Gary Explains

@simjnd Is that just a rephrasing of other IP matching texts in the DOJ file. ngrok's logs show this IP access the page, Microsoft knew his IP address, so match. But it is worded differently than the others.

@simjnd With telemetry enabled and he used Edge then that makes perfect sense, with it off and/or using other browser then that point is concerning. Why do Microsoft records show him accessing a specific page?

PSA: All the Linux users ranting and raving about the Windows Globally Unique Identifier (GDID), go look in /etc/machine-id and tell me what you find. Also check out my script that shows you lots of globally unique data from your machine: github.com/garyexplains/e…

@simjnd The GDID bit is just that the machine accessed a Microsoft service like a virus update and so they can match the IP address and that machine.

@simjnd The trick is that they match him accessing other accounts. I quote, "On June 4... the device... used the IP address 91.129.97.29... On the same date, this IP address was also used to access the Subject Facebook Account". They had a warrant for his FB account.

@simjnd Likewise a Linux machine that updates via apt or yum or whatever also connects to servers which record the IP address. Even Twitter knows our IP addresses because we are here using it. All logged and waiting for a warrant to force a reveal.

@simjnd Also, you have to use Microsoft Edge. If you use Chrome/Firefox etc then there is no tracking of online activities (that I have been able to see yet). However, if my machine sends a request to Microsoft to check for updates then Microsoft has my IP address even with VPN.

@simjnd IP address matching would also work if the guy used Linux rather than Windows.

@simjnd There is one "concerning" paragraph (point 26) which I am still looking at. But the rest is just IP address matching from client and server.

@simjnd Also, I have studied the DOJ release and it doesn't actually say what people claim it says. Most of the tracking is via matching the IP address from the client and the server. With access to the server logs they know which IP address accessed the server and when.

@simjnd This issue is quite nuanced. ANY software installed on a Linux machine can track your online activity and send it to a server using the machine-id as a GDID. So the existence of such an ID is point 1. Then 2, how is it used. They are separate issues, but connected.

@garyexplains You're missing the point. Every modern operating system has some form of unique ID. The fact that Microsoft is able to use it to track online activity is the problem. Your Linux install has a unique ID, but it's on your filesystem and nobody can use it to track you online.

The /etc/machine-id file contains the unique machine ID of the local system that is set during installation or boot. The machine ID is usually generated from a random source during system installation and stays constant for all subsequent boots.

Microsoft has built Rowhammer protection directly into the Azure Cobalt 200's memory controller: youtu.be/hmixqc9H8QY

We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon. We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models.

I hope to make a video about this soon... I got a sequence in the OEIS oeis.org/A396572 - Number of distinct states before repetition for a circular array of n distinct elements under repeated adjacent XOR operations. 🤓

Is NVIDIA is trying to kill Intel and AMD for PCs and laptops? NVIDIA has launched new processors for Windows on Arm: youtu.be/aJ-KeXihFTY

If you run a local LLM there are some interesting parameters that control creativity and craziness! In this video, I explain the key parameters that control how local large language models generate text, including temperature, top-k, top-p, etc: youtu.be/MkaazQttbpc