Cybersecurity professional with an interest in networking, and beginning to delve into binary exploitation and reverse engineering.

  • 0 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 27th, 2024

help-circle


  • I wouldn’t buy a used MacBook from an individual seller unless I could meet in person to verify there’s no BIOS/TPM lock going on that would prevent me from doing a secure erase and wiping the SSD to start fresh. A laptop with a replaceable ssd is probably less of an issue, but I’d still feel more comfortable having a picture of the BIOS showing no password set or anything, and a picture of it booted to desktop at minimum so you know it isn’t a stolen laptop that has a password no one knows. If you’re buying from like a second hand recycler or something, anyone that sells through significant volume of devices, I’d be much more comfortable just pulling the trigger sight unseen.




  • Yes, treating crypto as a way to invest is a scam. The vast majority of crypto and crypto-adjacent “projects” are scams.

    We live in a world where payment providers have the power to force Etsy to delist vendors that sell sex toys to customers of a legal age, payment apps like Venmo or PayPal will permaban your account for selling NSFW art or products, and physical cash is being largely abandoned for cards and digital wallets. Surely you can see the benefits of a completely anonymous payment method?

    To be clear, I vastly prefer cash, but there’s an obvious issue with trying to anonymously use cash to pay for something on the internet or to send money to someone who isn’t within easy driving distance.










  • Im sure they could pump out LED panels without spyware at pretty much the price they’re selling at now, sure. I have doubts they could produce OLED panels without the spyware garbage and keep them at an affordable price for someone making the median annual salary or lower in the US. You just have to look at OLED monitors to get a rough picture of this. A 34” OLED monitor sells for roughly the same price as a 48” OLED television.

    I’m not trying to excuse television manufacturers at all here, it’s bullshit and I hate it, I just don’t have much choice if I want a TV. I just try to be as invaluable as possible to them after that. I don’t see what monopolies have to do with anything here though, there’s a huge of TV manufacturers, from Sony, LG, and Samsung down to bottom of the barrel Chinese brands like TCL and stuff.

    Consumer protection laws that prevent data siphoning by TV manufacturers? Yes please. I’m just not sold on there being any antitrust/monopoly shenanigans going on.


  • While I get your point, the TV isn’t nice because of its app features. If it’s a nice TV it’s because of its display panel and features like upscaling, interpolation, etc., and it’s being subsidized by those built-in apps and tracking functionality.

    By purchasing a nice TV, never using the built-in apps, and never connecting the TV to the Internet (or better yet connecting it to a segregated VLAN and dropping literally all traffic to/from the TV), you’re costing the company money on that TV set. Or probably more accurately you’re like the credit card user that maximizes their point rewards while paying off the balance every paycheck, you’re profiting off people who are in debt to their credit card company for whatever reason.

    To be clear, I have a G series LG OLED that is not only in its own VLAN with no traffic allowed in or out, but I drop all DNS that isn’t coming from my pihole at the WAN port on my edge router, I watch stuff from a secondary device, and most everything I watch is pirated and streamed locally anyway, so I’m definitely subsidizing my entertainment with the privacy invasion of others. If I could get an OLED tv without any of the built in OS stuff I absolutely would, and would be willing to pay more for a SKU with that stuff stripped out, but afaik that’s just not possible.