I started with graphene a few months ago and it worked from the beginning just following the instructions on the phone to enable it. That said I do recall aention of extra permissions for Bluetooth android auto, which I didn’t want. My car doesn’t support it over Bluetooth anyway so didn’t matter to me, but you may be interested in looking that up (I don’t recall the specifics).

I’m not disagreeing with anything you’re saying and I think the articles about this are sensationalized in the impact in some ways, but I think you’re focusing too much on the type of traffic that is typically encrypted with HTTPS/TLS.

I think the bigger issue is internal networks where it is still common to run non encrypted and/or unauthenticated services. This is particularly an issue when SSID segreagation (lile guest networks) was used to mitigate this kind of issue. The AirSniff paper shows that SSID isolation in many APs can be bypassed.

Years ago i was looking for EV kits and found several people out there selling them. Idk what the current availability is, how much tech they have, or how open they are. The ones I saw were pretty low tech (lacking regen braking and such). Think accelerator pedal controls motor speed and a battery pack is about all they were. Again this was a while ago when I was looking (like 2010ish).

You could offer kits for older vehicles, but considering the cost of the kid and installation cost/effort, does it make sense to start with an older car that may have other issues coming soon?

So what’s the alternative? Start with a new car and throw out the ICE? Sure, but a bit wasteful and even more expensive than an older car or you could find an existing manufacturer (idk like Lotus) who will basically provide you the car without the ICE related components (aka a glider). ;)

Similar to SEO, there’s a lot that isnt public (some for obvious reqsons), so it’s a lot of guess work / trial and error / anecdotes. This volume thing I’m pretty sure is real. What is almost certainly real as well is open rates. If you send a bunch of mail that isn’t opened, this isn’t good either.

The warming up was in the docs for the 3rd party mail service I managed for work a few years ago when we wanted to switch to a dedicated IP. They also cautioned to keep open rates up. I assume they have the data to advise their customers appropriately.

I’ve mostly run my own mail servers since around 2000, and I gave up a few years ago and started using a 3rd party for outbound SMTP. I had considered giving people free SMTP accounts to boost legit traffic, but I didn’t know how to prevent spam/scammers from using it. Like if I posted on Reddit that I was doing that, I’d probably get legit people, but also almost certainly a spammer or few. As such, idk how anyone can practically run their own SMTP server today unless they sort of bootstrap it with a few legit newsletters (that people actually want and open) spread out over multiple days or transactional emails like say a ticketing system (if the people receiving them are the types to actually open them).

As far as personal emails going through the same spam filters, there are some headers newsletters add that I’d assume handles them slightly differently (list-unsubscribe).

I wasn’t able to do so and ended up switching to Mint in scenarios where I’d have used Ubuntu.

As long as you do pass through of the USB device (or USB host controller), it should be fine. The VM acesses it directlty without passing through a virtualized version of the device (like what normally happens with sound, network, graphics) and the VM can even DMA to it. Down side is that the hardware isn’t visible to the host anymore, so if you pass through a GPU, it’s used exclusively by the VM, not the host. If you connect a monitor to the GPU, you see the VM, not the host. So you can only do this with hardware that is intended specifically for use within the VM. Zune management sounds like an ideal use case. See IOMMU if you’re interested in some if the tech side if it.

I had some bad g.skill DDR4 last year. I assumed it was out of warranty. Thanks for the tip!

No reason it can’t be done on 120v (from a technical level). In fact, most solar inverters in the US could do this at a technical level as they basically do the same thing, just on a larger scale (higher current and therefore are wired in to electrical panels rather than through outlet as outlets have lower current limits). All you need is the inverter to synchronize its AC output to match grid. If you had a smaller inverter, you could just connect it to an outlet (ignoring building codes, insurance, and other non technical reasons). So the choice is then to have centralized larger inverters or smaller inverters per panel or 2. If you live in a very densely populated area where you can only pit a panel or 2 on a balcony or you don’t have control of your electrical panel, then the small inverter method makes sense.

