Yeah. Believe it or not but the sex pest who actively didn’t warn his contemporaries about the impact of the honey plugin and who now advertises on kiwi farms might be kind of a piece of shit who will say anything for a buck?

And now for a word from d-brand!

Apalrd has done some great “popular computer science” videos on the various remote KVM devices that is well worth looking up. One of them specifically goes into the ridiculously sketchy methods that are used to fetch and execute unsigned code in random buckets to handle firmware updates.

But as for the mic? Honestly, if you open up a LOT of consumer devices you are going to find random microphones. Not because they are all secretly spying on you. But because they use “off the shelf” chips and boards that already have those embedded. Especially since microphones and speakers are kind of the same hardware in most cases and we ALL love a good beep.

I 100% agree the software stack shouldn’t be on there. But, as the blog post points out, there is a LOT of developmental code and packages in that image that shouldn’t be. It is likely just a case of not removing unnecessary packages from the base image.

Because… the entire point of a device like this is that you plug it in somewhere you aren’t. MAYBE JetKVM corp can hear me muttering profanity or wondering where I left that USB c splitter when I am trying to assemble it the first time. The rest of the time? It is plugged into the back of a server that I am booting up so that I can install proxmox without having to drag a monitor over. And while you can potentially get some juicy info out of that? It is not at all worth the hassle to set up fake companies and market a fake (moderately high demand in the right circles) device.

deleted by creator

I’m explicitly not going to link to it as I can’t personally vet how safe it is or its origins but:

No. Check the various issues related to the subject matter. And hobbyist threads on sites like resetera.

Yeah. If you just want HDR, Cable Matters is the way to go.

If you buy one and flash it with a sketchy firmware, you can get VRR. But my understanding is the HDR is a smaller range. How much that matters when the vast majority of games aren’t taking advantage of HDR is up to you.

Personally? I love how much HDR pops. I more or less need VRR to not have to care about frame tearing and the like. And when I am running games on an underpowered glorified AMD NUC (or, in my case, ACTUALLY an AMD NUC)… my framerates are neither high nor stable.

In the sense that we have dongles/docks, sure. In the sense of monitors with native USB-c input? These are still fairly rare as the accepted pattern is that your dock has an HDMI/DP port and you connect via that (which actually is a very good pattern for laptops).

As for TVs? I am not seeing ANYTHING with usb c in for display. In large part because the vast majority of devices are going to rely on HDMI. As I said above.

I’ll also add that many (most?) of those docks don’t solve this problem. The good ones are configured such that they can pass the handshake information through. I… genuinely don’t know if you can do HDCP over USBC->HDMI as I have never had reason to test it. Regardless, it would require both devices at the end of that chain to be able to resolve the handshakes to enable the right HDMI protocol which gets us back to the exact same problem we started with.

And the less good docks can’t even pass those along. Hence why there is a semi-ongoing search for a good Switch dock among users and so forth.

Not that easy.

To get HDMI 2.1 support for the Gabe Cube itself essentially requires kernel level patches. Which on a “normal” Linux device is possible (but ill advised) but on these atomic distros where even something like syncthing involves shenanigans to keep active week to week? Ain’t happening. Because HDMI is not just mapping data to pins and using the right codecs. There are a LOT of handshakes involved along the way (which is also the basis for HDCP which essentially all commercial streaming services utilize to some degree).

There ARE methods (that I have personally used) to take a DP->HDMI dongle and flash a super sketchy Chinese (the best source for sketchy tech) firmware to effectively cheat the handshakes. It isn’t true HDMI 2.1 but it provides VRR and “good enough for 2025” HDR at 4k/120Hz. But… I would wager money that is violating at least one law or another.

So expect a lot of those “This ini change fixes all of Windows 11. Just give money to my patreon for it” level fixes. And… idiots will believe it since you can use a dongle to already get like HDMI 2.05 or whatever with no extra effort. And there will likely be a LOT of super sketchy dongles on AliExpress that come pre-flashed that get people up to 2.09 (which is genuinely good enough for most people). But it is gonna be a cluster.

And that is why all of us with AMD NUCs already knew what a clusterfuck this was going to be.

There are also ways to fake the handshake in software. I personally did not try that but from what I have seen on message boards? It is VERY temporary (potentially having to redo every single time you change inputs on your TV/receiver) and it is unclear if the folk who think it works actually tested anything or just said “My script printed out ‘Handshake Successful’, it works with this game that doesn’t even output HDR!”

Ballparking but it will likely take closer to a decade than not for that to actually happen… and I am still not optimistic. And there are actually plenty of reasons to NOT want any kind of bi-directional data transfer between your device and the TV that gets updated to push more and more ads to you every single week.

The reason HDMI is so successful is that the plug itself has not (meaningfully?) changed in closer to 20 years than not. You want to dig out that PS3 and play some Armored Core 4 on the brand new 8k TV you just bought? You can. With no need for extra converters (and that TV will gladly upscale and motion smooth everything…).

Which has added benefits because “enthusiasts” tend to have an AV receiver in between.

