Yes it can.

The fob has no idea what it has access to, in most systems it just has a serial number. When you tap it on the reader, the reader scans its serial number. The system has a list of which key numbers are allowed to open which doors at which times, if your key matches it opens the door. These almost always have some kind of log of which key opened which door when. Whether the building management knows how to access that is anyone’s guess.

If he loves in a building with fobs there’s probably cameras also.

So if he’s worried about after the fact investigation into his movements, he should live somewhere else.

That would require genuine intelligence. We only have artificial intelligence, both in the machines and the empty suits who market them.

For the last year or two AI has been the buzzword of the day. Anyone not investing in AI is considered dinosauric. Just like cloud was 5 to 10 years ago.

Only the cycle has happened a little more quickly this time. AI was supposed to produce immediate revolution, and we are seeing the immediate results are… Just okay.

Google spends billions building an AI that takes 10x more power per query than a standard search, only so it can tell people to superglue their pizza together and jump off the Golden Gate Bridge when they are depressed.

Copilot 365 costs about as much as an E3 license, so turning it on basically doubles your monthly spend with Microsoft. I don’t see it doubling anybody’s productivity.

AI is like cloud. There are some places where it makes sense, where it can be helpful, where it can save time or help do difficult jobs. That is not everywhere doing everything for everybody, and I think perhaps some of the world is starting to realize that.

I’ll bet they are great live. I actually have only heard one song of theirs, which I found by accident years ago when trying to find something else. Everlasting Light, played live. One of very few songs that completely makes it obvious how much mp3 compression sucks, and even if you download the FLAC (sadly not high res) you can still hear everything wrong with your speakers and if you listen to it on good headphones then you can hear the deficiencies of the mic they used to record it.

Truly a huge amount of audio information in that track. I love it!

Don’t think there is an ounce of principle in this either way. Toyota bet the farm on hybrids and hydrogen. Turns out EVs are the future, the one thing they bet would never happen. As a result they are now 10+ years behind everybody else in battery technology. If they pivoted and went 100% EV today, it would still be years before the models they start designing today make it to dealer showrooms. And here’s more before they made any kind of the per unit profit that current gas and hybrids do.

So they see laws like 100% EV by 2035 and they panic, because they aren’t ready to do that and probably aren’t going to be.

Thus, they try and stop EV mandates. And that gives them some unlikely allies, namely climate deniers.

It’s too bad that the company that made hybrids popular is now on the wrong side of history.

Not sure about better but I can add a step. Fire up Microsoft word, then write a macro which outputs a shortcut that launches Internet explorer with a URL that loads and local HTML page which after 1 second redirects to a .exe. then click open instead of save as. That only works with really old school internet explorer of course not the modern edge version.

It’s NYT. If you can’t defend Thompson as being worth keeping alive, may as well play the woke race card and say we only like him because he’s an attractive white male.

That’s the sort of shit I hope they get away from.
Lower taxes and more efficient less intrusive government are good ideas. They’re just too far in the pocket of big business so ‘lower taxes and more efficient government’ often comes off as ‘let’s give the 0.01% more tax breaks and defund the bloated inefficient EPA’.

If the Democrats lose, there is not going to be any soul searching. There is going to be a lot of finger pointing and blame. And most of it is going to be at Republicans, at the media, at Trump idiots, etc.

I am hoping that Trump loses if only because I think they’re actually be some realignment within the GOP. Unlike the Democrats, there is some actual question of direction within the GOP currently from what I’ve seen. Not everybody over there is happy with Trump. Many who just want power see him as too divisive and cultish, a Trump win is a win for Trump not necessarily for the GOP. There are some actual conservatives in the GOP who feel (IMHO correctly) that Trump is more of a cult of personality than a reflection of conservative values.

If nothing else, if Trump loses this time, he is probably finished. At least I hope so and I think there’s a good chance of it. Look at the younger generations, how many people under say 30 do you see waving Trump flags?

At least I really hope that realignment happens. And I also hope it comes with a realignment of message. I think there are a lot of conservative positions that could have mainstream appeal, that deserve a voice in politics, but the GOP has abandoned a great many of them in favor of harassing gay people and immigrants. That’s not a good way for us to go as a country.

