The ID is a distraction from the real problem. Windows has had per-installation IDs long before this, and other operating systems also have unique IDs. But there is no legitimate reason for Microsoft to know anything about anyone using ngrok at any time, and Microsoft definitely should not have the search capability to be able to run a query to find all users who were using ngrok at a certain time. This functionality provides no benefits to the users. It doesn’t matter whether they collect that information by machine ID or even by just the client IP address submitting the information to their data collection system. The data should not be collected.

It may be junk stock, but if you live in America and have any money, chances are that you are buying it because of government corruption.

It’s not winnable. The same politicians continuously reintroduce the same bad ideas and governments are increasingly authoritarian and decreasingly care about the opinions of constituents. Companies participating in fascism voluntarily censor and collect unnecessary identifying information to share with governments and advertisers because it benefits the share holders. Investors throw money at business models that depend on creating new markets for rent-seeking, leading to users sending their private data to more and more cloud services. Other companies without malicious intentions are pressured by the flood of bot traffic and content to collect verifiable user identification or use user-hostile services like Cloudflare or Recaptcha.

Yes, but if you are allowed to obtain a DRM-free copy of what you’ve purchased, you can put it on physical media and put that media in your hand yourself, and it’s better than Bluray which you can hold in your hand without owning. I think in the United States it is lawful to backup your Bluray and play it, but unlawful for somebody to provide you the means to backup your Bluray or play it except on licensed Bluray players connected to licensed displays.

The physical part of physical media ownership is not necessary. The problem with almost anything digital that people buy these days is that they aren’t buying it and often they can’t buy it. It’s either never fully in your possession or it’s protected by DRM that is protected by the US government, or both.

The US government cut off access to Mythos because Anthropic marketing claims it’s so powerful that it could be misused. If China has a better system, doesn’t that obligate companies that believe the marketing to use the Chinese system to find vulnerabilities in their software before somebody else does?

Gamers Nexus already has benchmarks out. My interpretation is that the performance is about what you would expect for a modern console, and the cost is about what you would expected to have gotten this kind of performance a few years ago. It’s not powerful by today’s PC standards, and you could have gotten a more powerful PC for less last year, but because of ongoing global economic collapse it’s competitively priced. If you weren’t fortunate enough to buy a computer shortly before companies started wasting all the manufacturing capacity on “AI” and you want to have a very compact and quiet computer with just okay gaming performance, it might be worth getting.

They said something about Netgear claiming to have removed the ability to administer your own device over SSH in the name of security, but that the option could still be turned on by sending some special network request.

Maybe you can issue some sort of note so that people don’t need to carry around bars of gold and scales. That sounds really inconvenient.

“the one they use” Who is they? What is the one they use? Most Linux distributions and F-Droid build every package from the source code and make available the source code that was built.

Was it really or is this all a publicity stunt to make it seem like it’s more capable than it is?

Modern cars do spy on you. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-takes-action-against-general-motors-sharing-drivers-precise-location-driving-behavior-data

There’s no point running games at 1800fps. Steel Nomad might be CPU or bandwidth limited on the PC laptop to make it perform worse, or it might be a Windows problem that manifests at such high frame rates. Gaming is an afterthought at Apple.

This is the reason why conventional AI can’t make strides in mathematics. The LLM is a statistical model that generates human text. The training data is the output text divorced from the process that generates it in humans. If you feed an LLM lots of mathematical text, it will confidently produce mathematical texts of its own, but the LLM can’t add two numbers together, and it doesn’t know that it can’t add two numbers together. It can be trained to use a calculator, but humans don’t interrupt their writing to say “And now I’m using my calculator to determine the value of 1 + 1” so the LLM is just going to draw upon its training data to predict that "1 + 1 = " is followed by “2” or maybe “3 (for large values of 1).” Maybe someday it will learn that “9 + 10 = 21.”

Are they really? They keep rolling out more AI slop generation features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZonG-qkGgTI

By default, Symfonium will stream music from Navidrome to your phone, but there are settings you can change in Symfonium to make it sync to your phone instead if you have data quotas or an unreliable connection. There’s probably a way to make it sync a subset and restrict playback to that subset when on a metered connection, but in my case I have more than enough storage to fit everything on the phone.

A second backdoor. Windows also uploads your BitLocker keys to Microsoft’s servers by default, just in case somebody needs to get in later.

This looks more comprehensive than Untracker, but maybe it is too complicated for some people?

Why RIP? It’s still alive.

This isn’t new. Even before AI, failing companies would use layoffs as a sort of loan on their quarterly numbers. If you lay off your employees, you’re really profitable for as long as you can continue collecting money for the work the employees had already done.