You’ve lost another submarine?

No. A full breakdown here https://youtu.be/1dhvry6E0jA

The power aspect is a lot bigger of a factor than I would have thought. I had an old computer I was going to use as a server for Foundry that I could keep up all the time, but when I measured its wattage and did the math, it would cost me $20 a month to keep on. A pi costs like $2 to keep running, so it paid for itself pretty quick

At least plugging them all into Google translate, the pronunciations are actually all pretty similar, with Swedish being the most dissimilar

It’s gotten so seamless now, and wine has gotten pretty good. I can download a Windows executable, double click it, go through the regular Windows installer, and then have it make a shortcut on my desktop which will launch it.

Your average user won’t even know all the Dark Magics making it possible, or that they were supposed to have looked around for a Linux alternative, it just works

Just curious, why aren’t you vegan if you consider it morally bankrupt to be complicit in the meat industry?

Bear in mind, with this liberal interpretation, any time you access a website, that is also consuming someone’s labor and if you don’t have a subscription to it, it is unpaid.

Ah, gotcha, I was thinking more in terms of software attacks than hardware, and that some vulnerability would come up at some point for them to get root access, at which point I think they’d be able to get the key one way or another. I’d imagine it also depends on how locked down the system can be based on the nature of their duties; arbitrary internet access makes shipping it off somewhere a bit easier. Another consideration would be that the drive could also be imaged, and if the key were ever recovered at a later date through whatever method/mistake/etc. the entirety of the data could be recovered.

But, yeah, definitely agree that that’s all moving well outside the bounds of disgruntled/opportunistic employee and more into the persistent adversary realm.

Fundamentally, once someone has some of the data, they have that data, and you can make no guarantees to remove it. The main question you need to ask is whether or not you’re okay with limiting it to the data they’ve already seen, and what level of technical expertise they need to have to keep the data.

Making some assumptions for what’s acceptable as a possibility, and how much you want to invest, I’d recommend having the data on a network-mapped share, and put a daily enforced quota for their access to it. Any data they accessed (presumably as part of their normal duties) is their’s, and is “gone.” But if you remove their access, they can’t get any new data they didn’t touch before, and if they were to try and hoover up all the data at some point to copy it off, they’d hit their quota and lose access for a bit (and potentially send you an alert as well). This wouldn’t prevent them from slowly sucking out the data day after day.

If they only need to touch a small fraction of the customer data, and particularly if the sensitivity of the data goes down over time (data from a year ago is less sensitive than data from a day ago) this might be a decent solution. If they need to touch a large portion of the data, this isn’t as useful.

Edit: another nice bit is that you could log on the network share (at your location) which of the customer data they’re accessing and when. If you ever want to audit, and see them accessing things they don’t need, you can take action.

I think the next best solution is the VDI one, where you run a compute at your location, and they have to remote into it. If they screen capture, they’ll still save off whatever data they access, and if they have poor, or inconsistent, connection up your network it’ll affect their ability to do their job (and depending how far away they are it might just be super annoying dealing with the lag). On top of that, it’s dependent on how locked-down they need to be to do their job. If they need general Internet access, they could always attempt to upload the data somewhere else for them to pull it. If your corporate network has monitoring to catch that, you might be okay, but otherwise I think it’s a lot of downside with a fairly easy way to circumvent.

I’m not the most up to speed on TPM’s, but does it have the capability to directly do network access in order to pull the key? Otherwise, you’re going to need the regular OS to get it to the TPM somehow, in which case that’s the weak link to pull the key instead of ripping it from the TPM itself.

And once they have the key once, how do you enforce them having to re-request it? Is there a reason that that point they couldn’t just unplug from the Internet (if even necessary) and copy the entirety of that drive/partition somewhere else?

I’m continually shocked by how often I learn of some structural systemic issue, pull the thread to see where it started and- oh, surprise, it was once again Reagan.

The Brewster’s Millions genie

Looking completely realistic and being able to discern between real and fake are competing goals. If you can discern the difference, then it does not look completely realistic.

I think what they’re alluding to is generative adversarial networks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network where creating a better discriminator that can detect a good image from bad is how you get a better image.

It is, and it does provide improved performance at the expense of complexity. Both India and the US Air Force actually used clusters of PS3s to create supercomputers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor) has some more details as well

Why would you suddenly add in the “hundred” when you didn’t do it for any previous ones?

Except when you do https://writingcenter.uagc.edu/apostrophes

Apostrophe when making a number plural is not uncommon.

Not necessarily. If your phone uses usb-c, and if you get a usb-c flash drive, you can make a bootable USB with your phone with the flasher app. The reviews are pretty mixed for it for whether or not it works, but could be worth a shot.

Ah, that makes sense, like summa cum laude.

sometimes it’s a matter of means & availability, sometimes it’s a matter of controlling their paid-for content (like people who actually buy switch games but want to run them on their steam deck), and sometimes it’s basically a hobby

Very little of that justifies it to me. For means & availability, this isn’t a mother stealing baby formula. Pirated content isn’t a need (though I’d make an exception for things like school books). There’s plenty of content made to be free and available, as well as libraries. And I’m completely fine with people pirating copies of paid-for content; there’s an argument to be made that that isn’t actually piracy and is personal archiving. It probably doesn’t need to be said that “hobby” is not a justification in the least, just like people who shoplift for the thrill.

I see supporting a service hostile to users as immoral - it’s like enabling an abuser, however slight, you’re contributing to behaviors that are a detriment to others

To me the real crux is that you believe that not doing something immoral is the same thing as doing something moral. Me sitting here is moral because I’m not murdering someone. Yay me. I’m also not blackmailing, gaslighting, stealing, etc. etc. Me sitting here might be the most moral thing anyone has ever done.

To me the case for the absence of activity actually being moral is it requires some amount of sacrifice to continue to do the right thing. Avoiding going to Walmart to support a local business, even if you pay more and it’s further away. The difference between not wanting to see a movie and boycotting it. There’s nothing moral about not going to a movie you didn’t want to see. But I think it is moral to avoid going to a movie you wanted to because of labor practices; you made a sacrifice in support of your beliefs. If you then go and pirate said movie, it’s indistinguishable from selfish behavior.

As I’ve said in other spots, if it’s genuinely about not supporting hostile services and not about self-interest, donate however much you’re saving by pirating to a union or charity. That’s completely fair. But if not, all I see is people acting in their self interest and trying to justify it by saying that they are doing a bad thing to bad people so it’s okay (and maybe they’re doing a little bad to some good people as well, but that’s a price you’re willing to have them pay for you).

The problem is when people claim they were never going to buy an awful lot of content. If someone spends a significant amount of time playing, or consuming, pirated content, I call bullshit. They would have bought at least some of it if they weren’t getting so much stuff for free. Considering the rewards and lack of consequences, I doubt the vast majority of people pirating are being really honest with themselves about what they “would never have” paid for, and instead use it as a simple excuse for bad behavior.

And rejecting a service you don’t consider worth it isn’t moral. That’s just basic capitalism and self-interest. That’s the standard decision to not buy something, which is a decision people make literally dozens of times when they go in the store. And pirating that content anyways certainly doesn’t make it any more moral.