I think you’re on to something, but sort of accidentally. A couple replies to you are saying it’s not possible, but I think they’re making an assumption that is not correct in many cases.

The replies is saying it’s not possible because the layers are flattened before passed to the compression, thus the uncensored/unredacted data is not part of the input to the compression and therefore cannot have any impact on its output. This is true assuming you are starting with an uncompressed image.

Here’s a scenario where the uncensored/unredacted parts of the image could influence the image: someone takes a photo of their ID, credit card, etc. It’s saved in a lossy compressed format (e.g. JPEG), specifically not a lossless format. They open it in an image editing tool to 100% black out some portion, then save it again (doesn’t actually matter the format). I feel lile someone is going to think I’m misunderstanding if I don’t explain the different output scenarios.

First is the trivial case: amultilayer output with the uncensored/unredacted data as its own layer. In this case, its trivial to get the uncensored/unredacted data as it is simply present and visible of you use a tool that can show the individual layers, but the general assumption is that this is not the case – that the output is a single layer image, in which we have 2 scenarios.

Second case: lossy compressed original, lossless censored. Consider that this censored/redacted image is flattened and saved as a lossless format such as PNG. Certainly there will be no compression artifacts of the uncensored/redacted data both because it is lossless (no artifacts added by PNG) and that it was flatted prior to being passed to PNG. However, the uncensored/unredacted artifacts remain in the uncensored/unredacted portions of the image. These were introduced by the compression that was applied prior to the censoring (e.g. the JPEG compression that contained the pre censored image). I suspect this is actually a common case.

Third case: lossy compressed original, lossy compressed censored: same as second case, except now you have additional artifacts, in particular you bow have artifacts from the censored portion, and the artifacts of the previous lossy compression are also adding additional artifacts. This is probably more difficult, but the point is that the original uncensored/unredacted artifacts are still present.

Basically what Nintendo did on one of their schemes to prevent unauthorized software (Famicom Disk System, which was a floppy disk drive for the Japanese version of the NES). This was the physical Nintendo logo embossed on to floppy disk and with a flat disk instead, the disk can’t be physically loaded (sort of, you can add extra cut outs). Other game systems required a logo or similar other brand/trademark/IP to be present in the game code in order to boot, so if you wanted to make your own game without Nintendo’s blessing, you had to invlude their IP in your physical disk or in the game code just to get it to boot. This BMW patent seems to be in the spirit of those hard and software protections that prevent people from doing what they want with the hardware (car) they bought.

Yeah and it’d be cool if they threw in a couple other games to show its versatility. HL3 of course, but a multiplayer game and maybe a unique puzzle game would be a good mix of game types.

I think you’re mixing up ME and 2000. ME (consumer) came after 98 (consumer) and 2000 (business) was the NT (business) version. I ran 2000 for a few years. Huge step up from 98/ME in stability and less eye candy bloat than XP.

It could be, but they seem to get through Cloudflare’s JS. I don’t know if that’s because Cloudflare is failing to flag them for JS verification or if they specifically implement support for Cloudflare’s JS verification since it’s so prevalent. I think it’s probably due to an effective CPU time budget. For example, Google Bot (for search indexing) runs JS for a few seconds and then snapshots the page and indexes it in that snapshot state, so if your JS doesn’t load and run fast enough, you can get broken pages / missing data indexed. At least that’s how it used to work. Anyway, it could be that rather than a time cap, the crawlers have a CPU time cap and Anubis exceeds it whereas Cloudflare’s JS doesn’t – if they did use a cap, they probably set it high enough to bypass Cloudflare given Cloudflare’s popularity.

Is there a particular piece? I’ll comment on what I think are the key points from his article:

1. Wasted energy.

2. It interferes with legitimate human visitors in certain situations. Simple example would be wanting to download a bash script via curl/wget from a repo that’s using Anubis.

