They’re probably not joking, TOX IDs are like that. :) Mine is:
CA9A4C1968AA38CC93CB32F31F3682AB897ABA42C90E6F0EA5E1FB541930FD64138B4CC09AD*
(*the number opposite to the first is the number that comes after one, to hinder any spam bots)
You can use Signal with a different client.
Can you advise, which one would be a good one? Because I actually use Signal too, it’s just misbehaving a lot recently.
I have had endless difficulties with Signal forcing upgrades on me and requiring to sign in on the phone, under threat of deactivating my account (I use it on a PC).
Commentary:
You’re linking to the Times of Israel. Since the news outlet operates in Israel, it is subject to censorship by the IDF, and they have chosen to use their power to censor the article and omit weapon types.
If you want information about assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, get their list from Wikipedia and google each of their names, looking for descriptions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassinations_of_Iranian_nuclear_scientists
My guess: guided missile or drone strikes. All the assassinations happened at a time of Israeli air strikes over Iran. Whatever weapon was used, was deployed from airplanes. Given the high profile of the targets, Israeli intelligence agencies did their job this time (in Gaza, they seem to be feeding their troops low quality AI slop).
I will use the opportunity to remind that Signal is operated by a non-profit in the jurisdiction called “the US”. This could have implications.
A somewhat more anarchist option might be TOX. There is no single client, TOX is a protocol, you can choose from half a dozen clients. I personally use qTox.
Upside: no phone number required. No questions asked.
Downside: no servers to store and forward messages. You can talk if both parties are online.
On social media, putting the burden of blocking on a million users is naive because:
I have once helped others build an anonymous mix network (I2P). I’m also an anarchist. On Lemmy however, support decentralization, defederating from instances that have bad policies or corrupt management, and harsh moderation. Because the operator of a Lemmy instance is fully exposed.
Experience has shown that total freedom is a suitable policy for apps that support 1-to-1 conversations via short text messages. Everything else invites too much abuse. If it’s public, it will have rules. If it’s totally private, it can have total freedom.
In our modern times, Ea-Nasir still has some bars of aluminum to sell you. Quite several, in fact. :)
But who would buy such hardware? :)
so good luck hiding a VPN client.
In my imagination, there is no VPN client. The whole network is behind a VPN router and the internet gateway is where it needs to be.
how did you do it?
In the BIOS options of that specific server (nothing fancy, a generic Dell with some Xeon processor) the option to enable/disable ME was just plainly offered.
Chipset features > Intel AMT (active management technology) > disable (or something similar, my memory is a bit fuzzy). I researched the option, got worried about the outcomes if someone learned to exploit it, and made it a policy of turning it off. It was about 2 years ago.
P.S.
I’m sure there exist tools for the really security-conscious folks to verify whether ME has become disabled, but I was installing a boring warehouse system, so I didn’t check.
please read up on intel management engine
I’m already familiar with it. On the systems I buy and intall, if they are Intel based, ME gets disabled since I haven’t found a reasonable use for it.
Oh yeah, ARM also has something similar.
Since this is more relevant to me (numerically, most of the systems that I install are Raspberry Pi based robots), I’m happy to announce that TrustZone is not supported on Pi 4 (I haven’t checked about other models). I haven’t tested, however - don’t trust my word.
Who would you buy from in this case?
From the Raspberry Pi Foundation, who are doubtless ordering silicon from TSMC for the Pico series and ready-made CPUs for their bigger products, and various other services from other companies. If they didn’t exist, I would likely fall back on RockChip based products from China.
https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/nsaant/firewalk/index.htm
Wow. :) Neat trick. (Would be revealed in competent hands, though. Snap an X-ray photo and find excess electronics in the socket.)
However, a radio transceiver is an extremely poor candidate for embedding on a chip. It’s good for bugging boards, not chips.
The first and central provision of the bill is the requirement for tracking technology to be embedded in any high-end processor module or device that falls under the U.S. export restrictions.
As a coder with some hardware awareness, I find the concept laughable.
How does he think they (read: the Taiwanese, if they are willing to) would go about doing it?
Add a GPS receiver onto every GPU? Add an inertial navigation module to every GPU? Add a radio to every GPU? :D
The poor politician needs a technically competent advisor forced on him. To make him aware (preferably in the most blunt way) of real possibilities in the real world.
In the real world, you can prevent a chip from knowing where it’s running and you can’t add random shit onto a chip, and if someone does, you can stop buying bugged hardware or prevent that random addition from getting a reading.