Not really because their rights have not been violated, nothing was stolen from them. They were presented with a software product that had a limited license, and they accepted that. As far as they are concerned, the developer has fulfilled their contractual obligation to them; they were never offered a GPL license so they got exactly what they were offered.

The author of the GPL’d code however is another story. They wrote software distributed as GPL, Winamp took that code and included it without following the GPL. Thus that author can sue Winamp for a license violation.

Now if that author is the only one who wrote the software, the answer is simple- Llama Group pays them some amount of money for a commercial license of the software and a contract that this settles any past claims.

However if it’s a public open source project, it may have dozens or hundreds of contributors, each of which is an original author, each of which licensed their contribution to the project under GPL terms. That means the project maintainer has no authority to negotiate or take payments on their behalf; each of them would have to agree to that commercial license (or their contributions would have to be removed from the commercial version of the software that remains in Winamp going forward). They would also each have standing to sue Llama Group for the past unlicensed use of the software.

Unless you are one of the original developers who wrote the GPL code included in Winamp, you have no standing to sue them anyway.

Not necessarily. It means that Llama group, and perhaps the original Nullsoft, have violated the license of whatever open source developer wrote that code originally. So the only ones who could actually go after them to force anything are the ones who originally wrote that GPL code. They would basically have to sue Llama group, and they might also have a case against Nullsoft / AOL (who bought Nullsoft) for unjust enrichment over the years Winamp was popular.

Chances are it would get settled out of court, they would basically get paid a couple thousand bucks to go away. Even if they did have a legal resources to take it all the way to a trial, it is unlikely the end result would be compelling a GPL release of all of the Winamp source. Would be entertaining to see them try though.

Complicating that however, is the fact that if it’s a common open source library that was included, there may be dozens of ‘authors’ and it would take many or all of them to agree to any sort of settlement.

Here’s the story:
Company buys the rights to Winamp, tries to get the community to do their dev work for free, fails. That’s it.

The ‘Winamp source license’ was absurdly restrictive. There was nothing open about it. You were not allowed to fork the repo, or distribute the source code or any binaries generated from it. Any patches you wrote became the property of Llama Group without attribution, and you were prohibited from distributing them in either source or binary form.

There were also a couple of surprises in the source code, like improperly included GPL code and some proprietary Dolby source code that never should have been released. The source code to Shoutcast server was also in there, which Llama group doesn’t actually own the rights to.

This was a lame attempt to get the community to modernize Winamp for free, and it failed.

Of course many copies of the source code have been made, they just can’t be legally used or distributed.

The only way you can do this, is if the only service you use the provider for is storage. Encrypt the data before you send it to the provider and then they don’t know what they’re storing.

If they have to do any processing on it at all, then conceptually they need a plain text copy of it to feed into the CPU. And if they have that, there is nothing you can do to stop them from stealing it or using it.

There has been some research in this field, the concept is called homomorphic encryption. That is where you encrypt something in a way that allows a third party to manipulate the data without possessing a key. It is still very limited, and likely always will be due to the extreme difficulty of the question.

with an outside control interface that’s quite literally about as optimal as it can be.

Which is probably true, as long as you make one assumption- that the operator dedicates a significant amount of time to learning it. With that assumption being true- I’ll assume you’re correct and it becomes much more efficient than a Nano/Notepad style editor.

I’m happy to concede without any personal knowledge that if you’re hardcore editing code, it may well be worth the time to learn Vim, on the principle that it may well be the very most efficient terminal-based text editor.

But what if you’re NOT hardcore editing code? What if you just need to edit a config file here and there? You don’t need the ‘absolute most efficient’ system because it’s NOT efficient for you to take the time to learn it. You just want to comment out a line and type a replacement below it. And you’ve been using Notepad-style text editors for years.

Thus my point-- there is ABSOLUTELY a place for Vim. But wanting to just edit a file without having to learn a whole new editor doesn’t make one lazy. It means you’re being efficient, focusing your time on getting what you need done, done.

A text editor that doesn’t need a tutor because the interface is intuitive enough that someone who has been using text editors (as a concept) for years can more or less instantly pick it up and start working without needing a tutorial to simply edit a config file.

Yes exactly. This is a big part of why some repressive countries are starting to require identity registration in order to participate in social media. Arresting people is unnecessary if you can simply stamp out non-preferred speech at the point of discussion.

All the crypto in the world won’t help if you do stupid stuff and have crap OPSEC.

