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Cake day: June 23rd, 2024

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  • Trojan is any malware that pretends to be a legit program. It does not need to have backdoor or info stealing capability even though most malware (trojan or not) today does. For example, pre-Internet trojans might just invisibly install themselves along the actual program they were bundled with and then nuke the system on a certain date. Antivirus companies would even advance the date on their systems in hopes of detecting these and being the first to develop a patch.

    But since this program is not malicious, it just straight up hogs system resources and/or crashes it due to a mistake, it cannot be considered malware and therefore not a trojan.

    Certain Intel processors from around 2000 would crash everything when loading the 4 bytes F0 0F C7 C8 into a specific register. Would you consider this a backdoor because it allows any program to crash the system? I wouldn’t say so, crashing Windows 98 was probably not too hard anyway…




  • It was advertised as “2 TB (64 GB Extended)” at a local clearance sale (not AliExpress), which was basically correct though I would prefer “64 GB but misprogrammed so everything can get corrupted at any time”. When buying it, I didn’t yet know if I could reprogram the chip but the low price was justified for the pretty aluminum case with a USB-C port and place for a custom PCB. I decided to buy it also to prevent another, less technical person from using it and losing their data. The store was getting rid of inventory for very cheap and would close soon so no more fake drives would be ordered.



  • Sometimes, counterfeits or unknown brands are so similar to the real deal that it barely matters. I’d say that basic electronics (alarm clocks, kitchen scales, calculators, SD security cams) or even RAM is fine. With appropriate expectations, parts like video or USB cables, hubs etc., small home improvement items (hooks, screws) are fine too. Avoid categories where a lot of items have fake specs (storage devices, LED bulbs, anything that claims a runtime on a Li-Ion battery). Power electronics (especially if using mains or non-tiny Li-Ion batteries) can be downright dangerous. For novelty items and electronics modules, it’s usually easy to find text or video reviews on other websites because they’re easy to uniquely describe. Remember to consider ways in which the product can be utter crap despite high reviews citing good first impressions; it also helps to have practical knowledge of testing the properties of the items and fixing common issues.


  • It’s worth doing even if your country did, or if it is predicted to fail the threshold, as all signatures count towards the total goal of 1,000,000. However, seven countries also need to pass their threshold and only two (Germany, France) did so your support is most valuable if you’re from Denmark, Benelux, Italy, Spain, Slovenia or Sweden. Some percentage of the votes will be invalidated in the verification process so it’s better to aim for 125% of the threshold.








  • Well, this is how a large part of how carbon credits “work”. You can pay someone to not cut down their tree, for example, and get a certificate in return. However, the demand for wood will likely just get satisfied elsewhere and there is little stopping people from selling multiple carbon credits per tree, or just including trees that would not get cut down anyway.

    In the best case scenario, actual carbon gets stored so that it won’t decompose (like dead trees or other biomass in oxygen, maybe even plastic someday) or burned (like coal that future people can reach); however, that’s energy-intensive (hydrocarbons release energy when turned into oxides and vice versa) and difficult. Obviously, such carbon credits are expensive and they would probably cost an airline as much as fuel for your flight. Sealing an oil reservoir instead of using it, as I suggest, would be the easiest way to effectively accomplish this but oil producers don’t want to miss out on the fields they operate.
    Unless the “carbon neutral” option for your flight ticket is a large percentage of its price, they are probably using dubious carbon credits - in the typical case, they are like saying your crypto mining rig is zero-emission because it’s next to an existing hydroelectric dam. The energy from that could have been used to offset some carbon-intensive production elsewhere (unless all your energy demand is already satisfied by clean electricity and you cannot export, like Iceland some islands).
    At worst, it’s a pure scam that offsets no carbon and is pushed by Big Oil to prevent buyers from considering systemic changes to their carbon-heavy operation.

    Edit: Iceand indeed has an overproduction of clean energy and they use it to extract and export aluminum, which is energy-intensive. Still, as long as there are gas furnaces and combustion engines on the island, there is room for improvement. However, small tropical islands (which cannot host aluminum factories) mostly use solar panels and some storage solution, and computationally heavy tasks are a legitimate use for any excess electricity production.