Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

  • 233 Posts
  • 7.85K Comments
Joined 3 年前
Cake day: 2023年10月4日
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•France Moves to Break Encrypted MessagingEnglish
    21·
    15 小时前

    “The inability to access the content of encrypted communications constitutes a major obstacle for the work of the justice system and intelligence services,” the delegation wrote, framing end-to-end encryption as a problem to be solved rather than a protection to be preserved.

    Senator Cédric Perrin, who chairs the foreign affairs committee and sits on the intelligence delegation, has been pushing this fight for over a year. During debate on a narcotrafic bill, he secured an amendment that would have forced messaging platforms to “implement the necessary technical measures in order to allow intelligence services to access the intelligible content of communications and data passing through them.”

    I mean, I can send a GPG-encrypted message over a messaging platform and you can recover it if you want even if that platform’s native encryption is backdoored, but you’re still just looking at an end-to-end encrypted message.

    $ gpg -q --quick-gen-key tal@lemmy.today
About to create a key for:
    "tal@lemmy.today"

Continue? (Y/n) y

    Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world:

    $ gpg -q --quick-gen-key doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria
About to create a key for:
    "doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria"

Continue? (Y/n) y

$ gpg -a --export doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria >doctor-doom.public-key.asc

    Back at tal’s computer:

    $ gpg --import <doctor-doom.public-key.asc
$ echo "Hey, Doctor Doom!  The time is right to initiate our secret plan!" >message.txt
$ gpg -a -r doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria -u tal@lemmy.today -e message.txt
$ cat message.txt.asc
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----

hF4DjahcIPqAf9cSAQdA/itkkQNubd3l6V1Rs1c00Z4zDquk9PrK1Z65VzNogzsw
8ypbEn0B145fyyfyeAc8r72J51qJbcTXVGQkb9JWXoLMh/irZZkYrUbuaBXephsm
0oQBqv6JgWc8kpeFKSihu69EXG/kEcHpOyCBb2nGOerHM1VzERdTdcfkgEQQYfYF
sPXVfRxGgJbGtkoyRGDGZCEnOpGDsQSCX8I8KkUfPALAqhBSmYbAa5lg0jWNiAQL
J4rrXGQiVCPC5Dr45KIEswddFI1oGhqZo16SgEGILcTiY4gN6yI=
=4RyB
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----

    tal sends the message to Doctor Doom over the backdoored messaging system. French intelligence watches closely. They break the platform-native encryption, but all they can see is the above text.

    On Dr. Doom’s computer:

    $ gpg -d message.txt.asc 
gpg: encrypted with cv25519 key, ID 8DA85C20FA807FD7, created 2026-05-10
      "doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria"
Hey, Doctor Doom!  The time is right to initiate our secret plan!
$
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Server vs miniPC dilemma for homelabEnglish
    3·
    20 小时前

    You could try reducing the fan speed. That might be okay, if the hardware doesn’t actually need the cooling. If the BIOS has fan curves, go fiddle with that. If it doesn’t, dedicated fan controllers do exist.

    If the server is a standard ATX motherboard and if your rack has vertical space, you can also probably get a new ATX case of whatever sort you want, preferably taller, and get something with larger, slower fans and transplant the hardware. A lot of rack servers are vertically-cramped to let a datacenter put as many in a rack as possible, so you get stuff like 1U machines with those dinky 30mm fans. In general, the larger the fan, the less noise per airflow.

    searches

    https://www.amazon.com/RackChoice-Mini-ITX-Rackmount-Chassis-Standard/dp/B0D296DVD8

    I’ve never used that, but it’s a 3U and has three 120mm fans.

    If you don’t care about cost, there are also sound-isolated racks. These have some sort of sound-blocking material like plywood on the outside and sound-absorbing foam on the inside. I have been interested in these in the past, because I would like one, but everything I’ve seen has been absolutely obscenely-priced, probably because datacenters don’t care about noise, and few people are running racks in homes or offices. I doubt that the people that sell them get much volume.

    EDIT: Example sound-isolated rack:

    https://tripplite.eaton.com/smartrack-quiet-server-rack-18u-sound-suppression~SRQ18U

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•EU calls VPNs “a loophole that needs closing” in age verification pushEnglish
    3·
    23 小时前

    I don’t think I’d say “inevitable”. Possible, maybe.

