I don’t think that the grid frequency is used for PC timekeeping. You have internal timekeeping circuits. AC power stops at the PSU, and I don’t think that there’s any cable over which a time protocol flows from the PSU to the motherboard.
[Pope Francis] went further in the 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, calling social media an “illusion of communication.”
There are probably a lot of criticisms one could make of this statement, but I think that a really good one is that the only reason I’m reading content from your papal encyclica is because it’s in an article that was submitted to a social media system.
“Sir, I’m not sure how exactly you managed to have this happen, but the pathology lab says that those are ultraviolet-C light burns on your scrotum.”
The relentless pursuit of profit and growth ruins absolutely everything it touches. Capitalist rot.
The factor driving age verification has been laws passed by countries. It’s not private industry forcing it, but government. That comes from people complaining to their legislators that they are unhappy that their kids can see <random thing that they object to> online.
If you want a communist system, fine. But there are far too many users on here who, when faced with virtually anything they don’t like, immediately post a screed complaining about ownership of private industry, when it often has absolutely nothing to do with the actual issue at hand.
EDIT: I’d also add that there are actual solutions if you object to something like this. You can pass a law against biometric-based age validation, which I can certainly understand — that form could be prohibited. You could have some alternative form of age-based validation to be instituted to create a path of least resistance for services, like having government provide and fund a zero-knowledge service to confirm various facts to services like age. In countries which have constitutional law and a higher bar to modify it than lower law, you could pass a constitutional law against any form of age validation (“ageism has no place in our country”) to prevent legislators from easily passing things like age verification laws, which I personally don’t think will fly politically in most places, but it’s at least one theoretical option.
I would love to load up custom ROM though… What annoys me the most is lack of RTC battery, because the time resets whenever there’s a power outage.
They made an Internet-connected fridge and didn’t put an NTP client on it?
Ah, thanks! Well, that’s one lone ray of light.
I’m still grouchy about a sandwich place that I liked that recently changed ownership putting in kiosks that apparently do facial recognition, as once I walked up, they suggested items that I’d purchased last time. That started me looking, and I’ve been noticing that a lot of the ordering kiosks that places have been installing around where I am have cameras (though none have been actively making suggestions). I can only imagine that that gets hooked into the tracking and advertising system at some point too, though.
Between increasing use of facial recognition and ALPRs, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to avoid targeted ads. I don’t have a fix for that. I mean, it’s illegal to block use of ALPRs. A lot of places also have anti-masking laws, though I suspect that in practice, they aren’t enforced much, and someone could theoretically put something on their face. I don’t especially want to run around wearing stuff on my face, though.
kagis
It sounds like that was a joke from some years back.
Skyrim: Special Edition Announced For Samsung Smart Refrigerators And Alexa
If that headline has confused you then let’s be very clear, this is a joke by Bethesda…
They do have a screen and Internet connectivity, but I don’t think that ATMs are actually a great route (unless they force people to stop and wait to get their money, which I don’t think will fly and will cut into capacity). There isn’t much eyeball time on them. The reason a car or a refrigerator works is because you’re likely to be around it a lot.
I will say that the rise of gas pumps at gas stations that play back advertisements is pretty obnoxious, though.
To enhance our service and offer additional content to our users, advertisements will be displayed on the Cover Screen for the Weather, Color, and Daily Board themes.
I really hope that Steam games don’t head down this path over time. Internet-connected refrigerators I’m willing to avoid, but that’s not the only vector for this sort of thing.
EDIT: And as has been pointed out on here before, some Internet-connected cars are starting to have updates to show ads on their UIs pushed out. Any time you’ve already spent the money and are kind of locked in and the manufacturer has Internet connectivity to the device and can update the thing subsequent to purchase, you’re kind of in a bad position regarding leverage.
I’d be pretty comfortable saying that buying enough battery storage to power-shift a year of power is more expensive.
What I want to do is find out what the maximum size battery I would need in order to store all of summer’s electricity for use in winter.
I mean, I think that it’s probably not a good idea for this guy to try to go fully off-grid if he has access to the grid, but for the sake of discussion, if one were honestly wanting to try it and one is in the UK, I’d think that one is probably rather better off adding a wind turbine, since some of the time that the sun isn’t shining, the wind is blowing.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/322789/quarterly-wind-speed-average-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/
Wind speed averages in the United Kingdom are generally highest in the first and fourth quarters of each calendar year – the winter months.
The UK is one of the worst places in the world in terms of solar potential:
https://globalsolaratlas.info/
But it’s one of the best in terms of wind potential:
After all, enterprise clients soon realized that the output of most AI systems was too unreliable and too frequently incorrect to be counted on for jobs that demand accuracy. But creative work was another story.
I think that the current crop of systems is often good enough for a header illustration in a journal or something, but there are also a lot of things that it just can’t reasonably do well. Maintaining character cohesion across multiple images, for example, and different perspectives — try doing a graphic novel with diffusion models trained on 2D images, and it just doesn’t work. The whole system would need to have a 3D model of the world, be able to do computer vision to get from 2D images to 3D, and have a knowledge of 3D stuff rather than 2D stuff. That’s something that humans, with a much deeper understanding of the world, find far easier.
