It’s been going on for a while. Search YouTube or the web for 48gb 4090 (this is one of the most popular modded Nvidia cards), Nvidia of course never officially made a 4090 with this much memory.
There are some on sale via eBay right now. The memory controllers on some Nvidia gpus support well beyond the 16-24gb they shipped with as standard, and enterprising folks in China desolder the original memory chips and fit higher capacity ones.
Give that most of mine, and probably yours, and probably most of the world's computers are in fact made in China one way or another, some higher percentage than others, I'm guessing most of us trust our hardware enough to continue using it.
True. I was specifically referring to "modded Chinese hardware" from some unknown, unvetted third party versus say through a well-known brand that hopefully has its own rigorous QA and security processes in place.
I wouldn't say that's true or even likely. It's completely possible to be in a pit of vipers where every single snake is venomous, and that is pretty much what we are seeing: With technological advances, there is a certain subset of people that will use them primarily to solidify their power and control over others. There is no utopian society right now whose government doesn't look to spy through technology, which of course is best set up at time of manufacture.
Agreed. Unless you have full control over the production chain to fully produce a device, you are subject to the whims and desires of those who preside over such technological feats that we take for granted in our daily lives.
To the original point, it's safe to say that highlighting a nationality with regards to trust is baseless and without merit, as would be for any other topic (men/women from x are y, z food is better here, etc..). Real life is much more complicated and nuanced past nationalities. Some might call it FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) but there's always a deeper rationale at the individual level as well.
Rather than people being wary of Chinese in general, it's more that there is a high degree of government control exercised in China and they are known to be very strategic with long-term planning in regards to technology control both for spying and actual remote control of devices. We are all just looking for the least bad option. It's not like devices from other countries are immune, but they are often less organized so there is a better chance of avoiding the Chinese level of planned access.
It does seem like pretty low risk in this specific case so I agree OP's comment was bit over the top, but I would have no way to make anything resembling even an educated guess as to how far their programs go.
Yes, this is really what I was referring to. And the fact that the original comment I was replying to mentioned "modded Chinese hardware" from some unspecified, unvetted 3rd party which doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
I went on to install this, but it seems very US centric, which isn't apparent in anything else than the domain name. The maps only cover the US, you can only download English dumps of Wikipedia, etc.
It's not the biggest deal if you're proficient in English, but I wasn't even able to download the full dump of English Wikipedia as their hardcoded link to it just seems to return 404.
The Docker setup leaves much to be desired, as network names are hardcoded, and extension services are expected to be reachable over hardcoded port numbers, making it impossible to run behind a reverse proxy.
Going to give this another go in a couple of years when it has had some more time in the oven, but it still looks very promising!
That is the way of the internet unfortunately. Instead of simply appreciating something, it's important to find a criticism and voice it. That way you're 'adding' to the conversation.
I mean look back at HN classic posts like the initial Dropbox announcement and the classic: this is nothing more than a wrapper over rsync, etc.
Thinking that you are operating in the UK because a UK user can theoretically send packets to you, is similar to thinking a corner store in Japan is operating in the UK because a brit can theoretically get on a plane and fly there to shop.
I run a site in the US and have zero intention of implementing GDPR or geoblocking anyone. If the feckless EU bureaucrats don’t want me serving Europeans, they can either block me or convince their citizens to stop requesting things from my servers. Beyond that, they can fuck off.
I travel internationally all the time, including to Europe. These clowns don’t even have the ability to connect me to my site. They can’t subpoena anyone, they have no control or visibility. Why does anyone outside of the EU give a shit about this? It baffles me.
You can declare that “it doesn’t work like this” all you want, and I’ll just keep ignoring it. GDPR is totally irrelevant to me, and no one who disagrees has the power to actually do anything about it.
I'm having a hard time understanding what this is. I was hoping it would be tools to manage secrets for AI agents, but it looks more like an "Enterprise trojan" type snitch for when your employees use AI tools and passwords are shared?
Please explain how opposition to privacy invasive solutions result in even more privacy invasive solutions being implemented? Is it purely out of spite from the lawmakers? This logic doesn't follow.
It’s obviously worse for your privacy to have third parties handle full images of your drivers license or video of your entire face, which can then be leaked, rather than using a zero knowledge proof that only sends e.g. a birth year. And no, it’s not spite, it’s incoherence. Lawmakers are single minded seekers of re-election to a first degree approximation and will do things to get votes, even if those things don’t logically make sense together, such as requiring age verification without providing the tools for companies to abide by the law themselves.
