Spyke

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India forces WhatsApp and Telegram into permanent SIM binding

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And that's the truest, just unpleasant, answer to all the talk about new messenger services and emerging replacements.

Power doesn't care about rules. Power does care that you don't have a way to communicate freely. Power punishes you if you try to find a way.

Social problems are not solved by technical means. Or, for the sake of correctness, - they are, but those technical means are called weapons of war. To change the balance of power so that your wishes were respected.

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Child psychiatrist jailed after using AI to make pornographic deep-fakes of kids

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Not only pedos, in general sadistic people tend to try and get jobs which would give them the feeling of power over someone, and not all of them can be dictators, warlords, just politicians, even lowly prison guards or policemen, also cowardice is a factor. So - child-related jobs.

But, to be frank, I'm not sure background checks are going to do that much good. People of this kind tend to bunch together, help each other, and can either get past the radar rather easy or utilize these checks to discredit anybody who'd be a threat to them.

It's a complex matter.

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Twitter owes ex-employees $500 mln in severance, lawsuit claims

I'm really starting to think that Musk deliberately destroying Twitter is not a conspiracy theory.

I mean, with Twitter and Reddit gone, only Facebook remains.

Ah, well, there are also WhatsApp, Viber, Tik-Tok, Youtube, Telegram which need similar treatment.

Of these I casually use YT and Telegram.

The former is slowly being replaced by uploading videos to the platforms they are posted on.

The latter - well, there was a time Durov promised there would be no ads ever, there are ads everywhere now. And technically it's junk (the protocol, I mean, while the QT desktop client itself on the contrary is notoriously CPU and memory efficient for my loads of subscribed channels, groupchats etc ; it does crash sometimes, but no Matrix or XMPP client would simply survive that amount of garbage perpetually updating, so).

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RAM Prices Got You Down? Try DDR3. Seriously!

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So personal computers of year 1999 gave their users that feeling of magic that can still be felt from media of that time, and state-of-the-art chips were being produced in fabs located not only on Taiwan, but USA, Israel, elsewhere.

Personal computers of today don't give any feeling of magic to most their users, you have to look for it.

Yet considering a standard still above what you realistically need is somehow lowering your standards.

In year 2006 they'd say about computers how many books you can fit into this or that volume of memory, or which calculations you can perform, sometimes, to give you perspective. They don't do that now, because then you'd be depressed how many resources you are using for something more vulgar than porn.

It's just sad.

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Silicon Valley Is Panicking About Zohran Mamdani. NYC’s Tech Scene Is Not

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I ... suspect it might be more that they are scared of the racial component. Not even "scared".

Silicon Valley is a burgerhole of Curtis Yarvin, dreams of technofascism with its inhabitants on top, impunity with wages not quite mirroring quality, and a bit - American academic culture. And American academic culture is the fucking opposite of the European one, or so I've read.

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task [edited post to change title and URL]

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My dad around 1993 designed a cipher better than RC4 (I know it's not a high mark now, but it kinda was then) at the time, which passed audit by a relevant service.

My dad around 2003 still was intelligent enough, he'd explain me and my sister some interesting mathematical problems and notice similarities to them and interesting things in real life.

My dad around 2005 was promoted to a management position and was already becoming kinda dumber.

My dad around 2010 was a fucking idiot, you'd think he's mentally impaired.

My dad around 2015 apparently went to a fortuneteller to "heal me from autism".

So yeah. I think it's a bit similar to what happens to elderly people when they retire. Everything should be trained, and also real tasks give you feeling of life, giving orders and going to endless could-be-an-email meetings makes you both dumb and depressed.

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Judge hands Lambo.com to Lamborghini after ruling owner acted in bad faith

I don't get it. Since when are similar words and cultural references and nicknames too owned by the trademark owner?

It was pretty normal for most of the age of trademarks' existence to use such derived references, including commercial use.

"He tried to claim ... a word play on "lamb" and not ... " - why would he have to?

I'm (ok, not really identifying as a fan of anything, but it's good) a Star Wars fan and I can point out plenty of such references there to other authors' creations, and George Lucas notably doesn't hide or deny that, actually the opposite.

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Russia Is Trying to Leave the Internet and Build Its Own

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Large intranets are not a problem (that's how it was in the beginning in many places, rather fast and unlimited access to LAN resources, chats etc, but slow and expensive to the Internet), it's just that nothing inside Russia is going to be self-sufficient.

Also every dick without balls in a chair will try to get some control or share or get a bribe or just prevent this from happening so that his relative or something would get the contract.

This wasn't a factor with the large Internet being accessible (unbeatable competition), but will be with intranets (or a countrywide intranet). Nothing will get built. In the 90s such dicks simply didn't understand that this is a good business, so they allowed it to grow (still all the major telecom providers that survived had some connections with FSB etc, or so people say).

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The entire US Social Security database was uploaded on a random cloud server, Whistle-Blower Says

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There was a time when bank card number was practically all you needed to get someone's money.

I think Estonia's electronic IDs are the best, they have the government sign (sometimes provide, but generally just sign) your public key. It's both that the government doesn't have your private key and that it's immediately usable for many things. I don't know if they do, but one can also make ID cards (with a necessary chip inside, of course), where a private key can be written and used for signing operations, but not read back.

Modern technology allows so much goodness that politicians and corps have just started globally gaslighting us over what can be done and what can't. Stalling on technically easily solvable issues, so that it wouldn't come to real ones.

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Computer Science, a popular college major, has one of the highest unemployment rates

To the quote in the summary - might be because debugging dozens of layers of bullshit is hard. Anyway, debugging is about sitting for hours and reading logs and looking for weirdness, and looking at dumps, and what not. It's a very different skill from "being the next Zuckerberg". Also Zuckerberg is a psychologist most of all, his computing knowledge is not that unique. Network effect is more important than skill and knowledge here.