Say what you will about having an anime girl wrap on your car, but everyone sees you and gives you plenty of space on the road.

I might mock the method, but I can’t argue with the results.

Please don’t shoot frag into the booty you want to loot.

Linux plus junk PCs. I’ve got a bunch of old computers my workplace tossed out because they wouldn’t take Windows 11 and I’ve never been happier with my tech setup in my life.

It’s probably some sort of mental condition, but I freaking love going trash-panda on our recycle PC pile and refurbing old hardware.

listen buddy, I’ve been getting computer junk every month for 20+ years. It’s all I think about and I still haven’t gotten addicted. If life has taught me anything is that the only thing you can’t get addicted to is free computer junk . how can I be addicted if it makes me happy? Computer junk is therapy, junking computers is LITERALLY my therapy. Life is free computer junk, everyday I wake up and I think about free computer junk. Every morning I grab my laptop and start looking on craigslist while I make my morning coffee. It’s literally all I think about, I can’t be at peace if I don’t junk at least 20$ a day. BUYING NEW IS JUST A PHASE. but I know a big junk pile is always right around the corner that’s why I’ll keep junking IT equipment until my wife leaves me.

I’d be in favor of putting Trump and his ilk in prison, but explicitly still letting him campaign and run his grifts. Here’s the deal though… He doesn’t get any real money for it, he just gets “prison bucks” that get him nicer treatment/amenities. We take all the actual money he generates from grifting, and use it to fund education in the areas that lost the most money in the con.

It’s a double whammy to find hotspots of the stupidest, most gullible people on the planet, and also getting their children properly educated and able to recognize and avoid the same scams their parents fell for.

You should re-evaluate your crisis planning. Communication is a key safety item, even if it is one-way. I’ve got a pair of GMRS walkie-talkies that can pretty reliably broadcast a little over a mile. Put them in scan mode and you can pickup chatter from other sources. This has fuck all to do with an AM radio, but they also have the ability to pick up the automated weather reports from the airport. So when it looks real stormy out, I turn one on (to test it) and to get continuous updates directly from the weather station instead of waiting for the news to catch up. Communication in a crisis, even if it’s just one way, is still a critical lifeline.

Better to mention that each device has a Bitcoin in it. Which is about 80k right now.

The RAM is soldered to the board. If you’ve got the tools and skills to get it off the device and onto another device, you’re making enough money that you don’t need to worry about the price of RAM.

Proving it is the hard and expensive part. I don’t really have the time, skillset, or money to buy a bunch of LG or other branded IoT devices, put them in an isolated test chamber and then try to decode all the RF noise come off them.

That being said, all the technical requirements to do the things I suggested in my previous comment currently exist in those smart TVs. All that was preventing LG from doing that was consumer trust, and they’ve clearly thrown that in the garbage. At this point, based on previous behavior, it should be assumed that they will go as far as possible to exfil customer data without their consent or knowledge, until proven otherwise.

Right… Because it will only talk to your wireless router.

Or… If your neighbor has an open network… Or the TV has a secret networking protocol that allows it to talk to other LG smart devices that are on a network. Or it looks for phones that have the LG app installed… You get the idea. Once you put wireless capabilities in it, there is any number of ways it can leak your data out.

To me computing is now plugging small black rectangles that look all exactly alike into another larger black rectangle that all look the same to get indistinguishable results for things I don’t even need or want.

I don’t know if I’m mad that this description is really wrong, or more mad that it is really on point.

Modern computing to me is slicing up a big computer to have it pretend to be lots of smaller computers.

I can feel every old laptop in my vicinity trembling in fear.

Don’t deny them that last chance to live a life of purpose.

No, digital storage in your phone is like ghosts playing a interdimenional clarinet when you look at the quantum tunneling aspects of an infinite universal wrap-up around rejected improbabilities of unstable bilateral states.

Because I would alter the structure of your atoms, and that would not be criminal, because why would it be.

On it’s bacsic premise, no, you’re allowed to move my arms or person (to the extent that it is not assault, kidnapping, etc) but say, altering the state of my atoms in a way that ends my life or does me physical harm is criminal.

So your point is not explicitly correct there, more detail is needed. You’ve also (either knowingly or unknowingly) built and argued against a strawman. My claim is that altering the position of a switch is not destruction of property, and that as the law as written explicitly criminalizes the destruction of property in response to a lawful search. Altering the position of a switch could be considered destruction of evidence, and by extension so would wiping the phone. I don’t know if there is a law that explicitly bans the destruction of evidence during a lawful border search though. So it could still be criminal, but there is significant reasonable doubt that any property was actually destroyed.

Exactly!

Maybe you finally get it. The premise that altering the position of a switch is legally destruction of property is patently ridiculous. Altering the position of a 16x7 array of switches and calling it destruction of property is also ridiculous. So why is altering the position of an array of billions of tiny switches suddenly destruction of property?

You absolutely can though. A 16x7 grid of light switches can store any 16 character password that uses the ASCII character set. Images would require many more switches (depending on the color quality and resolution) but it’s the same thing. Like I said, earlier, you are having an issue making a point to differentiate between the position of a binary switch and a single bit of data because there is no fucking difference in the first place.

You make it sound ridiculous, but we’ve stored data as a magnetic polarity for decades at this point, we’ve stored data on rocks, laser etched as dots and dashes at a microscopic level on thin bits of foil. Whole programs have been written and stored on stacks of cards. Heck, the programs to get a spacecraft to the moon were written on paper and then literally knitted into the onboard computers. Regardless of the medium chosen, (almost) all computer memory and storage is simply the representation of an array of binary states, something that can be done, and has been done with a simple array of light switches.

This uses 7 services to store a base-10 numeric value on a 7 segment display.

https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/blog/7-segment-display-tutorial.html

Here is a picture of a power switch for a power strip

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b6/Socket_5.jpg/500px-Socket_5.jpg

It’s can store any two data values people assign to it. In this case, power on, or power off.

We’re using binary switches (literal just different types of light switches) to store data all the time. That’s the whole fucking point. You’re having trouble differentiating between the two because the data they store the same fucking thing just at different scales.

that’s besides the point.

It’s not besides the point. It exactly is the point. Functionally, computer storage is a stable binary state circuit, just like a light switch. When we wire billions of them together and automate the switching process, and throw in a few layers of abstraction, you get functional data. Changing the state of those switches does not destroy them, therefore changing the state of those switches is not destruction of property, unless by extension, flipping a light switch counts as destruction of property. It may be destruction of evidence, as the state of that memory or the position of the switch could be considered evidence, but it is a far cry from actual destruction of property.

who the hack stores data on light switches, bit by bit?

This is exactly how early computer programs were stored/written.

you have already decided that destroying user data is a nothingburger.

Correction: I am arguing that the alteration of computer storage is not destruction of property as written in the law that prevents you from destroying property to in response to or as the result of a lawful search.

anything can store data in some abstract sense, I don’t think that is a valid argument here

You know that hard drives don’t literally store the number 1 or 0 right? We arbitrarily assign a value to a specific configuration of a material or circuit.

besides, most light switches cannot do that

Most hunks of silicon can’t do that either.

Light switches can store data. You can have open equal 1, and closed equal 0. Tada! You’re storing data on a light switch. All you need to do, is allow an electrical signal to control the position of the switch, and you essentially have 1bit of data storage right there.