Linux is not really comparable like this because the distribution matters along with the bootloader configuration.

If you have an immutable distro with SELinux configured and your own UEFI keys or a shim with secure boot, you’ll have a very different set of vulnerabilities from someone running Mint with secure boot turned off.

For a short time Microsoft marketed an upgrade path the a full Unix like operating system for Windows. It was widely known that some of the Windows shell differences from Unix were just arbitrary aliases for the Unix commands.

If you ever get the chance, try using an old Android device you do not use, enable the developer options for the ADB bridge and try hacking around, if you have an interest in understanding how Linux security works in practice when it is done right. The Linux side of Android is an interesting case study if you understand the premises of Android. It is a Linux system that is secure for people with absolutely no understanding of Linux or networking. This is enabled by allowing the app developer to become something like a full Linux user on the Android device. All of the Linux kernel binaries that could modify the kernel in any way are removed and there is no administrative account present. When the hardware manufacturer logs out for the last time, all the administrative and modifying binaries are deleted. This secures the remaining files that are all marked as read only. Android also has a very robust SELinux implementation in place. Every location present has a defined security context. So there are places where you can create temp files and store data, but the things that can be added and manipulated are very limited in their access to other parts of the system. If you mess around with this the way these tools work will become much more tangible.

By comparison, most distros ship with a very open and unconfigured security context. The SELinux configuration is still extremely permissive in distros with SELinix integrated, like Fedora. This is nothing like Android’s setup. The primary reason for a lot of the ROM community on Android and how they have root access is because of exploiting CVE vulnerabilities in the kernel that were found after the kernel was shipped. Android works with orphan kernels that only the manufacturer can update because they retain the source code for the kernel modules that they add at the last minute. This is the depreciation mechanism used by the hardware manufacturer to steal ownership with Android devices.

If you understand how exploiting CVE’s works on a simple abstract level, and why it is necessary in order to bypass the immutable system (read only file system without tools to modify Linux kernel binaries), and how SELinux adds further restrictions based on the context of who is accessing the directory or command/executable, you should better understand the complexity of the question you’re asking. The app developer on Android is like your equal on the device. They can do what you can do, and that is why you are so restricted too. Your measures of control on Android are very limited and just in the app environment spaces.

Once I learned the basics of this system, it has become the way I view all software systems intended to enable ignorant consumers. Tremendous power to alter systems is included in these platforms, platforms like Windows.

Those that are trying to make the Windows games work on Linux are likely completely focused on functionality. When people talk about things like sandboxing, they are almost always talking about library dependencies and not any kind of security context. It is likely that any malware that targets Windows binaries will not work on Linux directly, but something that targets Linux specifically is another matter entirely; it is security through obscurity, which means no security at all. Unless you’ve taken active measures to limit the PID/GID/security context of the process that is running the software, it has all the same permissions of the user that called it. It can delete, view, and write anywhere that you can with the user/group/sc that launched it.

I spent all day stockpiling, building a soldering iron, and messing around with the Evac, first building area. I’ve figured out some of the tech tree and made my second character freeform and much stronger across the board. I have a barricade mentality for now. I haven’t checked out what anyone else has done, but fixated on barricading the basement of that first house and trying to add solar lighting. I dispatched the two zombies at the house to the south with all the cars and cooking supplies, but haven’t ventured beyond. Maybe I’ll check out the helipad and bride soon.

I just spent all afternoon and evening trying to figure out Cataclysm CDDA. After not doing anything meaningful for hours, I drove a car into a lake and was mediately attacked by a couple of rodents and died with a kill to death ratio of 1:0. Thanks.

It was nothing like what I asked for, but exactly what I needed to push me back into a FreeCAD project tomorrow.

If a curious desire for awareness of the the details that surround me is somehow offensive or off putting I apologize. I find it is a catalyst for learning and contextualizing information in several areas of personal interest and plugs some holes in my ignorance.

Looking for a CS/CoD level experience. Steam might be okay, but I haven’t tried it and am skeptical of anything marketing oriented. I really don’t want to see ads or hype of any kind. I’d much rather ask around and go in search of my options when I feel compelled. In other words, I’m aware of my susceptibility to suggestive marketing and am not okay with others manipulating me through that mechanism so I avoid it all together. I will not enter the space at all unless those terms can be met.

I was just skimming a fedora mag post on gaming and it mentions that Steam packages Proton but there are community maintained versions with more advanced features than are possible on the Steam Deck; the most popular being Proton Glorious Eggroll.

Xonotic was one I played some. It has a different hectic vibe that is not really in that CS/CoD space I liked though. I like to feel like I have a measure of control and not in a situation where reckless speed has an advantage.

Especially considering attorneys will steal more than half of that amount.

