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TechNerdWizard42

@TechNerdWizard42@lemmy.world

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China starts smartphone inspections to boost 'anti-espionage efforts', raising fears among expatriates and foreign business people about arbitrary enforcement (english.kyodonews.net)

- China implemented new regulations on Monday under its toughened counterespionage law, which enables authorities to inspect smartphones, personal computers and other electronic devices, raising fears among expatriates and foreign businesspeople about possible arbitrary enforcement....

TechNerdWizard42 ,

First, obviously this is not good. Secondly, if anyone is complaining about this from the USA, you don't get to. CBP has the right to inspect your electronics with no questions asked by you. They have a right to make a copy of all data. They have a right to seize your electronics and decrypt them if you fail to provide the encryption pin. They have the right to compel you to unlock and decrypt your devices if it uses fingerprint or facial unlock. They have the right to revoke your residency status if you aren't a citizen.

CBP has authority to do this at any sea, land, or air crossing. It also has the authority to do this within 100 miles of any border. That means about 70% of all Americans live their day to day lives within the scope of the exact same legislation. And yes it is used, all the time. If you think it isn't, you're just ignorant.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

So same with the people voluntarily visiting the USA right? Because the same laws already exist there.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Yes it is very important to say America does it too. Because most Americans have no idea.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Because Americans like you are too stupid to realize a propagandist article.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

I'm convinced Americans have the same level of propagandist ignorance as North Koreans. And they also have no idea. Only a few can see the reality. And they try to escape.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Always UPS everything. But also always have a simple backdoor. I generally have 1 little desktop like a NUC running some basic Win10 OS and an install of remote software like TeamViewer. It is connected to my hardware router right after the ISP router and a backup connection. Used to be LTE everywhere, now I'm half and half on Starlink. It is then also connected to the router ports needed for management but inactive.

If I have to, remote into the NUC over Starlink. I can then reboot my main ISP box. I can eventually get into my router and enable those ports which are pre-plugged in. From there I can then access all the stack management and all the IPMI ports like iLo. It's a virtual interface through a virtual interface. It is slow, and painful. But it works.

And it works 99.99% of the time. But even then, I've had to do a call of shame and walk one of my friends through which button to press as I'm on the other side of the world. In my case it was also power related but the UPS I had decided to overheat. In reality over the summer, the temps were high. But also it is a super awesome double conversion UPS. The line voltage into the UPS was dropped to below standards from the utility because their grid was overworked with everyone's AC's. So the UPS saw this as a line failure, kicked in the double conversion and ran happily. But it did not count as a power failure, so none of my services scaled back. Essentially it was delivering 3KW of juice from the wall through a double conversion making the whole thing super hot. Eventually it shut down for safety automatically, just pulled the plug. My NUC is on a separate little backup along with the modems and an auto transfer switch which did its thing. But there was no way to press the reset button on the UPS for a critical safety shutdown like that. It had to be in person.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

I like the idea of Reddit and it works much better than Lemmy. But the moderation and AI scraping make it a no-go site for me anymore which is a shame.

I love internet forums and have been a mod at some and very high poster at other. But the snowball effect gets them. If there's no traffic, there's no posts, so there's no traffic. You need to have a good community to make it work. One area reddit really shines, small communities exist on a huge platform. Great idea before the enshittification.

I hate discord and the fact that anyone replaces customer support or fan support pages with it, is just fundamentally broken. The idea of a forum is that the question is asked and archived. 20 years later someone else googles the question and sees the answer and all the replies that lead up to it. That's what forums are for. In discord you ask a question and 30 seconds later it's gone forever eaten by useless drivel. Never to be searched or found again. Idiotic.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

😂

Freedumb!

Require licensing, registration, live gps tracking, and geofencing with a proprietary app because Freedumb people ruled that's what the free market needs.

They then rule, nah. Actually just ban em all.

And now even if you bought them, buy them elsewhere, or just try to use them on a US device you won't be able to. Selling them is illegal both from a company and on third party resale if it passes. Even police departments that are using them as spies and have the DJI alerting system installed all over town to track and log everybody in the sky, will need to get rid of it. But I doubt they will, of course it will be exempted for the pigs in blue.

