It’s worse. We are reverting back to the age of lügenpresse and hearsay comes in short-form video formats.

Many people simply do not care (or are even aware) if a source is trusted if the message aligns with their own bias or the message is presented as a new “fact”. Trust is irrelevant, unfortunately.

“real” is subjective.

I taught myself QuickBasic as it was the only thing I knew that was related to copying C64 BASIC out of magazines. (QBasic was packaged with DOS 3.11 I think and I was able to get a full copy of QuickBasic somehow. That was about +30 years ago? Dunno. I was about 12 at the time.) I didn’t know what other languages were out there besides TurboPascal. I did learn simple Pascal, but that was a short chapter.

I actually met someone else in the area that was learning to code, and of course, we wanted to write a game. The only way to code for a mouse at the time was to write an INT33 handler, so it kicked off our interest in asm. (I still use asm for MCU stuff on occasion, but it’s limited.) I quickly diverged into writing some really nifty… eh… “boot sector code” so that kicked off my career in security.

And yeah, it’s the same phenomenon for me: I just think in terms of bits and bytes getting shifted around and I still refuse to believe in “magic”. (Slight jab at Rust coders there, but in good fun.)

Fast forward to today, I train “kids” fresh out of college as part of my job now. The first thing I do is start giving them weird tasks that require they actually understand how something like an fopen() actually works.

(Funny story. I refused to “show my work” in math class for simple f(x) problems as I viewed it as unoptimized code. Lulz. I was such an autistic dork.)

That, 200%!

When I started in computers, years ago, I transitioned from QuickBasic directly into assembly. Ever since then, I can kinda “read the Matrix” (Blond, Brunette, Redhead…) and forget about how confusing a raw binary or how a mess of a dmp looks to someone else. (To me, I really just see patterns and nothing massively complicated.)

“It’s just data.” - You would be surprised how fuzzy that statement is for some people. It’s almost exactly like telling someone who doesn’t speak any English that “the sky is blue”. It’s totally cool though! Learning about the internals of any computer is really just a very long chain of “aha moments” as many concepts aren’t intuitive.

I would look into something like Doppler instead of Vault. (I don’t trust any company acquired by IBM. They have been aquiring and enshittifying companies before there was even a name for it.)

Look into how any different solutions need their keys presented. Dumping the creds in ENV is generally fine since the keys will need to be stored and used somehow. You might need a dedicated user account to manage keys in its home folder.

This is actually a host security problem, not generally a key storage problem per se. Regardless of how you have a vault setup, my approach here is to create a single host that acts as a gateway for the rest of the credentials. (This applies to if keys are stored in “the cloud” or in a local database somewhere.)

Since you are going to using a Pi, you should focus on that being a restricted host: Only run your chosen vault solution on it. Period. Secure and patch it to the best of your ability and use very specific host firewall rules for minimum connectivity. Ie: Have one user for ssh in and limit another user account to managing vault, preferably without needing any kind of elevated access. This is actually a perfect use case for SELinux since you can put in some decent restrictions on the host for a single app (and it’s supporting apps…)

If you are paranoid enough to run a HIDS, you can turn on all the events for any type of root account actions. In theory once the host is configured, you shouldn’t need root again until you start performing patches.

I dump memory more often than you would think. It’s usually not obfuscated or encrypted in any meaningful way even though it is fairly trivial to do so.

It’s good practice to scour through any bloatware installed on windows laptops. Since bloatware is generally written by the lowest bidder, you can find all kinds of keys and phone-home urls (sometimes with all the parameters) and other weird things. Just fire up a decent hex editor and search for strings in the dump file. You don’t need to know jack about reverse engineering either.

Context: The yellow dot is the tcell and the rest is the cancer cell. I found a video of this image, but cannot verify the exact source so I don’t want to post it. (All the links to this point right back at social media that I could find.)

This is a an article that has a neat gif of the process of how these specialized tcells work: https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2025/04/new-smart-immune-cells-a-breakthrough-for-long-lasting-tumor-destruction/

Mostly by Indian and Vietnamese slave labor: https://www.androidauthority.com/where-are-samsung-phones-made-3251712/

That’s what you just got shown: Shove the configgy bits into Git.

You will likely have to find the configs you want to save first.

The term is “read the room”, I think. Rarely, some movies are just like that. Classic showings of Rocky Horror aren’t exactly done for serious movie gowers as a prime example. While I am not attempting to put RHPS and a Minecraft movie in the same class, I would go to a Minecraft movie with the same mindset.

Something about this post title screams dirty poem.

Doesn’t need to be in the same band due to harmonics and power. If you keep splitting the 11m band (CB) into “fractional-frequencies”, you are going to get a cross-over somehow, especially if the fundamental is at super-high power.

Using a piano as an example, if you play a C2 at 62.41Hz it still expresses harmonics at C3 (130.81Hz), G3 (196.22Hz) and C4 (261.63Hz) and at least in theory, to infinity and beyond! Each harmonic away from the fundamental will be expressed in decreasing levels of power. (It’s like 1/3 power per, I think. The proper math is out there though.)

(sorry to add even more; I just made another comment about this and I am familiar with most of these concepts.)

Actually, that would be much easier. TV stations back then mostly received shows via satellite dish. Pointing a low power directional antenna directly at the dish’s LNB would work great. Satellite transmissions weren’t strong and were rarely encrypted back then so that would theoretically be super easy if you knew your RF and deep RF knowledge was much more common place +30 years ago.

I am not sure if they used point-to-point microwave antennas back then for TV, but it would be the same concept. (Microwave antennas are typically the round, cylindrical looking, covered antennas we see all over the place today.)

It would require as much, or more, power to drown out a TV broadcast signal at the source. I believe many of the old towers were 200kW-1000kW so it would have taken one hell of a pirate signal if interfering close to the main source. However, RF follows the same principle as light using the inverse square law so the further you get from the primary transmitter, the signal quickly becomes exponentially weaker for any receiver.

If you had a TV transmitter on a small hill that is a fair distance away from the target audience, like many were, splitting the distance with a directional antenna wouldn’t require nearly as much power from the pirate signal to overtake the original transmission.

If I wanted, I could interfere with ham radio signals with as little as a watt of power (in my immediate local area) even though people might be communicating through a ham radio repeater that transmits at a couple of thousand watts that is many miles away. (It’s actually a permitted emergency technique to “break into” active conversations. Actually, other ham radio operators are familiar with what interference sounds like, even for signals that can’t fully overtake a transmission. It’s customary to stop the conversation if detected and wait for the “break”.)

Unfortunately, AI has the creativity of a turnip.

“Political headwinds” is putting it mildly.

Use local accounts only and do not login to a Microsoft account.

Edit: In my situation, I used an MS account during a reinstall and disabled backups and logged out quickly after. There are methods to still do an offline install, from what I understand.

Disabling backup is annoying, but not hard.