US lawmakers are single-minded seekers of lobbying and insider trading money, they will sign and trade on whatever ALEC hands them so they receive more money.
Because we’re currently still in the phase where lawmakers are telling tech companies “please find a solution for this issue.” At some point, as has happened in the past with other issues, this will change to “solve this issue, here’s exactly how you have to do it.”
The logic not flowing is the point. People against a federal ID say it is government overreach into state's rights. They consider it the feds invading citizen's rights. They have no need, as it is the purview of the states. So in lieu of a federal ID, private companies are coming up with privacy invading techniques to attempt to verify age. How would one be okay with a private company's invasion of privacy yet not the government's? An invasion of privacy is an invasion of privacy regardless of the one doing the invading.
> An invasion of privacy is an invasion of privacy regardless of the one doing the invading.
Technically, yes, but one party (e.g. USGOV) has many more strands that it can weave together into a larger coherent picture than the other (e.g. Meta).
Also one party has guns and an almost blanket immunity to using them on people it deems it does not like via its privacy violations.
Up until the socials get their own security forces that are deployed as the algo tells them. They have enough money to be the next Pinkertons. /s
But at this point, the government is getting the data from private companies. So if the private companies were not gathering the data, the government would not have such easy access. So I'm much more concerned about private companies for that reason. Yes, the government can do more things to you physically, but they are too dependent on what private companies provide
>”How would one be okay with a private company's invasion of privacy yet not the government's? An invasion of privacy is an invasion of privacy regardless of the one doing the invading.”
‘Invasion’ is doing a lot of work in your comment, and I don’t think there is a clear and widely agreed upon definition of what constitutes an ‘invasion of privacy’. If you have such a definition, please do share it.
Ignoring the reality that some system of age (and ID verification, for certain tasks) system is desired by a significant portion of the population, and does have utility (despite the shouts for "just parent your children") is simply sticking your head in the sand. So by opposing any solution (even solutions that preserve privacy, like zero-knowledge), you make privacy concerns seem unreasonable and weaken stances opposing the more privacy invasive solutions.
Do you have a source for that? Does your source imply that this is desired by the population?
My question is mostly rhetorical: it is obvious that government & safety institutions are themselves fanning the flames of this ridiculous movement away from privacy and towards a surveillance state of over-protectionism. The world has not significantly changed in 50 years in terms of terrorist threats, (except for, ironically, threats to your identity online), yet suddenly now that we can track people online, we must to combat this non-changing threat factor? It's all security theater.
All intelligence agencies benefit from more data, and will happily use lack of data as a scapegoat for their own incompetence. They instill fear to justify their existence, unlawful behavior, and lack of results.
Microwaves are not directional, antennas are. They all have side and backlobes that would affect the carrier. To get something like this done, you have to:
- get enough backlobe attenuation to not affect yourself, but enough power and directionality to be useful against the target, also the beam should not be reflected by walls
- aim and activate it without anyone noticing (presumably by turning your back to the target), ensuring there's nobody else in the way
- the beam has to be wide enough to affect every target but narrow enough to not affect other people. This is a restaurant.
- presumably stay still long enough, because if this microwave magic works by mimicking brainwaves (if it does at all! biggest question), it should have relatively low modulation frequency.
All of this without raising suspicion. This needs James Bond levels of coordination and alignment of unknowns. Knowing how incompetent FSB/GRU and co are, I have a really hard time believing all this.
Here's a guy on youtube with a diy microwave gun. I presume the Russian researchers can do better than some youtube demo. https://youtu.be/80kDn4vit_w?t=445
From their video it just comes across as they stimulate different left/right neurons depending on where the enemy is on screen and then listen to some output that also says left/right. Shooting looks completely random, to be frank.
If you connected electrodes to two different fish, shocked them and interpreted twitching as intelligent output, fish could also play Doom. The interface is doing all the work.
It doesn't sound like the neurons have any concept of the game other than "left input means left output", which is a rather trivial result... It's effectively no different than the pong example.
They don't say anything on how much training is required for this to happen, or if there's any "learning" going on at all. The learning part is "next".
It is actively harmful to society. Slap SynthID on some of the photographic evidence from the unreleased Epstein files and instantly de-legitimize it. Launder a SynthID image through a watermark free model and it's legit again. The fact that it exists at all can't be interpreted in any other way than malice.
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