If you can't beat em, or even match their capabilities, ban em or implement 100%+ tarrifs. New American motto of the "free" market.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Their hardware is just poor. They can charge whatever they like, I'm fortunate enough to not look at prices for that type of kit. Objectively, their hardware sucks compared to many other brands, especially at the same price point.

Their OS sucks for 90% of my use cases. If your "work" involves you just using a browser then yes you can use a big phone to get your work done. Slap an arm in a big case with a keyboard as a "pc" or a big screened arm for a tablet, or a small screen for a phone. But if you do anything where you use a computer, you need an x86 architecture and you need certain hardware capabilities. Over the time, they have all been lacking in performance even at the highest tier, and the price has been high end. Overall makes zero sense. The locked down *nix systems hide everything useful to make it pretty. Isn't compatible with real software. And isn't backwards compatible. I can install windows and my software from the mid 90s or 2000s or today and it just f'cking works. That's why Windows is king. Bloated absolutely. But it just works.

That doesn't make me hate the company. That just makes me sad for the uninformed people that get fooled into spending their hard earned money on sub optimal pieces of kit.

What makes me hate them is this game of "we just invented this new feature from 10 years ago!" and then all their fan bois go apeshit over it like they just stepped into the future. And they're too stupid to know they're being lied to and manipulated for profits. But they are also vocal and arrogant about their stupidity and ignorance, so I don't like them either.

My phone has more RAM, more storage, better screen, better camera, faster charging by an order of magnitude (120W wired, 50W wireless...), more radio transceivers for global connectivity, better battery life, and honestly looks better. There is not a single thing I prefer about an iPhone and there is not a single qualitative metric an iPhone beats my phone on.

My laptop has more RAM, more storage, better screen, better camera, faster and more charging, more ports, upgradability, and is a BEAST that will eat even mid range desktop computers. There is no equivalent Apple product. Not even close. And when you factor in the best and beefiest new macs can't even run my software, it's not even an option. Now my battery life sucks and it looks like a zombie movie prop, but it is actually functional. I can run a simulation or a LLM/ML algo that stresses the CPU at 100%, the Quadro RTX5000 at 100%, and gobbles up 120GB of system RAM plus the 16GB of VRAM writing TBs of data to the 5 internal M2 drives. And I can do so indefinitely with the temps peaking to 100C and limiting to about 300W of power draw. It blasts air out of 3 sides that I could probably cook an egg in. But it doesn't thermal limit after 5 mins of web browsing like the Macbooks or the Airs. It's a beast that is made to beast and it does. Apple can't even compete in the class.

For a tablet, I don't have a need. My phone gives me a giant screen and my tiny auxiliary laptop does everything I need. My aux laptop is beefier than most, but it would be slower than a top of the line mac doing basic tablet things of web browsing. If I did need a tablet I'd just get a Xiaomi Pad. But in general I feel that the entire tablet market is a solution looking for a problem that only exists because Apple and fan bois are idiots again. I've been taking notes on TabletPCs for 20 years now. Seriously, Windows XP had a tablet mode. As did every one after. My laptops have touch input. My laptops in university the screen swiveled and then laid flat on the keyboard with a stylus to write on the screen. All of those fancy new Apple pen features? I had them in 2005. Pressure sensitive, gyro enabled for brush strokes/widths. Eraser on the other end. It was capacitive and needed a proprietary pen which was evil to say then. Now that's Apple motto and they stole the idea and people are believing it's new.

If they release a good product, I'll try it. I'm not brand loyal. If they keep releasing shit, I'm going to keep calling them out.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

People who use and trust Apple, are idiots. They gasp in wonder when they receive such new advances like arranging icons on your screen. Did this with my Palm Pilot in the 90's and every phone, even Windows Mobile phones on 2002/2003. But now it's "NEW"!

Same thing with AI and Apple. Too stupid to actually know any better. But when Daddy Apple says you are going to use it, everyone fawns.

