Jul (they/she)

Um…Koch Industries donated tons of money to politician to not retaliate against Russia when they invaded Ukraine, and they refused to pull out of Russia when lots of other companies were. And that’s just one small, recent example of their connections to Russia. Google can find lots of others. I mean go back far enough and their family had close connections to Stalin as well.

But why are the patches kept separate at all. Especially if it’s a copyleft licensed code they’re patching. Many of those require release of the code. And the spirit of that was to make companies who profit off of the code release anything they add as they add it. Otherwise, they’re welcome to instead of taking open source code and patching it, creating closed source code from scratch without using any of the code from the open source version and selling that. It’s very simple. The license says, you want this code, you’re welcome to it, but release any fixes or improvements you make do we all benefit, not just developers, but users all benefit. If they keep it locked up, even if they release it as a patch that’s not accessible to the large majority of users, then it’s violating the spirit if in some cases not the letter of the license.

There’s lots of things that could be innovated without faster processors. I mean if we’re just talking cell phones, adding a camera was an innovation, adding a touch screen and eventually touch keyboards that actually worked, different form factors. These things were aided by faster processors, but not directly dependent on them. But these could be totally unrelated devices to phones or even computing at all. Innovation across the board including med-tech, business models, city planning, and tons of other industries have suffered from privatization, deregulation, and leading then to consolidation and thus little need to compete and thus little need to innovate.

It used to be useful when there was competition to actually provide good service and actually negotiate prices. Consolidation to basically one parent company ruined the whole thing like most late capitalism consolidation tends to do…

“Companies aren’t innovating anymore and it’s costing the economy” is what it should say. When late stage capitalism leads to consolidation and cost cutting, stock buybacks, and other short term profit when competition is no longer necessary, that’s what kills the economy. That’s why monopolies and anticompetitive behaviors are bad, but the US doesn’t punish that anymore.

A lot of that was sexism and racism forcing less fascist loving conservatives over to Trump combined with a general sense of betrayal. The Democrats made a huge mistake forcing Biden down everyone’s throat by forcing other candidates not to run (which they do most years bit it was really obvious this time with the disapproval of how far right the party moved to even select Biden) and an even bigger mistake switching to Harris against the will of the (admittedly sham) vote.

But charge the capacitor with what? That’s the point. If it doesn’t kill the data immediately upon pushing the button, even when unplugged, it’s useless unless some bumbling idiot thief/cop/agent plugs it in before just disarming the button.

And as for fully physical, do tests with what? Another computer? Its a memory storage device with only an I/O driver and basic firmware. There’s no CPU to separately run software to detect if the components are destroyed. And if there were, that would have to be physically/electrically separated from the short that is going to kill the device and then physically reconnected, which would mean some kind of mechanical device most likely. Now were getting into a huge device, not a flash drive. The device already has capabilities to read and write data. Very easy to add a chip to give that random data to write over the existing data and a lot less power than a processor and motorized components.

And again, it doesn’t solve the redundancy problem. Single point of failure is always going to go wrong at least one in some number of cases. Even top of the line components and the best quality control available can’t beat redundancy and it’s way, way cheaper.

Exactly. But the corporations do it because it benefits them more than starting from scratch. They should release all changes to the central repository for all to consume as part of the agreement to get the benefit of the already created software. Not hold onto the patches to give them to their customers and people who pay them with their personal information.

“Dark” energy and matter aren’t necessarily actual objects or some special type of energy or matter, it’s just stuff we can’t detect with current technology. It’s such a poorly overdone sci-fi trope that TV’s imagination made us think it’s some exotic thing. I mean it could just be matter and energy in tiny amounts floating in the vastness of open space. “Empty space” isn’t actually a total void and it’s more vast than most people can imagine.

Yeah, but again, that requires precise destruction in a cheap chip while making sure both not to do it accidentally and making sure it’s successful afterwards. With redundancy, if one thing fails, there’s something else to do the job. Most corporations have abandoned this idea in exchange for short term profit and planned obsolescence. But it’s actually super important in real security.

Exactly, so give parents the tools to filter and make it their responsibility to police their children. Don’t make everyone give up their privacy and sometimes, security, and safety to shitty corporations who will eventually leak all of their data. Which is exactly what both I and pornhub are saying.

