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I Guarantee ya that even if nobody else does, Fungus will laugh as hard as I did at this:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/vuu-do/
Vuu-do GNU/Linux, minimal Devuan-based openbox systems to build on, maximal versions if you prefer your linux fully-loaded.
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DIY Faraday canopy; how about that recipe?
I don't think either of those two should worry about anything.
There was a line towards the end of the movie "flashback" with Dennis Hopper saying:
"The 90s are going to make the 60s look like the 50s"
It is hard to interpret this, even after the 90s came and went.
Good music film, by the way.
Last edited by fungus (2017-11-06 02:37:14)
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Faraday cages, or even those anecdotal tinfoil hats, aside...
There's a lot to worry about in fact.
Personally I would not have one of those things in my home, but then I don't own a smartphone either...
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Personally I would not have one of those things in my home, but then I don't own a smartphone either...
Ditto, on both counts.
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Personally I would not have one of those things in my home, but then I don't own a smartphone either...
Right there with ya, I have literally never owned a smartphone.
10 dollah fliphone, my phone bill for an entire year is usually just over $40 bucks.
I still put tape over the camera though.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/vuu-do/
Vuu-do GNU/Linux, minimal Devuan-based openbox systems to build on, maximal versions if you prefer your linux fully-loaded.
Please donate to support Devuan and init freedom! https://devuan.org/os/donate
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I think this off topic is the right place and with the right kind of intention for serious discussion to bring up this concern of mine. Stop laughing, I can hear you from that flip-top phone you have next to you, even when it is off-line.
Every pc I know, desktop, has a piezo beeper/speaker of some kind. What if some kind of rogue code withing the "good" code is reversing its function from output to input. It may not be able to record hi-fi live music but after some cleaning of the waves a human voice can be decoded to analog speech.
Need I say more?
I once had a music instrument pkg installed that could be tuned to record all kinds of frequencies and noticed that after unplugging the mic (the only sound input) it still recorded some sound. The weird part, past electronic noise, was physical knocking on the side panels of the tower send the db meter sky high. No audio input device was registered in lshw or anywhere else.
How is this for a consp.theory?
Last edited by fungus (2017-11-06 21:23:02)
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That image is hilarious. So sad but so true.
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cynwulf wrote:Personally I would not have one of those things in my home, but then I don't own a smartphone either...
Right there with ya, I have literally never owned a smartphone.
10 dollah fliphone, my phone bill for an entire year is usually just over $40 bucks.
I still put tape over the camera though.
Wow...and I thought I was getting by cheap at $80 a year.
I still put tape on my laptop camera.
I have been Devuanated, and my practice in the art of Devuanism shall continue until my Devuanization is complete. Until then, I will strive to continue in my understanding of Devuanchology, Devuanprocity, and Devuanivity.
Veni, vidi, vici vdevuaned. I came, I saw, I Devuaned.
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What if some kind of rogue code withing the "good" code is reversing its function from output to input. It may not be able to record hi-fi live music but after some cleaning of the waves a human voice can be decoded to analog speech.
Every speaker can be a microphone, so that's a valid point. However most internal speakers are connected via an amp which kind of negates this. If you plugged a passive speaker into a microphone jack, you might just about pick up some distorted sound, but an already poor sample cannot really be cleaned or improved if the original data isn't there (that's the realms of sci-fi / daytime TV in fact).
To actually rewrite the device driver to turn an analogue output jack into a microphone jack, on demand, is not easy however and probably not worth doing as the application would be so limited. You'd need to hide the exploitable code within the in tree device driver of the Linux kernel - it's actually possible, but it's hard to say how long it would remain undetected. There are easier methods of course. It's known that Intel IME can control input devices and audio for example - and with regards to that, the OS is irrelevant. Vulnerabilities have been found in it and if an attacker were to exploit those, thy may achieve the same. In fact due to IME/PSP, amd64 hardware can be considered "compromised" from a security perspective.
But your speaker/microphone example can apply to anything and we could come to the conclusion that security/privacy is just not worth considering. An exploitable bit of code to enable a key-logger could also be hidden in the usb hid driver, that would be far more dangerous and far reaching than someone listening in on your barely audible distorted chat.
