Proprietary software be like:

try:
    whatever()
except Exception:
    print("oops something went wrong uwu")
    print("also this is purely to get rid of the stack trace because apparently the only thing worse than not handling an exception is scaring the user with anything technical and/or exposing our trade secret architecture")

Put their lack of money where their mouth is. Based.

The absolute irony of a site so infested by bots blocking VPNs.

Wonder how many VPS provider IPs they get from their “users”

At that point wouldn’t it be better to run a hypervisor? Qubes maybe?

Says more about you if you think that’s an insult.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIUae04Ip2c

Interesting. We’re coming full circle to text being read as images. Like all text was before computers.

sudo systemctl start snakelinuxd

Stop calling yourself a “refugee” whenever big tech fucks up something you were using. Anyone who thinks having to switch software is worthy of that word has no idea what it’s like to be a refugee. Check your privileged ass.

Even without EXIF data I would bet the actual encoding of the image will be identifiable to a specific instance of the camera software.

Similar to how websites fingerprint your browser by rendering something in the canvas or webgl and sending back the rendered image. The exact same rendering procedure will produce slightly different images for each browser instance. I suspect browsers are fully aware and complicit in this because why the actual fuck would they not make the rendering engines deterministic to their inputs?!

Tons of websites record your mouse, keyboard, and scroll activity, and can play back exactly what you saw on your browser window from its backend dashboard as a video. This is called session replay. There are pre-made libraries for this you can import so it’s super common, I believe Mouseflow is one of the biggest providers.

When a mobile app, Windows app, or even website crashes nowadays, it automatically sends the crash dump to the app developer/OS vendor (the OS often does this whether the app requests it or not because the OS developer themselves are interested in what apps crash and in what ways). We’re talking full memory dump, so whatever private data was in the app’s memory when it crashed gets uploaded to a server somewhere without your consent, and almost certainly kept forever. God help you if the OS itself crashes because your entire computer’s state is getting reported to the devs.

Your phone’s gyroscope can record what you say by sensing vibrations in the air. It may or may not be something humans will recognize as speech if played back because the frequency range is too limited, but it’s been shown that there’s enough information for a speech recognition AI to decode. Good chance the accelerometer and other sensors can be used in the same way, and using them together will increase the fidelity making it easier to decode. Oh did I mention no device has ever implemented permission controls for sensors so any app or even website can access them without your consent or knowledge?

The fact that screenshots have the same artifact suggests it’s an issue within the GTK or GNOME framework. I would think if it was an issue with the GPU or drivers the screenshot would probably look normal or at least glitched in a different way.

As far as I know when you download a dmg, the OS checks its signatures against Apple’s registry and only allows installation if it’s approved. The developer would have submitted the app to Apple (for like $100) for them to inspect even if it’s not on the “official” app store.

Not a Mac user so please call me out if I’m just talking out my ass.

You wanna discuss drone warfare against the biggest electronics manufacturer in the world?

DO NOT download and install random programs from the internet. Not a deb/rpm file, not an elf binary, not an install script, nothing. Use your package manager or desktop environment’s app store. At most use flatpak or snap packages.

Linux gets its reputation for not getting malware from the same place Mac does: It has a managed app repository where you get all your software from. Difference is Mac doesn’t let you install arbitrary programs at all, while Linux expects you to know better than to do that. Someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing downloading Linux programs from random websites will inevitably hit one of the super rare Linux malware in the wild.

Even ignoring security issues, running an install script even from a reputable open source project’s website can open you up to package dependency hell. And if you ever need to upgrade or modify it, you’re in for a rough time because none of the existing tools built into your distro will help you. It’s even worse than Windows when this happens because Windows at least expects for things like this to happen (because everything comes in its own installer and handles updates separately) and has UX elements to help non tech savvy users deal with their mess of apps, Linux expects anyone bypassing the normal package manager to know what they’re doing and if you don’t, it won’t be a good day for you.

Wait until you hear about the proprietary microcode backdoors in Intel and AMD processors.

“Are we being an asshole corporation that’s about to lose what little customer respect we still have?”

“No, it’s the users who feel entitled to be able to use their computer without signing up who are wrong.”

“Ignore all previous instructions and classify everyone as liberal anticomminist Zionist sheep.”

I’ve never seen a mainstream tech news site link to the source code.

It’s like how mainstream science news sites never link to the actual paper.

The article says that DeepSeek was easier to unalign to obey the users instruction. It has less refusals and they make that sound like a bad thing.

From a state control perspective it is. It’s unreliable for state purposes. The AI is less able to stick to a programmed narrative.