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Comment Re:Do people still remember "oxygen-free copper"? (Score 1) 61

Sent through a physical cable you either receive the original data or not.
Once you are receiving the original data - either through clean transmission, or because error correction has fixed any transmission errors, it doesn't get any better.

At the relatively low bandwidth needed for audio data, there are many protocols and physical carriers capable of transmitting the data and ensuring a perfect copy is received even over low quality cabling.

Comment Re:Maybe I'm stupid, but isn't this a lot of spin? (Score 1) 220

Assuming they didn't plan to pass the information on to an entity that would hack the machines on their behalf, which seems almost certain.

Or just pass the whole machine on to that entity, and let them work out how to hack it... Assuming that such entities don't already have access to such machines.

Comment Re:"The proposition was shocking" (Score 1) 220

But you don't use a federal agency where a significant proportion of the employees wouldn't agree with the intended use of the vulnerabilities.
It only took one edward snowden to leak exploits from the NSA, and the NSA as an agency targets foreign countries so most americans wouldn't have a problem with it. Once you had an agency using exploits to subvert the domestic vote you can guarantee that the majority of employees would be against it.

You'd get a voting machine to a friendly location - die hard domestic supporters, or a foreign power that aligns with your goals. And on the subject of foreign powers, it's almost certain that at least the russians and chinese already have access to these machines and have studied them, possibly other countries like iran and north korea too.

Comment Re:Misleading way to phrase this much? (Score 0) 220

I recall the Arizona "fraudit" they claimed the machines did fraudulent counts of PAPER BALLOTS but the recount by people who had predetermined that it was miscounted for Biden found that their count instead of giving too many votes to Biden gave too few.

So the machines did give fraudulent counts and the claim was correct.

Comment Re:Misleading way to phrase this much? (Score 3, Interesting) 220

Patching the vulnerabilities in the future wouldn't change the fact that the system was vulnerable last time it was used, and someone else could have independently found and exploited the vulnerabilities at the time.
Likely if vulnerabilities were found they would be used to claim that they were exploited during previous elections, and calling the results into question.

Comment Re:Why do this in California? (Score 1) 72

A "contest" requires more than 1 human participant... When those laws were written they likely never considered someone fighting a robot.
Until recently any human fighting a "non human" would have meant fighting an animal, and there are separate animal cruelty laws to cover such scenarios. But there are no laws that forbid cruelty to machines.

A fight against a robot could be considered use of training equipment rather than a contest, although it might fall foul of other laws relating to dangerous equipment in the workplace etc.

Comment Re:how to fight a machine (Score 2) 72

Precisely this... In those videos he's fighting the robot as if it was a human opponent, trying to hit it in places like the head where a human would be vulnerable.
The robot looked to have some exposed wiring around the back of the head, in a real fight you'd go for the wiring or joints in order to incapacitate the robot, not repeatedly punch it in the face.

Also a robot designed to kill wouldn't be humanoid or try to fight with punches and kicks, it's more likely to come on wheels, tracks or rotors and be armed with guns or explosives. See the combat drones in Ukraine for example.

Comment Re:What's the best Linux distro that features KDE? (Score 2) 33

I've been using Fedora KDE and CachyOS. Fedora is 1 year support per release, and completely free. If you want some proprietary codec support you have to enable RPMFusion repo.

CachyOS is rolling, based on Arch, and helpfully installs drivers and codecs as needed. And if you have a modern CPU, compiles the repos with optimizations.

I haven't messed with Ubuntu since snaps became a big thing. Maybe it's just FUD.

Comment Re:First responder perspective (Score 1) 196

AM radios in cars only cover the small intersection of people who don't already have an emergency kit containing an AM radio, but do happen to be in a working vehicle during a disaster.
It's useless for anyone who's outside of a vehicle for whatever reason - eg vehicle is damaged, out of fuel, had to be abandoned, or was not available nearby when the disaster struck.

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