Sending your data, all of it, to a cloud is not privacy. I guarantee this is part of the content scanning and reporting requirements being seen across the globe. It's under the public relations marketing to prevent CSAM, human trafficking, drug crimes, etc. But anyone with a brain cell knows that's not the why. That's the way it can be sold to fear mongering groups.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Very true. But nobody cares or believes it. When you start saying that US made hardware like network switches, cryptographic algorithms, telecom radios, etc all have backdoors to the 3 letter agencies in 5 eyes plus the internet distribution over cloudfare or "the cloud" in Google, Amazon, Microsoft, then people just think you're a tin foil hat conspiracist.

The people are too stupid and ignorant to care enough to demand change. Why did the US lobby so hard to get Huawei off market? Because of course there are backdoors into the Chinese intelligence agencies. JUST LIKE US DEVICES! But nobody seems to make that correlation. China bad, China hardware spying bad, is the only thing they can get in their heads.

Good to bring it up, but nothing will change. 99.9% of people don't know what DNS or proxiing or caching is let alone Cloudfare. It's just "the internet". Some are aware of some agencies the US and five eyes have, but most don't believe what they actually do and are capable of. The US is the best producer of propaganda in the world. Hollywood is amazing at it, as are US media sources. The FISA bill that just came up for reauthorization and passed had a whole PR campaign about catching terrorists and stopping Russia and China and Hamas. Nobody stopped to think how and why they even have any of that info in the first place and how it's collected.

Keep being the crazy uncle ranting about government spying because the world needs it.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

There is substantiated proof of Cisco and Juniper switches having US government backdoors through the management ports. They also have the capability of decrypting everything that passes through them and mirroring to an external host.

I cannot say any more other than you will find that the NSA continuously denied all the backdoors that global security researchers were finding and Cisco denied putting them in. You will also find in leaked Snowden documents absolute proof that the NSA was behind it and did implement the backdoors and they do exist and work.

I at the time being a lowly semiconductor designer with access to unreleased networking gear from the big guys, cannot say anything about what I know those spying piece of shit devices do. But I will say, go look up the Snowden documents. They speak louder than any random on the internet.

And China has made a stink. It's one reason their great fire wall is setup. It does somewhat prevent citizens from using western tools, but they know they do and really don't care much. What it really is, is a way to monitor everything in and out. All the edge is Chinese hardware, no backdoors for the five eyes. Those prevent the backdoors, that are known or theorized, to be used. So essentially they are backdoored equipment inside a security fence that disallows the backdoor to establish a connection. Bad actors from within could make this bad for China. Or very very tricky phone home algorithms, but you have to be careful how it's implemented in unfriendly territory.

Most of the other countries just don't give a crap. If the Ivory Coasts data is being spied on by the 5 eyes or China, they don't care. Nobody cares about them either. It's just the sad state of world power. Those that care, have a side.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Same reason why Teslas are banned on Chinese military bases. Data goes back to US servers that are accessible by the US government at any time.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

What I said doesn't disagree with what you said.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

And what is the justification for the US attacking human rights?

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Lol that piece paper is not a god. It's useless jibberish written by traitors starting a now failed nation.

You have no rights in the USA. Everything you're granted as a right, you are also denied as a right by other laws. It's the playbook of a tyrannical society. Name ANY law that you have a right to, and then look up to find another law taking that exact right away from you.

Just like a tyrannical society, you're guaranteed nothing. But you can fly under the radar if you agree with the political powers that be. Which is no different than any country at any point in history.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

At this rate my owned outright copy of Adobe that requires no internet access, with hacks, will become a generational heirloom I can pass down to descendants with immersurable value.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

The exact same article could be written about the USA. Stop spreading propaganda about things you don't understand.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Yup. I remember when we had to tear our own half sheets of paper towel. Kids today have it too soft, and absorbant.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Yup, had them lock an account before. Never gave them my info. Had to start a new account and actively work around their fraud protections with fingerprinting. And eventually reconnect. Pain in the butt.

