Freely available and openly editable maps might be one of the things that we take for granted, but are simply an abberation of a brief period of peace and civility; now we'll return to the default hobbesian state of affairs.
See also: beautiful, detailed aerial photos of oil refineries posted by amateur drone photographers to public sites. Submarine cables and oil tankers, carrying the world economy on their shoulders without any protection out there at sea.
Security by obscurity is an illusion.
Bad actors, especially state actors, will have no problem getting this data.
We should make this data public so it's expected to be public, and then planners will take the risks more seriously.
Bad actors, especially state actors, will have no problem getting this data.
Everything that costs will cost to the degree that it costs. Putting the chocolate milk on the top shelf is enough to encourage children to buy less chocolate milk. The data you're talking about? The place I work at is the one doing the hard boots on the ground labor for aerial data, and from that perspective nothing is easy or free.
One can make great arguments about why people should have access to data notwithstanding all risks, but surely not that security by obscurity is mere illusion.
Easier access does lower the bar for amateurs and increase the risk of damage but these are two separate things.
GP said architects should anticipate bad actors and i'd add a "no matter their size". Putting the chokolate milk high up the shelf helps as long as children are small and dumb. Security by too-high-cost only effects poor, lone and unimaginative actors.
Do you think James Bond-style special agents are doing the state actor operations, like in the movies?
It doesn't work like that. The vast majority of the time it's regular stupid people that are doing the heavy lifting (often unwittingly) for state actor operations.
So yes, security by obscurity works. It makes the state actor's job that much harder.
An Apple Watch with a cellular connection, paired with Airpods, fulfills some of the role of a small iPhone - you can make calls, listen to music, and even do some light texting if Siri likes your accent.
I love my apple watch but I can safely say i've never done any of the above with it. It's too much of a pain to switch the bluetooth headphones to it and the screen is too small to do much actual computing with it. The fitness aspects are totally worth the money, though.
I'm not sure exactly what kind of armored vehicles ICE has. I'm pretty sure some of them would qualify as tanks at least in WW1. The war to end all wars... if only.
There are actually valid reasons for BORTAC to be armed to the gills, but they're meant to point all that firepower at organized crime (cartels) in the border zone, not Americans in Chicago.
But fair argument - words matter. I was being glib with "tanks". What I really mean is that anyone backed by the power of the US government to extrajudiciously kidnap people and deport them without due process is not a vulnerable group (by definition) and should not be a protected class (in my opinion).
Except there were no shotguns in the Trojan Wars, and there were tanks in WW1, many less armed and armoured than today's IFVs/APCs.
Regardless, the parent poster was right - I cannot find any proof of ICE having modern tanks, just some lighter equipment. And regardless of that, I think my point stands - ICE is emphatically not a vulnerable group, and Google is saying they are because they want Most Favored Company status with our increasingly fascist regime.
Congrats on the release. I was wondering what the zstd team is up to lately.
You mentioned something about grid structured data being in the plans - can you give more details?
Have you done experiments with compressing BCn GPU texture formats? They have a peculiar branched structure, with multiple sub formats packed tightly in bitfields of 64- or 128-bit blocks; due to the requirement of fixed ratio and random access by the GPU they still leave some potential compression on the table.
Japan lets you make payments for online content at convenience stores.
How it works is you purchase a product online and it gives you a barcode that can be scanned at any major convenience store. You go to the store, scan the code, hand over cash, and the content you bought is instantly unlocked once the payment is confirmed.
I doubt Mullvad has anywhere near the volume of transaction Valve does. And mullvad has plenty of other payment methods, so only a tiny, tiny fraction of their userbase likely pays in mail-in cash.
I don't think Valve could feasibly implement this at their scale - especially if this method was the _only_ way to acquire the games in question.
This realistically doesn’t work that well above anything like a micro scale. It’s also a crime to mail cash across many borders, so it only really works domestically.
The Mac is something like 30 billion in revenue per year, and 10 billion in profit.
The entire "generative AI" "industry" is struggling to reach 30 billion in revenue even with their creative accounting (my free Perplexity that comes with Revolut is somehow counted at full price, even though I never paid anything, and I'm sure Revolut doesn't pay full price), and gross profit is deep in the negative.
they are not talking about perplexity; the endless rumor mill talks about perplexity. The same that has them buying everything from Disney to Porsche to Nike for decades.
I've heard the phrase "through Apple new technologies achieve their final form", possibly not official Apple but one of the Apple choir bloggers (Gruber?).
There were smartphones before iPhone, now all smartphones are black featureless rectangles.
There were printers before LaserWriter, then for 20 years all printers became this. (And later disappeared.)
There were wireless heaphones before Airpods, now the difference is in the shape of the stubs.
There were laptops before the Macbook Air... etc
Yes, EPO is a normal drug used to treat certain disorders affecting blood formation, or to trigger increased blood formation before donations or operations.
Medication for human use has been availabe in various forms and brand names since before 1990, as Epogen, NeoRecormon, Eprex and lots of other names.
The Bulgarian translation I read was a valiant effort by a guy who ran the Bulgarian "science fiction and fantasy BBS".
(Yes, that kind of BBS, with the dial-up modems, XMODEM/YMODEM/ZMODEM etc.)
(Yes, it was mostly for pirating books in the form of badly OCR-ed TXT files, and occasionally discussing them.)
Apparently at some point he decided he needs to bring Gibson to the non-English speaking part of the population and... I don't remember the translation as being "good", but it definitely was "bold".
See also: beautiful, detailed aerial photos of oil refineries posted by amateur drone photographers to public sites. Submarine cables and oil tankers, carrying the world economy on their shoulders without any protection out there at sea.
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