I recently installed the STM32 Cube IDE from ST [1] and discovered that it contains a stealth binary of Google's Chrome in my home directory. The fans started spinning and I found the culprit pretty fast, but if you delete the Chrome executable in the double-hidden directory it just gets installed again at the next run of the IDE.
I wonder what percentage of market share can be attributed to this kind of clients that are used not for browsing but for lazily loading some web interface or product page.
That's a great point. Both Chrome and Edge are widely used as WebView drivers by some applications, and whether the user likes it or not they end up using one of the browsers that's dubbed market leader. Does Firefox even provide any webview-capable deployment option? If they managed to put together one that didn't weight around 100MB or phoned home, I'm sure it would be widely adopted once it's out.
The downside is that it would probably just end up increasing fringe and dangerous behaviors
This reminds me of a different type of “banning” I heard about some 20 years ago. There was a physicist who had a separate mailing list for laymen who would mail him to discuss their pet theory. Since he didn’t want to be bothered with them he added them to the mailing list, telling them that they would have the chance to discuss this with other experts in the field …
And I do wonder how difficult it is now. We have datasets like libgen and Anna’s Archive … are there public llm’s out there that have been trained in this way?
One of my pet theories is that the Fermi paradox is due to cloaking of extraterrestrial civilisations. We’re not entitled to observing them, and as a result the mass and energy of the universe doesn’t add up. Hence black matter and black energy.
Would this be the Dark Forest Hypothesis [1], with the added twist that the hidden civilizations are so advanced that they've "cloaked" themselves such that they only show up as what we currently interpret as dark matter?
Aside: dark matter and dark energy are pretty distinct concepts by my reading [2]. Dark matter interacts only gravitationally and is currently the leading explanation for things like galaxy rotation curves (visible mass is far too low to support observed disk rotation speeds, so non-luminous, i.e., "dark" matter must exist to make up the difference) and gravitational lensing by galaxies (again, visible mass is too low to produce observed lensing). Dark energy is, well, something that accelerates the expansion of the universe.
> Dark matter interacts only gravitationally and is currently the leading explanation for things like galaxy rotation curves
Not exact. For so weak technologically civilizations such our Terrestrial, now could not detect many distant objects which does not emit EM spectrum.
For example, only small fraction of known planets outside our Solar system, seen on telescopes directly, most others detected by indirect means - measuring difference of speed of star (by Doppler shift), or measuring changes of brightness of star, when big planet eclipse star (most cases partially).
In many cases, planets orbits are not so fortunate to us to detect them, and these planets for us are dark matter also.
To be exact, for us "normal" matter are only classic stars and some other objects like Black holes when they "eat" something.
Astronomers already made calculations, based on assumption, that Solar system is more or less typical (we know approx weights of matter of Sun, Planets, Asteroids, Star dust, etc), and seen, that all we know could been about half of dark matter, but other half we could not explain, and this is huge number.
You confused PHYSICS definition with ASTRONOMY definition, they are different.
For ASTRONOMY, dark matter is just what they could not see, but have gravitation features. And as I said, for astronomy, ~50% of dark matter is nothing special, but for example, only extreme models could suggest tens of thousands Black holes (to fill 50% of emptiness), because of this, they conclude, that exists something other matter which we don't know.
For PHYSICS, technical meaning of dark matter is special type of matter.
We have confusing and extremely sophisticated context. It involving wide spectrum of less complex contexts. Physics and astronomy, depend on from what direction we look on it.
Shouldn't we be able to detect the civilizations that have been broadcasting EM radiation before they got quiet? Whether they went silent voluntarily or involuntarily - unless every single technologically advanced civilization had the foresight to develop cloaking before becoming spacefaring (which seems unlikely) we should be able to detect their signals within some window of time.
Humans also have been broadcasting EM out into space for a bit now.. so either these hostile aliens are on their way right now, they are too far away to have detected us yet, or they don't exist.
Humanity just very short time have instruments to hear sky.
Visual observations exists much longer, but they are limited to just our galaxy, Milky way (more distant sources are not bright enough to see them with naked eye).
And even most obvious mask ideas (and development), which we see on our current sci-tech stages, very fast move spectrum to infrared, which is near impossible to observe via thin atmosphere. And even now, I hear about developments of laser cooling, which could emit extreme amounts of heat into some direction, where nobody will see it.
For example, now Earth communications conversed to Ultra high frequencies and very high gain antennas (3G, 4G, 5G, emit only very narrow beam to receiver and are very short range), and to fiber-optic communications, which emit just infrared from heat. Also, Ultra high frequencies very quickly absorbed by moisture, so also effectively converted to heat infrared.
So, right question should be, how much time industrial civilization emit observable to others emissions.
And imagine, what could alien civilization learn about Earth from locations, where clouds are rare, as others they could not hear :)
Regarding an ET source: some key questions to consider:
What kind of technology would produce such ultra high energy particles?
What would they use such technology for?
Can a technological source be inferred from the data we already have?
It could also 'just' be a new particle which behaves differently than anything on the board. (Would still be a VERY strange particle though for sure, and still leaves open the question of what produced it.)
So uh, 27% of the mass of the _universe_ is being cloaked by civilizations? Literally in all directions, distributed evenly throughout all of visible space? Seems extraordinarily unlikely.
Also, how do they erase their early radio signals after they have been emitted? Civilizations don't go from zero to dark mater cloaking capable without a few intermediate steps...
To cloak from so weak civilization as we, need to just hide electromagnetic emissions, as we cannot detect distant objects which don't emit anything EM to our direction.
Even recent stealth technologies know from late 1970th, how to hide from radio waves reflections and how to hide visual reflections and how to hide infrared emissions (slot nozzle, directed where no observer).
"OptiNAND uses a large non-volatile memory on the drive. It optimizes write performance by using DRAM as a cache. So, when the drive is powered up, performance is on par with WCE, well it is WCE technically as DRAM caching is enabled.
In the event of an emergency power off (EPO), the contents of DRAM are written to non-volatile memory (NVM) using the power of the spinning disk, so the data is protected. Since NVM can hold the data for a very long time without needing power , as soon as the drive is powered up again , the data can be transferred from NVM to the drive."
If there's even a diode worth of band-gap technology in there: yes, ageing would be demonstrably different in a device that lived a couple of decades longer. The crystal lattice is not set in stone and atoms move around.
The car would be authentic, built in 1967. What the person is asking is whether there's a technique to distinguish a car from 1967 from a sibling that was brought back from 2036.
Let's say there was a Corvette made in 1967. Let's say that in the 2030's, John Titor brought it back to the past. Let's say we found this car because it had a duplicate VIN number.
Then if we put the 2 cars side-by-side, we should be able to tell if one is a re-VINed stolen car, or if they are both the same car.
I suggested we look at welds that were done by hand in 1967 to determine if the 2 cars were the same car.
These systems are generally never used to solve low-level crimes. When they are, parallel-construction is used to avoid publicizing their existence. These systems are reserved for direct threats to national interests.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P0D4Ph_yRYM