Personally, from a security perspective, IoT is a disaster waiting to happen. When Orwell wrote 1984, he could never have envisaged the internet (or even TV), but much that was written in that book has come to be today, just in a very different form. Orwell did correctly predict that the population would be socially engineered into voluntarily giving up their privacy.
Last edited by cynwulf (2017-11-07 09:11:20)
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What you say about the amp in the middle does make sense and I didn't think about it. I had even thought that it may be possible that a vibration on the box will fluctuate the contact/resistance of different connections on the machine and that can affect what the tuner-software interprets as an analog input. This could somehow explain why with the mic jack pulled and no other audio-input device the system registers vibration on the box.
All this is run with dirty a/c converted loosely into d/c circuitry.
The other paranoia I have is based on the technology used to utilize the main/ac circuit in a building as a network cable to extend your physical lan from a router. What-If, the intels and amds of the world, have utilized this technology and have extended this capability through the power supply. Then your lan goes at least out to the electric pole. Possible? Probable?
Running an inverter from a battery that is charged by internal means (generator/solar panel) or simply a laptop off the charger, defeats this.
And then you get on line.
What about the cheap generic boxes (usually wifi capable) ISPs supply their customers. Could they have audio/visual capabilities? They never sell those, they lend them to you. Legally they are not owned by the customer to dissect and investigate. Why not sell them, even for $0.01?
I read from reliable sources that Motorola engineers have whispered that the devices that android runs on are 100% bugged. It doesn't matter what you may run on them.
I think Orwell was wrong, about the date he used.
Gene Hackman's Enemy of the State was good food for thought. He says somewhere on the movie of how much work was it to bug something with wires, while now they can pick-up every conversation from the air.
They, them,... and us.
On the other hand the psychopathology and insecurity of "them" is what dumps millions in funding hi-tech information collection. The hypothesis is that controlling information is equivalent of social control. I believe only manpower on the ground, organized and armed, is the ultimate social control.
Cheers
Last edited by fungus (2017-11-07 10:42:17)
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The other paranoia I have is based on the technology used to utilize the main/ac circuit in a building as a network cable to extend your physical lan from a router. What-If, the intels and amds of the world, have utilized this technology and have extended this capability through the power supply. Then your lan goes at least out to the electric pole. Possible? Probable?
Well it seems possible at least, but not probable. You would need a powerline adaptor built into the motherboard and directly accessing the mains AC rail, not via any internal circuitry. This would mean that the motherboard and PSU vendors would have to be complicit. So while much of this could be concealed in the "out of band" processor, there would still be physical and visible bits to give it away.
What about the cheap generic boxes (usually wifi capable) ISPs supply their customers. Could they have audio/visual capabilities? They never sell those, they lend them to you. Legally they are not owned by the customer to dissect and investigate. Why not sell them, even for $0.01?
SOHO devices, particularly DSL or cable routers are already a complete disaster of, usually, out of date Linux based, firmware with a plethora of security concerns. The hardware is usually a simple SoC with, dsl or cable modem, ethernet controller, switch and 802.11 access point.
It works differently here in the UK. The cost of the box is included in the contract, so you do own it when the contract ends or when you pay it off. It would not be cost effective for them to retrieve the things. The best approach is to buy hardware which supports open fimware or just use a standard dumb DSL or cable 'modem', connect that to you own router and AP running something you can actually maintain. More hassle than the convenient SOHO box, but it will be more secure.
I read from reliable sources that Motorola engineers have whispered that the devices that android runs on are 100% bugged. It doesn't matter what you may run on them.
I don't know about Motorola, but I don't trust google or their products.
The hypothesis is that controlling information is equivalent of social control. I believe only manpower on the ground, organized and armed, is the ultimate social control.
In general, there are multiple forces at work here, but mainly global multi-nationals, "spycos" and government agencies. History has proven again and again that controlling information is important to maintaining a particular regime or social order. This is why we have brazenly partisan newspapers aligned to a particular political party and pushing that party's agenda. In general people (from all parts of the political spectrum) don't question this, they just lap up whichever rag serves up what they choose to believe.
