Spyke

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Sorry, Pinta, my prayers have been answered

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Microsoft's definition of "cross-platform" generally means "Windows and mobile devices, maybe Macs"; MAUI supports Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and Tizen, but not desktop Linux.

Generally speaking, if you want a .Net UI that works on all desktop operating systems you'll want a third-party framework like Avalonia or Uno. Yes, that's extremely annoying but .Net is generally well-designed otherwise and they have to put that signature Microsoft touch somehwere.

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AI data centers face increasing complaints about inaudible but 'felt' infrasound — citizens complain high- and low-frequency sounds do not register on decibel meters but cause adverse health effects

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Yes, infrasound is a fairly well understood phenomenon. Loud noise at frequencies below 10 Hz isn't commonly picked up by recording equipment but can induce things like anxiety, nausea, and sleep problems. While recently wind power plants have sometimes been accused of generating it, it's also been caused by industrial fans and even resonance in a building's ductwork.

It wouldn't surprise me if a data center's AC caused enough noise at frequencies not normally monitored to become an issue.

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Electron apps

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Best I can do is mandatory Lumen and Nanite. You can get almost-stable 60 fps on a 5090 with DLSS Performance and 3x frame gen, which should be optimized enough for anyone.

My game will sell for 80 bucks, 150 if you want the edition with all the preorder-exclusive content.

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60% of MD5 password hashes are crackable in under an hour

So Kaspersky found out that MD5 passwords are unsafe. That's literally 20 year old news. Actually, Kaspersky found out that brute-forcing MD5 on consumer-grade hardware has become slightly faster than two years ago, which makes me wonder if Captain Obvious's secret identity is that of a Kaspersky cybersecurity expert.

El Reg concludes from this that we should ditch passwords, which they back up with the opinion of a second expert. This expert immediately tells them they're wrong, that passwords are perfectly fine if used with MFA, and that a lack of public knowledge about basic cybersecurity is the real issue. They somehow treat this as him agreeing with them.

Actual technological alternatives to traditional password use (such as passkeys or password managers with per-site passwords) are mentioned only as an aside or not at all. It never occurred to El Reg or Kaspersky to mention that MD5 has been considered obsolete since the days of Internet Explorer 7 and that more secure hashes like bcrypt have been around since the late 90s. For that matter, the Kaspersky source talks about rainbow tables without using the word "salt" even once.

Finally they conclude with a call to action to "improve that user security stack", arguing that passwords are inherently unsafe due to their "complex requirements and hashed storage". That's so deep into la-la land that I'm not even sure what it is they're trying to say or who they're even talking to.

That's an amazingly badly written article.

What impresses me the most is that the Kaspersky article they're talking about is just as asinine as El Reg's confused stammering. The most sense I can make out of it is that they're making a bad faith argument ("we can brute-force MD5'd passwords with a 5090 so you should use MFA") because they're trying to get nontechnical people to do the right thing and hope they can scare them into compliance if they bullshit hard enough.

Edit: I just noticed how often Kaspersky's article refers to the own password manager they sell. So their bad faith argument is really just in service of an ad that happens to contain some decent security advice.

linux

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Why does Linux have such a terrible sleep?

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It also doesn't help that ACPI is a badly-designed mess of a standard. I remember that in the 2010s one of Apple's selling points was that their laptops had sleep and hibernation that worked every time. Heck, MacOS X could even decide intelligently when to do which. This mostly worked because they fully controlled the hardware, firmware, and software. Other laptop manufacturers could just take their best stab at implementing ACPI power states and hope their implementation matched Microsoft's.

Microsoft tried to solve the mess by introducing the S0ix ACPI state (aka "Modern Standby"), which was defined in a way that could actually be implemented without too much guesswork. Unfortunately, this was during the Windows 8 era when Microsoft decided that laptops should be more like smartphones so S0ix is much closer to turning your screen off on a phone than to actual standby.

The system randomly waking up and deciding to do work is an explicitly intended feature because what if you get a Teams message while your laptop is in your bag? Sure, you might say that you'd either have Teams on your phone or wouldn't immediately care but that kind of thinking won't get you anywhere within Microsoft. Also, Windows actually has very little restraint about what it does when it wakes up so it might decide to install a heavy update or an application might decide it's important enough to do work right now. While the laptop is in your bag. Cue you wondering if the laptop turned off because the battery's empty or because it overheated.

