Nit: you likely mean steganography, stenography is what court reporters do :)
I encourage you and anyone else here to read into the GFW if you're interested. It's more like the Great Firewalls -- there's regional fragmentation with different vendors, operators, implementations and rules between different parts of the country.
Predictably this means there's no one-size-fits-all solution to circumventing censorship on the Chinese internet, and research into this area's difficult since China has both the technical means to identify violations very efficiently as well as the bureaucratic infrastructure to carry out enforcement actions against a considerable portion of those people who violate the GFW rules (with enforcement action being anything from a "cooldown period" on your internet connection where you can't make any connections for some amount of time between minutes and days, fines, or imprisonment depending on the type of content you were trying to access).
So, the ethics of digging into this get very muddy, very fast.
Hi, posting from my main account (I'm also the poster of the GP comment).
"Nothing special" in this case was meant to describe the fact that it's random data with no identifiable patterns inherent to the data; you're absolutely right that that's what obfs4 does. I understand the confusion though, this phrasing could be better.
> your government can decide to block unknown protocols
This does happen, though when I worked in the industry it wasn't common. Blocking of specific protocols was much more of an obstacle.
> you should trick DPI into thinking it sees HTTPS. Unless your government decides to block HTTPS
HTTPS blocking (typically based on either the presence of a specific SNI field value, or based on the use of the ESNI/ECH TLS extension) was prolific. I won't comment on whether this was effective or not in impeding efforts to get people in these places connected.
I will say though, Operator's Replicant does something similar to what you're describing in that it can mimic unrelated protocols. It's a clever approach, unfortunately it was a bit immature when I was working in that area so the team didn't adopt it while I was around.
I'm very sceptical of using shadow prompts (or prompts of any kind) as an actual security/compliance control or enforcement mechanism. These things should be done using a deterministic system.
I'm not a KDE user, but reading the article, it looks like theme-specific colourful icons for third-party apps will just be falling back to whatever icons originally shipped with the app.
You'll still have colourful icons, and hopefully, in most cases, they'll still be easily recognizable.
- First and most impactful: as the earth curves down and away from the observer's horizon, your line of sight goes through a thicker slice of the atmosphere.
Looking straight up you might have 100km of atmosphere until space (the distance is made up here, but I'm using the Kármán line as an arbitrary ruler), but looking out towards the horizon (assuming a perfectly spherical Earth), it's much, much more than that 100km, so the light will scatter off of (and/or be filtered by, depending on angle and time of day) more particles in the atmosphere, affecting the colour of the sky.
- The compounding factor here is if there are environmental factors that boost the particle count in the air, and especially particles that'd stay in lower layers of the atmosphere. Where I am, we've been dealing with wildfire smoke of varying strengths for a few weeks. Today's gentle enough, but it's bad enough that my gradient goes from rgb(115, 160, 207) at the top of the sky to rgb(227, 230, 227) at the horizon (which is shockingly accurate).
My issue with this comment is my issue with the original article -- what's the actual source for this information?
As far as I can tell, this article has no actual link back to any Unifi press release, git repo, or other project page about this, the closest the author does is link the downloads from Ubiquiti's site (as in, literally, links to the files, and nothing else).
This is janky, yes, and I'm not gonna shill for Ubiquiti, but for lack of a legitimate source, I don't think this is a fair representation of the actual install steps.
The actual source is this: https://community.ui.com/releases/UniFi-OS-Server-4-2-23/21d... but only accessible if you opt-in to the Unifi Early Access program. We are talking beta software / first release here, so any criticism needs to be looked at through that lens.
> astrophotographers do not use cameras with UV-IR cut filters at all
I'll be pedantic here and say that the author's probably talking to people who use DSLRs with adapter rings for telescopes. I've been interested in doing this for a while (just unable to financially justify it), and I think this is actually something people in this niche do.
Then there are things like the Nikon D810A, which remove the UV-IR filter from the factory (but IIRC retain the Bayer filter).
My recommendation, as someone who started with a DSLR and then modded it to remove the UV-IR filter, I would have been better to just skip to a beginner cooled mono astrophotography camera, like the ASI533MM Pro. It is night and day difference in terms of quality and roughly the same cost and it automates better much better.
