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Or btrfs for that matter. I'm doing something similar with btrfs. Used zfs for a while, but the external repositories kept getting out of sync with the distribtion kernel, so system updates required manual intervention. That annoyed the heck out of me over time. Switched back to btrfs, which has been working fine for the last year. 10 or so years earlier I still had data corruption and bugs with btrfs.

AFAIK every popular Android phone uses a qualcomm modem chip with a separate OS that has complete access to ram. NSA most certainly has a backdoor there and such complete access to any Android phone. This was common knowledge after the Snowden stuff. I don't think this has changed at all since. Only few niche phones (pinephone) separate these systems or have a hardware switch to disable the cellular system.

>I don't think this has changed at all since.

There is common knowledge to suggest that it is not the case (or maybe is no longer the case):

>Mainstream smartphones do not provide DMA access from the baseband to the application processor's memory... Yes, getting baseband access then lets you monitor regular voice and SMS comms. But no, it does not instantly compromise the AP so using the Signal app would still be secure. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906488

>Apple mitigates baseband processor vulnerabilities by putting it behind what's essentially an IOMMU. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29440154

>This is false FUD that keeps being repeated. It's not true. No iPhone ever has had a baseband with DMA access to my knowledge, and modern Qualcomm devices have advanced IOMMU systems to firewall away the baseband from the rest of system memory. I'm sure some phones somewhere existed where the baseband was privileged, but it's not the norm. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30393283

>Connecting a cellular radio via USB provides far less isolation than the approach of a tiny kernel driver connected to an IOMMU isolated cellular radio on mainstream devices. USB has immense complexity and attack surface, especially with a standard Linux kernel configuration. Forensic data extraction companies mostly haven't bothered using attack vectors other than USB due to it being such a weak point. Many of the things people claim about cellular radios in mainstream smartphones are largely not true and they're missing that other radios are implemented in a very comparable way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46841004


> NSA most certainly has a backdoor there and such complete access to any Android phone.

Citation needed?

> This was common knowledge after the Snowden stuff.

Not to me, it isn't? As far as I'm aware, most of the Snowden stuff were centered around PRISM, which allowed widescale wiretapping of internet backbone, as well as agreements with big cloud providers to allow tapping into their data.

I haven't seen anything indicating that there was widespread compromise of personal computing devices at such a deep level of the root of trust. I haven't seen any indication that the NSA has a backdoor in the earlyboot CPU of any device, whether that is the Qualcomm boot processor, the Intel Management Engine or the AMD Platform Security Processor (which all have similar capabilities and hidden firmware).

If I missed anything/have links to research into these backdoors, I'd like to see them!


The backdoor is that those are all US companies and the NSA can force them to comply.

"the greatest theft in human history" what a nonsense. I was curious, how the AI haters will cope, now that the tides here have changed. We have built systems that can look at any output and replicate it. That is progress. If you think some particular sequence of numbers belongs to you, you are wrong. Current intellectual property laws are crooked. You are stuck in a crooked system.


"Centralised systems were designed with the best of intentions, but were turned against us anyway."

What a weird take. The internet was built fundamentally decentralized but was centralized against us with the worst of intentions. They lost me at the first sentence.


You have to go into the past a little bit. Think about your:

University email, FTP, and terminal server.

The Internet is just a highway. You will end up at a destination.


I think it's a bit of a stretch to include protocols and protocol suites among centralized services. One simple test for this is the question: "How many Xs are there?". For examples, how many email servers, FTP servers or terminal servers are there? Compare that with "How many Facebooks or GitHubs are there?".

Email protocol suite is designed to be federated. FTP is just a file system access protocol. But you could combine it with an inter-server filesystem synchronization protocol/service to make it a distributed federated service. And as for terminal servers,.. well, I don't think centralization makes much sense there. How can you achieve any of these with centralized services?


I talk about the past, your university FTP-Server was the central point to get your Software/Manuals also publish your work (today's Github/Sourceforge?). Your university Email Server was the primary central point to exchange Information mostly inside your university.

Again i talk about the past when email was primarily used to talk to other peoples often not even over a net but inside a mainframe thing.

I though i was clear talking about the past hence not including Facebook or GitHub, and btw. Email just became "federated" when everyone agreed to use smtp when talking over the internet.


Not against us. Against some of the nerds will. The rest cheered. That's why it worked.

Humans hate friction, they don't want to pay for maintenance and have short term thinking.

Even on HN there are plenty of voices saying they won't even bother using firefox because it inconvenience them.

Can we blame then the normies for choosing integrated easy systems to use?


It really boils down to if the individual cares about freedoms. Some hackers don't care about them, and some normies do. Both of them use centralized and restrictive services. But the former does it by choice, while the latter does it because they don't know any better. But those normies do take an action when they have enough information. How many ordinary people have participated in boycotts and cancelation of subscriptions against corporations in protest of exploitation or for digital detoxification?

It's partially our own failure to be loud enough and get them the information they need.


>Can we blame then the normies for choosing integrated easy systems to use?

With that logic everyone would use the Edge-Browser right? Don't underestimate the "normie" ;)


Firefox was always a geek thing, I've been using it since it was called phoenix and at its peak, it was mostly nerds installing that at schools, convincing their mums, etc, thanks to the adblock.

