elevation

New Era

But no PQC?

John Stossel explained in _Give Me A Break_ that the US once had a variety of pharmaceutical labs researching different cures and conducting trials. But US courts allowed a frenzy of frivolous lawsuits to extract astronomical payouts on behalf of former trial participants, even demanding payouts from the companies that stocked the supply and janitorial cabinets of research companies. One by one, we bankrupted our competitive machines of innovation until the few remaining pharmaceutical companies had grown large enough to defend themselves against injury claims. Big Pharma was created by lawyers.

often providing services that are unnecessary

Thank a lawyer. "Patient with symptom X would have survived if only the doctor had tested him for Y". Now every patient with symptom X is issued a $5600 scan for Y -- not because of medical science, but because of liability. Every time a courts awards 10 figure settlement because "that insurance company is good for it," all of society pays for it.

Thanks for a well written article!

When spec'ing a signle database host, I've been told to select the highest L1/L2 cache possible (allowing O(n^2) loads to complete with the least IO delay) with IOPs and RAM also being desirable. Does this hold when selecting hardware for shards?

Do you ever see unusual ratios between egress bandwidth and shard count? For instance, do you ever see 128 shards under heavy load not managing to saturate a 1GbE link?

Would love to see more of your writing on this topic.

I typically use paypal for paying contractors, but try to "load balance" across a couple competitors because you never know when one of them will flag your account, nor for how long it will be flagged.

Consolidation in this industry puts my ability to transmit money at greater risk.

My dream configuration in the past was Vault, protected by step-ca's ACME implementation, with an IdP like KanIDM for SSO.

But it seems like there is so much feature creep: OpenBao now has its own ACME server. And KanIDM is considering it... Why is every app vying to be my root of trust?

This year, an octogenarian friend got locked out of his android phone permanently. He had never had a PIN on his Samsung phone.

It started when he signed up at a new bank, giving them his phone number. Somehow the bank enrolled his in their online banking system, which notified Samsung, who remotely initiated the "let's give your phone a pin" flow, presumably to protect him during online banking. (This happened without his knowledge -- he had not installed the bank's phone app.)

Later that day, when his phone went into a modal "let's setup a pin" screen, he panicked, assuming an attacker had gained control of his phone, since this was not something he initiated. No button would let him exit the screen, so he powered it down. Now, when he powers it up, it demands a pin, but he doesn't know what pin that would be. The only way to get the phone back would be to factory reset it, meaning he'd be wiping his data. He had the money to replace his phone, but that may not be true of every citizen, especially at his age.

People assume digital auth systems are perfect. But you don't hear from consumers who can't get online to tell you "I've lost access."

I've shared some other similar stories: a widow who got banned for life from facebook within minutes of making an account from an apple device on a consumer ISP with her real cell phone number.

A coworker attempted to sell his son's sporting goods on facebook marketplace and was banned for life with no appeal because AI thought it was "weapons."

Some high school students each made a gmail address from the same laptop one afternoon, only to be banned the next day. Each supplied their own cellphone number, but the accounts got shut down, presumably because multiple accounts were being created from the same device too rapidly.

AI moderation means there are a ton of unwritten rules, and private companies will keep you out of their platforms if you break them. That's fine, but it means governments have no business serving their citizens from these exclusive platforms.

e signed up at a new bank, giving them his phone number. Somehow

Older systems were imperfect and were understood to be. I've meet veterans who joined the Navy at 14 or 16. I've met many College students who can pass as old enough to buy alcohol, especially with a fake id. Dead people are sometimes registered to vote. We know this and have systems to try to catch these exceptions.

But cellphone access is different; it's assumed to be perfect, but it's increasingly being moderated by machine learning heuristics that serve as judge, jury, and executioner, severing your services if a couple of your actions trigger a fuzzy approximation to some of the training data.

AI moderation helps suppress spammers, but it's also punishing false positives, and there is just no recourse. Any ID system that piggybacks on "Apple | Google" is effectively shunning some non trivial portion of society. Governments of the people need to provision their own tech systems that are accessible to all citizens, even those who have run afoul of an AI moderation system.

This article deliberates about the venue of patent litigation. But even if you settle upon and ideal venue, there are deeper structural problems with patents.

US patent law is unenforceable against the world’s largest manufacturer, China, which boldly copies patented IP with impunity.

US patent law enables non-practicing entities (NPEs) to hold third parties liable for damages. If you bought toilet paper manufactured on a machine that infringes a patent, you can be sued for wiping your own ass. NPEs have successfully extracted millions from small businesses whose only crime was listing an app in the Play Store using a Google API, or using TLS to protect credit card information in flight —- obvious ideas that possibly technically infringed a US patent.

Patents are thought to protect small inventors but filing fees are exorbitant and as per the article, large corporations can easily steal ideas while tying inventors up in court.

Since patent laws enable trolls to decrease our GDP while trade secrets offer they only true protection against the biggest threats, arguing about the venue where we litigate farcical claims misses the point. We should just suspend the patent system until the rest of the manufacturing globe is on board.

My homelab consists of several baremetal hosts, Vagrant lets me instantiate a full testing environment from a text file and kick off provisioning scripts.