A high end DSLR is a huge waste of money in astrophotography. Spend the same amount on a dedicated astrophotography camera and you’ll do much better.
Yes, and you would almost certainly want to automate it with a filter wheel that changes the filters for you on a schedule. However, a key advantage of a mono camera is that you don't have to limit yourself to RGB filters. You can use some other set of filters better suited for the object you are capturing and map them back to RGB in software. This is most commonly done with narrowband filters for Hydrogen, Sulfur and Oxygen which allow you to see more detail in many deep space objects and cut out most of the light pollution that would otherwise get in your way.
> How do you recover colour from a mono astro camera? Just run it for 3 exposures behind a gel of each of the R/G/B colours, then comp?
Essentially yes. To get faint details in astrophotography, you actually will capture a series of images of each filter with long exposure times like 3 minutes per capture with a total capture time per filter measured in hours. You then star align everything, then you integrate the captures for each filter into a single frame to remove noise and boost signal, then you comp them together.
Except that the jury’s (at best) still out on whether the influence of LLMs and similarly tech on knowledge workers is actually a net good, since it might stunt our ability to critically think and problem solve while confidently spewing hallucinations at random while model alignment is unregulated, haphazard, and (again at best) more of an art than a science.
Well, if it's no big deal, you and the other copyright maximalists who have popped out of the woodwork lately have nothing to worry about, at least in the long run. Right?
It's not about copyright _maximalism,_ it's about having _literally any regard for copyright_ and enforcing the law in a proportionate way regardless of who's breaking the laws.
Everyone I know has stories about their ISP sending nastygrams threatening legal action over torrenting, but now that corporations (whose US legal personhood appears to matter only when it benefits them) are doing it as part of the development of a commercial product that they expect to charge people for, that's fine?
And in any case, my argument had nothing to do with copyright (though I do hate the hypocrisy of the situation), and whether or not it's "nothing to worry about" in the long run, it seems like it'll cause a lot of harm before the benefits are felt in society at large. Whatever purported benefits actually come of this, we'll have to deal with:
- Even more mass layoffs that use LLMs as justification (not just in software, either). These are people's livelihoods; we're coming off of several nearly-consecutive "once-in-a-generation" financial crises, a growing affordability crisis in much of the developed world, and stagnating wages. Many people will be hit very hard by layoffs.
- A seniority crisis as companies increasingly try to replace entry-level jobs with LLMs, meaning that people in a crucial learning stage of their jobs will have to either replace much of the learning curve for their domain with the learning curve of using LLMs (which is dubiously a good thing), or face unemployment, and leaving industries to deal with the aging-out of their talent pools
- We've already been heading towards something of an information apocalypse, but now it seems more real than ever, and the industry's response seems to broadly be "let's make the lying machines lie even more convincingly"
- The financial viability of these products seems... questionable right now, at best, and given that the people running the show are opening up data centres in some of the most expensive energy markets around (and in the US's case, one that uniquely disincentivizes the development of affordable clean energy), I'm not sure that anyone's really interested in a path to financial sustainability for this tech
- The environmental impact of these projects is getting to be significant. It's not as bad as Bitcoin mining yet, AFAIK, but if we keep on, it'll get there.
- Recent reports show that the LLM industry is starting to take up a significant slice of the US economy, and that's never a good sign for an industry that seems to be backed by so much speculation rather than real-world profitability. This is how market crashes happen.
I encourage you and anyone else here to read into the GFW if you're interested. It's more like the Great Firewalls -- there's regional fragmentation with different vendors, operators, implementations and rules between different parts of the country.
Predictably this means there's no one-size-fits-all solution to circumventing censorship on the Chinese internet, and research into this area's difficult since China has both the technical means to identify violations very efficiently as well as the bureaucratic infrastructure to carry out enforcement actions against a considerable portion of those people who violate the GFW rules (with enforcement action being anything from a "cooldown period" on your internet connection where you can't make any connections for some amount of time between minutes and days, fines, or imprisonment depending on the type of content you were trying to access).
So, the ethics of digging into this get very muddy, very fast.
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