And to make things worse Microsoft specified that in order to be allowed to use Modern Standby, the device must not offer S3 (sleep/suspend-to-ram). Some manufacturers still allow you to enable S3 but it's a legacy feature that's even less well supported than before.

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Don't Look Up

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I remember the early 2000s when basically 90% of all Americans were absolutely certain that jihadists were going to attack their local supermarket any minute now because Power Cable, Nebraska was such a strategic target.

Heck, there was a bomb scare because of an advertisement campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force that involved placing PCBs with LEDs on them that would display characters from the show. Because surely Al Quaeda would put conspicuous LED displays on their bombs.

News media want people to panic so they keep tuning in. Panicked people tend to come up with remarkably stupid scenarios like "Al Quaeda have unlimited resources and can show up anywhere to shoot people at random" or "Hamas want to take Dorcester as a strategic location to strike at Israel from".

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Netflix Plans to Bring Ads to Even More Parts of Its Service

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That's just misinformation. I put some shows onto a Jellyfin instance and not a single one has disappeared. Not even an email about something being dropped soon. So that's a core part of the Netflix experience you're just not getting with Jellyfin.

Heck, it doesn't even randomly force me to watch in 1080p or 720p despite being on the 4K plan and the show/movie being available in 4K. It's like Jellyfin isn't even trying.

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It was actually Brazil, but 'anywho'

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Not necessarily. Germany uses just pens and paper ballots for the election and has fairly trustworthy results. We can typically call the vote after six to eight hours, with the last votes being counted within twelve.

We do that by requiring all parties that are electable in a region to send representatives to the polling places. After voting ends, all ballots are taken to a backroom and divided into stacks. Each party representative tallies the votes in one stack, than passes the stack on to another party's representative. They tally the stack as well; if any discrepancies are found the stack is passed on to another representative and so on. Once all ballots have been tallied and everyone agrees that the count is accurate, the ballots are put into sealed containers for secure transport to the election commission and the tally is reported to them electronically. The whole process is open to public inspection so if you want to watch people count votes for eight hours on a Sunday night you can.

Since the count is parallelized over all polling places and over all parties within each polling place we can get authoritative results within hours. Typically, voting ends at 18:00 and the results are clear enough to call the election at around 22:00, with the last tallies coming in at around 02:00. There is no debate about manipulated voting machines because there aren't any voting machines. And since the parties check each others# results during the count it's assumed that the tally is fairly accurate.

Of course that only works if you have enough parties to matter; with two parties and a talking spoiler effect you're not going to be as fast. Oh, and in Germany polling places are only allowed to serve a certain number of voters by law; if there are too many voters and additional polling place has to be created. Of course that doesn't mesh with the American voting district system at all.

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Genius

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The SR-71 wasn't all that stealthy. Its main defense was that it moved too high for flak and too fast for SAMs. It was retired when interception capabilities improved to match it.

news

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Carrie Underwood, Village People to perform at Trump's inauguration events

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Victor Willis (the lead singer and effective owner of the band) has had some interesting interactions with the Trump campaign. To quote Wikipedia:

In the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump once again used the song at his rallies, usually performing the "Trump Dance" while it played. Willis has lamented his use of the song since 2020, and even considered a lawsuit to block Trump from using the song, but confessed there's "not much he can do about it" and decided it was "beneficial" to have the song back on the charts. He later reversed his position and thanked Trump for using the song, pointing out how it had earned him several million dollars.

On January 13, 2025, Village People announced their participation at Trump's second inauguration.

In December, Willis also stated that Y.M.C.A. had never had any homosexual connotations whatsoever in one of the most transparent attempts at marketing something to conservatives I've yet seen. I get the feeling that he's probably not a MAGA believer but he's perfectly willing to pose as whatever he has to if it makes him money.

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Nocturnal rule

We know that people have different chronotypes. We even know that most people of working age aren't really morning people. Unfortunately, our business world assumes a standard circadian rhythm and is structured around getting up early because people needed to use every bit of daylight way back when. So that sucks, especially if you're an evening or even night person.