3A) It doesn’t strictly meet the requirement of a CAPTCHA (which should be something a human can do easily, but a computer cannot) and the theoretical solution to blocking bots is a CAPTCHA.

and very related

3B) It is actually not that computationally intensive and there’s no reason a bot couldn’t do it.

Maybe there were more, but those are my main takeaways from the article and they’re all legit. The design of Anubis is in many respects awful. It burns energy, breaks (some) functionality for legitimate users, unnecessarily challenges everyone, and probably the worst of it, it is trivial for the implementer of a crawling system to defeat.

I’ll cover wasted energy quickly – I suspect Anubis wastes less electricity than the site would waste servicing bot requests, granted this is site specific as it depends on the resources required to service a request and the rate of bot requests vs legitimate user requests. Still it’s a legitimate criticism.

So why does it work and why am I a fan? It works simply because crawlers haven’t implemented support to break it. It would be quite easy to do so. I’m actually shocked that Anubis isn’t completely ineffective already. I actually was holding out bothering testing it out because I had assumed that it would be adopted rather quickly by sites and given the simplicity in which it can be defeated, that it would be defeated and therefore useless.

I’m quite surprised for a few reasons that it hasn’t been rendered ineffective, but perhaps the crawler operators have decided that it doesn’t make economic sense. I mean if you’re losing say 0.01% (I have no idea) of web content, does that matter for your LLMs? Probably if it was concentrated in niche topic domains where a large amount of that niche content was inaccessible, then they would care, but I suspect that’s not the case. Anyway while defeating Anubis is trivial, it’s not without a (small) cost and even if it is small, it simply might not be worth it.

I think there may also be a legal element. At a certain point, I don’t see how these crawlers aren’t in violation of various laws related to computer access. What i mean is, these crawlers are in fact accessing computer systems without authorization. Granted, you can take the point of view that the act of connecting a computer to the internet is implying consent, that’s not the way the laws are, at least in the countries I’m familiar with. Things like robots.txt can sort of be used to inform what is/isn’t allowed to be accessed, but it’s a separate request and mostly used to help with search engine indexing, not all sites use it, etc. Something like Anubis is very clear and in your face, and I think it would be difficult to claim that a crawler operator specifically bypassed Anubis in a way that was not also unauthorized access.

I’ve dealt with crawlers as part of devops tasks for years and years ago it was almost trivial to block bots with a few heuristics that would need to be updated from time to time or temporarily added. This has become quite difficult and not really practical for people running small sites and probably even for a lot of open source projects that are short on people. Cloudflare is great, but I assure you, it doesn’t stop everything. Even in commercial environments years ago we used Cloudflare enterprise and it absolutely blocked some, but we’d get tons of bot traffic that wasn’t being blocked by Cloudflare. So what do you do if you run a non-profit, FOSS project, or some personal niche site that doesn’t have the money or volunteer time to deal with bots as they come up and those bots are using legitimate user-agents coming from thousands of random IPs (including residential! – it used to be you could block some data center ASNs in a particular country until it stopped).

I guess the summary is, bot blocking could be done substantially better than what Anubis does and with less down side for legitimate users, but it works (for now), so maybe we should only concern ourselves with the user hostile aspect of it at this time – preventing legitimate users from doing legitimate things. With existing tools, I don’t know how else someone running a small site can deal with this easily, cheaply, without introducing things like account sign ups, and without violating people’s privacy. I have some ideas related to this that could offer some big improvements, but I have a lot of other projects I’m bouncing between.

I like forums, but maybe I’m part of the problem. I’ve read a forum obsessively for years without registering an account. Even when I have an account, I rarely post/comment. I’ve been reading Lemmy almost daily for over a year before registering an account and don’t reply much even with an account. Decentralization starts with individuals, so I’m going to try to add signal to the fediverse.

I generally prefer the traditional flat forum UI with oldest first, but that’s mostly a client issue. The problem though is if others are using a different UI the conversation may flow differently (think threaded vs flat forums).

