Indie iOS app developer with a passion for SwiftUI

  • 1 Post
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle

  • There are a couple of concerns with biometrics.

    The big one is, as you already mentioned, spoofing biometrics.

    The FaceID or TouchID sensor essentially saying “I got that face/fingerprint that you have in your Secure Enclave”. Granted it is a sophisticated attack, but nevertheless one you’d want to prevent if only because it’s good practice to maintain a secure chain in which the individual links can trust each other.

    For similar reasons the lockdown mode exists, which is mainly useful in limited scenarios (e.g. journalists, dissidents, etc).

    On the other hand, if ever there was a potential attacker, it would be a government because they unlimited funds in theory and it isn’t hard to imagine the FBI trying to utilize this in the San Bernardino case if it was available.

    A different risk, which would make the above quite a bit easier to accomplish, would be an altered biometrics scanner that, in addition to working the way it’s supposed to work, stores and sends off your biometrics or simply facilitates a replay attack.


  • Lossless is understood to have a bitrate of at least 1411kbps, or about 1.4Mbps.

    Theoretical sustained bandwidth capability of Bluetooth on the 2.4Ghz spectrum is 1Mbps, but in practice it’s a chunk lower in part due to overhead.

    Even if we assume if you could just cram a higher bitrate through a smaller bandwidth (spoiler, you can’t), everyone would be up in arms about Apple lying about lossless and class action suits would ensue.

    That said, you can’t. This is not like your internet connection where you’ll just be buffering for a minute.

    As for what is and isn’t perceptible, I think you’re mixing up your tonal frequencies with your bitrates here.


  • Honestly the most frustrating part is that there is plenty to criticize Apple on, so there’s no reason to get caught up in fabricated clickbaity nonsense.

    But instead of focusing on genuine concerns, people would rather hop on some misinformation train.

    All the while, if you espouse opinions that are bit more nuanced than “Apple bad”, then you must be a bootlicker like you said.

    It’s as if people are more concerned about missing out on joining the hype and showing off their armchair skills, rather than exercising a modicum of critical thinking.


  • Obfuscating what you have to do ≠ not providing you with a roadmap on what you have to do.

    If they didn’t obfuscate it there would be many tools out there already to let it be done.

    This is a non sequitur.

    It doesn’t automatically follow that a lack of tools means there is obfuscation. The simple fact that there can be many reasons why tools aren’t widely available alone breaks that logic.

    But I’d say the fact that we already know exactly why difficulties arise when replacing parts, definitely proves that there’s no obfuscation.

    Which again circles back to the difference between anti-repair and not pro-repair.

    Just because Apple doesn’t go out of their way to provide a roadmap and hold your hand and as a result you are having difficulties when you’re trying to do it yourself, doesn’t mean they are actively thwarting you.

    Apple doesn’t even think about you and me, their concern is to facilitate their own repair processes.

    They literally serial lock almost half of their parts.

    They don’t.

    Aside from biometrics none of the parts are serial locked.

    What you’re thinking about is parts based factory calibrated data loaded into the parts from a central database.

    Just because the system ignores the calibration data once the part doesn’t match the one the calibration was intended for, doesn’t mean it’s “locked”, it just means that you’re trying to use calibration data for the wrong part.



  • I’m not sure if you’re serious or trying to be sarcastic.

    Bluetooth and WiFi are two different things.

    For starters standard Bluetooth operates on 1MHz wide channels, BLE on 2MHz wide channels, whereas WiFi (nowadays) operates on 20 or 40 MHz wide channels.

    Modern Bluetooth (on 2.4Ghz) can theoretically do bursts of 2Mbps, but in practice even 1Mbps is hard to hit in a sustained fashion.

    2.4Ghz is just a frequency band and is not the same as bandwidth.

    You might as well argue that a pickup truck and a formula 1 race car should be able to reach the same top speed in the same time because their wheel distance is the same.

    I think […]

    Think again




  • Cue the nuclear shills that will handwave away any legitimate concern with wishful thinking and frame the discussion as solely pro/anti fossil, conveniently pretending that renewables don’t exist.

