Basically it works by every component validating the next one before loading it.

• UEFI validates the bootloader
• Bootloader validates the OS

They do this by checking a cryptographic signature. Specifically, UEFI checks that the bootloader is signed by a certificate that is in turn signed by a certificate authority (CA). You can upload custom CA keys in the UEFI interface.

Per default, every UEFI ships with the Microsoft CA. That does not mean you can only run secureboot with Windows and you absolutely should enable secureboot on every machine you own. Microsoft does sign other signing keys allowing them to be also used with secureboot. For example, every major Linux distro has keys signed by the Microsoft CA and so secureboot works out of the box with those.

Even if you have an OS that does not have a signing key signed by the Microsoft CA, you can upload your own secureboot keys to get around that.

It should be pretty clear at this point that all of this is pointless if you do not set a UEFI password.

I just want to point out that billionaires do not have billions on their bank accounts, they own companies worth that much. The issue is the concentration of power they have through that.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever had a public project, but for most people, be it YouTube, twitch, github, whatever, its not so easy. Negative comments grate on you, and, over time, can really take a toll.

William Osman interviewed a bunch or creators about this: https://youtu.be/DVCpKfedfok?si=_7Y13T00rfoSQPDN

Its not as easy as to call people out. Some people go great lengths out of spite, doxx you, send you death threats… Is it really worth it? Not that a “fuck off” will work anyway.

You say people will join you but they really don’t. The reality is there are a ton of crucial open source projects being run by one person on the edge of burnout. See curl, xy, etc.

Money absolutely would help and I wish the EU would put additional funding into this.

The Finns could probably take Russia on their own. They have been continuously preparing since the winter war. Everything is build around it, everyone has trained for it, they even test moving their entire economy to war economy on a regular basis.

Maybe you should read that article you linked completely. EU battle groups are multinational rapid response forces, and merely a subset of troops the EU can muster. Germany alone has 180k active service personnel.

I just want to voice the thought that “ripped off” is not a good term for this. It has a very negative connotation. The reality is, people try all kinds of stuff and whatever works sticks. That’s a good thing.

You mean a hotbar? Minecraft didn’t come up with that.

That is impossible. There are more unique experiences than one can have in their lifetime. Getting a bachelors, meaning really surface level understanding in one topic takes three full time years. If you actually had nothing else to do, you could do that for maybe 15 topics. And that’s just learning. What about sports, music, traveling and the endless other human activities.

AES is already post quantum crypto so that sounds a bit marketingy.

Related: https://timsh.org/tracking-myself-down-through-in-app-ads/

Unity games on mobile send your location to Unity servers every couple seconds through the Unity ad network.

Things you can do:

• GDPR Request to Unity
• use a DNS that blocks trackers, like mullvad

That’s a lot of work, I appreciate it.

Reminds me a bit of how it was in Germany at the beginning of the Iraq war (2). Plenty of Americans saying we should be bombed back to the stone age for not going to Iraq, while our soldiers were dying in Afghanistan. I remember in all the bulletin boards people would kind of cheer for American losses, hoping secretly or sometimes openly that Iraq would win, and the schoolyard bully would get another bloody nose.

That’s the moment large parts of my generation became anti-american.

Americans like to think of themselves as heroes, fighting for what’s right, upholding the constitution etc. But if you look at history Americans again and again chose to simply do nothing. You reached late Roman decadence.

Here a candidate voted with the far right and a week later, one million people were on the streets. Population adjusted that would be 5 million Americans. That was a small protest for us. And that’s nothing compared to the French. I looked at the biggest American demonstrations and this one demo, a regular Sunday for us, would have been the third biggest in the US, population adjusted, or the seventh biggest, not adjusted.

All these talks of civil war… You cannot even move your ass to go to a demo. You think regular Americans are actually going to look at a Bradley, who can kill all the inhabitants of a house with one shot, and go like “yep, time to strap on the suicide vest!”

Even those militia types… Look at them. How far do you think they can run on average? How far with a backpack? They are just LARPing. 80% will stay home, 4% will go back home after the beer runs out, 15% will rat the others out to the Gestapo.

I would get a backup tool that offers encryption, which is most of them. Popular choices are: tarsnap, restic and Borg.

Get a refurbished Lenovo thinkpad t470 or so from ebay, make sure it has full HD and comes from a commercial shop. All the Thinkpads work great with Ubuntu. They are good quality business notebooks, easy to repair with good parts availability. You can probably get one around 150 or so.

I repaired laptops for a living for a while and Thinkpads were always my favorite.

It’s a gas where the chemical reaction of the combustion has produced enough energy to heat it up to a temperature where it emits visible light. Kind of like a glowing piece of metal, but in gas form.

It’s a mixture of black body radiation and individual spectral lines.

The spectral lines happen when electrons fall from a high to a low energy state and the energy difference is emitted as light.

Black body radiation describes the fact that everything constantly emits electromagnetic radiation (=light). But what kind of light depends on the temperature with colder bodies like us humans emitting infrared whereas warmer bodies like the sun emit visible light. That is also why light temperature is a thing and the unit is Kelvin.

Here are some graphs and stuff: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/648273/does-fire-emit-black-body-radiation

Mine doesn’t seem to exist anymore sorry.

If you assume everything is compromised, there is no safety. You have to trust something at some point.

Usually, speaking from a professional IT perspective, people trust encryption. Once you do that, it does not matter how safe or unsafe the place where you store your data is.

AES, the encryption standard used by pretty much everything, is safe. It has not been weakened in any meaningful way since its inception and is also quantum - safe.

You could use for example openssl or Veracrypt or even just 7zip to encrypt it. If you don’t trust these tools, encrypt it twice with two different ones, just put a txt file next to it with the exact steps to decrypt, because you will forget in which order you have done things.

Personally I have a homeserver that is encrypted at rest and then it uses restic to store encrypted backups in the cloud.

Ultrasonic cleaner! Really awesome for glasses, jewelry, all kinds of small stuff. I fill it with isopropanol solution and clean my phone case in it.

Its very unlikely for these reasons:

• limited lifetime
• we have already seen volcanic eruptions which put a lot of SO2 into the stratosphere, and thet did not cause an ice age, so it’s clearly fine if we don’t put too much

Anyway, that’s what research is for.