RE karma, a lot of forums show post counts and like counts next to their forum profile, which is often included in every reply, so in some ways, the likes (karma) was a little more in your face. I think there was less astro turfing due to scope of benefit. What I mean is that while traditional forums were decentralized, so was the account and its reputation, so karma (like/post count) farming was isolated to that specific forum/community and if you were astro turfing, you’d get banned and lose that and could not transsfer that to other forums. Services like reddit effectively make this transferrable between forums. I’m concerned about how this will play out as decentralized platforms grow. It could be worse than reddit. I’ve been trying to come up with ways to handle this, but I can find flaws in every idea I’ve had so far.

A friend (works in IT, but asks me about server related things) of a friend (not in tech at all) has an incredibility low traffic niche forum. It was running really slow (on shared hosting) due to bots. The forum software counts unique visitors per 15 mins and it was about 15k/15 mins for over a week. I told him to add Cloudflare. It dropped to about 6k/15 mins. We excitemented turning Cloudflare off/on and it was pretty consistent. So then I put Anubis on a server I have and they pointed the domain to my server. Traffic drops to less than 10/15 mins. I’ve been experimenting with toggling on/off Anubis/Cloudflare for a couple months now with this forum. I have no idea how the bots haven’t scrapped all of the content by now.

TLDR: in my single isolated test, Cloudflare blocks 60% of crawlers. Anubis blocks presumably all of them.

Also if anyone active on Lemmy runs a low traffic personal site and doesn’t know how or can’t run Anubis (eg shared hosting), I have plenty of excess resources I can run Anubis for you off one of my servers (in a data center) at no charge (probably should have some language about it not being perpetual, I have the right to terminate without cause for any reason and without notice, no SLA, etc). Be aware that it does mean HTTPS is terminated at my Anubis instance, so I could log/monitor your traffic if I wanted as well, so that’s a risk you should be aware of.

Since you mentioned an upscaler, I’m assuming you got an old digital (LCD/Plasma/LED) TV that still had a few analog input types (my last couple TVs were lacking on analog inputs). A retro console upscaler probably has better results than your TV, but you can still use an analog switch box before the upscaler. Rather than spend a lot on multiple retro upscalers, spend much less on 1 upscaler and quality analog switch box(es).

Assuming the old Sony TV is CRT. The answer is still analog switch boxes but without an upscaler.

Most analog switch boxes can be used for analog audio, most will also be fine for non-optical digital audio. For optical, there are toslink switch boxes, but an audio receiver with multiple optical inputs is what I have.

EDIT: HDMI mods if they are taking the raw digital output rather than just being internal upscalers are an option, but depending on how authentic you want to be, the analog output circuits also affect the output and so an HDMI mod that bypasses the analog output would lose that.

I also didn’t want to try typing the name, search suggestion helped me. I played a couple of his games and they weren’t particularly difficult, so I assume it’s referring to his later games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomonobu_Itagaki

I bet you read the fine manuals too, dontcha?

This may seem pedantic, but mp4 is a container that holds the video and audio streams. The actual video stream can be encoded im various formats (mpeg 2, h264, h265, etc). If you open vlc and look at the codec menu, find the video stream and report back the encoding type it may provide some insight. It could be that there’s a performance regression with a particular decoder or maybe they changed decoding library or any number or things. Sorry it’s a bit vague, but what I’m getting at is if we know the actual video encoding of the file it may help to track down the decoding performance issue.

If it does turn out to be mpeg2, it could be that something changed about how the video decoding drivers (kernel module) are loaded. Like maybe they stopped including them by default or are no longer being used for some reason.

If it’s not mpeg 2, then could look in to decoder specific changes between distro versions or hardware support related changes (like maybe a kernel module needs an extra config passed to it to get better performance on 3b), or even decoder library config may be possible to tweak. Sometimes performance optimizations make things worse and the new default configs work better on newer hardware but worse for you.

In any case, I think knowing the specific video encodings would be helpful. I also just remembered that I had some performance issues on some files due to audio formats if I was having the Pi software decode vs connected to an external AV receiver that could decode the bit streamed audio data.