    ETA:

    Let’s look at some great examples of handwaving and other nonsense to further the nuclear agenda.

    Here @danielbln@lemmy.world brings up a legitimate concern about companies not adhering to regulation and regulators being corrupt/bought *cough… Three Mile Island cough*, and how to deal with that:

    So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?

    So of course the answer to that by @Carighan@lemmy.world is a slippery slope argument and equating a hypothetical disaster with thousands if not millions of victims and areas being uninhabitable for years to come, with the death of a family member due to faulty wiring in your home:

    Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.

    At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.

    Then there’s the matter of misleading statistics and graphs.
    Never mind the fact that the amount of victims of nuclear disasters is underreported, under-attributed and research is hampered if not outright blocked to further a nuclear agenda, also never mind that the risks are consistently underreported, lets leave those contentious points behind and look at what’s at hand.

    Here @JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works shows a graph from Our World in Data that is often thrown around and claims to show “Death rates by unit of electricity production”:

    Seems shocking enough and I’m sure in rough lines, the proportions respective to one another make sense to some degree or another.
    The problem however is that the source data is thrown together in such a way that it completely undermines the message the graph is trying to portray.

    According to Our World in Data this is the source of the data used in the graph:

    Death rates from energy production is measured as the number of deaths by energy source per terawatt-hour (TWh) of electricity production.

    Data on death rates from fossil fuels is sourced from Markandya, A., & Wilkinson, P. (2007).

    Data on death rates from solar and wind is sourced from Sovacool et al. (2016) based on a database of accidents from these sources.

    We estimate deaths rates for nuclear energy based on the latest death toll figures from Chernobyl and Fukushima as described in our article here: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima

    We estimate death rates from hydropower based on an updated list of historical hydropower accidents, dating back to 1965, sourced primarily from the underlying database included in Sovacool et al. (2016). For more information, see our article: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

    Fossil fuel numbers are based on this paper which starts out by described a pro-nuclear stance, but more importantly, does a lot of educated guesstimating on the air-pollution related death numbers that is straight up copied into the graph.

    Sovacool is used for solar and wind, but doesn’t have those estimates and is mainly limited to direct victims.

    Nuclear based deaths is based on Our World in Data’s own nuclear propaganda piece that mainly focuses on direct deaths and severely underplays non-direct deaths.

    And hydropower bases deaths is based on accidents.

    So they mix and match all kinds of different forms of data to make this graph, which is a no-no. Either you stick to only accidents, only direct deaths or do all possible deaths that is possibly caused by an energy source, like they do for fossil fuels.

    Not doing so makes the graph seem like some kind of joke.


  • There’s not much for him to be concerned about currently, given that he is dead.

    As for 16 yo Aaron who wrote that list of hot takes in order of controversy, is it really surprising that a kid that developed an opinion of free speech extremism penned that down?
    Especially after being inspired by this article as per his own admission?

    The article also helps provide context for the time period this was written in.
    Simple possession was still a relatively novel concept and simulated CSAM wasn’t criminal yet in the US.

    Don’t misconstrue my own position on the matter, I originate from, and was legally trained in, a jurisdiction that criminalizes hate speech, imposing a significantly broader limit on free speech than the US currently does, and I think that’s the better path to take.
    So I personally don’t adhere to free speech extremism.

    Nevertheless, while not agreeing with his take, I can see the logic that persuaded him.

    It’s essentially the facetious version of “Why stop here, why not also ban hate speech/guns/drugs/etc?”
    All of those can be argued to be gateways to the harm of others, perhaps even disproportionately children.

    To me it reads as him challenging the logic, not condoning the outcome much less the subsequent consequences. Very edgy indeed.

    As for those who bring up that he reinstated his blog multiple times and with it this particular post from when he was 16, as a way to posthumously attribute this to a more older adult version of him; I’m not sure it’s that cut and dry.

    As a fundamentalist such as himself it could also just be an exhibition of his free speech extremism perhaps combined with an effort to maintain transparency.

    After all, it could suggest an eroding of his beliefs on free speech if he would remove it “now” with little benefit to him since the cat’s already out of the bag, even if he disagreed with his former self at the time of restoring the blog.

