wiki-user: car

  • 4 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • We have plenty of things to be old grumpy grouches about.

    “Those banks ruined the American dream and we bailed them out!”

    “Fossil fuel companies successfully lobbied the government to allow them to poison our planet in the name of profit!”

    “Those Disney crooks consolidated all media and destroyed independent creative ventures!”

    “Back in my day we could afford a house if we saved 10 years of earnings for a down payment and then took out a loan eventually totaling twice the value of the purchase price. You kids have it easy with your rental sleeping pods and low-monthly rate outdoors park subscriptions. You don’t even contribute to furniture or clothing industries because you don’t own a place to put any!”


  • The bottom 20% of earners aren’t likely to make the same amount in CA vs TX.

    California’s minimum wage is $16. Working 40 hours (hard on a minimum wage job for reasons) brings $640 a week. 10.5% of that is $67

    Texas’s is $7.25. 40 hours of that job is $290. 13% of that is $38.

    In this bad example, a minimum wage earner in California pays almost double the tax than a minimum wage worker in Texas. It’s a bad example for many reasons, including us not taking into account the extra spending power the California worker has after taxes.





  • Data harvesting is half of the problem. I have a feeling that congress could give two shits about the data harvesting as it’s almost literally everywhere in modern society and not in the interests of donors or the nationality security apparatus to remove.

    The other half is the platform and its potential (hypothetical and actual) for use in information operations. TikTok has direct access to something like 160 million American devices. That rivals other social media giants like Meta who have some government liaisons and relationships embedded in their security teams. ByteDance to my knowledge does not have these relationships. This problem could just as easily apply to any other foreign platform if any were large enough to pose threats of this scale.


  • The electric motors can be pretty tiny. The batteries are generally the packaging problem. They’re heavy and lumping them all where the engine would have been in a vehicle will have severe impacts on weight balance and handling. Distributing them is best, but requires space that vehicles need to be designed around. You can put some batteries in the engine compartment and some in the trunk to keep things neutral, but that still requires giving up storage space and requires running a high voltage line throughout the vehicle to connect the battery banks.



  • I feel like it isn’t congress’s job to do that. They don’t have to share or repeat information that they are not experts on to the public. They can share their thought process and rationale for supporting legislation, but we shouldn’t expect them to be perceived as technical experts. I bet that fewer than 10 congressional representatives can look at a portion of code and make an educated statement on what’s going on and how authors may be performing abnormal operations or obfuscating other actions.

    It’s the job of the organization(s) that prepare the security briefing, and we’ve already been hearing this kind of thing in the cybersecurity field for years. Those in the know, know. Those not, tend to not believe it. Warnings about the potential for data harvesting and information operations via platforms like (and specifically) Tik Tok aren’t new.

    This is like public health information during COVID. Medical professionals have the training and experience to share their professional assessments, but large portions of the population were instead solely relying on politicians to deliver medical information.





  • I would not say

    any self-respecting malware writer will download [powertools] and…

    I’m not as familiar with mass-market malware, but APT-level gear generally doesn’t try to make use of such easily observed events. The more network traffic malware appropriates, the greater the probability that it’s caught.

    Simply put, Powertools puts several functions within arms reach for malware looking to stay under the radar. Without it, malware needs to bring more of its own code which increases footprint. Living off the land exploits in particular love the presence of these kinds of programs





  • Those certainly are words, but how does this jump cut detection algorithm work?

    Embedding an ad doesn’t need to change any of the video stream information in a serious way. It’s not like they’re going to do something obvious like change the colorspace and encoding scheme several times just for ads, because that would provide artifacts for these types of mitigation techniques. And even if they did, how is that any different from changing the quality of the stream to continue serving video despite degraded or improved network connections? Google could decide to implement random quality changes and break this particular workaround.

    Plus, if they’re embedding ads into the data stream, how exactly is the metadata going to change? It’s the same connection, served from the same location, over the same socket. It’s not like sections of video need to have “AD” in the middle of their encoded data streams.