111–120 of 162 posts
By supporting Saudi Arabia the West really shoots itself in the foot. You can't lecture other countries about freedom while supporting this regime.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking back, it was unbelievable to see how huge the storm caused by Intel's "processor serial number" in Pentium 3 was, that even forced Intel to withdrew it. Meanwhile, nobody has ever said anything about the serial numbers of hard drives, GPUs, motherboards, RAM modules, Ethernet MAC address, etc, etc, etc. Nowadays, basically everything comes with one UUID. Pretty illogical, isn't it? > We've long lost the war o…
Furthermore, in many OS those unique numbers are not protected from applications. For example, in Linux any application can read any hardware identifiers without any specific permissions. For comparison, in Android an application needs to have a permission to read phone or IMEI number.
BTW, how does Windows hash your hardware serial numbers for DRM nowadays? I haven't used and checked it for a long time. Is it still the harddrive and the motherboard?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMEI is the phone’s unique serial number, not a phone number. But everything you said still applies: why does my phone need a serial number that it phones “home” with?
For the same reason your Ethernet card and wifi chip have MAC addresses, except the cell network is a single giant address space spanning literally the entire planet. Even better, it's paid-access you wouldn't gain anything by periodically randomizing it unless you also anonymized payment. On top of all that, it's all the way down at the hardware level, and I bet that cell network equipment is sensitive enough to tel…
By supporting Saudi Arabia the West really shoots itself in the foot. You can't lecture other countries about freedom while supporting this regime.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a delicate game being played. If you are friendly with SA you can put pressure on them to improve. If you declare them an evil enemy would the outcome be better? There is a path to walk and it is not easy to find the right one when you have to deal with reality not just idealism. The natural resources in the middle east are important to the world and it is not so simple as an 'us vs. them' because there are…
> If you are friendly with SA you can put pressure on them to improve. If you declare them an evil enemy would the outcome be better? > There is a path to walk and it is not easy to find the right one when you have to deal with reality not just idealism. The natural resources in the middle east are important to the world and it is not so simple as an 'us vs. them' because there are many entirely separate interests in…
I lament the position of these women. I lament the position of a lot of men and women in the Kingdom. But the best I can do for them is to vote for politicians who won't support bloodthirsty tyrants like MBS. That's all that most Americans can do for those people. We're not a bad people, we're just ruled over by elites with no conscious. There's a difference.
Now that they know, they can try to swap out for a burner phone along the way.
I've been thinking about having a service that lets someone else randomize the location of your phone. That was the primary goal and it evolved to food delivery couriers having additional services where they charge people's phones in a lockbox while they run around all day. Result: Many people's location is erroneous data. No single person's use of the service is suspicious and merely reflecting a societal sentiment…
By supporting Saudi Arabia the West really shoots itself in the foot. You can't lecture other countries about freedom while supporting this regime.
There is a delicate game being played. If you are friendly with SA you can put pressure on them to improve. If you declare them an evil enemy would the outcome be better? There is a path to walk and it is not easy to find the right one when you have to deal with reality not just idealism. The natural resources in the middle east are important to the world and it is not so simple as an 'us vs. them' because there are…
False dichotomy, one could simply maintain distance. We do declare Iran to be an evil enemy despite the fact that Iran has considerably more in common with the US than SA does: it's quasi-democratic with an established religion, has considerably greater social and economic diversity, occupies a superior strategic position, and rests on a vastly more solid historical foundation.
I remember back in the 90's, when Intel was going to introduce a unique identifier in their processors that could be used for authentication purposes, it caused a huge uproar and Intel backed down. [0] Having a hardware embedded unique ID that can be (is) used for tracking a known persons location at all times is probably the most intrusive privacy violation we've ever had. That we willingly carry these things around…
Looking back, it was unbelievable to see how huge the storm caused by Intel's "processor serial number" in Pentium 3 was, that even forced Intel to withdrew it. Meanwhile, nobody has ever said anything about the serial numbers of hard drives, GPUs, motherboards, RAM modules, Ethernet MAC address, etc, etc, etc. Nowadays, basically everything comes with one UUID. Pretty illogical, isn't it? > We've long lost the war o…
Don't run spyware on purpose.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Does that mean that privacy is dead by an inexorable process? Yes. >Doesn't that imply that individual liberty is also, eventually, dead? Yes. >How can we, the people, administer the thousand cuts? Stop carrying a cell phone. There was a brief period of time, from 1990 to 8:40 AM, September 11th, 2001, when you could do all sorts of stuff online, and the powers that be either didn't, or couldn't, monitor it. That's…
> There was a brief period of time, from 1990 to 8:40 AM, September 11th, 2001, when you could do all sorts of stuff online, and the powers that be either didn't, or couldn't, monitor it. The belief that September 11 brought in the dark times overlooks the actual history of things. The European Parliament’s ECHELON report, which detailed American massive interception and storage of internet and other electronics comm…
http://new.duncan.gn.apc.org/menu/journalism/newstatesman/So...
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The opposition to that, Clipper chip, and V-chip are three of the specific examples that come to mind when I think of cultural changes among CS techies. My impression is that there used to be more awareness, concern, and forward-looking/vision about such things. (I even recall techies being shunned for doing the tiniest fraction of invasiveness/recklessness that some major companies do today, yet those companies are…
The culture was different in 90s. I remember that Windows used to ask a permission to connect to Internet to search for drivers. Today they just collect whatever telemetry they want without giving an option to disable it. I guess the reason for change is that their customers were mostly power corporate users then and now it is mostly ordinary people.