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Alex @lemmy.ml

FLOSS virtualization hacker, occasional brewer

Posts 8
Comments 316
It's Tuesday, what made you happy last week?
  • I met a man who's focus was on making ASIC fabrication accessible to students and hobbyists. The audacity of the ambition made me smile and the fact they have succeeded using an open source workflow made me happy.

  • What kind of special knowledge or equipment do piracy groups have?
  • In all DRM devices there are private signed certificates that can be used to establish a secure authenticated connection. To get at them you need to crack/hack/file the top of the chip to exfiltrate the certificate. More modern "Trusted Computing" like platforms include verified boot chains so even if you extract the certificate you couldn't use it because you also need to sign the boot chain to ensure no code has been altered.

  • What kind of special knowledge or equipment do piracy groups have?
  • Absolutely - modern pirates are extracting the digital streams with the DRM removed. However they closely guard the methods of operation because once the exploits or compromised keys are known they can be revoked and they have to start cracking again. They likely have hardware with reverse engineered firmware which won't honour key revocation but still needs to be kept upto date with recent-ish keys.

    For example the Blu-Ray encryption protocols are well enough known you can get things working if you have the volume keys. However getting hold of them is tricky and you have to be careful your Blu-Ray doesn't read a disk that revokes the old keys.

    For streaming things are a little easier because if you get the right side of the DRM you can simply copy the stream. However things like HDCP and moving DRM into secure enclaves are trying to ensure that the decryption process cannot be watched from the outside. I'm sure their are compromised HDCP devices but again once their keys get leaked they will no longer be able to accept a digital stream of data (or may negotiate down to a sub-HD rate).

  • Former Intel CPU engineer details how internal x86-64 efforts were suppressed prior to AMD64's success
  • Itanium was an interesting architecture but it relied on compilers to build efficient code for it's bundles. This compares to x86 which dedicates loads of silicon to getting the best performance even out of mediocre code. Unfortunately the Itanic architecture was really ill suited to emulating the other.

    ETA: rm dups.

  • Does spanking harm child development? Major study challenges common beliefs
  • I think it's often used with younger kids because parents don't understand why their kids are acting up and can't work out how to "get through" to them. As kids get older they become a lot better at understanding and really words should be the only tool you need.

    The dreaded phrase "I'm not angry just disappointed" should cut deep when (rarely) used because the kids understand their parents have their interests at heart. If they don't then something has gone wrong building that relationship of trust and respect.

    ETA: forgot to say of course positive reinforcement is also key. Kids need to know when they get things right so they are not walking on eggshells worried about getting things wrong.

  • Does spanking harm child development? Major study challenges common beliefs
  • I'm not sure how assaulting children is ever going to build an effective relationship between kids and their parents. Parents should represent safety and unconditional love because then the educational message will have an easier time being accepted by the kids.

  • Why are people impressed with SpaceX?
  • They are pretty focused on reducing the cost of launches by aggressively re-using components that would normally crash into the sea. Previous launches landed on floating sea platforms but yesterday's heavy was so big it needed a more stable landing zone. So after boosting the Star Liner the rocket returned down the trajectory it had followed up and then hovered briefly before being caught by two pincers on the very launch pad it had left five minutes before. That's pretty cool.

  • www.bbc.co.uk Hilary Cass: Weak evidence letting down children in gender care

    A landmark report says "toxicity" of debate is hampering medical research into gender services.

    Hilary Cass: Weak evidence letting down children in gender care

    The long awaited Cass report has been published looking at gender affirming care in the NHS.

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    infosec.exchange Soldier of FORTRAN :ReBoot:​ (@[email protected])

    Attached: 1 image #xz #CVE #cve20243094 #Linux

    Soldier of FORTRAN :ReBoot:​ (@mainframed767@infosec.exchange)
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    A week of fprintfs has me wanting to code rust next week

    105

    Controllable water valves?

    Are there any good recommendations for water control valves? I want to control a automatic watering system and need something to attach to the garden tap. Open firmware would be a bonus.

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    vgel.me How to make LLMs go fast

    Blog about linguistics, programming, and my projects

    I found this post interesting for my layman's understanding of LLMs and some of the underlying architecture choices that are made.

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    www.bennee.com A Systems Programmer's Perspectives on Generative AI

    Alex discusses his experience playing with the current crop of large language models and muses on the power of processors multiplying lots of numbers together.

    A Systems Programmer's Perspectives on Generative AI

    I wrote this as a layman's primer to the basics of LLMs and other generative AI. I'm still early on in my journey but hopefully it helps explain things to other newcomers even if it glosses over the details.

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    The Rest Is Politics: 179 discussing the dangers of deep fakes.

    They covered a number of topics but for me the most terrifying was the examples of deep fakery that had already been used in elections.

    I wanted to ask the community if they had had any experience with deep fake media online? If so did you notice or did your need to be told it was? How much effort do you take to verify things you see online?

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