You don't even have to get that radical with "nothing to hide".
Next time someone says that ask if they use blinds in their house/apt, if you could setup a webcam in their living room, or if you could just read some texts between them and a significant other.
Or ask for their passwords, date of birth, SSN, credit card numbers, pets' names, and parents' names.
Simple things like this are why I talk to people via Signal and why I'll never get a Ring/Nest doorbell, or any other 3rd party owned internet connected camera.
People don't care when they are just a statistical datapoint, like sure they can see "now a million people are having sex", but nobody will act on that since it isn't interesting. Which is why people would be more fine with having a camera in every bedroom than having a camera in their bedroom specifically.
So arguing "what if I spy on YOU?" wont convince anyone. They see that as a completely different thing.
The point of Signal is supposed to be that to the best of our knowledge, even if all its packets are run through FSB and NSA, and even if they captured all Signal employees at once and somehow forced them all to cooperate, your messages should still be safe until they manage to push an app update that compromises the app.
Of course this only helps as long as your device isn't backdoored but that is true for any app.
(I say this as someone who regularly defend Telegram here, because in my opinion I don't have to pick one or another.)
many argue that silicon valley firms are de facto extension of the US government [1]. a swiss army knife (haha) in their toolkit that allows complete control over the flow of information. i mean seriously, just look at how fast the Crypto AG story was forgotten. only this Dutch article [1] and a handful of others properly dives into the profound impacts that the CIA backdoored Crypto AG devices likely had on world events in the past 50 years. [2]
so yeah if SV firms were not extensions of the US govt. (hardware firms too, not just software), they would have already been broken up years ago.
the senate hearings are just a charade used to stroke the ego's of the 'visionary' SV tech bro CEOs. they also show us how tech illiterate the working class has been made. [2]
Gee, thanks for contributing to the conversation and providing a useful alternative.
The only semi-popular better option I can think of is Matrix, but getting people on Signal is already hard enough and using Matrix on a mobile device is (last I checked) far from ideal.
Security is a gradient, not an all-or-nothing. Signal is vastly better than almost every other electronic communication method.
Once its compromised there is no gradient anymore and you never know when things are compromised because three letter agencies will anyway not tell you.
Given the risk of xyz agency, there seem to be only a couple options to me:
- side-load a peer reviewed apk so you can check the sigs and make sure all crypto is being done locally (and to make sure that the implementation is solid)
- manage your own keys like you would with traditional pgp emails. Give your public to your friend. Force them to send anything sensitive using it. Maybe change to symmetric keys from asym but rotate occasionally. But you still have to trust the app you use to do this unless you want to do it manually each time.
Signal has open sourced clients with reproducible builds (on Android) and their encryption library has been reviewed by multiple 3rd parties to great acclaim.
PGP lacks forward secrecy, meaning if a key does get compromised all of your past correspondence is now also compromised.
I'm curious about your concerns about a Nest/Ring doorbell. Since it would presumably face a public space, if there was a privacy concern, it would seem easier for a third party to set up their own camera for surveillance. If I was worried about being watched, I would think the best strategy would be to set up vulnerable cameras on my own network, monitor them for access, and hope that someone would try to use them instead of installing their own.
>Next time someone says that ask if they use blinds in their house/apt
I think this is the closest analogy I've heard yet, but not in windows on suburban, tree-lined street. People walk down those streets and the windows are at eye level. Someone could accidentally see into those windows. No, I think if we consider windows in hi-rise buildings in a major city, the analogy is getting much closer. Seeing into one of those windows requires a bare minimum of intent and possibly an inexpensive tool, say binoculars or a telescope. However I would be willing to bet that a large portion of hi-rise dwellers do NOT close their blinds on the theory of "No one is looking in MY window."
Definitely, to the point where it feels like they're breaking up their product line to further narrow this variation, or at least that felt like the case with the i9-10850K vs the i9-10900K.
> you often could get better performance UNDERCLOCKING
> often to the amount of 1% less performance
That doesn't sound like better performance to me. Better performance per watt maybe, but then if I'm buying an i9 chip I'm probably not chasing performance per watt.
They hit thermal throttle quite often. Especially the high end chips where Intel is maximizing the clock to bin them as i9s.
1% overall decrease in performance to ensure a lower power draw overall to prevent reaching thermal throttling thresholds absolutely does equate to better performance.
Something they list as 65W can draw over 200 Watts at full load.
Consider that even with the most high end CPUs, they include the copper slug stock coolers than can make even a 45W rated CPU thermal throttle.
> For most of the 2010s, Intel kept its typical desktop CPU power consumption at or below the CPU’s rated TDP, even at peak power draw. Once AMD launched Ryzen and Intel had to start adding more CPU cores to its desktop parts, that changed. The Core i9-10850K draws up to 265W but claims a 125W TDP. The Core i7-10700 claims 65W, but draws up to 214W under load, at motherboard defaults.
