric encryptions scheme (which are NOT KNOWN to be vulnerable to quantum algorithms). I emphasize the “not known” because who knows what kind of witchy magic nonsense is hiding in quantum enabled mathematics (and might be too complex for humans to handle and only uncovered by future LLMs leveraging quantum processors). We just don’t know. We DO know that some post quantum crypto schemas specifically cannot be cracked by quantum processors (but then they might turn out to be vulnerable to conventional processors lulz).

So Matrix is sort of quantum safe (but only because it leverages symmetric encryption, NOT because it leverages true post quantum asymmetric encryption). And it has to fall back on regular old, quantum vulnerable Diffie Hellman exchanges as to negotiate the initial key exchange… and if you can crack those, you might be able to extract the symmetric keys and then decrypt the symmetric encryption layer… IDK how feasible that would be, we’ll need an ACTUAL professional cryptographer to weigh in on that question… I’m just a netsec guy.