/tech/ - Technology

Hello, faggots, thanks to our unwavering dedication to the community I am proud to announce we are rolling out our own, official, leftychan.net i2p address.
You can locate the eepsite @ http://leftychmxz3wczbd4add4atspbqevzrtwf2sjobm3waqosy2dbua.b32.i2p, or, http://leftychan.i2p/.
If you have any trouble, as stated on the news announcement, try manually adding the address and domain to your address book.

-Yours Truly.

This thread is only for feedback related to technical issues(bug reports, suggestions). Otherwise use
>>>/leftypol/30356
Public Repo: https://github.com/towards-a-new-leftypol/leftypol_lainchan
If you have any grievances you can make a PR.

Mobile Support: https://github.com/PietroCarrara/Clover/releases/latest
Thread For Mobile Feedback: >>>/tech/6316

Onion Link: http://wz6bnwwtwckltvkvji6vvgmjrfspr3lstz66rusvtczhsgvwdcixgbyd.onion
Cytube: https://tv.leftychan.net
Matrix: https://matrix.to/#/#Leftypol:matrix.org
Once you enter, consider joining the lefty technology room.

We are currently working on improvements to the site, subject to the need of the tech team to sleep and go to their day jobs. If you need more immediate feedback please join the matrix room[s] and ask around. Feel free to leave comments, concerns, and suggestions about the tech side of the site here and we will try to get to it as soon as possible

Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

Marx taught us how to do material analysis by looking at societies and economics in motion. I'll endeavor to apply this to surveillance capitalism.

We'll take the perspective of the other side. There are essentially 3 search engines.

Number One is the hustle-search. It's a search engine that allows scammers to search for consumer-victims based on what kind of psychological weaknesses can be used to trick them.

Number Two is the snoop-police-search. This is a search engine for finding people with dissenting political views, and it also serves the vital function of enabling wife-beater cops to find out in which women's-shelter the soon to be ex-wife is hiding for example.

Number Three is the massacre-search. A search engine for finding the designated human sacrifices. For example the Zionators are getting their murder machine target data to eradicate the human-shield-ethnicity of the Palestinian population and of course students from American/European universities, from this type of search engine. Obviously it's also going to be used by other ethically-challenged groups, like religious nuts taking out abortion doctors or people that frequent gay-bars. Or neocons taking out journalists and whistleblowers, to ensure freedoom and democrazy. The legislators that fail to understand that privacy has to be an absolute right, have blood on their hands.

Lets contrast with an ordinary web-search that finds web-pages. If you have a webpage you want your auto-generated click-bait at the top of the search results. To shove your generic page above all the relevant stuff, to the top, you use something called SEO (search engine optimization). For the 3 previously mentioned search engines you want the opposite type of SEO. That puts your 'page' near the bottom of the search results.

SEO has ruined websearch. The same will happen to the rest of surveillance capitalism. There are powerful incentives to feed this machine bogus information that favors your advantage. For many people it will become a matter of survival.

To elaborate the coming paradigm. Think about ad-blockers those deny the monster the ability to steal your information soul, but it still knows that you are there, it knows that some of it's pray escaped, it will keep hunting and harassing you. The next evolutionary stage will be add-fantasy. Adds are no longer blocked, instead it willPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Recently there has been a lot of commotion around large language model text based AI.
They are able to do impressive stuff, they give useful answers, and even can write somewhat usable programming sample code.

The most famous one currently is chatgpt, but all of those AIs are basically black boxes, that probably have some malicious features under the hood.

While there are Open-Source Implementations of ChatGPT style Training Algorithms
https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/01/open-source-chatgpt/
Those kinda require that you have a sizeable gpu cluster like 500 $1k cards that are specialized kit, not your standard gaming stuff. To chew through large language-models with 100 billion to 500 billion parameters.

The biggest computational effort is the initial training run, that chews through a huge training data-set. After that is done, just running the thing to respond to your queries is easier.

So whats the path to a foss philosophy ethical AI ?
Should people do something like peer to peer network where they connect computers together to distribute the computational effort to many people ?

Or should people go for reducing the functionality until it can run on a normal computer ?
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

This is the place to share articles.

>Leaked Microsoft documents reveal effort to "Gender Transition" young children
https://conservativenerds.locals.com/post/5120067/leaked-microsoft-documents-reveal-effort-to-gender-transition-young-children


>Firefox Money: Investigating the bizarre finances of Mozilla
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla


>IBM / Red Hat whistleblower leaks internal, racist, anti-White presentation.
https://conservativenerds.locals.com/post/4996525/ibm-red-hat-whistleblower-leaks-internal-racist-anti-white-presentation


>Microsoft's growing control of Linux
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

A video game that nintendo had a legal distribution monopoly on was leaked ahead of the official release. They got really mad about that and they are trying to take it out on the video-game emulation communities, by attacking emulation related software projects on github.

So the lesson here is if you give companies like that money they are going to use it to attack your hobbies. I think this legitimizes "pirating" games because you have no legal option to buy these games without also supporting nintendo's legalistic mafia-terror.

If copy"right" wasn't set up like a monopoly, and you could buy these specific games from any distributor not just nintendo, so that you could choose to buy from non-mafia sellers, it would at least be logically possible to make a case against "piracy". But as long as that's not possible "piracy" is basically just self defense. Keep in mind that nintendo doesn't make games, it's just a legal entity, and not the same as the people that make the games like for example programmers and artists.