What are businesses supposed to actually do with this?

A responsible business should increase an attacker's cost above the likely benefit. If your current threat model accepts the risk of a particular attack because "it would be too costly" and this model changes that, then you need to consider mitigating rather than accepting that risk.

Triggernometry

A couple of immigrants to Britain discuss politics, culture, and world events. Some topics are pertinent to life in the US, others are just interesting discussions. The hosts' previous work as comedians can make their discussions more entertaining.

Any good debian-ish distros that integrate TTS and STT in a usable shell?

Yes -- and even a spectacular punishment does not establish the guilt of the recipient.

Some may be innocent (framed) or only partially guilty (scapegoat.) Other may have been known to be guilty all along and has only recently fallen out of favor.

Yes, self contained python utilities.

Claude runs on an isolated machine with no access to production data, its role is to generate tools that we can use to analyze production data.

I think this is spot-on for the business of shipping podcast players.

But big-company-style support is only inevitable if your company must scale. Many markets can sustain players with higher margins and a premium product+support.

Flipper Zero's marketing helps it to be able to pass as a toy to people who don't know about furries or security.

Video describes the decline in usage of US-based AI due to budget concerns overriding whatever benefits the models might provide. To realize LLM benefits at a lower cost, companies are switching to Chinese models -- with the added benefit of being able to self host, rather than leak IP for frontier models to train off of.

This is just a price discovery mechanism. LLM started out cheap/free, but as the effective costs go up, AI companies get to see the level at which customers no longer value their services. Investments in US training/inference are still growing domestic capacity enormously, this trend is only revealing the returns they'll get for their investment.

a fine fate for narcissistic bosses. Fire them all and let unemployment sort them out!

Never underestimate the self-preservation abilities of an entrenched cohort within the organization they manage; you cannot reform the good old boys. If you know how to use WFH as a competitive advantage, don't worry about firing your RTO managers, just start your own company and compete with them.

would require thousands of changes

But LLMs are great at this, provided you have a test suite to keep the process on the rails.

Some are more equal than others.

A friend with an iPhone runs his a couple businesses with the Quo app (nee OpenPhone) which allows him to manage calls/sms for multiple business numbers from his personal phone while allowing him to automatically disable ringing after 5pm when he leaves the office to be a family man.

My problem is that my customers prefer to reach me over iMessage, and porting my number to any "business phone in an app" means I'd be downgrading to unreliable SMS in a green bubble. So if I want to separate work/personal use, I'd need to carry a second iPhone.

s/LLMs, maybe two/LLMs may be too/

Text to speech, you're killing me!

Sentrix' product has integrated this for Windows, but I couldn't help but wonder how I would implement equivalent functionality for Linux. You could detect access to a honeytoken file by monitoring SELinux logs; on access, you could snapshot procfs for relevant information like open sockets and other fds.

if an LLM can either produce something higher-quality and more tailored

LLMs won’t always do this well. The best ideas in my backlog are the ones where the LLMs won’t finish my thoughts because they’re contrary to what 1000 people said on a forum somewhere. Or because I’m relaying an original personal experience.

But even if LLMs can finish your thoughts, it’s probably good to post anyway. Because in five years LLMs, maybe two commercialized, or their trained opinion may shift. A dated blog post is a nice Ebeneezer, a memorial to the Zeitgeist it hails from.

I have exclusively printed from Ubuntu, I currently use a Dell C1765 color laser.

I also use a Brother HL-2170W, but I was unable to enable network printing on this device without first attaching it to a windows machine via USB and running the brother utility.

I print infrequently enough that inkjets would essentially be one-time-use, as the nozzles would completely dry up before I could use it again. So Laser is the best option.

My memory was that this was an NPR story, the local affiliate has distinct production values that I believe I would have noticed. However, even searching the local affiliate's site only yielded the stories you referenced.

mixes in the name of a competitor

If I were your competitor and saw that your listing includes my business name but your contact info, you might be getting a letter from my lawyer. Have you let Google know they're putting you at legal risk?

Was the floppy quieter than an HD?

While we’re on the topic, on the last year, NPR interviewed an expert who warned of lifelong debilitating injury (pain walking) that dancers developed by going en pointe too young. The woman recommended waiting until 15. But searching for this to share with dancers, I cannot find the interview now. Did NPR retract this?

I'm glad to see UBNT in this space.

I've always used ZFS because it's vastly superior to other options. When I see storage companies building without fault tolerance, or without a merkle tree (so that you can backup deltas efficiently without having to recompute them) it's a sign their marketing team has more influence over the company than their engineers.

Sadly, the few ZFS COTS options have been somewhat underpowered. QNAP supports ZFS filesystems, but their backup configuration won't let you arrange for a nas to pull from the source (instead of the source doing a push.) You can still pull it off by scheduling your own cron job, but this somewhat defeats the purpose of paying extra for a vendor solution.

UBNT is still supporting my 15 year old edgerouters with security updates, and their interface is clean and usable for anyone with basic network experience. And their video surveillance solutions are unusual in that they allow you to keep your footage entirely onsite and offline, an uncommon level of privacy. If they can bring the same polish to their storage solutions, I'll be using these new products for a long time.