Thank you being around, bringing this nice community here, and helping with the federation!! 😁
If the timing is right, I would bring a mushroom grow bag with mushrooms sprouting.
If not… probably my radiacode gamma spectrometer and some of my radioactive items. Maybe a clock with radium painted dials and a piece of trinitite. I think that there are many different points of discussion that can be of interest to a broad audience (radioactivity, spectroscopy, electronics, US labor law story of the radium girls, nuclear explosions, background radiation… etc). As a bonus I can bring a UV flash light and show the radium fluorescence. Adults love UV flash lights.
I am also quite interested in this. It is not something that keeps me awake at night, and I am not particularly paranoid about it. But I find that working towards answering this question is a fun frame from which to learn about electronics, radio communications, and networking.
Since this appears to be something that is causing you some anxiety, I think it is better if I start by giving you some reassurance in that I have not yet managed to prove that any electronic device is spying on me via a hidden chip. I don’t think it is worth being paranoid about this.
I can explain some things that could be done to test whether a Linux computer spying. I am not suggesting that you try any of this. I am explaining this to you so that you can get some reassurance in the fact that, if devices were spying on us in this manner, it is likely that someone would have noticed by now.
The “spy” chip needs some way to communicate. One way a chip might communicate is via radio waves. So, the first step would be to remove the WiFi and Bluetooth dongles and any other pieces of hardware that may emit radio waves during normal operation. There is a tool called a “Spectrum Analyzer” that can be used to capture the presence of specific radio frequencies. These devices are now relatively affordable, like the tinySA, which can measure the presence of radio frequencies of up to 6 GHz.
One can make a Faraday cage, for example, by wrapping the PC with a copper-nickel coated polyester fabric to isolate the PC from the radio waves that are coming from the environment. The spectrum analyzer antennas can be placed right next to the PC and the device is left to measure continuously over several days. A script can monitor the output and keep a record of any RF signals.
Since phones are small, it is even easier to wrap them in the copper-nickel polyester fabric alongside with the spectrum analyzer antenna to check whether they emit any RF when they are off or in airplane mode with the WiFi and Bluetooth turned off.
What this experiment may allow you to conclude is that the spy chip is not communicating frequently with the external world via radio frequencies, at least not with frequencies <= 6 GHz.
Using frequencies higher 6 GHz for a low-power chip is not going be an effective method of transmitting a signal very far away. The chip could remain hidden and only emit the signal under certain rare conditions, or in response to a trigger. We can’t rule that out with this experiment, but it is unlikely.
A next step would be to test a wired connection. It could be that the spy chip can transmit the data over the internet. One can place a VPN Gateway in between their PC and the router, and use that gateway to route all the traffic to their own server using WireGuard. All network packets that leave through the PC’s ethernet connection can be captured and examined this way using Wireshark or tcpdump.
If one can show that the device is not secretly communicating via RF nor via the internet, I think it is unlikely that the device is spying on them.
Fair enough. I just looked it up and if the scale in this image is correct, I agree that the size of the hole looks small in comparison. I also looked at the security video of the crash itself and it is frustrating how little we can see from it.
Since this was such an important event and there seems to be a lack of specific pieces of essential evidence - either because of bad luck or because of a cover-up - I understand the skepticism. And I am not a fan of blindly believing any official narrative. But, without any context, if I see that photo and someone tells me that a plane crashed into that building, I would find it probable simply because the shape is so similar to the photo of the Bijlmer accident that I’m familiar with. A plane crash seems to me like a very chaotic process, so I don’t have a good expectation of what the damage should look like.
Maybe I’ll look for a pentagon crash documentary some time.
I don’t have much of an opinion on this topic, I haven’t really looked into it.
But as soon as I saw this image, the El Al Flight 1862 which crashed in the Bijlmer in Amsterdam in 1992 immediately came to mind. The shape of the hole is very similar!
This image shows the likely position of the Bijlmer plane during the crash:
The image you posted of the Pentagon seems to me consistent with what I have seen of the Bijlmer accident, and so the shape of the hole and the absence of wings in the photo does not persuade me personally that no plane was involved.
A botnet could have many unique accounts, and some could even appear like users. So I can’t rule it out. I also haven’t done a deeper dive into the accounts.
But when a post gets popular I would expect it to get at least a few downvotes, regardless of what it is.
There is one account that has a single comment from 5 months ago that is downvoting most posts and comments. That one is very suspicious
Other than that… No other accounts are as obvious. A few do have some reoccurrences but most of those votes do seem organic on first inspection.
Yes, you are right. If a mod wants I can send them the username and they can ban them from the community. I can see it as an admin from my instance but I can’t take action.
Thank you for that reference! Very interesting
Ah, cool! I got my 4 devices today and I have managed to play with them a bit. They are pretty cool! I was able to walk over to a park near my house and spoke with people across the world with no data in my phone :D
I ordered four of the simpler devices this weekend (LilyGO T3-S3 LoRa 868MHz - SX1262) and I have been reading about antennas.
Since I live in a city I am not super optimistic about the range. But I am still very curious about the concept, and I would love to be surprised.
After doing some search about antennas, I have decided to test the following combination:
3dBi 868MHz ISM Band Dipole Terminal Antenna for the LoRa that stays at home:
Sighunter 868 MHz to bring with me.
I also have a vector network analyzer (LiteVNA) that can be used for checking antennas, so I will also try to build some antennas myself. I doubt that my custom antennas will approach the performance of the professional ones… But I just find it such a cool concept.
Have you already gotten to play with it? What is your experience so far?
Yeah, I found out only after choosing that domain name… This TLD also gets penalized by the automatic e-mail spam detectors (like SpamAssassin). I wouldn’t pick the “.xyz” TLD if I were picking today 😅
Ah, actually, I responded thinking that you meant the /c/mycology community.
I’m not the creator/mod of the uncle_ben’s community, and the sidebar says “A community for the uncle ben’s mushroom growing technique.”, so I am actually not sure. I think it would be fine… Sorry!
Sure, what’s wrong with bird seed tech?
All fungi are magical ;)
The mycology community is more general in scope. Psychedelic mushrooms are not excluded, but there can be so much specialized discussion in that sub-category that is worth it having a more specialized community.
There is also the first community [email protected] dedicated to growing, but it is not very active.
I wiped all my data from a supercomputer by trying to ‘cd’ into a folder but making a typo and then running rm -rvf *
from my home directory.
At least they kept backups… The system administrators were probably amused about who gets access
Nice to see he has had a graphics upgrade :p
I wouldn’t use this language myself because I am not ready to defend that it is reasonable to apply the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in this context.
I think that they might be referring to Article 1, and possibly 5.
If this is their interpretation, then calling someone a worthless piece of trash is also a violation. You are talking to another human being as if they have less dignity, and you are treating them in a cruel and degrading manner.
For example I can go up to someone and insult them for all sorts of things - “you’re an ugly stupid worthless piece of trash” and that’s ok but I say “you’re a dirty [racial slur]” all of a sudden it’s different?
If it makes you feel any better, telling someone “you’re an ugly stupid worthless piece of trash” would get you banned from my instance too, so it is not so different.
I did not know of the term “open washing” before reading this article. Unfortunately it does seem like the pending EU legislation on AI has created a strong incentive for companies to do their best to dilute the term and benefit from the regulations.
There are some paragraphs in the article that illustrate the point nicely:
Thank you for pointing out Grayjay, I had not heard of it. I will look into it.