They’re 1,000 years too soon to make more of this low-effort anime.

This is a, “it’s turtles all the way down!” problem. An application has to be able to store its encryption keys somewhere. You can encrypt your encryption keys but then where do you store that key? Ultimately any application will need access to the plaintext key in order to function.

On servers the best practice is to store the encryption keys somewhere that isn’t on the server itself. Such as a networked Hardware Security Module (HSM) but literally any location that isn’t physically on/in the server itself is good enough. Some Raspberry Pi attached to the network in the corner of the data center would be nearly as good because the attack you’re protecting against with this kind of encryption is someone walking out of the data center with your server (and then decrypting the data).

With a device like a phone you can’t use a networked HSM since your phone will be carried around with you everywhere. You could store your encryption keys out on the Internet somewhere but that actually increases the attack surface. As such, the encryption keys get stored on the phone itself.

Phone OSes include tools like encrypted storage locations for things like encryption keys but realistically they’re no more secure than storing the keys as plaintext in the application’s app-specific store (which is encrypted on Android by default; not sure about iOS). Only that app and the OS itself have access to that storage location so it’s basically exactly the same as the special “secure” storage features… Except easier to use and less likely to be targeted, exploited, and ultimately compromised because again, it’s a smaller attack surface.

If an attacker gets physical access to your device you must assume they’ll have access to everything on it unless the data is encrypted and the key for that isn’t on the phone itself (e.g. it uses a hash generated from your thumbprint or your PIN). In that case your effective encryption key is your thumb(s) and/or PIN. Because the Signal app’s encryption keys are already encrypted on the filesystem.

Going full circle: You can always further encrypt something or add an extra step to accessing encrypted data but that just adds inconvenience and doesn’t really buy you any more security (realistically). It’s turtles all the way down.

It’s not enough that they’re cross. They want you to be cross too!

This is crap. TikTok is just a video hosting platform with a powerful, China-controlled algorithm that keeps people addicted. If TikTok were to disappear today a new platform would rise to take it’s place within milliseconds. Seriously: Do you honestly think that everyone would just put down their phones and do something else because TikTok doesn’t work anymore‽

It’s not even being banned! Which is another reason why this article is total bullshit. ByteDance just needs to comply with the law that is meant to prevent the Chinese government from interfering in US politics (yes, that’s the real reason why that law was passed). That means they need to break ties with China or just outright sell the platform to some other company. If they let it die in the US they’d be throwing away billions of dollars which just isn’t going to happen.

Furthermore, China has absolutely no ground to stand on by complaining about TikTok bans. They ban all sorts of foreign-owned apps in China for more dubious reasons.

The squarish thing pointing down is most likely a radiation detector:

https://www.hsaj.org/articles/14715

The rest of it is point-to-point wireless networking antennas. Not sure which technology but it’s probably something specific to emergency alert/law enforcement.

The rectangular box in the back is a standard NEMA box that houses the electronics/power supplies for the other components.

I’ll take laptops over a Punch Card System (PCS) any day!

Who said anything about whole trees? If a car is there I guarantee there’s some maple leaves stuck to it somewhere. Look in that space between the windshield and under the hood 😁

Now do big trucks and cars modified to be extra loud!

Butter on crackers‽

It’s all the places in Canada where you can find maple leaves.

Just use Gentoo. Do it from scratch on the command line without the GUI installer like a pro 👍

At the very least you’ll learn how everything works at a deeper level.

The biggest takeaway from this poll is that only 15% of Republicans believe in objective reality.

It’s more that they got sweaty and uncomfortable. Kids need to move around, ya know?

To be fair, carrying a child on your back can be fun for MAX an hour at a time. So maybe perfect for a video game 🤔

I used to carry my kids in a kid backpack for hikes on the weekends and they loved it. Too much, actually. In the Florida heat that’s a good way to sweat your ass off.

Can’t say the thing missing from those fun hikes through the arboretum was fashion 🙄

It’s garbage.

This vastly underestimates the laziness of English speakers. No: It’ll be shortened to…

Donferget

Retarded, I think. Definitely not Riskable! Nobody mentions my name anymore 🤷

You say that because you don’t realize the benefits:

• Better support for Linux with any new PC hardware on day 1. This includes things like USB devices, monitors, KVMs, UPS, everything.
• Better support for all commercial software in general. More software will become available and it’ll be higher quality.
• Vendors will be forced to test all their stuff on Linux which means it’ll all become more reliable and less glitchy.
• There will be more diversity in software and distros which means widespread attacks (aka hacking, worms, viruses, etc) will have less success and smaller impacts.
• The more Linux users there are the more Linux developers will result. It’s also much easier to start learning how to code on a Linux desktop than it is in Windows.
• Better security for the entire world. Linux has a vastly superior security architecture than Windows and a vastly superior track record. The more Linux users there are, the harder it will be for malicious entities to break into their PCs which translates into a more secure world.
• It’s much easier (for experienced users) to troubleshoot and fix problems in Linux than in Windows. This will lead to support teams everywhere getting frustrated whenever they have to deal with Windows users (this is already the case for many software vendors, haha). Therefore, it makes support people happy and easy going. Who doesn’t want to reach a happy, helpful person for technical support instead of the usual defiant/adversarial support tech? 😁
• The worst sorts of hardware vendors won’t be able to get away with their usual bullshit. For example, if there were enough Linux users HP wouldn’t be offering extremely invasive 2GB printer “drivers” because their Windows customers would know enough Linux users that they’d be rightfully pissed and not depressively submissive like they are now.
• When you do have a problem it will be easier to find a solution because the likelihood that someone else already had it and posted a solution will be higher (though admittedly this factor doesn’t seem to do much for Windows currently because of how obtuse and obfuscated everything is in that OS).

There’s actually a lot more reasons but that’s probably enough for now 😁

Unless it runs Linux it doesn’t stand a chance. The moment you decide to sell a handheld gaming console running Windows you doom it to failure. It’s the worst OS possible for that purpose.

I’d love to see more adoption of… I2C!

Bazillions of motherboards and SBCs support I2C and many have the ability to use it via GPIO pins or even have connectors just for I2C devices (e.g. QWIIC). Yet there’s very little in the way of things you can buy and plug in. It feels like such a waste!

There’s all sorts of neat and useful things we could plug in and make use of if only there were software to use it. For example, cheap color sensors, nifty gesture sensors, time-of-flight sensors, light sensors, and more.

There’s lmsensors which knows I2C and can magically understand zillions of temperature sensors and PWM things (e.g. fan control). We need something like that for all those cool devices and chips that speak I2C.