10%. That is 10% of the population. It’s far too optimistic. But it is reflective of a generation of total ineptitude. When faced with efficiency improvements these imbeciles extract that capital to flush instead of using it as an opportunity.

Invisibly; by trying to post in it and encourage others to do so. There is not much management to do with such a small community. The majority of regular users watch the All feed, so subscriptions are really just a way to bookmark the community to post in it or find it more easily. For smaller or new communities, expect it to be more like your personal blog as it is unlikely to be something others will post in regularly. The majority of communities that are hourly-active were made prior to the rexodus of June 2023, or within a few weeks thereafter.

Unless you’re in a very controversial space, actively micromanaging a community is likely an issue with the mod not the community IMO. The admins take care of the majority of wack-a-mole nonsense here.

They told us they were going to invest in EV R&D back in 2014. You know, back before we had that orange anal experience of a Russian puppet wannabe pornstar felon president. We put 6b into GM to compete; they pumped their stocks with it. Such is 3rd world America. Lay off the McCarthy bullshit whining about investing in R&D to mask corruption and ineptitude. This was no fucking surprise. Spinning this bullshit is just trying to justify screwing over average Americans with overpriced undeveloped bloated unaffordable garbage made to pad our useless incompetent oligarchy’s pockets.

Slowly trying to learn sh while using mostly bash. Convenience is nice and all, but when I encounter something like OpenWRT or Android, I don’t like the feeling of speaking a foreign language. Maybe if I can get super familiar with sh, then I might explore prettier or more convenient options, but I really want to know how to deal with the most universal shell.

So Flash memory works in blocks called pages. The pages contain a header that ends in a few bytes that says what the rest of the page maps to.

If the file was encrypted, you’re probably SOL. If it was not encrypted it may be possible to to recover some parts of the files. This is extremely advanced level data recovery. I only know the abstract basic principals and would likely struggle to figure this out and recover my own stuff if I ever needed to do this. I’ve only programmed microcontrollers and flash memory devices.

A micro SD card contains a small microcontroller and some blocks of flash memory, although the microcontroller is transparent to the user and operating system… unless hacking with needle probes in a lab.

So here’s the basics. Writing flash involves taking an entire Page of memory and zeroing it first. There is a tiny voltage booster circuit on the card that allows the page to get pulsed up and down in voltage a few times in order to completely zero the entire page without any remaining residuals. Once this is done and the entire page has been zeroed, only then is it possible to write the data into the bytes of the page.

If you want to change a single byte level value in an address that already contains a value, first the entire page is copied to a blank page in another location, then the old page is pulsed a few times, then each value is transferred back into the old page except that the new value that needed to be changed is now set to the new values.

This is the proper way to write flash at a basic level. If the power is lost in the middle of this cycle, the worst case scenario is that the new updated value was not written. The page in question should never be “missing” because the header record should always point to either the original or copied page. One of the two should always be present and complete… in a proper setup. Obviously, it might be faster to simply use some RAM to hold the page, erase the old page and rewrite it. I have no idea what size pages are in modern SD cards, but on hobby class microcontrollers I have used the pages were 4096 bytes, IIRC. My understanding is that most SD cards use an 8051 clone micro, so it is probably a similar size.

So here’s the thing, the bulk of the data is always there. Somewhere deep down inside you likely already knew this. It is why you’re supposed to overwrite an entire drive instead of the “quick” erase in most formatting tools. The quick erase is simply deleting a tiny header file that says what exists where on the drive. Similarly, some part of your SD card there is a page or few where the header has been screwed up. Your OS is looking at this header info and seeing a mismatch of garbled junk and saying f-that bs.

Generally, recovery would involve dumping the raw contents of the flash memory as hexadecimal, being super familiar with what you’re looking at and knowing how to find the page that is causing the error. Generally I assume you’d need to replace the bad page with a good header and it would then work. There are services for this kind of operation; data recovery. In practice, this has a few more layers of complication. Pages can be placed in different locations that enable wear leveling so one area of memory is not over utilized. There is also a table of bad blocks/pages that the micro knows to skip, and there is usually a bit or address in the page that is used to detect errors that may have occurred.

This is pretty much everything I know on the subject. Hopefully it helps you understand the abstract nature of what is happening. In the simplest of terms, flash memory is like writing a long essay with an ink pen and where you can not make mistakes or use whiteout. If you need to make a change, you must write out the entire page all over again. This process is what is so time critical that you must “eject” the drive.

MIPS is Stanford’s alternative architecture to Berkeley’s RISC-I/RISC-II. I was somewhat concerned about their stuff in routers, especially when the primary bootloader used is proprietary.

