Giver of skulls

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Joined 101 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 1923

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  • Votes federate, but only for communities followed. I won’t see your votes in a community that I don’t follow, but I can see when you upvoted or downvoted what post in the community.

    A scraper could simply follow every community on a Lemmy server and, barring Lemmy performance issues, will receive all comments and votes.

    Just a quick and dirty SQL query of which votes of yours are in my server’s database:

    select comment_like.score as score,comment_like.published as when, person.actor_id as who, comment.ap_id as what from comment_like join person on person.id = comment_like.person_id join comment on comment.id = comment_like.comment_id where person.actor_id = 'https://lemmy.ml/u/GolfNovemberUniform' order by comment_like.published desc; 
    

    The same info is also available for posts, of course, I just didn’t want to bother making the query any longer.

    Server admins/mods on Lemmy also have a button to see who upvoted and downvoted each post. This is just the inverse of that.




  • Why would they need threads for that? A whole bunch of companies are already doing that without running actual social media services.

    They can analyse your likes and you wouldn’t even know it. All they need to do is follow the same servers you do here on Lemmy. On Mastodon they can set up a basic puppet domain, follow every user they can find, and then your Mastodon server will deliver your posts, likes, and re-tweet for them, no scraping or interaction necessary.

    If you’re trying not to get analysed, the Fediverse is not for you. It’s simply not designed for privacy.


  • A factor in favour of jet fuel is that as the plane burns fuel if becomes lighter, thus consuming less fuel. Batteries stay the same weight. The difference between a full plane and an empty plane can be 18 metric tonnes. Super cheap operators tend to carry only a small extra margin of fuel over the amount technically necessary to make a trip, because it makes a real difference.

    That means the energy density you need in this comparison isn’t really linear. If you’re doing Taylor Swift flights to the couch and back, you can save a lot of weight by having a minimal amount of fuel in the tank, but with an electric plane you’ll always have to have the full battery in case you need to go somewhere further away.


  • The difference between servers and countries is that servers aren’t countries and countries aren’t servers.

    Servers aren’t a democracy. Well, most of them anyway.

    The difference between a violent, oppressive authoritarian regime and a fee Fediverse server is that you’re free to join other servers. Multiple at the same time, even! You can just leave, no passports, no refugee status, no paperwork.

    You can even set up your personal little server where you decide on the rules. A server for you and your friends can cost as little as ten dollars per month. Try that in any real country and you’d be considered an insurrectionist or a traitor, do it online and it’s just everyday business.

    The unfortunate reality of most “everybody is welcome” servers is that hey generally attract a lot of people who have been banned elsewhere. Some for stupid reasons (like calling any criticism of the CCP “orientalism”), some for very valid reasons. You need some form of moderation, or your server is going to be a cesspool. Some server admins preemptively decide to block servers that don’t have moderation that’s up to their standards, others wait for abuse to spread to their server.







  • Then, what prevents whosoever, to copy that file through cloning the complete disk?

    Nothing. At most, you can have a hardware encrypted drive that won’t permit access to the encrypted data without a password, but the file will remain available after unlocking that. Plus, dedicated people (law enforcement, data recovery specialists) may be able to get access to the flash chip itself unless you buy one that self destruct on any tampering attempts (and even those have flaws).

    You cannot prevent copying of data if that data is readable at disk level. At most, you can make the data useless by padding a layer of encryption (as well-encrypted data may as well be random data without the key material). That’s why everyone is going for encryption: encrypted files may as well be inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t know the passphrase. There’s no sense in copying a file which you cannot possibly read any bytes from.

    If the key is gone (i.e. the real key is a password protected file that gets overwritten so even the password doesn’t work anymore), the file becomes irretrievable. This is sometimes called “cryptographic erase” in the context of disks. There are variations of this, for instance, storing the key in the computer’s processor (fTPM) behind a password, and clearing that key out. There’s no way to get the key out of the fTPM so it cannot be backed up. Even if someone were to guess your password, the file will forever remain locked. Or at least until someone manages to break all cryptography, but even quantum computers don’t know how to do that part yet.

    If you’re willing to go deep, you could reprogram the firmware on your SSD/HDD to refuse reading the file. A few years back, someone made a proof of concept firmware that detected disk imaging attempts (because all blocks on the disk were read in order) and had the firmware return garbage while secretly wiping the disk when this detection triggered. You could, in theory, write firmware that refuses to read that block of data. However, if whoever you’re hiding this file from know about that, they can take out the platter/memory chips and dump them directly, bypassing your firmware entirely.


  • “undoing the protection should include filling in a password” That sounds like an encrypted drive. There are USB keys that’ll require software to enter an encryption password before you can do anything (including deleting the contents).

    If you’re on Windows, try Bitlocker or Veracrypt. You can create hard disk images that can be mounted temporarily with a password.

    Same can also be done on other operating systems, though I don’t know what tools yours come with.

    In a pinch, you can just create a password protected 7zip archive, though viewing and editing those files usually involves a temporary copy.

    There’s no way to prevent a file that’s loaded in memory from making it back to the disk. The best you can do is also encrypt the system drive so only people who know the encryption password can boot the computer that’s accessing these files.


  • The edits are what makes it made with AI. The original work obviously isn’t.

    If you’re in-painting areas of an image with generative AI (“context aware” fill), you’ve used AI to create an image.

    People are coming up with rather arbitrary distinctions between what is and isn’t AI. Midjourney’s output is clearly AI, and a drawing obviously isn’t, but neither is very post-worthy. Things quickly get muddy when you start editing.

    The people upset over this have been using AI for years and nobody cared. Now photographers are at risk of being replaced by an advanced version of the context aware fill they’ve been using themselves. This puts them in the difficult spot of wanting not to be replaced by AI (obviously) but also not wanting to have their AI use be detectable.

    The debate isn’t new; photo editors had this problem years ago when computers started replacing manual editing, artists had this problem when computer aided drawing (drawing tablets and such) started becoming affordable, and this is just the next step of the process.

    Personally, I would love it if this feature would also be extended to “manual” editing. Add a nice little “this image has been altered” marker on any edited photographs, and call out any filters used to beautify selfies while we’re at it.

    I don’t think the problem is that AI edited images are being marked, the problem AI that AI generated pictures and manually edited pictures aren’t.