Dark Arc

Yeah it was before AMD did graphics.

ATI had an atrocious closed source driver. I used it … but it was not good at much of anything.

I remember reading that and I very much hope it is truly what they end up doing. As of now though, that has yet to materialize.

Sure, but by then it could be too late for the vast majority of people.

It’s not super relevant if nobody is looking for it/it’s hard to detect even if you are and plenty of damage can be done prior to detection.

They can do whatever they want. Operating systems are effectively divided into two partitions, privileged kernel space and user space.

When you run a kernel level anticheat what you’re really doing is running a custom program in the kernel space. It effectively becomes part of Windows.

This means that anything that an operating system can instruct hardware to do, that program can do. It can read your files, check your email, print letter you wrote to your crush in Word but “deleted” because it was embarrassing, log every key you type, turn on your webcam, listen to the microphone, download explicit or illegal imagery, upload your hard drive to the NSA, disable your computer fans, etc

You really only want to run this stuff if it’s from a trustworthy vendor and even then it’s completely defensible to object to running one of these programs.

Currently these things have yet to be caught doing any of these things, but that’s because they haven’t been instructed to, not because they can’t.

I mean it installs a rootkit on your computer that gives them full control over everything including what you type, hear, and see as well as the ability to record what you’ve previously typed and said. It could at any moment also fully disable your computer (as well as millions of other computers) rendering them useless.

Just because they haven’t used it that way, don’t assume they can’t or won’t.

China is state capitalism. Capitalism isn’t losing. The West is losing because China is using state funds to buy up successful Western companies, and as their new owner, has the ability to force them to do China’s bidding.

Meanwhile the West is completely barred from buying a majority stake in any successful Chinese company and even if it could would not be taking it over on behalf of serving the state.

The problem is China plays by its own rules and those rules are heavily stacked against every other nation. That was fine when they were making junk for Walmart; it’s not so fine when it’s highly sophisticated electronics and software (that can do whatever China wants it to in the West) … and to add insult to injury it’s often based on stolen Western technology (since us idiots decided to put the factories that manufacturer the designs there).

Mileage plus I think is just their free rewards program. So, not really a subscription, but it’s kinda like “download the app for a free coffee once a week”/“join our loyalty program” kinda promotions.

Yes, it’s expensive as hell, and my suspicion is that long term the displays will be replaced with a waveguide (Stanford’s looks pretty good at this point), so it won’t need the external-facing display

Interesting; any more information on this? I tried a search but didn’t turn much up.

I think that they saw what Google glass could become capable of, and thought that the phone as it is now (screen, etc) was going to become obsolete at some point, and they were terrified of losing that race.

That’s very fair… I definitely think the only viable future here is lightweight AR glasses.

I think one of the computers in my basement is an ASRock board, and it’s the flimsiest board I’ve ever had. Like the USB ports are really flexible.

Interesting; I’ve associated them with just making cheap boards. Is that changing?

I’ll add this to the list of things that were working just fine that we’re about to break along with using a passport to board a plane.

So… Having no public API means people just develop libraries to interact with your private API.

Furthermore, beautiful soup can work on any page… It’s just a matter of how easily.

CSRF doesn’t do what I think you think it does. It only works with a cooperating client (i.e. it’s to protect a user in their own web browser). If it’s a bot you’d just scrape the token and move on.

Fluctuations in user actions can also be simulated (you can have a bot architecture that delays work to be done to be similar to what a normal user might do/say/post) … and rate limiting can be overcome by just using more accounts, stolen IP addresses, etc

You can do a lot, but it’s always going to be a bit of a war. Things you’re suggesting definitely help (a lot of them echo strategies used by RuneScape to prevent/reduce bots), but … I think saying it’s an architecture problem is a bit disingenuous; some of those suggestions also hurt users.

How do you propose such an architecture works?

Quantum mechanics do “bypass” the speed of light from my understanding.

It’s not that you’re moving anything or actually bypass the speed of light. You just have basically a value that’s “entangled” so when it’s changed in one place it’s instantly changed in the other; it’s really freaky.

Well… I think the idea is once you can reliably send a photon, you can start sending entangled photos. Then you can use those to build networking hardware that transmits bits instantly.

Just that their names are so similar… It’s literally “-Link” with a character or two in front.

but we are mostly talking about a very low margin product and the volume of data that you’d need to retrieve and process to sift out anything useful would be massive and obvious so in general I think this is mostly conspiracy level thinking

Bold of you to assume they actually need to make money on these.

They also don’t need to sort through data to be problematic; they just need to be able to be remotely disabled or remotely given the order to start sniffing if they are one of the higher end systems that would be used in major infrastructure (that could process at volume).

Sure a researcher could stumble upon something… But closed source, embedded deep in the hardware, etc the number of researchers working at that level is not all that high AFAIK. The research is also from my understanding very very difficult at that level. It would be borderline equivalent to reverse engineering the Intel remote management engine or something.

The examples you gave are all at the OS level and installing OpenWRT would fix them. The firmware/BIOS level is much more custom and can be susceptible to attacks the OS is completely unaware of (effectively pre-installed rootkits). Hence why I mentioned it may not be enough to install OpenWRT.

The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing; that’s just it you’re right.

There’s no conspiracy where the left and right hand have carefully coordinated this system or conspiracy to protect companies from their legitimate competition. We’re not saying this about Taiwan or European devices (even though many of them are better than the Chinese and American devices) and that’s kind of “case and point” that it’s about more than the economy.

Basically the politicians just screwed up and didn’t think through their decisions and effects of trusting a foreign power to do all this manufacturing for important pieces of infrastructure that “think” … and now there’s a problem.

Oof, fair 😅