and it’s potentially an existential threat.

Macy’s now has a Toys Я Us branded toy department.

… but there is a way, and it has been proven.

One of the more memorable physics classes I’ve had went into the history of discoveries that led to our understanding of relativity. The relevant story here, starts with how sound travels though air.

Let’s say you’re standing at the bottom of a building shouting to your friend peeking out a window on the 5th floor. On a calm day, that friend will hear you at pretty much the same time as someone standing the same distance away, but on the street. However, if it’s windy, the wind pushes around the air through which the sound of your voice is traveling, the friend up in the window will have a slight delay in receiving that sound. This can of course be verified with more scientific rigor, like a sound sent in two perpendicular directions activating a light.

Scientist at the time thought that light, like sound, must travel though some medium, and they called this theoretical medium the Aether. Since this medium is not locked to Earth, they figured they must be capable of detecting movement of this medium, an Aether wind, if you will. If somehow the movement of this medium caused the speed of light in one direction to be faster than another due to the movement of this medium, measuring the speed in two directions perpendicular to each other would reveal that difference. After a series of experiments of increasing distances and measurement sensitivities (think mirrors on mountain tops to measure the time for a laser beam to reflect), no change in the speed of light based on direction was found.

Please enjoy this wikipedia hole: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson–Morley_experiment , and please consider a bit of caution before you refer to things as facts in the future!

Not even Chrome is blocking some of the add-ons…

is that something you know for sure? or has Google quietly complied with similar requests, without making a statement like Mozilla has here?

I do this with my xreal glasses sometimes when washing dishes or whatever. Connected to phone in my pocket with a desktop mode, set a black wallpaper, and drag the video into a corner.

It’s nice for situations like that, where you’re doing something with your hands and can’t reasonably place a screen in a way where you wouldn’t have to constantly strain your neck to look at it.

it could explicitly be a reasonable deterrent. if you double your price, but lose half your customers, you’ve made the same amount of money for half the work.

"Hi, I just sent the ransom payment to the Bitcoin address you provided.
"Now you’ll unlock my data, right?
“… right?”

(obligatory I’m not a network surgeon this is likely not perfectly correct)

The article mentions network interfaces, DHCP and gateways so real quick: a network interface usually represents a physical connection to a network, like an Ethernet port or a WiFi card. DHCP is a protocol that auto configured network routes and addresses once a physical connection is established, like when you jack in via an ethernet cable, it tells you the IP address you should go by, the range of IP address on the network you’ve connected to, where you can resolve domain names to IP addresses. It also tells you the address of a default gateway to route traffic to, if you’re trying to reach something outside of this network.

You can have more than one set of this configuration. Your wired network might tell you that your an address is 10.0.0.34, anything that starts with 10.0.0. is local, and to talk to 10.0.0.254 if you’re trying to get to anything else. If at the same time you also connect to a wireless network, that might tell you that your address is 192.168.0.69, 192.168.0.* is your local network, and 192.168.0.254 is your gateway out. Now your computer wants to talk to 4.2.2.2. Should it use the wireless interface and go via 192.168.0.254? or the wired one and use 10.0.0.254? Your os has a routing table that includes both of those routes, and based on the precedence of the entries in it, it’ll pick one.

VPN software usually works by creating a network interface on your computer, similar to an interface to a WiFi card, but virtual. It then asks the OS to route all network traffic, through the new interface it created. Except of course traffic from the VPN software, because that still needs to get out to the VPN provider (let’s say, at 1.3.3.7) via real Internet.

So if you’re following along at home, your routing table at this point might look like this:

• traffic to 1.3.3.7 should go to 10.0.0.254 via the wired interface
• all traffic should go to the VPN interface
• traffic to 10.0.0.* should go to the wired interface
• all traffic should go to 10.0.0.254 via the wired interface
• traffic to 192.168.0.* should go to the wireless interface
• all traffic should go to 192.168.0.254 via the wireless interface

whenever your os wants to send network packets, it’ll go down this list of rules until one applies. With that VPN turned on, most of the time, only those two first rules will ever apply.

If I’m reading the article correctly, what this attack does, is run a DHCP server, that when handing out routing rules, will send one with a flag that causes, for example, the last two rules to be placed at the top of the list instead of the bottom. Your VPN will still be on, the configuration it’s requested the OS to make would still be in place, and yet all your traffic will be routed out to this insecure wireless network that’s somehow set itself as the priority route over anything else.

That’s the other one. The Rabbit thing is $200, which, not that I would buy one, is not too unreasonable for an AI tamagotchi

Everything else wrong with Gmail and Google aside, those are the least reasonable complaints? You can use labels as folders. You can also disable conversation grouping, but I doubt you go more than a week before turning it back on.

Likely relevant John Oliver about these types of scams: https://youtu.be/pLPpl2ISKTg?si=WYsqiiQ4f3U6ZoIe

Another way of writing ‘10’

there’s the open book if you want a Project

I love it. now I don’t need to bring a controller in ADDITION to my steamdeck when I come visit!

“Bringing together all of our AI offerings, we introduce Copilot-Copilot!”

Putting aside the fact that this is a bit of a straw man, multiple countries having nuclear capability is the only thing preventing nuclear war. Russia does not nuke the US (or allies) because they know the US will respond with a nuclear launch of its own. same for the other way around. Awareness and access to similar capabilities makes everyone think twice about becoming the aggressor. if I had to pick, a cold war is preferable to a hot one.

Then what are we even discussing? we’ve had orbital cameras for decades. These are just networked better and launched different?

Do you have any particular pieces of theirs you can recommend I read?

I don’t consider Musk, by any means, to be “a good guy”. Ideally, I’d just rather let SpaceX keep building out starlink for the good of the world and have it be a medium for communication that is difficult to disable.

Why do we need to kill our enemies at this point in our civilization even? it’s barbaric and ridiculous. The state of the art of weaponry right now is trending towards remote operations. How long until it just becomes BattleBots but with collateral damage? When do we get to world leaders settling disputes in a game of Worms?

So that the US government can more directly use starlink for surveillance?

Surveillance is a usecase for communication. I can’t think of a communications technology that hasn’t been (ab)used for surveillance… Books even! Historically people have been prosecuted due to the books they possess! Should our target of ire be the entity building the network? Or the entity wanting to use it for surveillance? The vibe I’m getting from this thread is that folks would prefer the US government, via NASA or otherwise, have control of the whole thing instead.