Diffusion models have their own strong points where they’re a lot better than humans, like easily mimicking a artist’s style. I expect that as people bang away on things, it’ll become increasingly-visible what the low-hanging fruit is, and what is far harder.
Well…
From an evolutionary standpoint, we’re basically the same collection of mostly-hairless primates that, 20,000 years ago, hadn’t yet figured out agriculture and were roaming the land in small groups of maybe 100 or so at most, living off it as best we could.
From that standpoint, I think that we’ve done pretty well with a brain that evolved to deal with a rather different environment and is having to navigate a terribly-confusing, rather different situation.
I mean, you see any other critters that have been outperforming us on improving their understanding of the world?
At least some of this is due to the fact that we have really appallingly-bad authentication methods in a lot of places.
The guy was called via phone. Phones display Caller ID information. This cannot be trusted; there are ways to spoof it, like via VoIP systems. I suspect that the typical person out there — understandably — does not expect this to be the case.
The fallback, at least for people who you personally know, has been to see whether you recognize someone’s voice. But we’ve got substantially-improving voice cloning these days, and now that’s getting used. And now we’ve got video cloning to worry about too.
The guy got a spoofed email. Email was not designed to be trusted. I’m not sure how many people random people out there are aware of that. He probably was — he was complaining that Google didn’t avoid spoofing of internal email addresses, which might be a good idea, but certainly is not something that I would simply expect and rest everything else on. You can use X.509-based authentication (but that’s not normally deployed outside organizations) or PGP (which is not used much). I don’t believe that any of the institutions that communicate with me do so.
Using something like Google’s SSO stuff to authenticate to everything might be one way to help avoid having people use the same password all over, but has its own problems, as this illustrates.
Ditto for browser-based keychains. Kind of a target when someone does break into a computer.
Credentials stored on personal computers — GPG keys, SSH keys, email account passwords used by email clients, etc — are also kind of obvious targets.
Phone numbers are often used as a fallback way to validate someone’s identity. But there are attacks against that.
Email accounts are often used as an “ultimate back door” to everything, for password resets. But often, these aren’t all that well-secured.
The fact that there isn’t a single “do this and everything is fine” simple best practice that can be handed out to Average Joe today is kind of disappointing.
There isn’t even any kind of broad agreement on how to do 2FA. Service 1 maybe uses email. Service 2 only uses SMSes. Service 3 can use SMSes or voice. Service 4 requires their Android app to be run on a phone. Service 5 uses RFC 6238 time-based one-time-passwords. Service 6 — e.g. Steam — has their own roll-their-own one-time-password system. Service 7 supports YubiKeys.
We should be better than this.
should have been a red flag for someone who literally works in an authentication role.
Maybe. But the point he was making is that the typical person out there is probably at least as vulnerable to falling prey to a scam like that, and that that’s an issue, and that sounds plausible to me. I mean, we can’t have everyone in society (a) be a security expert or (b) get scammed.
The first comment in response is probably the most important bit:
In addition: trust no inbound communications. If something is in fact urgent, it can be confirmed by reaching out, rather than accepting an inbound call, to a number publicly listed and well known as representative of the company.
I recall reading that one application of sentiment analysis in voice recognition — like, determining what a speaker’s mood is — is that if someone gets upset on a call talking to a computer, the system will route them to a human.
Altman said in a statement accompanying the announcement, adding that the company is “building an age-prediction system to estimate age based on how people use ChatGPT.”
I suppose our theoretical teenager could get an account on, say, Grok and ask it to rephrase all of his prompts as if they were written by a 30-year-old and then send the output of that to ChatGPT. Let the models fight it out based on their profiles of what constitutes an adult.
I’d also bet against the CMOS battery, if the pre-reboot logs were off by 10 days.
The CMOS battery is used to maintain the clock when the PC is powered off. But he has a discrepancy between current time and pre-reboot logs. He shouldn’t see that if the clock only got messed up during the power loss.
I’d think that the time was off by 10 days prior to power loss.
I don’t know why it’d be off by 10 days. I don’t know uptime of the system, but that seems like an implausible amount of drift for a PC RTC, from what I see online as lilely RTC drift.
It might be that somehow, the system was set up to use some other time source, and that was off.
It looks like chrony is using the Debian NTP pool at boot, though, and I donpt know why it’d change.
Can DHCP serve an NTP server, maybe?
kagis
This says that it can, and at least when the comment was written, 12 years ago, Linux used it.
https://superuser.com/questions/656695/which-clients-accept-dhcp-option-42-to-configure-their-ntp-servers
My Debian trixie system has the ISC DHCP client installed in 2025, so might still be a factor. Maybe a consumer broadband router on your network was configured to tell the Proxmox box to use it as a NTP server or something? I mean, bit of a long shot, but nothing else that would change the NTP time source immediately comes to mind, unless you changed NTP config and didn’t restart chrony, and the power loss did it.