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Cake day: August 6th, 2023

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  • The most elite trackers perhaps.

    Trackers on /r/opensignups ? Nah they open their doors to the public every now and again.

    Would not recommend it to anyone who can’t dedicate a seed box or machine uploading torrents most hours of the day every day. It’s possible to do it without those but difficult. With them it’s merely a matter of using free leech and building a buffer up as well as taking advantage of points systems to get free upload just for keeping torrents seeding even without uploading.

    If you only ever grab free leech then all you have to worry about is meeting seed time and activity requirements like logging in every 90 days.

    An old computer with an external drive. A raspberry pi, a nas that can run a BitTorrent client. Any would work if one doesn’t want to pay for a seed box. (Most trackers ban shared seed boxes though so you will have to get dedicated)


  • Take a look here for some alternatives:

    https://dessalines.github.io/essays/why_not_signal.html#good-alternatives

    • Matrix
    • XMPP
    • Briar
    • SimpleX

    Also just because there are no alternatives doesn’t mean your default position should be we just have to trust whatever exists now because it’s good enough. Or that we can’t criticize it ruthlessly, distrust it. Call it out and as a result of that build perhaps the desire for something better, a fix as it were.

    The evidence and history clearly points towards Signal being very suspicious and likely in bed with the feds. This is not conspiracy thinking. Conspiracy thinking is thinking that the country/empire that gave away old German engima machines whose code they’d cracked to developing countries without telling them they’d cracked it in the late 40s/early 50s, that went on to establish a crypto company just to subvert its encryption. That’s done everything Snowden revealed has in fact changed suddenly for the first time in half a century for no particular reason and not to its own benefit. That’s fanciful thinking. That’s a leap of logic away from the proven trends, the pattern of behavior, and indeed the incentivizes to continue using their dominant position to maintain dominance and power. They didn’t back down on the clipper chip because they just gave up and decided to let people have privacy and rights. They gave up on it because they found better ways of achieving the same results with plausible deniability.

    Also why is everything “tankies” with you people. Privacy advocates point out the obvious and suddenly it’s a communist conspiracy. LOL


  • No.

    HDMI does have a feature called Ethernet over HDMI that in theory could allow that.

    Thing is though it’s literally never been implemented in anything. It died because cheap WiFi became common.

    For it to work you’d need both the TV and Chromecast and HDMI cable all to support it. It’s not uncommon on cables and a surprising amount of them include it in features list (probably to trick low info people).

    But I believe that’s a hardware design thing so not something even a software update could enable. It costs extra money and they’re already paying for a WiFi chip so why bother?


  • Just FYI. Comments nearly exactly like yours on Reddit were used in copyright troll lawsuits against ISPs as evidence they didn’t do enough to enforce copyright and were negligent and legally liable.

    Further when that didn’t work the copyright agency sued Reddit to try to unmask the identities of those people to bring legal proceedings against them to coerce them into testifying against their ISP at threat of being in trouble for their activities. Reddit was big enough to fight off the lawsuit luckily but be careful.




  • That seems like a real problem given they are a people being actively subjected to genocide which is being censored and distorted by western media, who have their land stolen, their existence denied, and been subjected to apartheid sponsored by the most powerful nation in the world (the US no less) in flagrant violation of international law for over half a century. Abuses and genocide carried out by a regime so powerful, so important to US interests that there are multiple states in the US where you can lose your job or your business contract for simply voicing support for boycotting and divesting from the apartheid regime that is an illegal colonization and occupation of stolen land by radical far-right reactionary ethno-fascists operating under the cloak of religion. Most major western media are some degree of complicit in giving one-sided pro-apartheid state slants, omitting key details, and using dishonest framing to attempt to deceive the public and manufacture apathy and complicity.






  • Lot of cope and denial in these threads. Yes the same-day is probably a rosy estimate based off people using 6 digit codes or something easy to crack, doesn’t mean it’s false or that they can’t hypothetically target longer alpha-numeric passwords. For all we know they might not even be brute-forcing and could be conducting some sort of exploit that over time reveals the encryption keys themselves in some way.

    I’m still very curious about the nature of the mechanisms of action. I assume they manage to bypass the basic lock-out against entering too many passcodes too quickly somehow which is what enables this. If throttling could be properly enforced (to say nothing of something like 10 attempts and it refuses all future attempts and erases the key type of thing) this type of attack wouldn’t be practical for anyone using anything above a 6 digit numerical passcode in any reasonable timeframe. I wonder if they exploit wireless radios including cellular, wifi, bluetooth and force some code on the phones via these usually-on chips that enables this via exploiting problems in their architecture. Perhaps something that locks up, prevents functioning or resets certain checks via flooding parts of the hardware/software from these points of access. Or if it really is purely phy/log access to the lightning/usb-c port.



  • Politely agree to disagree and I’ll elaborate. Thanks for your input.

    LTH are all marked as such. MABL normal (non LTH) discs such as verbatim sells for less than half the cost of M-Discs have the same physical properties as M-Discs, the protective layers are the same, the recording methods are the same using the same materials. Therefore the longevity is the same or near the same without getting into M-Disc’s ridiculous marketing claims of 1000 years (when NIST and others agree the poly-acrylic protective layer would degrade and decompose after a century or two at most even in ideal circumstances).

