Jajaja, sí, soy Mexicano 😁
🥳 Muchas gracias!
Amazing work! Thanks a lot!! Took me a few days to get to it but I have upgraded now and it looks great 😄
If the timing is right, I would bring a mushroom grow bag with mushrooms sprouting.
If not… probably my radiacode gamma spectrometer and some of my radioactive items. Maybe a clock with radium painted dials and a piece of trinitite. I think that there are many different points of discussion that can be of interest to a broad audience (radioactivity, spectroscopy, electronics, US labor law story of the radium girls, nuclear explosions, background radiation… etc). As a bonus I can bring a UV flash light and show the radium fluorescence. Adults love UV flash lights.
I am also quite interested in this. It is not something that keeps me awake at night, and I am not particularly paranoid about it. But I find that working towards answering this question is a fun frame from which to learn about electronics, radio communications, and networking.
Since this appears to be something that is causing you some anxiety, I think it is better if I start by giving you some reassurance in that I have not yet managed to prove that any electronic device is spying on me via a hidden chip. I don’t think it is worth being paranoid about this.
I can explain some things that could be done to test whether a Linux computer spying. I am not suggesting that you try any of this. I am explaining this to you so that you can get some reassurance in the fact that, if devices were spying on us in this manner, it is likely that someone would have noticed by now.
The “spy” chip needs some way to communicate. One way a chip might communicate is via radio waves. So, the first step would be to remove the WiFi and Bluetooth dongles and any other pieces of hardware that may emit radio waves during normal operation. There is a tool called a “Spectrum Analyzer” that can be used to capture the presence of specific radio frequencies. These devices are now relatively affordable, like the tinySA, which can measure the presence of radio frequencies of up to 6 GHz.
One can make a Faraday cage, for example, by wrapping the PC with a copper-nickel coated polyester fabric to isolate the PC from the radio waves that are coming from the environment. The spectrum analyzer antennas can be placed right next to the PC and the device is left to measure continuously over several days. A script can monitor the output and keep a record of any RF signals.
Since phones are small, it is even easier to wrap them in the copper-nickel polyester fabric alongside with the spectrum analyzer antenna to check whether they emit any RF when they are off or in airplane mode with the WiFi and Bluetooth turned off.
What this experiment may allow you to conclude is that the spy chip is not communicating frequently with the external world via radio frequencies, at least not with frequencies <= 6 GHz.
Using frequencies higher 6 GHz for a low-power chip is not going be an effective method of transmitting a signal very far away. The chip could remain hidden and only emit the signal under certain rare conditions, or in response to a trigger. We can’t rule that out with this experiment, but it is unlikely.
A next step would be to test a wired connection. It could be that the spy chip can transmit the data over the internet. One can place a VPN Gateway in between their PC and the router, and use that gateway to route all the traffic to their own server using WireGuard. All network packets that leave through the PC’s ethernet connection can be captured and examined this way using Wireshark or tcpdump.
If one can show that the device is not secretly communicating via RF nor via the internet, I think it is unlikely that the device is spying on them.
That’s awesome! Thanks for sharing
Thank you for that reference! Very interesting
Awesome job! Thanks again! Upgraded without issue 🤘🏼
Ah, cool! I got my 4 devices today and I have managed to play with them a bit. They are pretty cool! I was able to walk over to a park near my house and spoke with people across the world with no data in my phone :D
I ordered four of the simpler devices this weekend (LilyGO T3-S3 LoRa 868MHz - SX1262) and I have been reading about antennas.
Since I live in a city I am not super optimistic about the range. But I am still very curious about the concept, and I would love to be surprised.
After doing some search about antennas, I have decided to test the following combination:
3dBi 868MHz ISM Band Dipole Terminal Antenna for the LoRa that stays at home:
Sighunter 868 MHz to bring with me.
I also have a vector network analyzer (LiteVNA) that can be used for checking antennas, so I will also try to build some antennas myself. I doubt that my custom antennas will approach the performance of the professional ones… But I just find it such a cool concept.
Have you already gotten to play with it? What is your experience so far?
Yeah, I found out only after choosing that domain name… This TLD also gets penalized by the automatic e-mail spam detectors (like SpamAssassin). I wouldn’t pick the “.xyz” TLD if I were picking today 😅
You are awesome! Thanks :D I hope you get to relax this weekend!!
Sure.
If I make my own AI image generator and create a nice image with it, or use some AI engine that gives me full ownership of the output, I can choose to share it online with whatever license I want to share it with. I don’t see why the regular copyright rules for digital images and photographs would not hold… If someone shares their AI creation online and wants others to share with attribution, or not share at all, what is wrong with that?
I can take a ton of photos of objects with my phone, upload them to Flickr, and they are all copyrighted. That doesn’t mean that other’s can simply take similar photos if they wish to do so. The same with AI. One can decide whether to share with attribution, pay someone to let them use it, or to generate the image themselves using AI. It does not seem like a problem to me.
Thank you for your hard work!!
I appreciate that you going through this test period. I hope it all goes smoothly and that at least a few hairs remain on your heads by the end of this week. Good luck!
Nice to see he has had a graphics upgrade :p
I wouldn’t use this language myself because I am not ready to defend that it is reasonable to apply the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in this context.
I think that they might be referring to Article 1, and possibly 5.
If this is their interpretation, then calling someone a worthless piece of trash is also a violation. You are talking to another human being as if they have less dignity, and you are treating them in a cruel and degrading manner.
For example I can go up to someone and insult them for all sorts of things - “you’re an ugly stupid worthless piece of trash” and that’s ok but I say “you’re a dirty [racial slur]” all of a sudden it’s different?
If it makes you feel any better, telling someone “you’re an ugly stupid worthless piece of trash” would get you banned from my instance too, so it is not so different.
I’m not sure about Web Hosting. Many of us use a dedicated virtual private server (VPS)
I use https://serverspace.io, I think Lemmy.ml is hosted with https://www.hetzner.com/
These are servers that you access via SSH and can install the instance inside of it. I personally install using docker compose, but there are some other methods that are claimed to be easier. The cost starts at ~$5 / month. Currently I pay about $15 / month. You would then rent the domain name from a domain name registrar (I use namecheap.com) and ask them to point the domain name to your server’s IP address.
No, there is no API to get the votes (https://join-lemmy.org/api/). If my understanding is correct, now that I upvoted your comment my instance will push that information. I’m not sure whether it pushes it to dandroid.app first or to all instances, saying basically “[email protected] upvoted https://dandroid.app/comment/441785”, and so every instance that has that comment can save my user ID in the “upvote” list of that comment, and that upvote is counted.
If only the vote direction was federated, then it would be very easy for me to spam the message “Upvote https://dandroid.app/comment/441785”. I would not even need to create an instance for that, I just need to speak ActivityPub. And it would be more difficult to detect that I am doing that, because the database would only hold the vote count.
I don’t think there is a way to ask an instance to reveal this list. You can only get it by directly querying the database if you have access to it. This is why if you fetch an older post or comment, it will arrive with a single or zero votes.
I did not know of the term “open washing” before reading this article. Unfortunately it does seem like the pending EU legislation on AI has created a strong incentive for companies to do their best to dilute the term and benefit from the regulations.
There are some paragraphs in the article that illustrate the point nicely:
Thank you for pointing out Grayjay, I had not heard of it. I will look into it.