In effect, Intel is brute forcing performance by cranking the power draw way up in order to compensate for what AMD has been able to bring to the table. They're bulldozering their way out of this mess, basically. The end result is that Intel is already pushing their chips to near maximum performance, power efficiency be damned, leaving zero room for overclocking... as the reason for this article exists.
> Consider that even with the most high end CPUs, they include the copper slug stock coolers than can make even a 45W rated CPU thermal throttle.
While isn't true for either the i9-10850K or the i7-10700K, but one is included for the i7-10700. However overclocking is mostly irrelevant on the 10700 since it requires changing your motherboards clock and most people won't bother.
Honestly I love what they're doing. With AIO coolers in abundance getting liquid cooling no longer requires researching and building a custom loop, and is nearly as easy as installing air cooling. If my PSU's 12V rail can deliver 250W, and my cooler can easily displace 250W, why not let my processor consume that much?
> The end result is that Intel is already pushing their chips to near maximum performance, power efficiency be damned, leaving zero room for overclocking
Isn't this what silicon lottery was doing before? Intel saw that market space and is now filling it directly. Overclocking has never been about power efficiency anyway (undervolting of course is), it's always been decreasing gains as you increase the voltage and clock rate. Also, as an owner of a i9-10850K, I can confirm that there is room for overclocking (tho not much or else it would be an i9-10900K), and you can find many instances of people overclocking their i9-10900Ks as well.
Intel has figured out what their high-performance non-business users want and are delivering on it perfectly. This is even one/two of the reasons that siliconlottery is listing as to why they're closing.
>If my PSU's 12V rail can deliver 250W, and my cooler can easily displace 250W, why not let my processor consume that much?
1) Because electricity costs money
2) In the summer, your AC also has to get rid of that heat from your conditioned space, using even MORE electricity.
not to an extent that really matters to a home user. let's say you actually let your cpu draw 250W 24/7. average US consumer electricity rate is ~$0.13/kWh. that would add ~$23 to your monthly electricity bill. certainly a lot for a single component, but not likely to matter to the sort of person who would buy a high end cpu in the first place. if you could get the same performance using 100W, you would only save about $14 each month. and of course most people don't max out their cpu 24/7, so the actual savings would be even less.
Household of three, my electric bill is $50-75mo. So… that seems like a huge jump as percentage.
Plus I don’t HAVE to be a hypocrite. If I say I care about climate, pollution, energy, I can chose to run a more efficient processor like a Ryzen or an M1.
Their estimate would require stress testing it every second of every day. Even if you game 4 hours every day (which would be a lot imo if you have a 9-5 job), you're looking at peak usage of 150-200W (most games won't utilize 20 threads), which using OPs costs numbers comes out to $3/month.
Fwiw I pay extra to get my electricity from wind and ride my bike ~25 miles round trip anytime I commute to work or the gym, which alone saves me over $3 and prevents ~20 lbs of CO2 per trip.
But it's not like what we do on an individual level really matters anyway. :/ The idea of a "carbon footprint" was BPs clever way of shifting climate responsibility from corporations to the consumers. I at least hope every little bit we do does help.
> Consider that even with the most high end CPUs, they include the copper slug stock coolers than can make even a 45W rated CPU thermal throttle.
In one of the thermal design documents of their processors (It's either Core2Quad family or i7 3rd generation, I don't remember), it clearly states that:
"The included processor cooling solution is neither guaranteed nor designed to keep CPU within acceptable thermal envelope when the CPU is 100% utilized".
So they basically say that they include a complementary HSF assembly to smoke test your CPU until your proper HSF arrives.
> Yes, the usage of third party fan&heatsink void the Intel warranty on your processor. The Intel fan is made to keep the Intel processor working correctly. When we run the processor without the original fan means we are running the system out of the specifications and it may damage the processor.
Intel did everything they could with scare tactics to deny warranties. They basically implied that they would consider your RMA an overclocking case if you used a cooler with capabilities that exceeded the slug cooler included with your CPU.
Definitely. I think the growing TDP would be more concerning if AIO liquid coolers weren't so common these days. Setting up a water cooling loop used to be expensive and time consuming. Now it takes about $80 and 15 minutes, and Intel is catering to this.
I did a similar thing in the golden days with my AMD Athlon (Thoroughbred/B) processor.
It was 1400MHz out of the box, I clocked it to 2200MHz (200x11). None of the AMDs offerings ran at 2200MHz with 200x11 configuration, so it was blowing everything out of the water, with less heat and noise nonetheless.
Since x11 wasn't an extreme multiplier for it, I was running it slightly undervolted. That system is still running rock-solid even today, somewhere.
That's a per-server controllable setting. The admins can set it such that only users with a verified email (and phone number if they desire) are able to send messages.
Google auctions the promise of showing ads to relevant users. Google would be eliminating themselves as a middle man service by selling the data they've curated.