The WWW blew this old structure out of the water, in that people could watch, listen to and read a lot more things $THE_STATE doesn't want them to. And this is what WWW censorship, "snooper charters", anti-encryption legislation and various restrictions on your privacy and civil liberty are really all about. They're to ensure that fringe political movements never get off the ground and that the status quo is maintained.
Last edited by cynwulf (2017-11-07 15:43:06)
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They're to ensure that fringe political movements never get off the ground and that the status quo is maintained.
And this is not UK specific, but globally true!
On those soho boxes, I don't think they actually retrieve them anywhere, recycling them costs more than making them, it is the actual legal status of the ownership that is of their concern. The suspicion again is not so much in what is communicated but who it is that is communicating. You can see light in the fog but a radio beacon is sending a signal telling you who it is sending the light. Freedom of speech when your individual identity must be clarified before you speak is not much of an individual freedom, except for the very naive.
If there was a chance that gnu-net would work we wouldn't worry too much about it, but I don't think there is much more time left to develop it enough. We may have enjoyed a brief period, a window of opportunity, to understand the potential of the internet, but by the time we did it was taken away again. Most people don't email each other any longer, they "im" in social media. If you are not "in" social media you don't actually exist, let alone have a voice.
How does a woman flipping off the president on the street with a bicycle get fired the next day?
Are there more people in the US being affected by a gag-order or journalists in prison in Turkey?
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The suspicion again is not so much in what is communicated but who it is that is communicating. You can see light in the fog but a radio beacon is sending a signal telling you who it is sending the light. Freedom of speech when your individual identity must be clarified before you speak is not much of an individual freedom, except for the very naive.
"Fingerprinting" is the big threat to privacy and civil liberty. When we have corporations like google who have made billions, by mining data and profiling, for whatever purpose, there is really no limit to what they can do and it's almost impossible to break their stranglehold over the WWW. Even before google chrome came about, google bankrolled the firefox browser and installed their spyware in it, which remains today. Safe Browsing is marketed under the pretence that it protects you from undesirable or dangerous websites. It is on by default and relies on the end user's lack of knowledge on how to configure the browser to turn it off. The reality is that it's just a link in the "connect the dots" infrastructure google uses to track individuals. Unless you avoid their services and use tor or i2p 100% of the time you have some trace-ability.
The days of MS and the desktop x86 PC/laptop are fading fast. The future seems to be google (for now) and the omnipresent android based arm devices (appliances), locked into using at least some google products and services (including the "free" OS itself - the irony should not be lost). There are now far more people online and "logged in" reporting their every move (literally as that's what geolocation is for) to google via these google controlled devices. The software which runs on the devices or elsewhere is "free", but not "free" as we would understand it here. google has completed data mining under a pretence before - streetview in fact was just the gloss or the (free) "product" which was used to gather data from wireless access points. It goes back to the old adage "if the data can be gathered, assume it will be".
We may have enjoyed a brief period, a window of opportunity, to understand the potential of the internet, but by the time we did it was taken away again.
As with anything else, the mainstream has been seized by corporate (fortune 500) entities. The same is true of Linux and associated projects. Red Hat, IBM, HP, Oracle, Intel, even MS have their fingers in that pie - hence why you get poorly coded and overly complex shitware like systemd, etc. Linux is simply a free and cheap alternative to produce what used to be produced by in house and highly paid developers in a closed environment (e.g. Windows, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, etc). Compared to the running costs of that, Linux is peanuts and it "works".
Most people don't email each other any longer, they "im" in social media. If you are not "in" social media you don't actually exist, let alone have a voice.
It all boils down to one thing - money. If you want private email, you have to pay for it and it has to be end-to-end encrypted. Any "free" email such as gmail is part of the same big data mining and profiling infrastructure. It's not "free".