The only reason we are not all using edge is because google spend billions marketing Chrome in early 2000. They got the normies with brute forcing, because they could make money with it, not for making the world better.

Heck, they promoted google on the HOME PAGE of google search, an ad spot you can't even buy from google, with a pseudo notification, a format google uses for nothing else in ads.

They went full throttle.

But nobody is going to spend millions to promote decentralization. Because it's about concentrating less power.

HN has always been terrible at undertanding that, because while they argue about what browser to use, the average user can barely make the difference between an app and a website anyway.


>I've been using it since it was called phoenix and at its peak, it was mostly nerds installing that at schools, convincing their mums, etc, thanks to the adblock.

Are you talking about Netscape? Because that was installed on everything ;)

>because google spend billions marketing Chrome in early 2000

Really? Early 2000?


No, firefox was first called phoenix (because it was seen as a rebirth of the netscaoe ethos) then firebird.

Netscape got killed by ie 5.5 and firefox competed mostly with ie 6 on Market and opera on innovation.

And yep, i think 2008 was first chrome ad on google search. It hurts but we are a quarter century in now.


>And yep, i think 2008

That's late 2000

Firefox was installed on around 30% in 2010:

https://statisticsanddata.org/data/most-popular-browser-1996...


Open systems provide plenty of opportunity for smaller businesses to provide innovative and convenient services. What kind of innovation and experimentation other then getting more ads in are the gatekeepers that we have today interested in doing as long as there's no competition?


I'd read that as "some centralised systems", not "all centralised systems"


Do you mean that you can mark files for which still the underlying filesystem is used? As far as I remember there were experiments with that about 20 years ago, but it was decided that the added complexity wasn't worth it. The implementation that replaced all of that has been very stable (unlike the ones before) and i'm using it heavily, so i think they had a point. Some write-through behavior can be scripted on top of that.

EDIT: So, wikipedia lists overlayfs and aufs as active projects and unionfs predates both. Maybe unionfs v2 is what replaced all that? Maybe I'm hallucinating...


Overlayfs doesn't write through, and I believe unionfs and aufs no longer support write-through.

What I want is pretty much like how a write-through cache would work.

1. Write to top-level FS? The write cascades down but reads are fast immediately

2. Data not available in top-level FS? The read goes down to the bottom level and then reads up to the top so future reads are fast.


If you select 30, 60 or 90 columns you get the clearest patterns. It kinda seems that the more divisors the number of columns has, the clearer the vertical clusters are. And somehow 30, 60 and 90 stand out. Number theory is so weird. I expected more randomness.


The reason vertical clusters appear in these examples is that all your chosen numbers are multiples of 6. A prime number greater than 3 leaves a remainder of either 1 or 5 when divided by 6. In other words:

For all primes p greater than 3, p ≡ ±1 (mod 6).

Therefore, when the total number of columns is a multiple of 6, all primes except 2 fall into the same columns, namely 1, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17 and so on.


I just set the column width to 6 to verify this for myself. What a neat tool!


Oh yes, thanks!


If you can do 210 you'll see even more.

Any primorial will give you the strongest patterns. (Primorials are the products of the first N primes, so 2, 6, 30, 210, etc.)


Very cool. Go from 30 to 31 to see this ‘pattern’ twist in on itself.


Go for 258 and be ready to get your mind blown.


210 columns is stripes


This thread fails to mention that a cipher has to be somewhat hard to compute or someone with a lot of resources can't just brute force it. Therefore you also want an implementation of a given cipher to be as efficient as possible, so that no future improvement lowers the security of your cipher.


"Lightweight" cryptography is not intended for smartphones, personal computers and similarly powerful devices.

It is intended only for microcontrollers embedded in various systems, e.g. the microcontrollers from a car or from a robot that automate various low-level functions (not the general system control), or from various sensors or appliances.

It is expected that the data exchanged by such microcontrollers is valuable only if it can be deciphered in real time.

If an attacker would be able to decipher the recorded encrypted data by brute force after a month, or even after a week, it is expected that the data will be useless. Otherwise, standard cryptography must be used.


... without, however, creating the impression that Ascon or Xoodyak could be broken by brute force in a week, a month, or a century.


Those demonstrations are absolutely amazing and I don't think they are meant to maximize usability.


There is openstreetmaps of course and osmand as a navigation app. There is also a biking specific project related to openstreetmaps. None of it is as polished as komoot of course. Far from it. This sell-out was totally predictable. Why the outrage? Do people never learn? It's so frustrating.


I think it is fair to be annoyed that crowd sourcing is used to enrich a select few.

Honestly the best course of action is to let it die. $300M is enough money that losing the user base would be enough for similar things to stop happening.


Sure, hate AI all you want, you are going to be the ones left behind. What you call "the web" has been dead for a long time.


I am having an experience that sort of supports this view. Getting into photography I am finding it difficult to find good tutorials and guides which are not videos. But everybody wants some of the YouTube money I guess so that’s where creators focus their efforts..


This might be a sign of things to come, the quality of the virtual world is decreasing at record speed, that's opening the door to a return to the analogical world - aka books in your case.


Yes. But I already have shelves filled with books wishing half of them were digital.. but I agree we can have both..


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