The only way USB C becomes a primary for televisions (since display port and usb c are arguably already the joint primary for computer monitors) is if EVERY other device migrates. Otherwise? Your new TV doesn’t work with the PS5 that Jimmy is still using to watch NFL every week.

There are still handshake issues with that.

There IS a workaround consumers can do. It involves flashing a REALLY sketchy firmware to one of the mainstream dongles. And it still isn’t true HDMI 2.1. It just gets you VRR and enough HDR that I don’t know the difference.

But probably not something a company like Valve wants to actively sell. Expect hundreds of variants on aliexpress but your country may vary as to whether that is cost effective to purchase.

De facto, no.

Yes, there are still some services where there are absolutely zero questions asked and all you need is a prepaid card that doesn’t need to be activated at all. Those are quite rare and have a very limited number of phone numbers allocated to them and pretty much are all flagged as spam/bots by every single system out there.

The next tier up are services where you technically don’t need to provide any ID to use a prepaid card… but the store you purchased it from needs your ID/credit card to activate the card when you buy it. Those ALSO tend to have the same problems with burned numbers.

What most people have as burners these days are just the same phone service as anyone else. They just pay a rebranded t-mobile at the start of the month rather than the end of the month. And those have all the same restrictions, and capabilities, as “real” phone plans.

Eh.

Robots capable of melee combat are pretty much pointless. Melee is what you resort to when someone gets too close and you can’t point your gun at them because your reflexes are too slow or you are not strong enough to overpower them pushing it out of the way. Robots will always have faster reflex times, can physically attach the gun to their bodies, and are going to be stronger than a human trying to push their arm out of the way.

This is just the cultural dance aspects of martial arts. It shows that the robot has dexterity and coordination and is capable of elaborate choreography.

This kind of robot is genuinely a good invention for the purposes of elder care (something China is going to have massive problems with because of their one child policy fundamentally breaking multiple generations). For the purpose of slaughtering those pesky non-Hans?

https://terminator.fandom.com/wiki/T-1 is a MUCH more effective design. Guns on a heavily armored weapons platform.

https://www.google.com/search?q=svg+to+dxf+command+line yields

inkscape --export-type="dxf" input.svg --export-filename=output.dxf

At which point it is just bash scripting, for loops, and printf/awk. Which… is a Thing but it is also a Thing you only have to solve once (and actually is great fodder for LLMs).

It still does make sense considering that russia is literally invading Ukraine (at least once a decade…) and continue to probe NATO nations. Because, in that regard, it is less a “military base on foreign soil” and more just a NATO base on NATO soil. And, in theory, it is a good idea to let the country dumb enough to spend most of their GDP on a massive standing military to foot the bill.

But considering that the US is just as likely to be on russia’s side in WW3…

That ship sailed closer to decades ago than not.

Spend some time with ER workers (and pay for their damned drinks) and you will learn just how toned down The Pitt actually was.

In fairness, that is a different situation than this.

This is google basically providing a mechanism for employers and parents to pull text messages on devices on their plans. That wouldn’t impact BYOD as that is still not on their plan.

But all the management software and spyware already have those capabilities. Which… is the other aspect of this karma-bate post.

Considering I have to deal with these kinds of security concerns on the regular as part of my professional life… kind of.

But you are just switching to ad hominem because your non sequitor “gimme updoots” response to a thread title is nonsense and you can’t admit that. So… I strongly encourage you to wipe your work phone and install graphene with an isolated partition for google/work android and see what happens.

Ah. So graphene DOES have a system where it takes your entire existing OS, shrinks all the partitions on disk, installs itself around that, AND prevents the monitoring software from reporting that your 512 GB device is now actually a 128 GB one?

Well color me surprised.

Or, you know, more likely you end up wiping the existing OS by effectively factory resetting it. And then you ping the management software server saying “I need to reinstall your spyware” which triggers a flag that IT may or may not care about. Similarly, said spyware now wonders why your phone’s storage shrunk so massively and raises another flag.

Yeah… having to reprovision a phone because it just got reformatted is going to raise a red flag. And if you are installing a rogue OS on your work phone to prevent your employer from seeing what you are doing… I actually side with them when they fire your ass.

Your nonsense makes sense if it is a personal device that you are using for work purposes. Which… I strongly oppose for a range of reasons. If your work wants you “on call” then they can provide a device. Otherwise you can never be off call.

Just remember everyone: the real victims the armed jackbooted thugs holding a populace at gunpoint in honor of rapists and nazis. And if you don’t Support The Troops then you are literally worse than hitler

And legit creditors just need your SSN, address, and maybe an old address. They run a credit check (hence why you freeze that shit) and then you are driving away in your 4k a month pickup truck.

And less legit creditors… don’t ask too many questions other than where you live and where your loved ones love.

But hey. Feel free to throw a hissy fit rather than think through why that plastic card actually doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as you thought it did. I mean, it would be nicer if you could actually sit and think and learn. But this is the 2020s. Ain’t nobody doing introspection.