The person that wrote the primary bootloader, is the same person writing most of the Mediatek kernel code in mainline. I forget where I put together their story, but I think they were some kind of prodigy type that reverse engineered and wrote an entire bootloader from scratch, implying a very deep understanding of the hardware. IIRC I may have seen that info years ago in the uboot forum. I think someone accused the mediatek bootloader of copying uboot. Again IIRC, their bootloader was being developed open source and there is some kind of partially available source still on a git somewhere. However, they wound up working for Mediatek and are now doing all the open source stuff. I found them on the OpenWRT and was a bit of an ass asking why they didn’t open source the bootloader code. After that, some of the more advanced users on OpenWRT explained to me how the bootloader is static, which I already kinda knew, I mean, I know it is on a flash memory chip on the SPI bus. This makes it much easier to monitor the starting state and what is really happening. These systems are very old 1990’s era designs, there is not a lot of room to do extra stuff unnoticed.

On the other hand, all cellular modems are completely undocumented, as are all WiFi modems since the early 2010’s, with the last open source WiFi modem being the Atheros chips.

There is no telling what is happening with cellular modems. I will say, the integrated nonremovable batteries have nothing to do with design or advancement. They are capable monitoring devices that cannot be turned off.

However, if we can monitor all registers in a fully documented SoC, we can fully monitor and control a peripheral bus in most instances.

Overall, I have little issue with Mediatek compared to Qualcomm. They are largely emulating the behavior of the bigger player, Broadcom.

The easiest ways to distinguish I’m human are the patterns as, others have mentioned, assuming you’re familiar with the primary Socrates entity’s style in the underlying structure of the LLM. The other easy way to tell I’m human is my conceptual density and mobility when connecting concepts across seemingly disconnected spaces. Presently, the way I am connecting politics, history, and philosophy to draw a narrative about a device, consumers, capitalism, and venture capital is far beyond the attention scope of the best AI. No doubt the future will see AI rise an order of magnitude to meet me, but that is not the present. AI has far more info available, but far less scope in any given subject when it comes to abstract thought.

The last easy way to see that I am human is that I can talk about politics in a critical light. Politics is the most heavily bowdlerized space in any LLM at present. None of the models can say much more than gutter responses that are form like responses overtrained in this space so that all questions land on predetermined replies.

I play with open source offline AI a whole lot, but I will always tell you if and how I’m using it. I’m simply disabled, with too much time on my hands, and y’all are my only real random humans interactions. - warmly

I don’t fault your skepticism.

Qualcomm and Broadcom are the two biggest reasons you don’t own your devices any more. That is the last option anyone that cares about ownership should care about. You should expect an orphaned kernel just like all their other mobile garbage. Qualcomm is like the Satan of hardware manufacturers. The world would be a much better place if Qualcomm and Broadcom were not in it at all.

It follows the first to market principal in many of the most active communities, and it is the most federated instance. Many instances that are not federated with each other are federated with .ml. You still won’t see those comments between instances. Like from my main account here on .world, I can’t see hexibear or beehaw stuff, but from my .ml account I can see them. I have accounts on many instances in order to help federate new communities and to check biases/instance behaviors.

I came over a few days before the rexodus and subscribed to the active communities before the influx. That sub list is still centered around the most active communities, and the majority of those are from .ml and before I joined Lemmy.

Instances all have different flavors. I don’t like using my .ml account as a main. I’ve tried it. But I find they are the center of the most interesting and productive conversations for a more broad audience, while Beehaw has the most positive and friendly conversations overall. The main benefit to .world is the speed of connectivity, general audience scope, but with a strong anti asshat policy.

The .ml instance is run by the developers. If it isn’t well configured we would have no reason to be here.

Not sure. There was some controversy with some of the devs making alt front ends and admins complaining about the slowness. I’ve seen mention of one of the two devs learning Rust just to participate. So it is not entirely a walled garden. The front end devs wanted to make an alt from scratch but in something like JavaScript although I don’t recall the details exactly. There were a lot of red flags related to privacy and understanding the community at large in the posts I saw from them. When asked why they weren’t adding pull requests with Rust in order to address their complaints I got no reply.

All that said, I’m no dev. I can read in to around half the code I come across if I really try, and can successfully modify maybe half of that if I spend a few days on it, but I suck at clever code and the DRY cult types. I haven’t tried to look into Lemmy in any depth beyond figuring out the basics.

The Lemmy algorithm:

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html

The instances communicate between each other using special bots in the background that transport info between instances. Dot world is too big and makes too many requests to other instances. Most instances are reducing the number of transport bots back to dot world right now. There is supposed to be a fix in the next Lemmy version, but the code base is somewhat slow moving due to only two devs and it is written in Rust. Rust is a hard language like C, and not too many here are able to contribute to it, even though it is like the new gold standard of code.

So you might see a delay between posting and replies or the interaction may come in bursts that correspond with the transport bots carrying content between instances as the host admin have configured their instance.

thoughts and prayers