I’m not from the US, but I straight out recommend quickly educating oneself about military stuff at this point - about fiber guided drones (here in Eastern Europe we like them) and remote weapons stations (we like those too). Because the US is heading somewhere at a rapid pace. Let’s hope it won’t get there (the simplest and most civil obstacle would be lots of court cases and Trumpists losing midterm elections), but if it does, then strongly worded letters will not suffice.
Trump’s administration:
“Agency,” unless otherwise indicated, means any authority of the United States that is an “agency” under 44 U.S.C. 3502(1), and shall also include the Federal Election Commission.
Vance, in his old interviews:
“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
Also Vance:
“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
Googling “how to remove a dictator?” when you already have one is doing it too late. On the day the self-admitted wannabe Caesar crosses his Rubicon, it better be so that some people already know what to aim at him.
Tesla dealerships… nah. I would not advise spending energy on them. But people, being only people, get emotional and do that kind of things.
As an exception to most regulations that we hear about from China, this approach actually seems well considered - something that might benefit people and work.
Similar regulations should be considered by other countries. Labeling generated content at the source, hopefully without the metadata being too extensive (this is where China might go off the handle) would help avoid at least two things:
Tox is nice. My favourite flavour is qTox.
The typical pattern over here: if someone uses Signal, you guess they’re some military type (wants things to be secure, doesn’t care much about anonymity, wants things to work one way and simply).
If someone uses Tox, you guess they’re some hacker / anarchist type (wants things to be secure, but also anonymizable, wants things to be flexible, even if it can backfire).
Maybe I’m misreading because one poster above deleted their comment, but I can’t understand: how exactly has TSMC shown “disrespect”? Or was the poster showing disrespect?
Putting corporations aside and speaking of states: the US and Taiwan have respectful and friendly relations. They depend on each other.
Now, a tariff of 25-100% on a partner’s primary export and one’s own vitally important import is more like putting a shotgun to one’s leg out of spite. It would be hurting oneself and hurting the other side - and not a little bit.
The US is a store that Taiwan frequently shops in - a very big defense equipment store, I should say. Some of the toys cost money, but if you buy enough, you get kickbacks - the US gives Taiwan some security assistance for free. It also says it will assist Taiwan if anyone (we can imagine who that might be) attacks it.
Meanwhile, Taiwan is a store the world frequently shops in - a very big microprocessor, memory and microcontroller store. Frequent customers can tell TSMC “it would be nice if you brought some of your business here, we have a vacant spot suitable for your plans”. And it works: one factory will be built in the US, one factory in the EU. Maybe elsewhere too. Getting that to happen didn’t need Trump or insane levels of customs tariffs.
To achieve that, people just negotiated like normal people do. TMSC know they operate in a country prone to violent earthquakes and close to an agressive neighbour, they are quite OK with placing some of their business abroad.
Same here. Forums (about science fiction, aeromodelism, electric vehicles) have been important to me, and continue to be important in some fields.
For ease of reading, the investigation he refers to:
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/
In short: fake artists with stock music (changing labels and other camouflage applied). Likely goal: to depreciate streaming counts for actual artists and increase profit margins.
What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.
I would recommend Signal and maybe Tox (protocol, has several clients).
Signal is a nonprofit. They make it a point not to collect your data. Just the phone number. Military folks seem to like them.
Tox is not a centralized entity at all, anarchists seem to like it. Multiple Tox clients exist and use a common protocol and network. Messaging happens via peer-to-peer, lookups make use of servers. For messaging to occur, both communicating parties have to be online, so don’t expect much convenience.
There are use cases for this router, but please don’t get the plastic clone sold by the same Chinese company that assembles the real thing. (The plastic clone costs a third, but doesn’t have detachable antennas and doesn’t accept mainstream OpenWRT because it uses an almost unknown CPU.)
Myself, when I need a high capability router (for me “capability” typically means “range”) I turn towards a Raspberry Pi and Alfa AWUS1900 wireless card. Yes, it lacks in throughput (USB is a severe bottleneck)… but with a bit of tweaking, you can talk out to 2 kilometers if terrain allows. :)
“To bombard someone with letters” is an expression actively used in the English language.
China hasn’t dropped bombs in, what, 60 years?
Almost correct. The last war-sized conflict China took part in was the 1979 Chinese-Vietnamese war [1]. That was 45 years ago. Battle-sized events between China and Vietnam have occurred up to 1991 [2], that would be up to 23 years ago. Skirmish-sized events with India are as recent as 2021. [3]. As for what occurs in Gaza, I agree. Bad stuff has been happening there. Going by the tonnage of things blowing up, Gaza is a gang shootout compared to Ukraine, though.
Technical summary: it seems OK against an observer who can see the network traffic but hasn’t infiltrated the phone of the source or the computer of the news organization.