Salamander

  • 55 Posts
  • 206 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: December 19th, 2021
  • Salamander@mander.xyztoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•SIM card VS e-SIM
    2·
    12 hours ago

    That’s a very interesting resource!

    Actually, the countries where I have been able to purchase anonymous SIM cards are in the list “As of 2021, the following countries do not have mandatory SIM card registration laws”. So, it appears like I just happen to have been lucky and I should not make this as such a general recommendation…

    Funny, about Mexico it says:

    Countries expected to implement mandatory SIM registration in 2022: Philippines, Mexico.

    I can at least confirm that I was not asked for ID when buying SIM cards last year in Mexico.

    I just looked it up and found the proposed law for Mexico on Wikipedia. It was struck down in 2022 as unconstitutional.

    So, then, I really have no anecdotes to say that it is easy in places where it is formally illegal.

  • Salamander@mander.xyztoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•SIM card VS e-SIM
    5·
    23 hours ago

    I am not sure about France. When I search online, I often find resources stating “Yes, ID is required”, even for the countries where I know that I have bought SIM cards with cash. Well, the SIM is usually free and what I pay for is the top-up code.

    I would imagine (but I’m not sure) that if you try to buy a SIM card at an airport or at an official store from a large telephony provider you are more likely to get asked for an ID. I find them in shops that have signs with the names of smaller MVNOs. Something like what is shown in this image that I found online, where you can see signs of ‘Lyca Mobile’ and ‘Lebara’:

    But, your mileage may vary. Probably some locations are more strict than others.

  • Salamander@mander.xyztoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•SIM card VS e-SIM
    16·
    2 days ago

    Depending on where you are travelling to and from, you can often get an anonymous prepaid SIM card. That is what I do: buy one with cash, put it into a MiFi router, and only switch it on when I need internet. That way I stay off the records of whoever else is with me and I am not relying on their identity as a shield. I have not found an eSIM provider that gives me the same level of anonymity, so I have avoided those.

    If you really have to register a SIM with your identity, it depends on the situation. For example, if you buy a SIM in the EU, activate roaming, and then use it in Mexico, the Mexican authorities can’t instantly demand your subscriber info from the EU. On the other hand, if you or your family buy local SIMs while showing ID, then travel together and check in to hotels together, it makes little difference whose SIM is whose. For Mexico specifically, you can walk into an OXXO store, pay cash, and get a prepaid SIM with a data package, no ID required. Many countries have similar cash options so you check ahead of time.

    About whether the worry is justified. The type of surveillance you mention, such as stingrays, requires both strong capability and strong motivation. If a government wanted to, they could stop your entire family at the border before you ever left. But from what you describe, you are just a foreigner who might pass by a protest. That is unlikely to trigger the level of targeting you are thinking of.

    Still, I would not call it “in vain.” Building habits that protect privacy and understanding how information flows is always useful. But if you can get a prepaid SIM anonymously with cash, it is usually a cleaner option than tethering from family.

  • Salamander@mander.xyztoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•When is it time to switch away from youtube?
    21·
    3 days ago

    I like the idea of PeerTube, but I tried running an instance and was unable to sustain the experiment for too long. I made it very open and it got quickly flooded by pirated TV series and spammy and heavy content.

    After that, I had a difficult time at some point finding an instance to host some videos I wanted to upload - and, having had that failed experiment before hand, I can see why the instances that do survive are often those with more stringent filters and less generous with resources.

    So, I am sorry to “chime in about the shortcomings”, but hosting a PeerTube instance can be a demotivating experience. You set up the infrastructure expecting to contribute to a space reminiscent of the old youtube, and you see it filled with spam. The signal-to-noise ratio is just awful and it is expensive. To avoid this, you can be an aggressive gate keeper - but this makes the platform less friendly to people who are looking to find a space to share their original content. Gate keeping is also an additional effort that you need to make. In the end I chose to just shut it off as it was more of a hassle than fun. By comparison, hosting a Lemmy instance is fun, much much cheaper, and little hassle.

    I still haven’t given up on the idea of Peertube, though… I have some video ideas, and when I finally get to making them I plan to make another instance to host only my channel. Then, I would be able to host my own channel using my own infrastructure via a federated network. This use case would work very well for me, and it can probably work for many others. So that is one way of building the Peertube network.

    General permissive video uploads is something that makes YouTube such a powerful platform though, and that is very difficult to replicate.

