• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Yeah, and it’s not like you want the information out there, it’s just that in my opinion it’s not something I would pay money for. Having the authority to make the request doesn’t mean that the party on the other end is obligated to comply, or in some cases even legally permitted to.

    I’ve used Google’s service where they send you an email to review results if they find something, and my Google results for my incredibly distinctive name are basically only professional resources that I kinda want to be findable.


  • Honestly? It’s not something I would pay for. Google has their own service where they’ll let you know if they find your information and you can ask them to remove the search result.
    Beyond that, there’s some information that you just fundamentally can’t make private and no service can get taken down.
    Most data mining sites just collect those public records and put them next to each other, so they get a pile of your name, birthday, where you were born, how active you are as a voter and all that stuff.

    Removing your address from Google maps just seems silly to me. That there is a residence there is fundamentally public information, not being on maps doesn’t make it less public it just probably causes issues for delivery drivers.

    Anyone who has your data and is going to be a jerk about it isn’t going to listen to a request to take it down either. They’re just going to send you spam messages.

    The odds of being Targeted by a determined individual who’s focused explicitly on you is low. They tend to target a broad swath of people, and then dig in on people who take the bait a few times.


  • I have never felt so old.

    Name, address, and phone number of the account holder used to be published in books that got sent to everyone in the city and also just left lying in boxes that had phones in them if you needed to make a call while you weren’t home, because your phone used to be tied to a physical location.
    You also used to have to pay extra to make calls to places far away because it used more phone circuits. And by “far away” I mean roughly 50 miles.

    It’s not the biggest thing in the world, privacy wise, since a surprising amount of information is considered public.
    If you know an address, it’s pretty much trivial to find the owners name, basic layout of the house, home value, previous owners, utility bill information, tax payments, and so on. I looked up my information and was able to pretty easily get the records for my house, showing I pay my bills on time, when I got my air conditioner replaced and who the contractor who did it was.

    As an example, here’s the property record for a parking structure owned by the state of Michigan. I chose a public building accessible by anyone and owned by a government to avoid randomly doxing someone, but it’s really as easy as searching for public records for some county or city and you’ll find something pretty fast.


  • Depends on the vendor for the specifics. In general, they don’t protect against an attacker who has gained persistent privileged access to the machine, only against theft.
    Since the key either can’t leave the tpm or is useless without it (some tpms have one key that it can never return, and will generate a new key and return it encrypted with it’s internal key. This means you get protection but don’t need to worry about storage on the chip), the attacker needs to remain undetected on the server as long as they want to use it, which is difficult for anyone less sophisticated than an advanced persistent threat.

    The Apple system, to its credit, does a degree of user and application validation to use the keys. Generally good for security, but it makes it so if you want to share a key between users you probably won’t be using the secure enclave.

    Most of the trust checks end up being the tpm proving itself to the remote service that’s checking the service. For example, when you use your phones biometrics to log into a website, part of that handshake is the tpm on the phone proving that it’s made by a company to a spec validated by the standards to be secure in the way it’s claiming.


  • Package signing is used to make sure you only get packages from sources you trust.
    Every Linux distro does it and it’s why if you add a new source for packages you get asked to accept a key signature.

    For a long time, the keys used for signing were just files on disk, and you protected them by protecting the server they were on, but they were technically able to be stolen and used to sign malicious packages.

    Some advanced in chip design and cost reductions later, we now have what is often called a “secure enclave”, “trusted platform module”, or a general provider for a non-exportable key.
    It’s a little chip that holds or manages a cryptographic key such that it can’t (or is exceptionally difficult) to get the signing key off the chip or extract it, making it nearly impossible to steal the key without actually physically stealing the server, which is much easier to prevent by putting it in a room with doors, and impossible to do without detection, making a forged package vastly less likely.

    There are services that exist that provide the infrastructure needed to do this, but they cost money and it takes time and money to build it into your system in a way that’s reliable and doesn’t lock you to a vendor if you ever need to switch for whatever reason.

    So I believe this is valve picking up the bill to move archs package infrastructure security up to the top tier.
    It was fine before, but that upgrade is expensive for a volunteer and donation based project and cheap for a high profile company that might legitimately be worried about their use of arch on physical hardware increasing the threat interest.


  • Minimum wage means minimum livable wage, and “livable” isn’t the same as “survivable”.

    Anyone working should be able to afford the amenities we call living, not just scraping by. Children, transportation, food, healthcare, reasonable recreation, savings, retirement, self development and actualization. All of it.
    People not working should be able to survive, and we should do everything we can to get them to that “living” point as well. Disability or a bad labor market shouldn’t close someone off from eating, having children or going to the doctor.



  • So, kinda. The ruling did have more nuance than a lot of people take from it, but it’s still not a good ruling by any means.

    The president has absolute personal immunity for core constitutional acts, and the presumption of immunity for official acts.

    That means that you can’t sue Biden for vetoing a bill, or other things defined in the constitution. That doesn’t mean you can’t sue the office of the president, but that you can’t sue the individual.
    The next part is that the courts need to assume that there’s immunity for anything done “as the president” unless the prosecution can argue that not having immunity couldn’t possibly infringe on a power of the president, and you can’t use the presidents motivation to make that case.

    So the president talks to the justice department about what they can do to sway the election for him: you can only talk about the impact of holding the president liable for talking to the justice department about elections.

    You can’t talk about the president assassinating a political rival because that introduces their motive. “Would the office of the president be hindered by holding them personally liable for using the constitutional power to command the military to target a threat to the country”.

    Trumps family could sue, but Biden wouldn’t be liable, only the executive branch.




  • Most voters don’t have a business and never will.

    The value of a net new business is that it creates more jobs and economic activity.
    Most people benefit from more jobs to either work at or drive up labor demand.
    Per that school of economic thought, incentivizing a new business adds more activity to the market and more opportunity for people to find ways to innovate, provide value and become profitable.
    Giving money to an existing struggling business is subsidizing a businesses that’s already demonstrated that it’s not working.

    However, we’re both putting too much into it. The goal is to say $50k for small business, because people like a business friendly atmosphere.
    Trump gets credit for giving tax cuts to businesses for stock buyback, which only helps investors. The goal is to court people who want pro business policies without literal handouts to corporations.






  • In isolation it’s not great, but in conjunction with your own advocate talking about you not following a doctor’s orders? It doesn’t bolster confidence that the individual would follow doctors orders in the future.

    It means she hasn’t been able to quit drinking!

    Yes, that’s exactly the point. It’s quite unlikely her medical troubles started when she was hospitalized.
    A history of not following medical advice casts doubt about a future of following medical advice.

    Yes, addiction is a disease that the individual may lack the ability to control. That doesn’t change that it’s a risk factor for non-compliance that’s absent in others who need the transplant.


  • Not made up, I just read a couple other articles that mentioned it.
    It’s also part of the whole “the only people who can talk freely are the people with an interest in the doctors being wrong”.

    People aren’t turned away because they didn’t exercise or because they work too much or they don’t get enough sleep or they didn’t follow doctor’s orders. So, in Nathan and Amanda’s case, you’re seeing someone being told, ‘You didn’t follow doctor’s orders, so we’re not going to help you. We’re going to let you die’

    As a quote from the other interested party, as well as the “in documents shared with CTV News, notes show […] their decision was based on ‘minimal abstinence outside of hospital.’” is pretty much spelling it out.