A big part of that is stay under the radar. If I were NSA I’d be running a great many TOR nodes (both relay nodes and exit nodes) in the hope of generating some correlations. Remember, you don’t need to prove in order to raise suspicion.

So for example if you have an exit node so you can see the request is CSAM related, and you run a bunch of intermediate nodes and your exit nodes will prefer routing traffic through your intermediate nodes (which also prefer routing traffic through your other intermediate nodes), you can guess that wherever the traffic goes after one or two relay hops through your nodes is whoever requested it.
If you find a specific IP address frequently relaying CSAM traffic to the public Internet, that doesn’t actually prove anything but it does give you a suspicion ‘maybe the guy who owns that address likes kiddy porn, we should look into him’.

Doing CSAM with AI tools on the public Internet is pretty stupid. Storing his stash on cell phones was even more stupid. Sharing any of it with anyone was monumentally stupid. All the hard crypto in the world won’t protect you if you do stupid stuff.

So speaking to OP- First, I’d encourage you to consider moving to a country that has better free speech protections. Or advocate for change in your own country. It’s not always easy though, because sadly it’s the unpopular speech that needs protecting; if you don’t protect the unpopular stuff you jump down a very slippery slope. We figured that out in the USA but we seem to be forgetting it lately (always in the name of ‘protecting kids’ of course).

That said, OP you should decide what exactly you want to accomplish. Chances are your nation’s shitty law is aimed at public participation type websites / social media. If it’s important for you to participate in those websites, you need to sort of pull an Ender’s Game type strategy (from the beginning of the book)- create an online-only persona, totally separate from your public identity. Only use it from devices you know are secure (and are protected with a lot of crypto). Only connect via TOR or similar privacy techniques (although for merely unpopular political speech, a VPN from a different country should suffice). NEVER use or allude to your real identity from the online persona. Create details about your persona that are different from your own- what city you’re in, what your age and gender are, what your background is, etc. NEVER use any of your real contact info or identity info.

Casey Neistat. Back when he was doing his daily vlog thing a lot of it was really interesting, covering him and his wife trying to make shit happen in the city as he was running and riding his powered skateboard around Manhattan. At some point his audience started drifting younger, way way younger, and I don’t know if it was him or me but I just kind of lost interest. It didn’t feel new anymore.

That might be me to be honest. I actually don’t watch YouTube that much at all anymore, unless I’m looking for something specific. Their recommendation algorithm is garbage and it is so obviously going for raw time suck engagement that it leaves me with a bunch of unfulfilling clickbait / ragebait where I could watch it for an hour and then just want my hour back so I end up not returning. The whole platform used to be more full of interesting genuinely entertaining and educational videos, now it just feels like a giant time sink. And every other video is now some paid sponsorship or plug where the creator is basically just whoring out their own influence. Case in point, look up reviews of laser engravers. Every single one that I could find, especially of a couple major brands, the creator got the laser hardware for free. Some of them are just advertisements that reuse the manufacturer’s own stock footage, and some seem more like real reviews, but for one or two brands I literally could not find one video where the creator wasn’t sponsored by the laser manufacturer.

It’s a very simple answer Apple has guaranteed that your data will stay on your device and stay secure. This is generally trusted because Apple has a track record of keeping user data secure on the device or encrypted in the cloud even in ways Apple cannot access. Point is, when Apple says they are going to do this in a way that respects privacy, and they outline the technical details of how it will work, people trust that because there’s a track record.

Microsoft has no such trust. They have a recent track record of being intrusive and using dark patterns to persuade users to give Microsoft their data, for example in Edge there have been new feature pop-ups that require data sharing with Microsoft and the two options are ‘got it’ and ‘settings’ so accepting requires one click and rejecting requires 4 going into the settings menu and changing a few things. Microsoft is also heavily pushing Copilot which is mostly cloud-based. Furthermore, Microsoft recently showed a system that would basically screenshot your computer at very regular intervals and store them in an insecure manner. Granted it was on the device, but the way they were going to be stored meant they could be stolen with two lines of code. And let’s not forget that Windows 11 cannot be set up without a Microsoft account, so to even use your computer you have to share your email address with Microsoft. In this and many other ways they just do not act like a company that respects privacy at all, they act like the typical big tech give us everything or we will make your life difficult type company that nobody trusts.