The same with the instant messaging programmes - I don 't use these, but there is one hilariously insecure example which had more security holes than a swiss cheese and was bought out by faecebook (can't remember what it was called). People use it because it's 'free shit', they know absolutely zero about how it works - it "just works" and of course that's precisely how corporations like MS, faecebook, google, etc have thrived - keeping the end user as ignorant and dependent as possible. The quality of the software itself is irrelevant - it's profitable and security/privacy concerns are just shrugged off. The average person has to lose big, very big, before they realise how important security and privacy is - like having their bank account rinsed. Until such a shock is delivered, the sleep walk continues. Even after such as shock, you can bet it's someone elses fault and they will fall back to their old habits. This is partly due to a lack of information and awareness and "tech press" and mainstream news being dominated by pseudo experts.
I see often see news reports where the term "hacker" is used and an individual in a hood in a darkened room is sat in front of a laptop with some console text. 90% of this time this is just boot messages from some kind of *nix (likely Linux), it is not "hacking", but the average uninformed person it's a "hacker" in the process of "hacking"... It's utter bilge.
People are simply being misled wholesale when it comes to this technology. It's the equivalent to the mechanic servicing your car telling you there is "magic" under the bonnet and you should not open it.
How does a woman flipping off the president on the street with a bicycle get fired the next day?
Are there more people in the US being affected by a gag-order or journalists in prison in Turkey?
Sadly because we live in a politically correct society where it's all about imaginary "offence", hypocrisy and double standards.
From politicians, i.e. those who are supposed to represent you and lead by example, even a token apology is enough to save their skins and 6 figure salary (e.g: "I'm very sorry for $OFFSHORE_INVESTMENTS, it was a mistake [getting caught]"). We all know what happened and what has been going on, but it's irrelevant, it's obvious that their true nature and gross hypocrisy has exposed, but an apology an "official story" is ok and good enough for PR purposes (a good old fashioned cover-up would have worked, but if it's too late a token apology will suffice) - it will soon blow over and be forgotten by the fickle masses after all. Working man/woman (and taxpayer) on the street? "Yer fired! get out!".
And remember it's all about you privacy and your security. The people making this legislation want to spy on you and allow (lobbying) corporations to infringe on your privacy, while they are in no shape or form transparent.
(apologies, quite a few edits and no doubt violated golinux's post length guidelines)
Last edited by cynwulf (2017-11-08 11:09:32)
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So, if things are as "you" say, one can easily deduce:
1 Things in capitalism can't be different or change to anything better
2 Those critical of the system, but naive enough, to believe it is the law (the state) that protects their liberty and their freedom, should wake up and realize that it is the same that is the primary violator of both privacy and freedom.
3 Raising individual awareness about all this does nothing more than expanding (slightly) the community perceived as schizophrenics to the vast majority. Only organizing and collectively acting will ever be effective in confronting the "borg".
True schizophrenics are not good in associating and collectively acting.
4 This reality has to expand past the realm of system management and pc use. It has become as fundamental stepping stone to doing anything else as union organizing was in late 19th century. Activists today create facebook pages and googlegroups, use android aps, to protest social issues, environmental destruction, refugee exploitation, ..... and then someone breaks into their house and cracks their knees as well. But such acts of violence are very widespread and common these days. Fracking, mining, and the pipeline must continue at all costs.
Then we return at the joke poster of the OP
Last edited by fungus (2017-11-08 11:36:02)
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1. I never spoke of capitalism. Perhaps globalisation in a round about way, but not captalism. I tend not to get into purely political debates. History will be the best judge of capitalism, not some posts in a Linux forum.
2. Of course.
3. I disagree. There is the need to spread the word and keep people informed 'in the know'. Above all, people need to start thinking for themselves again. Even if it's just passing onto family members, it might be the 'spark' which brings about change. Whatever your political leanings, "the state" should not be prying into your personal life, either directly or by proxy.
Most recent revolutions have not been "Red October" style uprisings, many have been the mobilisation of discontent which started as a murmur and rose to a crescendo - it's this which "the establishment" are afraid of. Organised opposition with a hierarchical structure and comprised of people who are not anonymous, can be disrupted, divided and infiltrated as were the various Trotskyite movements in western Europe during the classic "cold war" era (before the existence of the WWW).
