Super knowledgeable but with patchy knowledge, so they’ll confidently say something that practically everyone else in the company knows is flat out wrong.

This is hard to truly eli5, so I’ll have a go too, in case the others haven’t cleared it up for you.

The spot on the moon that moves isn’t a real thing, it’s the effect of photons hitting the left side, then other photons hitting the right side. The ‘reason’ or ‘cause’ for those photons comes from earth very much at light speed. But the left side of the moon can’t cause an effect in the right side, that fast. It just experiences a thing right before the right side experiences something similar.

Like if two cars drive from London to Manchester and Liverpool, arriving within seconds of each other. It doesn’t mean you can drive from Manchester to Liverpool in seconds.

There’s an SMBC I love on this: “The shadows of reality go as fast as they like.” https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/superluminal

Bonus: IIRC, any two events that are too close in time for light to travel from one to the other, can be viewed from a different “inertial reference frame” (someone else moving fast and analysing things with the same physics) as being the other way round. I.e. the right observer could see the right hand side of the moon get lit up before the left hand side. But the chap on earth wiggling the laser pointer is still wiggling it slower than the speed of light, so this observer would still see the laser pointer move from left to right. How does that work?

I’ve not heard of Jeep culture, myself, so now I’m going to imagine a colony of asexually-reproducing microscopic Jeeps in a Petri dish.

Today, O Squid, you have broadened my imagination beyond yesterday.

aaaaaare you sure!?

I know, but I liked the idea of sending messages by interpreting meaning in a series of cat memes :-)

By the way, do you know if steganography in an image is truly undetectable? Or if an attacker could, by statistical analysis or pattern analysis, determine that steganography has been used?

“Jones, take a look at these cat photos.”

“Oh, they’re lovely, sir!”

“No, Jones, look at them. What do they mean?”

“Well, sir, this one is hungry, so it’s asking for food, but in its native American style. This one is looking at the camera funny, probably because it’s been startled by something off camera. This one is looking smug, and the angry people there have been added by the artist, they’re not from the same photo. This one–”

“Sit down, Jones. Look at their meaning. The terrorist attack will be at 2pm on the 23rd at South Kensington station, used as a distraction for the simultaneous heist in the Natural History Museum!”

Whitespace steganography in markdown ;-)

Wow, thank you for this! But it looks like IMAP and POP, not server-to-server. And how would one of these severs compromise security if not one of the end points?

Smaller attack surface and fewer leaks. If you specifically are targeted, the government will look for a warrant for the data in your account, rather than the one you sent to. Gmail also I think there’s a concern that text will leak via AI - I remember hearing this concern even when it was just that associations in search terms might build from private email content.

I don’t think gayhitler is entirely correct about reading all the plaintext emails. If I understand right, major (most?) email providers use TLS (encryption) between each other and and to your laptop. The difference is the email is available on their servers somewhere, if someone were to get access.

And yet the other day I read an account of researching tracking for ads, and the iPhone used sent a request to Facebook even before anything was installed

A bit of a different thing, but still.

I’m thinking CalyxOS for my next phone.

Thanks for the well-meaning advice.

The recovery password in iCloud to stop even Apple accessing it is exactly what the UK is trying to undermine. It protects you - for now.

I tried to start using pgp for email years ago, the problem is of course adoption by everyone you’re communicating with, be that personal, corporate or official. I got one friend to make a gpg key! And most email servers, as I understand, pass to each other with TLS, and the connection from your computer to your email service is encrypted. The problem is the emails at rest on both ends, including hosted by the email provider. Moving my email off Fastmail, whether to something like Protonmail or stored only on my computer, would remove one particular attack surface.

I couldn’t remember if UK gov have been trying to get access into iCloud e2e before; I’m sure they’ve been getting to mandate access to other encryption previously.

Do you think the AI was just fed the title to make an image, and successfully combined “rust” and “os”?