Giver of skulls
If you still use MBR, and Windows has an update to its bootloader, yeah.
I don’t even know if Windows 11 still supports MBR, though. Maybe it’ll happen if your firmware is broken and always boots from the fallback bootloader instead of the normal boot entry? But in that case Windows is right and the firmware needs an update.
Even if they’re marketing BS, some decent mainline support for Qualcomm chips is always welcome. It’ll help projects like postmarketOS and mobile Linux distros massively to have more usable Qualcomm code.
Then, what prevents whosoever, to copy that file through cloning the complete disk?
Nothing. At most, you can have a hardware encrypted drive that won’t permit access to the encrypted data without a password, but the file will remain available after unlocking that. Plus, dedicated people (law enforcement, data recovery specialists) may be able to get access to the flash chip itself unless you buy one that self destruct on any tampering attempts (and even those have flaws).
You cannot prevent copying of data if that data is readable at disk level. At most, you can make the data useless by padding a layer of encryption (as well-encrypted data may as well be random data without the key material). That’s why everyone is going for encryption: encrypted files may as well be inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t know the passphrase. There’s no sense in copying a file which you cannot possibly read any bytes from.
If the key is gone (i.e. the real key is a password protected file that gets overwritten so even the password doesn’t work anymore), the file becomes irretrievable. This is sometimes called “cryptographic erase” in the context of disks. There are variations of this, for instance, storing the key in the computer’s processor (fTPM) behind a password, and clearing that key out. There’s no way to get the key out of the fTPM so it cannot be backed up. Even if someone were to guess your password, the file will forever remain locked. Or at least until someone manages to break all cryptography, but even quantum computers don’t know how to do that part yet.
If you’re willing to go deep, you could reprogram the firmware on your SSD/HDD to refuse reading the file. A few years back, someone made a proof of concept firmware that detected disk imaging attempts (because all blocks on the disk were read in order) and had the firmware return garbage while secretly wiping the disk when this detection triggered. You could, in theory, write firmware that refuses to read that block of data. However, if whoever you’re hiding this file from know about that, they can take out the platter/memory chips and dump them directly, bypassing your firmware entirely.
“undoing the protection should include filling in a password” That sounds like an encrypted drive. There are USB keys that’ll require software to enter an encryption password before you can do anything (including deleting the contents).
If you’re on Windows, try Bitlocker or Veracrypt. You can create hard disk images that can be mounted temporarily with a password.
Same can also be done on other operating systems, though I don’t know what tools yours come with.
In a pinch, you can just create a password protected 7zip archive, though viewing and editing those files usually involves a temporary copy.
There’s no way to prevent a file that’s loaded in memory from making it back to the disk. The best you can do is also encrypt the system drive so only people who know the encryption password can boot the computer that’s accessing these files.
The edits are what makes it made with AI. The original work obviously isn’t.
If you’re in-painting areas of an image with generative AI (“context aware” fill), you’ve used AI to create an image.
People are coming up with rather arbitrary distinctions between what is and isn’t AI. Midjourney’s output is clearly AI, and a drawing obviously isn’t, but neither is very post-worthy. Things quickly get muddy when you start editing.
The people upset over this have been using AI for years and nobody cared. Now photographers are at risk of being replaced by an advanced version of the context aware fill they’ve been using themselves. This puts them in the difficult spot of wanting not to be replaced by AI (obviously) but also not wanting to have their AI use be detectable.
The debate isn’t new; photo editors had this problem years ago when computers started replacing manual editing, artists had this problem when computer aided drawing (drawing tablets and such) started becoming affordable, and this is just the next step of the process.
Personally, I would love it if this feature would also be extended to “manual” editing. Add a nice little “this image has been altered” marker on any edited photographs, and call out any filters used to beautify selfies while we’re at it.
I don’t think the problem is that AI edited images are being marked, the problem AI that AI generated pictures and manually edited pictures aren’t.