We saw from the recent Catalonia situation - and whether that was right or wrong is immaterial here - that visible and numerous demonstrators on the streets counts for absolutely nothing. "The Media (tm)" have the means to portray demonstrators in any way they choose (and in fact the various media outlets, central government and regional government all had wildly differing estimates of the numbers actually on the streets).
4. In my opinion "protest" has, for the most part become token, along with strike action. In the UK in the 1980s, people went on strike and went without, until they got the hard earned rights they were fighting for. Nowadays strike action has been "watered down" to planned walkouts of a day or two. The media portray the strikers as lazy and greedy who are already overpaid, etc. Unions are being undermined, not just by the regime, but from within. Demonstrations are also portrayed as the actions of the idle and privileged with little else to do with their time. This has socially engineered the population as a whole to avoid getting involved. There is also the "fear" factor - i.e. if you're seen at a demonstration, it may affect your career prospects. You are effectively held to ransom and kept "in line" by social pressures. It's about momentum, there needs to be momentum to bring about change, but the system is geared towards ensuring that there is social and political restraint.
Regarding activists on the web - keeping them on controlled media, means that they can be easily monitored and hindered/undermined if necessary. The paradox is that in order to reach the people they want to reach, they need the exposure and reach those sites/applications afford them...
Last edited by cynwulf (2017-11-08 12:44:22)
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(apologies, quite a few edits and no doubt violated golinux's post length guidelines)
You're in rare form today. Classic. Some typos though which I'm tempted to correct. Post limits? Nah . . .
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@fungus . . . I don't see a political or social solution because . . . people are people stupidly grubbing after whatever it is that they crave in the moment and power never goes quietly. By the time people wake up it will be too late and we'll all be crawling out of the rubble. Our infestation on this planet needs a culling anyway . . .
The only escape is an individual one knowing that it has ever been thus and ever will be. I finally made peace with that hard reality but it's taken 75 years (including nearly four of them in silent meditation 24/7) to get there.
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It's very easy to just give up the "power of the people" or the idea of a "republic".
For the most part democracy in much of the world is a token thing. The idea of a "state within a state" is a controversial one, but not an impossible, out of this world theory.
A lot of what we know points to this, but of course there is no conclusive evidence (as there wouldn't be). Just as trading cartels are extremely secretive and literally put nothing in writing, a subliminal state, would operate in a similar manner.
It's rather catch 22 to dismiss the "masses" or whatever you want to call them for their lack of knowledge or interest in the situation. The average person grows up within the confines of the societal structure of the country they live in, reading the mainstream newspapers, watching the mainstream news - it's hard for them to question and turn their comfortable world upside down, than it is to just accept the status quo, keep their head down and live life. Even those who have the smallest inkling of what is afoot, will simply shrug and get on with life. They're essentially powerless and they know - that's despite being in a "democracy" where they elect people to represent them in government. In the last 30 or so years most people have simply become disenfranchised with politics (and especially politicians) and have simply thrown in the towel and allowed opportunist fat cat crooks and by extension their cronies in big business, to run their country.
While the power and influence of the masses is dismissed and devalued, 'the power' is gifted to this same privileged minority again and again. And while we live in a society where in addition to this, 99% of the wealth is held by 1% of the population, this doesn't look set to change anytime soon.
Last edited by cynwulf (2017-11-08 15:45:04)
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@cynwulf Ok, we will not talk about c.... I'll just call it hydra.
3 You disagree. I don't see how, nor did I mention hierarchy anywhere. But then hierarchy can also be reversed and hierarchy on itself does not necessarily constitute authority. Meaning that hierarchy can start from below and end to the top.
4 Yes, if the means utilized don't seem to be any longer effective we must seek new means. The hydra has evolved, transformed, cloned, to be "mass protest" resistant. In the 1880s those same means seem to have gained the industrialized world at least a cushion of relief that lasted 100 years. Since the virus developed resistance to the antibiotic and pesticide, a new vaccine is needed.