Obviously there also is the hole deal with DRM which is total hypocrisy, it basically attacks the concept of personal ownership of your possessions. It's property-rights for me but not for thee.

If they were to reform copy"right" and remove the distribution monopoly aspect, so that everybody with the means to distribute copies was free to do so as long as they gave royalties (as a form of revenue sharing) to the people who actually created the stuff that is being copied. Maybe that would work.

But as long as they keep the monopoly part "piracy" is basically just competing distributors that were arbitrarily banned from participating in the market. Some times people make the strange argument that pirates gain from the work of others but that's also true for the capitalists that own nintendo, by that logic all of nintendo's profits are pirated.

I sometimes feel like the copy-monopolists take the most extreme ideological positions, while we don't and that's why this hole shit drifts ever more towards reactionary insanity where Nintendo gets to rape random software devs on github as some kind of bully-frustration release mechanism and it's a crime if you play with toys "the wrong way". Maybe we should redefine piracy as everything that keeps works-of-art outside the creative-commons/public-domain and drm as a product defect. Maybe that will create a counter-weight.

Here is a thought experiment about a hard problem in auditing computer security
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=sOeuYuvOcl0

if you didn't watch it here's the tldr:
In principle it's possible to compromise enough of the existing software and hardware stack so that a intelligent enough malicious security flaw could hide it self from you no matter how hardcore you go with your security audit. The conclusion being drawn is that the only solution to making sure you have a clean system, is to start from scratch with basic logic circuitry and then slowly build up a trusted software and hardware stack.

It's a clever argument, but there is a much easier way to get around all of this.

You can get to a trusted stack simply by scrambling the logic of a cpu. The only one that will be able to run logic operations on that cpu will be the person that can use the de-scrambler-key on the logic instructions given to that cpu. Malicious inserts into the hardware will return gibberish if they try to listen, and make the cpu produce logic errors if they try to inject code. It doesn't need to be a performant cpu either, something equivalent to 1985 era processors is good enough, as it's only necessary to bootstrap a trusted environment. A moderately sized organization can probably muster the necessary funds and technical sophistication to get a small batch of scrambled cpus produced.

The internet is dying, maybe it's actually already dead. This is a general thread about the dead internet theory. Share articles, first hand proof that the internet is dead, discuss etc. There is alot going on which indicates, that the dead internet theory is becoming reality.

So it appears that in Italy the IPmafia has infiltrated the state and issued a dictate dubbed "Piracy Shield". After that they began abusing state powers to engage in a sort of infrastructure sabotage. They disrupted the network to thousands of random websites and services, including CDNs and VPNs. It caused a huge political shitstorm. Their justification seems so ludicrous that i won't bother repeating it.

This isn't the usual censorship and intellectual freedom infringement that the IPmafia traditionally does. They upped their game. Disrupting lots of online services was a show of force. Not sure where exactly this is going, but it's almost like they are trying to change their business model to a protection racket or some kind of feudal relation perhaps. Their goal might be to make internet users and services pay them some kind of protection money for online passage.

Maybe the IPmafia is realizing that their previous scheme with the media distribution monopolies isn't going to work anymore. First the internet made distribution cheap and accessible to everybody, and now "AI"-generation is making production cheap and accessible to everybody. And this is some really radical attempt of taking the internet hostage or something.

Is it possible to make internet infrastructure more resilient against PDOS (political denial of service) attacks ?

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/27/italys-piracy-shield-creating-real-problems-as-vpns-start-turning-away-italian-users/
https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-shield-cloudflare-disaster-blocks-countless-sites-fires-up-opposition-240226/

In the early 20th century armies used search lights to find airplanes in the sky. They sometimes fitted shutters on these lights and used them for Morse-code. The light was pointed at the sky, sometimes at clouds. That enable transmitting "blinky-messages" beyond line of sight over significant distances. Armies eventually abandoned this method of communication for radios.

But there might be cause to bring this idea back. Science has advanced quite a lot in the last 100 years and we can use light to make tiny low power plasma bubbles in the air that emit brief light pulses. Enabling over the horizon optical communication with minimal to no infrastructure costs.

Imagine projecting a tiny holographic blinking dot of light in the sky to transmit information and a photodetector+optic to receive information.

A communication link is configured in 3D space.
-The upside is that the available volume of sky is functionally unlimited, and you never again have to deal with network-collisions and interference from communication signals of others.
-The Downside, it requires a good deal of precision in mechanical systems, so it'll be fiddly for a while. Picture using Binoculars to look at a firefly floating high up in the sky, you need to get up-down, left-right and focal distance just right to see it. There is a technology upgrade path to a solid-state chip version, that works similarly to matrix array antennas, It needs Terra-hertz switching logic, which requires photon-based micro-controller (it exists but it's very bleeding edge)

The range can be tremendous, there is enough gas molecules in the stratosphere to make this work. It will enable hops over the ocean with a small number of relay buoys.

The military might want this technology because
- it's harder to triangulate the origin of a transmission (you need to intersect the light-beam, to find the source), relay-transmitter-stations, soldiers, planes and ships will suffer fewer attacks from signal homing weapons, making it very robust.
- it's very hard to jam, (you need to flood the sky with very thick smoke, usually associated with forest-fires and volcano eruptions)
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.