Same they did before or red hat does or every other corporation who has benefitted from the labor of open source developers. Services built on those things or built around them. Not the things themselves. Their corporate customers benefit from the stuff they produce, but they didn’t produce most of it,so either start from scratch with, propriety software, or they need to give the content to everyone at the same time, not hold onto it for some time. That’s against the whole idea of open source and probably technically violates some copyleft licenses, but definitely violates the spirit of them. Even if they fix some bugs or add some features, they didn’t come up with the ideas, build the thing while it wasn’t producing income, or build the communities that they collaborate with. They just add what benefits them to the existing content.

What if the destruction fails, or isn’t thorough. Much harder to retrieve information from a partial block of memory if it has also been overwritten with garbage to erase it. Redundancy is essential to security.

A device like that isn’t putting enough voltage into it to “melt” it. It you want it that well destroyed you’re going to need a high temperature incinerator with a good filter since it’s not safe to breath the smoke it will create. Or at the very least a heating element inside it, but then you need layers of heat protection so it doesn’t catch everything around it on fire or burn the person pushing the button.

This isn’t that. This is meant to destroy the data at a moment’s notice with the push of a button. Problem is that it has to be plugged in to do it, which in my mind is defeating the purpose.

Ubuntu has that dumb subscription to get security updates that pushed me away. Sure it was free for personal use, but I don’t want to have to give my personal information to get updates that are created primarily by volunteer open source developers anyway.

Capacitor wouldn’t allow long enough to wipe the data first. It’s a two pass system. Wipe data then destroy. Also capacitors lose charge over time much, much more quickly than a battery. You still would need to have plugged it in very recently. And yes to build enough voltage to destroy electronics physically and quickly with a battery, it would actually probably need both battery and capacitors anyway which would also increase size. I’m guessing it was a tradeoff of size vs functionality, but having it not work until it’s plugged in after pressing the button which is bright red when pressed, seems like a very simple way to bypass the destruction by simply disassembling it before plugging it in. Only good if the thief/agent doesn’t know why there’s a big red spot on it before plugging it in, which is a bad assumption for security especially if you deploy these widely so everyone knows what they are.

It’s always been obvious that Putin was behind the Tea Party which evolved into MAGA, and even more obviously, Trump. Problem is the whole system is designed to only allow wealthy land owners to hold power, thus the two party system enforced by the electoral college, and the districting systems that are easily manipulated to give power to land area, above population. The whole system at the federal level is broken on purpose. All we can do is try to get more people to vote so population has more power over land area, but the conservative controlled states cut funding for voting and people have to work do can’t wait in line for many, many hours in large cities on election days. Only progressive states have mail-in voting and early voting and even there we’re stick voting for “lesser evil” candidates due to the two party system both controlled by the wealthy. There’s the far right fascist Republican party and the moderate right Corporate friendly Democratic party. No party gir the people.

Have devices do the blocking for kids by having sites required to identify themselves as adult oriented in a standard way. The bad sites aren’t going to enact the requirements for people to identify themselves any more than they would enact the requirements for sites to identify themselves to devices but it eliminates the tracking of adults and blocking of legitimate content to children with parental permission like sexual education sites by allowing exception lists for parents.

Fatal flaw is it has to be connected to a computer to start the process. If someone truly wants the data they could just disassemble the device before it gets connected if the button has been pressed. They should have found a way to do it with a small onboard battery reserved only for that purpose.

I wouldn’t say invention of the emoticon since it already existed since typewriter days in the same exact form and in print and writing for at least hundreds of years. Maybe the first recorded attempt to create a specific purpose for it on a computer system. But that seems pretty flimsy as an “invention”. But given the state of the patent system, just about everything I’m technology is an invention these days despite how long it has existed or how obvious it was.

Yep. Government/taxpayer funded access to the internet including funding fiber to the home just like we did with phone lines many decades ago, and putting back laws to enforce net neutrality. That way it’s cheap to run a server again. Right now most residential access has poor upload speeds so you have to pay for expensive, business priced plans to run a local server to compete with big corporations.