    A better indication of his opinions later in life would be comments that reaffirm the prior expressed beliefs or, if the suspicion is that he practiced what he preached, one would expect this to have come out during the FBI investigation, considering they went through all his data.

    Do I think it’s healthy to consider him a hero, or anyone else for that matter?
    No not really, if only because the likelihood of heroes having irreconcilable blemishes is extremely high just by the very virtue of their, let’s say, unique thinking producing the things we love about them but also the things that might cause pause in many.


  • The proposal is bad enough as it is, but it’s the duplicitous gaslighting BS that really pisses people off.

    If they came out and said “We came up with this thing to prevent loss of revenue on ads and prevent LLMs from capturing data” then people would still be against it, but at least it would feel like an honest discussion.

    Instead it’s just another page out of Google’s playbook we’ve seen many times already.

    1. Make up some thinly veiled use cases that supposedly highlight how this would benefit users, while significantly stretching the definition of “users”
    2. Gaslight every one by pretending that people simply misunderstand what you’re proposing and what you’re trying to achieve
    3. Pretend that nobody provides reasonable feedback because everyone is telling you not to commit murder in the first place instead of giving you tips on how to hide the body
    4. Latch onto the few, inevitable, cases of people going too far to paint everyone opposing it in a negative light
    5. Use that premise to explain why you had to unilaterally shut down any and all avenues for people to provide comment
    6. Make the announcement that you hear people and that you’re working on it and that all will be well
    7. Just do what you want anyways with minimal concessions if any and rinse repeat

    For what it’s worth I blame W3C as well.
    Their relatively young “Anti-Fraud Community Group” has essentially green lit this thing during meetings as can be seen here:

    https://github.com/antifraudcg/meetings/blob/main/2023/05-26.md

    https://github.com/antifraudcg/meetings/blob/main/2023/07-07-wei-side-meeting.md




  • Most of these services are US-centric because a lot of the necessary records to provide the information isn’t public in many countries outside of the US.

    Birth records, death records, marriage records, divorce records, voting records, criminal records, etc. is considered public information in much of the US. Even address information can be found publicly and immigration records become available to the public after a certain time.

    In a lot of countries, especially in many European countries, these are hard to access for people that aren’t the subject of these records, if accessible at all.

    For example while court records are public in much of Europe, often times the names of private persons are censored because it’s not deemed necessary to know who the parties are to be able to check if the courts make fair decisions.
    This automatically excludes criminal and divorce information from disseminating into the public.

    Some countries will make some records public once the subject of those records have passed for X amount of years, but that’s still pretty rare.

    As such services like these have limited use outside the United States.


  • Like some have pointed out there are ways to circumvent this, but it doesn’t make for a great experience, might cause issues down the line in particular with updates and there’s no guarantee it’ll keep working.

    If you’ve purchased this form your company’s surplus and they refuse to unenroll from MDM I’d just give it back and ask for my money back, it’s not worth the hassle and the warranty is a nonsense reason since they can take the MBP off of their warranty service plan.




  • Current 2FA implementation in Lemmy is a bit janky with the risk of being locked out.

    First things first: DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES LOG OUT UNTIL YOU’RE 100% SURE YOUR AUTHENTICATOR WORKS AND THAT YOU CAN LOGIN USING ITS GENERATED 2FA CODE

    Now that that’s out of the way, here are some steps to follow:

    1. Ideally clicking on that button will open your authenticator which will then prompt you to select login credentials to attach it to; if it doesn’t and you instead are lead to a URL with a secret key or if you right click and you can copy that URL, then you need to manually copy the URL and paste it in the 2FA section of your authenticator or password manager
    2. Once you’ve figured this out don’t log out, instead open a private browser window and test to see if you can login with your credentials + 2FA

    If you can’t get it to work then you can disable it in the window you’re still logged into.

    If you share which authenticator you use, people might be able to give you more specific instructions to get you through step 1.

    Whatever you do, don’t log out. You will be locked out!
    Unlike most common implementations, there is no built in step to verify if you can successfully generate a TOTP before 2FA is fully enabled.