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

    The splinternet (also referred to as cyber-balkanization or internet balkanization) is a characterization of the Internet as splintering and dividing due to various factors, such as technology, commerce, politics, nationalism, religion, and divergent national interests. “Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it”, wrote the Economist weekly in 2010, arguing it could soon splinter along geographic and commercial boundaries.[1] The Chinese government erected the “Great Firewall” for political reasons, and Russia has enacted the Sovereign Internet Law that allows it to partition itself from the rest of the Internet.[2][3] Other nations, such as the US and Australia, have discussed plans to create a similar firewall to block child pornography or weapon-making instructions.[1]

    Clyde Wayne Crews, a researcher at the Cato Institute, first used the term in 2001 to describe his concept of “parallel Internets that would be run as distinct, private, and autonomous universes.”[4] The concept itself dates back at least to pair of articles in the journal Science and at the International Conference on Information Systems by Marshall van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson in 1996 and 1997.[5][6] They argued that it the Internet and related technologies “have the potential to fragment interaction and divide groups by leading people to spend more time on special interests and by screening out less preferred contact.” They dubbed this effect “cyberbalkanization” and developed a set of formal measures.[7]

    Crews used the term in a positive sense, but more recent writers, like Scott Malcomson, a fellow in New America’s International Security program, use the term pejoratively to describe a growing threat to the internet’s status as a globe-spanning network of networks.[8]

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Why is Grok so stupid? It really is the dumbest AI that's only good for images.English
    2·
    23 小时前

    “YOU’RE DONE. TAKE THE SUIT OFF.” for like 70 consecutive messages.

    Once an AI gets in a tight loop like this, you’re done. Tokens become heavily weighted to repeat this sequence because it was the “right” sequence for 5, 10, 15+ responses.

    I use a local LLM, and use the DRY sampler with llama.cpp. 0.85 multiplier, base 1.75, allowed token length 2, 4096 token window. This — and it’s not the only way to do this, but probably the newest approach — will penalize repeated statements. I don’t see the “repetition loop” come up any more, though I have seen it with different settings on different models in the past.

    All that being said, it’d be interesting to see which LLM OP feels does the best Spiderman roleplay. I don’t know how you’d effectively score something like that; having one user do, say, 5 sessions with each LLM and try to rank them seems like it’d be expensive in terms of human time.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•If someone threatens to kill you (but yk they can't really do it) what's a good non violent revenge that doesn't involve hitting them?English
    7·
    23 小时前

    If you don’t actually feel threatened, I’d probably ignore it. I’d point out that pretty anyone can kill someone else, given a will to do so, so I don’t think I’d take “oh, they’re physical weaker than me” or something as grounds for not taking a threat seriously.

    But if it’s a credible threat…depending upon where you live and the form of the threat, a threat to kill someone may be illegal. They are one of the few exceptions that case law has established to the First Amendment in the US.

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

    “True threats of violence” that are directed at a person or group of persons that have the intent of placing the target at risk of bodily harm or death are generally unprotected.[41] However, there are several exceptions. For example, the Supreme Court has held that “threats may not be punished if a reasonable person would understand them as obvious hyperbole”, he writes.[42][43] Additionally, threats of “social ostracism” and of “politically motivated boycotts” are constitutionally protected.[44]

    In California, for example:

    https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-pen/part-1/title-11-5/section-422/

    CA Penal Code § 422 (2025)

    1. (a) Any person who willfully threatens to commit a crime which will result in death or great bodily injury to another person, with the specific intent that the statement, made verbally, in writing, or by means of an electronic communication device, is to be taken as a threat, even if there is no intent of actually carrying it out, which, on its face and under the circumstances in which it is made, is so unequivocal, unconditional, immediate, and specific as to convey to the person threatened, a gravity of purpose and an immediate prospect of execution of the threat, and thereby causes that person reasonably to be in sustained fear for their own safety or for their immediate family’s safety, shall be punished by imprisonment in the county jail not to exceed one year, or by imprisonment in the state prison.

    (b) In sentencing a person convicted of a felony violation of subdivision (a), the court may consider, as a factor in aggravation, that the defendant willfully threatened to commit a crime that would result in the death or great bodily injury of a person the defendant knew was a state constitutional officer, a Member of the Legislature, or a judge or court commissioner, as defined in subdivisions (a), (b), (c), (n), and (q) of Section 7920.500 of the Government Code.

