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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)BO
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490
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2 yr. ago

  • During World War II, the telegraph interception guys would figure out which enemy units were where, even without having broken the codes, because each telegraph operators each had their own "fist," or distinct patterns in how they punched in the Morse code, and people listening to the signals day in and day out could learn to distinguish them even when dealing entirely in encrypted text.

    In modern times, attribution of hacker groups include other indicators include what time zones certain people seem to be active in, what their targets are (and aren't), hints about installed language support or keyboard layouts or preferred punctuation or localized representations of numbers. For example, you can tell here on Lemmy when someone uses different types of quotation marks a decent indication of what country that person might be from, even in a totally English language thread.

  • I get how it works with wifi connections, and Bluetooth scanning (since that's a peer to peer protocol that needs to broadcast its availability), and obviously the OS-level location services, but I'm still not seeing how seeing wifi beacons would reveal anything. For one, pretty much every mobile device OS now uses MAC randomization so that your wifi activity on one network can't be correlated with another. And for another, I think the BSSID scanning protocol is listen only for client devices.

    Happy to be proven wrong, and to learn more, but the article linked doesn't seem to explain anything on this particular supposed threat.

  • I set a simple task to turn off WiFi when my home network is not detected so my phone doesn't scan and report my location to businesses.

    I was under the impression that BSSID scanning was entirely passive, and that a phone that scans for beacons doesn't actually reveal itself to anyone.

  • Because every single president does the same exact thing.

    What are you talking about?

    Biden got about as much as he could get through a Republican controlled House and a filibustering Senate: a major COVID relief bill, a major infrastructure bill, and a major environmental reform bill.

    Trump did a shitload in his one term:

    • Replaced 3 Supreme Court justices and a lot of lower court judges who went on to overturn Roe v. Wade and Chevron, deliver a shitload of conservative decisions, and block a bunch of Biden executive actions (including student loan forgiveness, all sorts of COVID policies, and a bunch of economic regulations).
    • Major tax cuts in 2017 for corporations and high earners
    • Withdrew from the Paris accords and rolled back a lot of Obama EPA regs
    • Made shifts towards privatization of k-12 education, including towards religious private schools.

    Obama signed a bunch of stuff into law his first two years:

    • Obamacare
    • Universal healthcare for children under S-CHIP
    • Student loan reform, creating public service loan forgiveness and much better repayment plans while cutting out private lenders who took all the upside with none of the downside.
    • Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
    • Repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell
    • Passed Dodd Frank, including the creation of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau
    • School lunch reform

    Bush campaigned on tax cuts and got them, and then got a bunch of other stuff in from his first term related to 9/11 and the aftermath: The Patriot Act, authorization for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, etc.

    If anything, presidents are far less effective their second term than their first term.

  • One time pads are perfect encryption, but the problem is that the key length needs to be longer than the message length. So if you have the ability to get the symmetric key to the recipient securely, then you had the ability to get the whole message to the recipient securely.

  • They use different heuristics to make their best guess, and to give themselves a confidence score.

    Some indicators include whether groups refuse to target certain targets, what time zones correspond with their highest activity levels, types of linguistic or grammatical markers they use, including grammatical errors (a native Russian speaker makes different types of English mistakes as a native Chinese speaker), keyboard layouts, types of punctuation, etc.

    From there, watching their techniques can kinda reveal what other groups they might learn from or cross pollinate with.

    Everything can be spoofed, of course, but maintaining a false persona for a long time is hard, and often not worth doing.

  • And that introduces a specific type of supply chain threat: someone who possesses a computer can infect their own computer, sell it or transfer it to the target, and then use the embedded microcode against the target, even if the target completely reformats and reinstalls a new OS from scratch.

    That's not going to affect most people, but for certain types of high value targets they now need to make sure that the hardware they buy hasn't already been infected in the supply chain.

  • I don't know why you're framing this as solely a demand problem, or why you think the elasticity of demand won't extend to negative prices. Negative prices tend to show up only during periods of very high supply, due to a confluence of factors like weather, so supply is part of it (low or even negative prices can induce producers to curtail production). There's nothing special about the number zero.

    And negative prices therefore take the place of disposal: oversupply and the need to expand real resources taking that energy off of the grid in that particular moment. That's demand, too: incentivizing people to do what needs to be done, and get rid of that excess energy by disposing it or whatever.

  • you don't have to pay electricity to f*ck off if you produce too much of it.

    It's not any different than most physical goods. Whatever you can't sell before it goes bad, you have to pay someone to take off your hands using real resources (dumpsters, trucks, human labor).

    Too much electricity in the system is harmful, and if nobody wants to buy it, then you have to pay someone to take it out of the system.

  • If we were able to adequately shape demand to match available supply, rates would fluctuate, but they would never go negative.

    I don't see why that would follow.

    If supply is higher than demand, then getting rid of that excess supply costs money, and the producer might have to pay someone to take it away. It applies to grocery stores that over order inventory of perishable goods, to oil companies that run out of space to store oil, and electricity grids that need to get rid of damaging/dangerous excess power.

  • More egalitarian venues tend to pool tips, so line cooks get a slice of the tip out at the end of the day.

    Federal minimum wage law requires that if front of house tips are pooled to be distributed to kitchen staff (who aren't traditionally tipped), then front of house must first be paid at least minimum wage pre-tip. So that kind of restaurant, while becoming more popular, isn't exactly the type of restaurant in the discussion when we talk about servers being paid less than minimum wage before tips.

  • They don't make less just because they're paid less by their employer. The minimum wage of how much they actually make is the same.

    And as a result, servers in the US make a lot more than line cooks of similar experience. That wage gap is a source of frustration for cooks.