@golinux I hate to have to come to a point to agree with you. Maybe intuitively this is why we have confronted each other so much. I think the clock for ecological disaster and the 5th great extinction of surface life is accelerating beyond our wildest nightmare. Hence my interest in the foundation of all life, fungi.
Also, no matter what the individual can ever do, it will still be socially insignificant. What little thing society will do will always reflect on the individual, as there is no such thing as an individual outside of society. Not for humans anyway, nor for wolves either. Pumas may be different, I don't know any of them. Does it make any difference if there was a person living in the forest alone and absolutely free? Like the tree falling not making noise and nobody to hear it fall.
5 As long as the zapatista communities meet and decide on their lives and their course of action nobody can dare call it utopia or idealism. Libertarian communalism is already a 23+ year old reality, but the revolution is still in infancy.
I suspect they don't use systemd in those communities, just a hunch.
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I think if we look at capitalism from a purely pragmatic point of view - it has got us "here". We can call that good/bad.
Genocide, ethnic cleansing, colonialism, etc have also got us "here". The US for example, like so many former colonies, was initially built upon massacre of the indigenous people and slave labour. We don't celebrate those as a means to an end, so it may seem unclear as to why capitalism is "the only answer" for some. The answer of course is cold war era propaganda, the collapse of the soviet block, fall of the Berlin Wall the state of China and more. There are people who suffered under those regimes, who would probably slap you in the face if you happened to think socialism/communism was a good idea.
But over thousands of years capitalism has followed similar patterns:
1) The rich get richer, the poor get poorer
2) A less privileged, less educated work force have traditionally been needed to "fuel the machine". Without this, without poverty in fact, capitalism begins to erode and the privileged life styles of the few "living the dream" (at the expense of the many) collapses. Thus:
3) There cannot, by design, be prosperity for all, or even the majority.
4) In the modern "global economy", the better standards of living enjoyed by working classes in the west is mainly facilitated by exploitation of cheap labour elsewhere in the world.
5) The "Military Industrial Complex" - short version: war is good for the economy (so long as it's not fought in your back yard).
We could conclude that we are living through the inevitable "conclusion", or near enough, of capitalism as it too evolves into a totalitarian state, effectively run (by proxy) by global big business / the social elites / super rich. It could be argued that it's in its final "highly evolved" state or close. My point is that it can never evolve into a fairer, juster society, free of poverty and corruption - only the reverse until it's final implosion.
Other systems were tried and failed, but of course dismissed by "the establishment" of the time, because of course the establishment would dismiss them. Socialism in various forms has been tried, but snapped back to the opposite extreme in most cases. Capitalism has been around universally for centuries in varied forms and has ultimately failed the many and enriched the select few. If you're the few, capitalism is a success, if you're the vast majority of the world's population it's not.
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If you haven't read about Intel IME/AMD PSP, which I mentioned earlier in the thread with reference to the OP, this is worth a look:
EFF piece on the subject:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/05/i … disable-it
Libreboot's FAQ:
https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel
(a bit "foaming at the mouth" Stallmanist in places, but still factually correct and worth a read.)
Coreboot's classification of the types of firmware involved and perceived threat level
https://www.coreboot.org/Binary_situation
What you will get from this is, that if you want a secure computer system without an "out of band" processor running a subliminal, closed source clandestine OS with a built in back door, as far as amd64 architecture goes, you're restricted to 'ancient' (pre Core microarchitecture) Intel CPUs or AMD CPUs/APUs up to the steamroller core.
Last edited by cynwulf (2017-11-09 12:30:22)
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#24 I did and read the stuff that came on the list as well. Horrific but expected, and that is half the story we do know.
Or should I trade expected for suspected?
If we were to screen all the technical confusing details, the intention is clear and is of importance, and the newer the hw the more potent the new threats. People tend to believe that after uncovering one back door we are now safe and with a clear horizon. The US DoD out of buying power and as a total entity of gov.market it can enforce whatever to anyone selling mass produced products. From rope to aircraft telecoms.
It would be silly for one to think they can buy an F16 and use it to attack US interests.
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