• 6 Posts
  • 348 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: October 20th, 2023

help-circle
  • Keepassxc is great if you don’t need to synchronize passwords across too many locations and do not require anything where state matters (mostly related to stuff like yubikeys). It DOES have the vulnerability in that a bad actor has infinite time to crack it should they get a hold of the file whereas bitwarden still lives on a server.

    But they are very different products with very different capabilities. Whether someone needs bitwarden over keepass is going to be a question of use cases.


  • Yeah. This isn’t the first time the news app and the core nextcloud updates have fought each other in weird and mysterious ways (for me or others). I forget how I solved it last time (I think it was a similar case of needing to manually update to bleeding edge and then tweak things) but… I just don’t care anymore.

    I don’t know who is right or wrong in how nextcloud is maintained (my instinct is the nextcloud devs because… have you seen nextcloud? but also, most apps don’t have this recurring problem). But at this point, the benefits I get out of it are largely gone. And when so many issues boil down to “We need more people and resources to maintain this”, it kind of feels like getting off the train BEFORE it crashes rather than after.


  • I’m on the alpha and it still won’t update any of my feeds. And going through the github issues it is basically summed up as “We will do another stable release once we have a frontend developer” which is basically never. So, at best, it will work until it doesn’t and then I have to fix it myself yet again and… yeah.

    And if my choice is to run an older version of nextcloud to support one app? Hell no.









  • The thing is? Ignoring the apparent void that black skin creates on all cameras (oy), it doesn’t take much time. It takes computing power.

    As poops and giggles a few friends and I took the public (rumble…) traffic camera feeds that a nearby county has online. Set up a simple python script to scrape those and then configured an off the shelf tool to track a buddy’s general car (green hatchback) and told him to just drive around for an hour.

    We were able to map his route with about 70% accuracy with about two hours of scripting and reading documentation. And there are companies that provide MUCH better products for the people who have access to the direct feeds and all the cameras we don’t have access to.


  • I mean, you definitely want to wear a mask and some goggles at a protest. If only for the purpose of pepper spray. I totally don’t have a thin gaiter, goggles ,and a beanie and have definitely not heard great things about mountain biking helmets (the ones with faceguards) and totally am not considering grabbing one next time I do an REI run.

    But also be aware that, with protests, you are almost always up against the groups who have access to all those “traffic” cameras and the like. And computer vision makes it fairly trivial to identify when a bunch of unmasked people walked into a dark alley and came out with their faces fully covered by tracking them back from the 4th street protest. It isn’t Enemy Of The State levels of asking Baby Busey and Jamie Kennedy to generate a 3d model from a single shot of Big Willy Style ogling some ta-tas, but most of the ways surveillance is used during that sequence are shockingly realistic and feasible.



  • Yeah but this is (basically) reddit and clearly it isn’t racism and is just a problem of multi megapixel cameras not being sufficient to properly handle the needs of phrenology.

    There is definitely some truth to needing to tweak how feature points (?) are computed and the like. But yeah, training data goes a long way and this is why there was a really big push to get better training data sets out there… until we all realized those would predominantly be used by corporations and that people don’t really want to be the next Lenna because they let some kid take a picture of them for extra credit during an undergrad course.


  • No. I have worked with phone camera sensors quite a bit (see above regarding evaluating facial recognition software…).

    Yes, the computation is a Thing. A bigger Thing is just accessing the databases to match the faces. That is why this gets offloaded to a server farm somewhere.

    But the actual computer vision and source image? You can get more than enough contours and features from dark skin no matter how much you desperately try to talk about how “difficult” black skin is without dropping an n-word. You just have to put a bit of effort in to actually check for those rather than do what a bunch of white grad students did twenty years ago (or just do what a bunch of multicultural grad students did five or six years ago but…).


  • For low contrast greyscale sequrity cameras? Sure.

    For any modern even SD color camera in a decently lit scenario? Bullshit. It is just that most of this tech is usually trained/debugged on the developers and their friends and families and… yeah.

    I always love to tell the story of, maybe a decade and a half ago, evaluating various facial recognition software. White people never had any problems. Even the various AAPI folk in the group would be hit or miss (except for one project out of Taiwan that was ridiculously accurate). And we weren’t able to find a single package that consistently identified even the same black person.

    And even professional shills like MKBHD will talk around this problem during his review ads (the apple vision video being particularly funny).




  • People tried that.

    reddit corporate will remove those mods and ask which other mods want to be super duper awesome and be able to say they moderate another N thousand users per day for zero pay. And people leap at that.

    Until the users leave, nothing will happen. In a fucked way, reddit corporate are doing everyone a favor by removing the spineless “We are going to go silent for 24 hours with no real demands or bargaining power” idiocy.


  • … mostly the other way around?

    Theoretically it is possible that a compromised machine could compromise a USB stick. If you are at the point where you are having to worry about government or corporate entities setting traps at the local library? You… kind of already lost.

    Which is the thing to understand. Most of what you see on the internet is, to borrow from a phrase, Privacy Theatre. It is so that people can larp and pretend they are Steve Rogers fighting a global conspiracy while necking with a hot co-worker at an Apple store. The reality is that if you are actually in a position where this level of privacy and security matters then you need to actually change your behaviors. Which often involves keeping VERY strong disconnects between any “personal” device and any “private” device.

    There have been a lot of terrible (but wonderfully written) articles about journalists needing to do this because a government or megacorporation was after them. Stuff like having a secret laptop that they never even take out of a farraday cage unless they are closer than not to an hour away from wherever they are staying that night.


  • I think any “privacy oriented OS” is inherently a questionable (kneejerk: Stupid and reeks of stale honey) strategy in the first place.

    A very good friend of mine is a journalist. The kind of journalist where… she actually deals with the shit the average person online larps and then some. And what I and her colleagues have suggested is the following:

    Two flash drives

    • One that is a livecd for basically any linux distro. If you are able to reboot the machine you are using and boot to this, do it. That helps with software keyloggers but obviously not hardware
    • One that is just a folder full of portable installs of the common “privacy oriented” software (like the tor browser) supporting a few different OS types.

    Given the option? Boot the public computer to the live image. Regardless, use the latter to access whatever chat or email accounts (that NEVER are logged into on any machine you “own” or near your home) you need.