  • Salamander@mander.xyzMtoScience@mander.xyz•DNA cassette tapes could solve global data storage problems
    3·
    3 days ago

    Fair point - I completely forgot to take the 3D geometry into account. I guess this could be solved by either making both sp³ (sub the Si-O with Si-Cl) or both sp² (sub the H-O-Si with H-N=Si)? But then writing data becomes more complicated than just adding or removing hydrogens that, as you said, isn’t as simple as it looks like.

    I think that the solution that life came up with - making a flexible double helix-forming backbone from which base pairs hang is actually a pretty good way of going about it. Similar as with proteins - a standard flexible backbone with different groups hanging off the chain and influencing how it folds. In your proposition you have the silicon backbone and a single atom as the ‘side chain’, so there is no separation between the backbone and the pairing elements to add this flexibility.

    There are also some other details to consider. For example, the amount of data you can store in a given chain length changes depending on how many different types of chemistry you have. In your example, you are using only one type of ‘base’ because the only options are ‘hydrogen bond donor’ or ‘hydrogen bond acceptor’. If you have a chain length of 3, you get only 3 bits, which can store one of 2^3 = 8 values from 0 to 7 (000 to 111). With DNA, you have 4 different base pairs, so a chain length of three can encode 4^3 = 64 values.

    That means that, to get a good information density, you would also want to increase the number of possibilities. The challenge here is that you need to tune the set of possibilities so that the thermodynamics are balanced. You don’t want some pairs to stick very strongly while others stick only loosely, and you also don’t want certain bases to be able to pair with each other. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleic_acid_thermodynamics

    You can perhaps dispense with some of the thermodynamic tuning if you don’t need to be able to easily replicate the data through a process similar to DNA replication, as you don’t actually need to ‘pair’ at all - you have a single string of data. But in that case you lose a very powerful method as you are forced to re-synthesize every data chain from scratch - I think that with such a system you lose too many benefits.

    If you go through the steps of creating a system of molecular data storage from scratch, I think it is easy to converge towards something similar to DNA. A lot of ‘origin of life’ research is actually about this - thinking about these systems and how to engineer them from scratch, and… DNA is pretty good at this. When you consider that early chemical evolution was an optimization algorithm to solve this problem, it makes sense that DNA is a good choice.

    I do think it is good and fun to explore this. We do have at least some advantages over nature - for example, we have managed to purify many compounds that were not abundant in early chemical soups. So, perhaps we can find something.

    Like the dNaM / dTPT3 pair, right? That’s perhaps more viable, at least to increase information density.

    Yeah, like those. In this recent paper, for example, researchers sequenced a chain of four anthrophogenic base pairs that they refer to as ‘ALIEN bases’: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61991-9

  • Salamander@mander.xyzMtoScience@mander.xyz•DNA cassette tapes could solve global data storage problems
    7·
    4 days ago

    The R2S=O case is closer to a trigonal planar geometry, the other silicon is tetrahedral. The silicon-silicon distances for different pairs of adjacent molecule types will be different. In a very very rough forcefield optimization I see about 3% difference. I don’t think this one will work out structurally because the chains will become unable to pair after a short length as the chain will not have the flexibility to create the O–H bond without adding too much strain.

    But, that’s just one thing. You then need to consider how to actually selectively place/remove the hydrogen atoms, how to avoid the molecule from chemically reacting, and how to read out the data.

    So, yes, eventually it would be nice to have a fully orthogonal system. There are already several synthetic DNA base pairs that can be used instead of the naturally present bases. But these would still be susceptible to DNAses or RNAses.

    The way I see it is that the chemistry of living things is currently centuries ahead of human tech. A large portion of the techniques used in biochemistry rely on using living things to produce the components, and then we purify those components and use them. It makes a lot of sense to make use of that toolkit because the amount of challenges that need to be solved to create this system from scratch is massive.

    Your proposal of your silicon chain reminds of the Ferroelectric RAM, where the state is encoded by the polarity of a cell that is changed by moving a zirconium or titanium cation:

    This does work, but it works because the crystal is contained within a semiconductor scaffold, and this is something that we do have a good handle on.

  • Salamander@mander.xyzOPtoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•The Pager
    2·
    9 days ago

    Yeah, as others mentioned, you can get cheaper data plans depending on the monthly data you need.

    However, one of the interesting properties is that, unlike with phones, there is no restriction on the number of pagers that can listen to your assigned RIC. You can use one subscription to communicate with as many pagers as you would like, and each individual pager can be programmed using text filters such that one can implement their own sub-address system.

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