    (c) (1) For purposes of this section, “immediate family” means any spouse, whether by marriage or not, parent, child, any person related by consanguinity or affinity within the second degree, or any other person who regularly resides in the household, or who, within the prior six months, regularly resided in the household.

    (2) For purposes of this section, “electronic communication device” includes, but is not limited to, telephones, cellular telephones, computers, video recorders, fax machines, or pagers. “Electronic communication” has the same meaning as the term is defined in Subsection 12 of Section 2510 of Title 18 of the United States Code.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•Fears grow that age verification coming to VPNs as a British research firm labels them a 'loophole'English
    4·
    1 天前

    One other note: One of the first conversations on here I had was when Ada, the lemmy.blahaj.zone admin, was talking to some gay guy in some Middle Eastern country where content related to homosexuality were banned. The lemmy.blahaj.zone instance was blocked at his country’s network, but he could view the text content from any other home instance (since any accessible home instance on the Threadiverse itself intrinsically basically acts as a proxy for the content on other instances). I remember pointing out that he could tunnel via SSH. His problem was that he couldn’t view images, since the images were hosted on the lemmy.blahaj.zone server, but these days, some lemmy home instances (including my home instance, lemmy.today) automatically locally proxy images posted elsewhere to hide the IP address of their users, so he wouldn’t even have that problem now.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•Fears grow that age verification coming to VPNs as a British research firm labels them a 'loophole'English
    381·
    1 天前

    However, such efforts are technically flawed because the only reliable method for identifying VPN protocol signatures is deep packet inspection at the network level, which the EPRS paper doesn’t mention.

    I mean, you can tunnel whatever over whatever. You can tunnel a VPN over anything else that’s encrypted, so unless you also want to ban SSH and HTTPS connections and suchlike (well, okay, for UDP-based VPNs, you’d probably prefer something UDP-based, but I think that the point stands), you’re going to have trouble, say, blocking OpenVPN connections.

    Tor exists for the explicit purpose of not being blocked.

    Maybe you could try to characterize VPN traffic and do traffic analysis without being able to look inside the encrypted payload, say “VPN traffic tends to look like this”, but again, it’s not that hard to add noise to the signal.

    And you don’t even mostly need a full-on VPN for most of this, since it’s mostly just people trying to access Web services.

    Get yourself any Linux system in some less-restrictive location (which I’ll call server) running OpenSSH. SSH into it from client like so:

    [tal@client ~] $ ssh server -N -D127.0.0.1:1080

    On the client, install the Proxy Toggle Firefox plugin. Set it to use localhost, port 1080 as a SOCKS5 proxy. Click the toolbar button to toggle on proxy use. Now all your browser traffic is coming from that remote server. All a network provider can see is an SSH connection. Click again, and you’re back to normal mode.

    But tal, that’s complicated. Some people won’t know how to use SSH.

    So is virtually everything that a computer does. Raytracing. Image composition. Decoding discrete cosine transformation encodings. Rendering real-time video game worlds. If there’s a need, someone goes out and writes software that makes it easy for the end user. And if you create a situation where there is an unlimited quantity of stuff that a lot of end users want access to behind a wall which someone can make a one-click program to bypass, it’s probably a reasonably safe bet that that those one-click programs are going to show up.

    There is no loophole that can be trivially closed here. It’s a fundamental limitation — if users are going to be able to send traffic that you cannot inspect the inside of — and avoiding that would mean encryption spanning your borders being disallowed, which you probably do not want — then they can appear to be coming from wherever in the outside world they want.

    And plenty of people pointed out that this was a problem before age-verification stuff was put into force. This isn’t a situation where one just does the thing and there are a few lingering minor issues to iron out. It’s fundamental to the concept of doing age verification.

    But voters don’t want their kids seeing porn.

    Well, frankly, if said kids have Internet access and they want to see porn, they probably are going to be able to see porn or otherwise enjoy use of the least-restrictive set of rules out there. That’s part of having a world-spanning network where people can communicate with each other. There is going to be blasphemy and pornography and political extremism and stuff saying that Santa Claus doesn’t exist out there. Some of that is going to be material that doesn’t conform to the set of social norms where you live and will conform to social norms elsewhere in the world. I don’t personally see that as all that catastrophic.