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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I hadn’t heard of this, and it makes me quite angry. Sooo many phones have Qualcomm chips in them, including every phone I’ve ever owned.

    The amount of data they’re collecting is unreasonable for what’s actually required for A-GPS (the only actual feature this enables). And it’s all completely invisible to users because they don’t even include the Privacy Policy with the phones.

    If I want to stop Qualcomm sending out a bunch of my data unencrypted over the web, I’ve got very few options, all of which are: Buy a new Phone…

    Edit: After more research on this, it seems this A-GPS request is still happening from the OS, which controls Wifi. /e/OS just didn’t reconfigure the Qualcomm driver like GrapheneOS. This isn’t a hardware or firmware backdoor or something like I thought initially. The article seems like an ad for NitroKey / NitroPhone, which is just a modified Pixel with GrapheneOS on it. I might look at GrapheneOS for my Samsung phone.


  • I’m not OP, but if transcoding is happening on user CPUs, it’s theoretically possible to modify or inject stuff into the transcoded video. There’d need to be some way of validating a transcode matches the original, which is non-trivial.
    A consensus algorithm could work, but that would massively increase the required compute. I’m not even sure things like NVENC vs CPU ffmpeg are deterministic in how tbey compress video. Different encoders could very likely end up with visually identical transcodes, but the hashes wouldn’t always match.
    Maybe someone else has a better idea for validating transcodes?


  • “A few double spends” is underestimating the impact. When this has happened in the past, the whole network gets fragmented, and at some point everyone needs to decide which version of history to throw out, allowing potentially anyone to double-spend in that time frame. A bad actor with enough compute could cause a network split and put whatever they want in the ledger. Getting caught isn’t really a concern if it’s all anonymous wallets, and it only takes 1 unnoticed transaction to move millions.

    The entire basis for trust in Bitcoin (and any proof of work blockchain) is that the network is so big, no single actor has the resources to become a majority and influence the ledger.


  • I think you’re missing a critical part of how blockchains function: If Bitcoin was running on only 100 Mac Minis, there is nothing stopping someone buying 101 more Mac Minis, becoming dominant in the network and suddenly they can decide to just print their own bitcoins for themself.

    The profitability of running Bitcoin miners is proportional to the market cap and the value of Bitcoin itself. For Bitcoin to remain stable, the total value must remain less than the cost of hardware to dominate the consensus algorithm.