Looks like people are finally finding out they’ve been using AI all along.
Seems to me that employing the use of AI to alter an image should be labeled as “made with AI”. It’s not made by AI, AI was merely one of the tools used.
If you don’t like admitting you used AI, just strip the metadata, I guess. This feels like something you should be able to turn off in your editor’s settings, but I guess Adobe hasn’t implemented that.
This comment was made with AI, as my phone’s keyboard uses AI to automatically complete words, in a process strikingly similar to how ChatGPT works.
Actually, Windows has implemented quite a few tricks to make this very difficult without setting off antivirus engines at least. X11’s security model is absolute trash compared to Windows Vista and above. Linux is getting safer with Wayland, but Linux on the desktop hasn’t had the XP SP1 security humiliation that Windows had so almost all of it is opt-in.
Solving the issues Windows has already solved with things like integrity levels will break compatibility with many applications (it also did on Windows, which is why Vista made you run everything as admin) but simply enabling the Flatpak sandbox can solve many problems already.
I wonder if there’s a desktop distro out there that enforces sandboxed applications by default. It would make running Linux a lot less risky.
I’ve got my Mastodon and Lemmy servers hooked up to a postgres server that’s running separately, and the CPU usage between the two is now about the same.
That actually proves that Lemmy is more efficient, because it’s handling a hell of a lot more data. I don’t follow a lot of big accounts, and I’m the only user on my server, so I rarely get more than 40 posts + metadata through Mastodon. On Lemmy, however, each post can easily produce hundreds of events to process because of comments and likes all federating out.
In total, Lemmy seems to be heavier, but only because it does more. Mastodon is super inefficient, especially with things like RAM. I think it has something to do with the framework and language it’s running on; Gitlab seems to be using the same runtime and that eats through RAM like crazy as well.
When you puke, you get rid of the alcohol in your stomach. However, if the alcohol is already in your system, puking won’t help.
If your body is continuing to make you puke, you’ve probably poisoned yourself. Your body is desperately trying to get rid of the toxic substance killing you, but it’s too late to eject it out through the mouth, so it just has to tank the damage by sacrificing liver cells and brain cells, which are both things your body Does Not Like.
If you’re still drinking after your body triggered its poison response, well, it’s trying to stop you from poisoning yourself.
If you regularly drink until you puke, something may be wrong with you medically (making you sick after one or two glasses of alcohol) or you’re killing yourself (by drinking way too much alcohol). Either way, you need to get yourself help.
Given your “it becomes like I drink water”, I think you have a serious problem.
I’ve heard a lot of people about how much they enjoy working fully remotely. Almost all of them have a separate home office room to work in.
Stress lowers your immune response (as does smoking, which many people do to combat stress). Any natural healing process will go faster if you cut out stress factors. The stress itself can’t cause the ulcers to appear on their own.
It’s also possible to get ulcers from certain medication (including over the counter painkillers) so if the cooks are lacing the food with medication they could still cause them, I suppose…
Oh, I definitely wouldn’t go near that stuff, too easy to mess up and die. Every dose is a dance with death (unless you’re an experienced doctor and/or pharmacist, maybe). I do like the concept, though, just boosting passive energy consumption during times when it’s easy to get rid of the excess heat. Seems less addictive and long-term-death-y than the ones messing with the already-messed-up glucose regulation systems.
Now that’s interesting! I can see why they took it off the market because of hyperthermia risks, but that would kind of be the perfect weight loss pill for me in the winter months…
That’s the point of VPNs, isn’t it? Do you trust the companies that sell your location information to shady people like bounty hunters or some foreign VPN company?
Personally, I trust Mullvad more than I trust many ISPs. It all depends on how good your ISP is and your country’s laws are. ISPs here in the Netherlands used to collect the IP addresses and other metadata of all websites you visit, as well as location information, for six months or more, because the law forced them to, in case the police ever needed that information. The law got overturned (though that doesn’t mean ISPs can’t track you anymore, they’re just not forced to) but this definitely feels like a reason for an always-on VPN to me. The government also pushed for IPv6 not because it’s not 1980 anymore, but because they foolishly thought that it would give every device a unique IP address so they could track people better.
