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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • The hero photo for the article shows a camera over a road that likely is likely running number plate recognition software…

    Honestly I’d be more worried about where that data is going than the tracking software in your car. They’ve got the most critical information (where did you drive and when), and they’ve got it for every car instead of just Honda drivers.

    This needs to be fixed with legislation, and it needs to be fixed actively. For example by getting rid of number plates entirely and replacing them with something like the transponders used in aircrafts and ships, but with an encrypted rolling code that only shares your data when authorised to do so (by the owner of the vehicle).

    Apple “Find My” works like that… your location is encrypted, and it’s uploaded without any identifying information. When the user brings up a map looking for their keys, that’s the only time encryption keys are handed over allowing the already stored information to be accessed. The car version of that could be police asking you at every traffic stop to hit a button on your dashboard that unlocks your registration/insurance details so they can run a quick check against their outstanding warrant/etc database.



  • you can’t ignore basic laws of the universe that oil is a finite resource

    TLDR - oil might be a finite resource but gasoline is not oil and it can be renewable. But it’s also a rapidly shrinking market.

    The stuff can literally be grown on trees. It’s cheaper to pump it out of the ground, but it’s actually not much cheaper. Fuel from plants, which we farm in bulk for human consumption, can absolutely be used to create gasoline. It’s also net-zero — because the plant takes carbon out of the atmosphere to create the oil and then it’s simply returned to the atmosphere when your burn it.

    Most gasoline in the USA contains at least 10% biofuel, and some is up to 85%. The latter requires an engine tuned to run on it, however it’s possible (and is an area of active research) if you’re willing to spend a bit more money to manufacture 100% pure biofuel that can run on unmodified engines. Porsche in particular has started selling a biofuel that is specifically designed to run on classic cars that were manufactured decades ago. They plan to produce something like a million gallons a month of the stuff, and it will work in basically any car. And if you have a classic car (designed for gasoline that contained lead) then it will work better than the fossil fuel you can buy at a gas station

    The thing is though, battery powered vehicles are way cheaper than doing any of that. And if you really need a fuel based approach (e.g. batteries are just too heavy for large aircraft), then Hydrogen is a better option than any biofuel.

    So - while gasoline can technically be environmentally friendly and is a usable source of energy for the foreseeable future, in reality it’s destined to follow horse drawn carriages and steam engines, a technology some people only use for their own personally enjoyment or to preserve our history.


  • Everything-but-Windows?

    No. Any device that implements a certain DHCP feature is vulnerable. Linux doesn’t support it, because most Linux systems don’t even use DHCP at all let alone this edge case feature. And Android doesn’t support it because it inherited the Linux network stack.

    I would bet some Linux systems are vulnerable, just not with the standard network packages installed. If you’re issued a Linux laptop for work, wouldn’t be surprised if it has a package that enables this feature. It essentially gives sysadmins more control over how packets are routed for every computer on the LAN.



  • The porn industry is, in fact, extremely hostile to AI image generation. How can anyone make money off porn if users simply create their own?

    Also I wouldn’t be surprised if the it’s false advertising and in clicking the ad will in fact just take you to a webpage with more ads, and a link from there to more ads, and more ads, and so on until eventually users either give up (and hopefully click on an ad).

    Whatever’s going on, the ad is clearly a violation of instagram’s advertising terms.

    I’m just hoping I can communicate the danger of some of the social media platforms to my children well enough. That’s where the most damage is done with the kind of stuff.

    It’s just not your children you need to communicate it to. It’s all the other children they interact with. For example I know a young girl (not even a teenager yet) who is being bullied on social media lately - the fact she doesn’t use social media herself doesn’t stop other people from saying nasty things about her in public (and who knows, maybe they’re even sharing AI generated CSAM based on photos they’ve taken of her at school).


  • In less than two years, the rechargeable lithium-ion battery found in your AirPods is due to die an untimely death.

    Bullshit. I got four years out of each of my pairs and I used them several hours a day. Also replacing the battery when it does wear out is is something like 50 bucks. Sure, you can’t do it yourself but Apple will give you a refurbished pair, and they will recycle your old battery.

    And they provide free recycling for all their products — you’re basically paying for it to be recycled when you buy AirPods and any that go into landfill that’s entirely the customer’s fault.

    No wired headphones I’ve ever owned lasted even close to that long - the cable eventually fails with several hours per day of swinging around and being packed tightly into your pocket.

    That said, I’ve switched to bone conduction headphones now, and will probably never own another pair of airpods unless they go down the same path.


  • Oh is see it is the porn site itself blocking the uk visitors

    Sure. A little more to it than that though.

    AFAIK the UK most likely said “this content is illegal, if you don’t remove it, we’ll go all Kim Dotcom on your ass” and it’s entirely up to the website operator how they want to respond to that. They could fight it like Kim did… might not end well though.

    Any large website with user uploaded content receives notices like that routinely (including Lemmy) and most of them respond by deleting the content itself, because it’s usually pretty nasty shit or else it wouldn’t have got the feds attention. It’s treated the same as malware/spam/etc.

    For whatever reason, these ones chose to take the entire website offline if necessary.


  • or is it something I’ll need to worry about for weeks/months

    Try years. For example the 2020 Takata airbag recall… wouldn’t be surprised if there’s still a hundred million cars around the world that haven’t been recalled. If you don’t live in a first world country, it wasn’t even possible to get parts for the fix until recently.

    Even if the fix was smaller, there aren’t enough mechanics in the world to check/update/test a significant percentage of cars quickly, and manufacturers share components so that can easily happen.

    And the biggest time sink for a recall is often not the repair, it’s all the time spent with humans scheduling/testing/documenting the recall. Only way to speed that up is with automation/OTA updates.



  • Fuck an OTA update too, I don’t want that either

    Yeah no - you’re dead wrong about that. My oldish car has an annoying glitch where it occasionally goes into limp home mode. The workaround makes it pretty clear this could be fixed with a software change (or even just a non-vague error code would be nice…) - but my car can’t do OTA updates and also it’s old enough it doesn’t really have software so a recall would be hideously expensive.

    It’s not a safety problem, so wouldn’t rigger a recall. When it’s under warranty, they fix it… but sometimes it takes several attempts with multiple thousand dollar parts replaced on suspicion before finally finding the one that caused it, when it fails out of warranty… either live with the issue or sell the car for spare parts.

    if an OTA update was possible they would absolutely do that. The ones that fail under warranty must be costing them a fortune.

    But the real issue is recalls are expensive, and ultimately the car buyer pays for them. Car manufacturers are not charities, they will either raise prices to cover the cost of a recall or they will go bankrupt to avoid doing a recall. There is no other option on the table.


  • Yeah you’d be wrong. Apple is very open about how the security model works - which is similar to Signal and fully encrypted. The only way to decrypt a message is with physical access to one of the sender/recipient’s devices.

    Their claims about how it operates have been confirmed by open source developers reverse engineering the protocol (e.g. Beeper).

    There is one workaround — device backups can be accessed and depending how you backup, your message history is likely in there (you can do encrypted backups, but that means data loss if you forget your password or an attacker changes it on you which would happen, lots of money in a ransomware attack like that). However even then – all your other devices show a popup message if you restore from a backup - warning that a “new device” has access to your messages.