The phone numbers being hashed doesn’t matter because of how small the input space is. A standard phone number is a country code plus 9 digits. If we assume that anybody looking at this information already knows what country the people they’re targeting is from, that means there is 1000 000 000 possible phone numbers to check for any hash. Even if the hash is extremely slow, and takes 1 second to compute on a strong CPU, that still only takes 1000 000 000 / (60 * 60 * 24) = 11574 days, or 31 years to compute on a single core. For any large organization (like, say, any government or any large tech company), getting 1000 cores to run the hashes in parallel would be quite simple, reducing the time it takes to have a complete hash list down to 11 days to get a complete database of all possible hashes. Hashing phone numbers is literally just a mild inconvenience.

Edit: Actually looking it up phone number formats vary quite a lot by country, but the point still stands.

The amount of times I’ve seen my nieces and nephews stop mid-sentence, pull out their phone and have ChatGPT complete their thought is

How does that even work? Like what do they say to the machine if they can’t speak to a person?

Does disabling install scripts actually do anything though? The attack would still work if put in the code itself, no? The only difference I can see is that it would run when the project is run instead of when the package is installed.

Instead of your ISP seeing every site you go to, a different company sees every site you go to.

VPNs have their uses, but avoiding surveillance is not one of those uses.

Such as?

How would you produce solar panels when living “off grid”? You need a large, integrated economy to be able to produce such complicated hardware. This is why solar punk is fundamentally an elitist ideology. You look down your nose on “authoritarians”, and have a holier-than-thou attitude toward them, but the society you envision is impossible without them.

Empirical examples… that you have not provided?

I’m starting to question whether the free press should even exist, or can exist under capitalism.

It cannot. To begin with, having one rich fuck have their voice be amplified to a thousand or a hundred thousand times that of the average person, merely because their wealth allows them to buy and therefore control media, is obviously not democratic.

It’s really easy to show this even with a known problem. Ask an LLM to play a game of chess, and then give it 1. h3 as a first move. They always screw up immediately, by making an illegal move. This happens because 1. h3 is hardly ever played, so it isn’t part of it’s model. In fact, it’ll usually play a move that ‘normally’ responds to h3, like Bh5 for example

Sure but we’re talking about people who got laid of, they’re not getting a salary anyway. Unless starting a business gets rid of unemployment benefits I guess? But you can hold of on officially forming the business until you have some clients. I’m not saying it’d be easy, but I think it’s better than being unemployed

Tbf, unless there’s some massive capital expense that I’m not thinking about, you don’t really need any capital for doing software related work besides a computer, which most people already have anyway and maybe some office space. Software is about as capital lite as an industry can be, so if making a workers co-op under capitalism is going to work in any industry, it would be software.

FYI it seems about half of these have been taken down