Nerd of all trades from New York City.

he/him 💙💜🩷

Original content [OC] of mine which I post here is licensed Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 International.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • I argued with my old bank for ages about this and they continued to insist enabling it on my account was a great idea.

    The film Sneakers showed the world why voice ID was a massive security hole and an all-around crappy idea back in 1992, and some idiots are still insisting it’s a good idea in 2025 when it’s only become astronomically easier to beat than Robert Redford and friends demonstrated.

    In my case, I’ve been doing radio, podcasting, and other voice work for a long time and as a result there are hundreds and hundreds of hours of my voice freely available out there. People can cut and paste me saying “my voice is my passport, verify me” or anything else they like together in Audacity, no AI needed, and fool any telephone-based audio security computer on the planet with it. And explaining this in-person to the branch manager of my former bank elicited nothing more than the blankest expression I’d seen since the pet goldfish I had as a kid.







  • And in all likelihood forcing your fingerprint or face unlock is perfectly legally acceptable for them to do. A password or a code is something they’d have to force you to say and ultimately you can choose not to (though they’re still fine to just try and hack out a pin/pattern on their own, or use phone-cracking tools or backdoors) but you have no defense whatsoever against your biometrics being used.


  • From the article:

    Aida said the new material is as strong as petroleum-based plastics but breaks down into its original components when exposed to salt. Those components can then be further processed by naturally occurring bacteria, thereby avoiding generating microplastics that can harm aquatic life and enter the food chain.

    As salt is also present in soil, a piece about five centimetres (two inches) in size disintegrates on land after over 200 hours, he added.

    The material can be used like regular plastic when coated, and the team are focusing their current research on the best coating methods, Aida said. The plastic is non-toxic, non-flammable, and does not emit carbon dioxide, he added.

    So I think the next thing the goose wants to know is, what’s it being coated with?