You have zero recourse and no appeal process. Even uploading an ID doesn't guarantee anything.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Hopefully the rack is mounted directly into the studs or concrete. I've seen them crush gypsum between the stud and paint too...

I'm not much help, but they all suck. I've bought probably 2k worth of universal sliding rails to attempt with various servers. I don't know why but none of them fit properly. None of them slide properly. They are all just annoying. I gave up with them. I bought the OE sliding rail kits for my various servers and magically everything works perfectly.

For servers where I want to move them in and out but don't want sliding rails, I just buy those universal L bracket type mounts. The servers slide well enough on them, they're just powder coated bent steel. And a single screw from the front panel into the rack keeps it secure enough since the weight is being held by the support, not its own ears.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

It used to be that all versions of windows were fine. Then Home was a mess and you needed Pro or above to stop being nannied. Now you'll need Enterprise to not be nannied and spied on. The cost is completely worth it.

I do NOT blindly hate windows. It runs software today that existed 30 years ago. I haven't had a real blue screen since my Win98 machine that was upgraded to XP. It just works, it works well, and gives my company life. Linux is a mess comparatively unless you want to tinker. And yes I also daily drive nix machines, and only fan bois don't see how hassle free windows can be comparatively.

The big words are can be. Because out of the box, they're making it worse and worse. I don't have a Microsoft account, local only. And boy do they not like that. Enterprise doesn't force updates at all, I can keep my machine up and running indefinitely like the old days. The only issue I have today with Win11 is the forced task tray "overflow" menu that nobody asked for and nobody wants. Currently no way to disable without hacks, and if it isn't fixed soon then I'll do that.

But this screen shotting malware cannot happen. I know there are many places where it legally cannot happen. Therefore there will have to be a way to disable it or install a version without it. And that's what I'll be getting.

If Microsoft sold a Windows 11 Platinum Edition 3000 for $2000 that just gave you all the knobs like XP and let you shoot yourself, I'd buy it. Totally worth it.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

I have never encountered a user oriented Linux experience that is more hands-off that Windows this decade.

My embedded Linux systems, sure. The Linux backends in a closed system, sure. But something that is interacted with, not a chance. People love to hate Microsoft but there is a reason why they have the install base they do.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

That's your corporate overlords screwing up your system. Not Daddy Gates. Yet.

Enterprise is something almost no standard corporate drone uses. The benefits are really for nerds and IT people. But it is a requirement for Xeon processors, and most of my machines are Xeon including my laptop.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

I have no problem paying for software at this point in my life. But I won't pay for a subscription. And if I pay oodles of money, I'd hope Microsoft would opt me out of all the crap they hope to make money on with an install base like ads and inevitably copilot data sales.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

The only idiots that repeat this, are unskilled workers who have no idea what skilled workers do. Just assume they sit in a cubicle and browse Facebook all day for big money.

As others have said, your job is unskilled if you don't need to be trained for many years to do it. A retail worker, in any position, can be trained very easily. Go from McDonald's to Starbucks to Target. Same shit, different company. But from working the till at McDonald's to being a neurosurgeon? Just a surgeon? A doctor of any kind? Yeah, no. That takes training and skill.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Lol, you're an idiot. I am a skilled worker. You couldn't do my job to save your life.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

You're proving my point. You have NO fucking idea what skilled labour is.

I'll give you all my tools and lab equipment. Design a semiconductor. Do the electrical simulations at transistor level. Do the block level sims. Do the HDL. Do the layout. Send to fab, get it back, and now bring it up in the lab.

If I give you $1 billion if you did it yourself, you couldn't.

These are skills that take 4 to 5 years minimum of training just to look like an idiot. Then another 10 years to start getting the hang of it. By the time you're a gray beard with the mega skills and knowledge, it's been 30+ years of hard skilled work. To know where to swing that proverbial hammer.

Office work is not just excel and PowerPoint. There is office work that is skilled. And idiots who don't know what they don't know, have no idea how hard it is. And will never know, because they're too stupid to figure it out.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

It's basically a job requirement

TechNerdWizard42 ,

And by the time you did, 20 years later, you'd be a skilled worker!