    /r/Datahoarder has had this argument several times and the consensus so far seems to comes out to the fact that M-Discs were a DVD-era innovation that in the BD era offer no meaningful advantages in technologies.

    I’d rather have two BD’s from a reputable company like Verbatim (not fly by night plain white discount bulk BD’s from who knows where) from separate batches bought 6 months apart stored properly than rely on one overly expensive M-Disc that isn’t going to last any longer and probably isn’t made to meaningfully tighter tolerances.

    NIST only estimates the lifetime of M-Discs, real world abuse tests on BD’s (non LTH, should have mentioned that to be honest) show good endurance that far exceeds DVDs. It comes down to however burning it right and storing it right. A pile of M-Disc left in a window in your uninsulated garage year after year and burned at 16x are not on the whole going to be in a better state in 20 years than a pile of BD-R’s burned at 4x, stored in protective sleeves in a case in a temperature controlled, insulated environment. Add in having a back-up copy and the chances of total data failure on both primary and backup disc and you’re looking at better survivability. NIST numbers generally assume things like storage in archival quality environments such as old salt mines which are a controlled environment, low humidity, neither excessively hot or cool and not subject to shifts in temperature. Most people can’t store things in an environment like that and those who can usually have the finances for a better solution like multiple tape copies and/or continually updating and refreshing hashed/checksumed files and moving on a schedule to new better storage mediums (e.g. keeping files in a raid array in a plugged in NAS, checking for failures regularly, replacing disks and upgrading disks every 5-10 years one at a time).

    I wouldn’t trust any media not professionally stored in a purpose-built archival environment and with at least two copies to last more than 25 years without degradation or loss. Anyone trying to store stuff really long-term and cannot afford degradation or loss needs to have a plan to update their archival copies every 15 years or at least do an assessment that often and survey the options as well as the physical and ideally logical state of their chosen back-ups.



  • There is just no excuse for not even salting or SOMETHING to keep the secrets out of plaintext. The reason you don’t store in plaintext is because it can lead to even incidental collection. Say you have some software, perhaps spyware, perhaps it’s made by a major corporation so doesn’t get called that and it crawls around and happens to upload a copy of a full or portion of the file containing this info, now it’s been uploaded and compromised potentially not even by a malicious actor successfully gaining access to a machine but by poor practices.

    No it can’t stop a sophisticated malware specifically targeting Signal to steal credentials and gain access but it does mean casual malware that hasn’t taken the time out to write a module to do that is out of luck and increases the burden on attackers. No it won’t stop the NSA but it’s still something that it stops someone’s 17 year old niece who knows a little bit about computers but is no malware author from gaining access to your signal messages and account because she could watch a youtube video and follow along with simple tools.

    The claims Signal is an op or the runner is under a national security letter order to compromise it look more and more plausible in light of weird bad basic practices like this and their general hostility. I’ll still use it and it’s far from the worst looking thing out there but there’s something unshakably weird about the lead dev, their behavior and practices that can’t be written off as being merely a bit quirky.


  • I wish they would just push all the big mainstream porn sites to remove the most abusive misogynistic content rather than slapping these checks on everything.

    Also this will never be okay until there is a zero knowledge version that means neither the government, nor the sites, nor any other party can establish a given person’s habits which is probably not something they’ll ever do because tracking is probably part of the point.

    I’m not a fan of the easy access to porn that kids have or the proliferation of the industry in general but I am worried that as part of this harmless things like erotic roleplaying websites will be swept up as part of it and well I use those. And their point is not porn though some people host and share porn as part of it (which is why it’d get swept up with it eventually probably), it’s about writing, smutty, erotic writing. And I’d rather not have to tie my identity to my desires to roleplay out an elf who ends up making “friends” with the wolf-men tribe to my real life identity (I’m not claiming that’s something I do there but it’s an example of something that would be kind of embarrassing for others to know and it’s far from the weirdest stuff that goes on in places like that).

    Government having credits for how often I could say log in and continue a long-term erotic writing campaign with someone is just weird but that’s the end point of this kind of thing. Having credits seems not helpful anyways, the true porn addicts are just going to download stuff then share it in private forums, discords, p2p, etc. If the point is to stop kids from accessing this the credits thing seems odd.


  • M-Discs had merit in the DVD era. It’s a common refrain of those who don’t know the intricacies and read a wired article years ago to claim they mean anything in the Blu-ray era. They don’t.

    Standard Blu-ray Discs have all the technologies that supposedly make m-discs so long lasting and as far as media that isn’t continuously updated and hashed from live storage medium to live storage medium (cold, archival storage unpowered) they are about as good as you’ll get.

    They are much tougher than DVDs. Of course a variety of things go into how long a disc remains readable and without damage to data including luck with regards to no impurities in the batch. Even m-disc themselves based their longest claims off storage in ideal situations like an inactive salt mine (commonly used for archives by governments). Kept out of sun, away from extreme heat (including baking in uninsulated 120 degree F heat all summer year after year), away from high humidity and away from UV exposure to the data side of the disc as well as scratches and such and they should last a quarter to half a century, some more.

    In the Blu-ray era m-discs are just an overly expensive brand.