Not that I want to evade the police, but when crazy religious people get in power, I don’t want to get convicted for contacting porn sites at some point. VPN providers that you don’t trust not to log anything are still better for privacy than that.
Some VPN providers lie and say they will never log anything (only for lawsuits to prove otherwise). You can’t trust those. I consider every VPN that pays for YouTube ads to be untrustworthy. Mullvad, and some of its competitors, however, seem to be relatively trustworthy.
With VPNs, you move your point of tracking to another company or country. Whether that benefits you depends on who you are, where you live, and what your priorities are.
I remember a long blog post about it on f.lux comparing it a bunch of competitors with actual measurements rather than pure RGB values.
Of course LCD doesn’t turn on any pixels, it just stops blocking the white light from behind the panel, but the result isn’t any different.
Unfortunately I can’t find the link right now, I must’ve read it a decade ago. Perhaps it’s been lost to time.
The end conclusion was that a bunch of free apps/cheap software thought they could get in on the blue light fad and turned the screen redder without significantly reducing the amount of blue light transmitted. At the time, there were one of two kits of software that actually showed a significant drop in blue light because their colour mixing algorithm/colour profile adjustments were done correctly whereas the competition just implemented it wrong.
Oh, that’s not what I meant. Weight loss programs, especially the ones designed to help you maintain weight for the long term, work well. I’d say they’re probably the best way to lose weight if you can’t do it alone (and very few people that really need it can). There are some bullshit ones, but there are also great alternatives.
What doesn’t work is the “drink a bag of this powder every day and you’ll lose weight automatically” bullshit. Sometimes this bullshit is also sold as berries, sometimes it’s some foreign kind of nut, but new “magical weight loss food” bullshit pops up a few times per year and desperate people will fall for it over and over again.
Any weight loss pill, drink, or food. It’s all scams built in top of scams.
Those new ones based on diabetes medicine seem nice, but as soon as you stop taking them their effects wear off. They’re a medically induced crash diet. The real hard work, fixing your bad habits long-term, still needs to take place.
“Almost everyone” seems a bit broad. Lots of people watch porn and illegally download stuff that they don’t want their ISP to know about, especially in countries like the USA where ISPs are allowed to sell browsing statistics of their customers for marketing purposes.
I take offence to the “protect against hackers” bullshit those ads keep repeating, but for their intended purpose, VPNs are a good solution.
Night mode kind of differs. I think there was one piece of software that did it way before operating systems got night mode, and with the help of some measuring device they found out that most competitors turned the screen red but did not actually lower the amount of blue light much, negating the whole point (as the theory behind this stuff is that blue light messes with your sleep schedule). Your screen turning reddish yellow does very little if the effect is achieved by turning on more red and green pixels.
The difference between servers and countries is that servers aren’t countries and countries aren’t servers.
Servers aren’t a democracy. Well, most of them anyway.
The difference between a violent, oppressive authoritarian regime and a fee Fediverse server is that you’re free to join other servers. Multiple at the same time, even! You can just leave, no passports, no refugee status, no paperwork.
You can even set up your personal little server where you decide on the rules. A server for you and your friends can cost as little as ten dollars per month. Try that in any real country and you’d be considered an insurrectionist or a traitor, do it online and it’s just everyday business.
The unfortunate reality of most “everybody is welcome” servers is that hey generally attract a lot of people who have been banned elsewhere. Some for stupid reasons (like calling any criticism of the CCP “orientalism”), some for very valid reasons. You need some form of moderation, or your server is going to be a cesspool. Some server admins preemptively decide to block servers that don’t have moderation that’s up to their standards, others wait for abuse to spread to their server.