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Current 4 year old laptop with 128GB of ECC RAM is wonderful and is used all the time with simulations, LLMs, ML modelling, and the real heavy lifter, Google Chrome.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Dell 7740 Workstation laptop. Has a Xeon processor and a 16GB Quadro video card as well. 5 M2 slots so I currently have 36TB of SSD as well. 4k screen, physical privacy shutter camera, actual buttons for the trackpad. I love this thing.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

It cost about a tenth of its weight in gold... So I guess that's a deal?

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Surely you printed this out from your desktop computer and mailed it to him in the post.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Oh but you are. It's at 0.8v to 1.2v range so it's high current.

This is what all the VRM design is for. The motherboards are generally 20-30 layers nowadays with 2oz copper in the power layers. The traces are short and you do get hundreds of amps.

And yes, I've designed them on the silicon side.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Fascists will fascist. The US is no different than China to anyone paying attention. Except your people get none of the benefits that the Chinese do like modern and clean cities and infrastructure, lower cost of living, low crime, etc.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Do not take anyone that buys a mac seriously. In any way.

32GB has been my minimum laptop memory for YEARS now. My current laptop was 64GB from the factory and 2 years later I made it 128GB. Nice socketed ECC RAM. If the RAM or SSD is soldered on a laptop, I'm not buying it.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Haven't bought anything on Ticketmaster or their owned companies in years. And I generally go to 2 to 5 live shows a month.

This and their policy towards VPNs means I won't support them.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Directly from many venues. And some ticket sellers that aren't owned by them. Some smaller venues use them, and some artsier places.

But for the mega concerts, I just don't go where Ticketmaster holds the venue contract. I fly and see who I want elsewhere.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Nice try NSA

TechNerdWizard42 ,

You know what sucks? Getting your VPS shut off or account suspended. All your data gone in an instant, not recoverable. You don't have access to the metal, and the metal no longer has access to you.

Hetzner is known for randomly boinking accounts. You update billing info? Whoops maybe shutoff. You login via a VPN, account disabled. Just randomly for no reason, account locked and VPS down.

You have basically zero recourse. Their support staff suck and the immediate reaction is suspend and delete. NEVER use them for anything you don't consider temporary.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

I use World Stream for many of my storage VPSs. They have pretty cheap servers that can take 14x or 18x drives. So I use their super powerful Epycs plus storage and then they can do an internal LAN only network for your boxes at 10G. 140TB to 200TB per box, connected to the rest of my stuff at 10G.

Their support is opposite of Hetzner. Everything is communicated. It's almost too much. You get emails that they're updating the air conditioning unit in a different building. Your downtime is zero. I've had some questions on setting up my rack space with them, and engineers respond back, not sales.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

I also used them for years, then everything blocked and deleted instantly. I have other homelab type friends, same thing happened. Again more anecdote vs anecdote. But if you google about hetzner and this type of activity there are bagillions of reddit threads.

After paying them about a grand a month forever, losing all my "safe data" and having to wait a week for even a response that just says "account has suspicious activity. Disabled". Not a single response after that. And they had the nerve to charge my credit card again at the next payment period. Overall, truly scummy. And I will prevent everyone I can from ever engaging with them.

When hiccups happen, you would hope to be able to at least talk to someone and figure out what's going on. If they don't want to keep your business, fine let me get it out privately. But they don't play that way.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

That was my first thought as well. So... It's email.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

Who wants to bet he received a nice lump sum deposit of cash from a five eyes state to make an "accident"...

TechNerdWizard42 ,

You open the command prompt during initial setup, change the oobe. It reboots, then no Microsoft account.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

The US doesn't have a parliamentary system. It is winner take all. There are no votes of no-confidence. There are no coalition governments. The winner of the electoral college which is NOT popular vote gets full control with no oversight.

If you vote for a party that does not win, you get zero representation, not partial or proportional representation.

So abstaining truly does mean you don't care.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

It most definitely is NOT. It's a oligarchian theocracy at this point and deserves to crumble.

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