ricecake

I have never felt so old.

Name, address, and phone number of the account holder used to be published in books that got sent to everyone in the city and also just left lying in boxes that had phones in them if you needed to make a call while you weren't home, because your phone used to be tied to a physical location.
You also used to have to pay extra to make calls to places far away because it used more phone circuits. And by "far away" I mean roughly 50 miles.

It's not the biggest thing in the world, privacy wise, since a surprising amount of information is considered public.
If you know an address, it's pretty much trivial to find the owners name, basic layout of the house, home value, previous owners, utility bill information, tax payments, and so on. I looked up my information and was able to pretty easily get the records for my house, showing I pay my bills on time, when I got my air conditioner replaced and who the contractor who did it was.

As an example, here's the property record for a parking structure owned by the state of Michigan. I chose a public building accessible by anyone and owned by a government to avoid randomly doxing someone, but it's really as easy as searching for public records for some county or city and you'll find something pretty fast.

Depends on the vendor for the specifics. In general, they don't protect against an attacker who has gained persistent privileged access to the machine, only against theft.
Since the key either can't leave the tpm or is useless without it (some tpms have one key that it can never return, and will generate a new key and return it encrypted with it's internal key. This means you get protection but don't need to worry about storage on the chip), the attacker needs to remain undetected on the server as long as they want to use it, which is difficult for anyone less sophisticated than an advanced persistent threat.

The Apple system, to its credit, does a degree of user and application validation to use the keys. Generally good for security, but it makes it so if you want to share a key between users you probably won't be using the secure enclave.

Most of the trust checks end up being the tpm proving itself to the remote service that's checking the service. For example, when you use your phones biometrics to log into a website, part of that handshake is the tpm on the phone proving that it's made by a company to a spec validated by the standards to be secure in the way it's claiming.

Package signing is used to make sure you only get packages from sources you trust.
Every Linux distro does it and it's why if you add a new source for packages you get asked to accept a key signature.

For a long time, the keys used for signing were just files on disk, and you protected them by protecting the server they were on, but they were technically able to be stolen and used to sign malicious packages.

Some advanced in chip design and cost reductions later, we now have what is often called a "secure enclave", "trusted platform module", or a general provider for a non-exportable key.
It's a little chip that holds or manages a cryptographic key such that it can't (or is exceptionally difficult) to get the signing key off the chip or extract it, making it nearly impossible to steal the key without actually physically stealing the server, which is much easier to prevent by putting it in a room with doors, and impossible to do without detection, making a forged package vastly less likely.

There are services that exist that provide the infrastructure needed to do this, but they cost money and it takes time and money to build it into your system in a way that's reliable and doesn't lock you to a vendor if you ever need to switch for whatever reason.

So I believe this is valve picking up the bill to move archs package infrastructure security up to the top tier.
It was fine before, but that upgrade is expensive for a volunteer and donation based project and cheap for a high profile company that might legitimately be worried about their use of arch on physical hardware increasing the threat interest.

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they're using one of the languages that uses := for assignment. :P

Minimum wage means minimum livable wage, and "livable" isn't the same as "survivable".

Anyone working should be able to afford the amenities we call living, not just scraping by. Children, transportation, food, healthcare, reasonable recreation, savings, retirement, self development and actualization. All of it.
People not working should be able to survive, and we should do everything we can to get them to that "living" point as well. Disability or a bad labor market shouldn't close someone off from eating, having children or going to the doctor.

Implying that the river water was contaminated is misleading. The river water was perfectly capable of being used as drinking water if treated properly, but they didn't and so the pipes were damaged by acidic water which contaminated the drinking water with lead.

It's totally fair to have a distrust of public officials after something like this, but they're not the same officials, and the water has been tested by independent parties.
It's not really in doubt that the pipes have been replaced. It's not something you can do that people might miss. They very obviously dug up and replaced a lot of pipes.

Strictly speaking, anyone can apply for a license to build a plant but you do need a license. The whole thing is pretty regulated.

So, kinda. The ruling did have more nuance than a lot of people take from it, but it's still not a good ruling by any means.

The president has absolute personal immunity for core constitutional acts, and the presumption of immunity for official acts.

That means that you can't sue Biden for vetoing a bill, or other things defined in the constitution. That doesn't mean you can't sue the office of the president, but that you can't sue the individual.
The next part is that the courts need to assume that there's immunity for anything done "as the president" unless the prosecution can argue that not having immunity couldn't possibly infringe on a power of the president, and you can't use the presidents motivation to make that case.

So the president talks to the justice department about what they can do to sway the election for him: you can only talk about the impact of holding the president liable for talking to the justice department about elections.

You can't talk about the president assassinating a political rival because that introduces their motive. "Would the office of the president be hindered by holding them personally liable for using the constitutional power to command the military to target a threat to the country".

Trumps family could sue, but Biden wouldn't be liable, only the executive branch.

Particularly since summarizing text is something that llms are actually decent at, it makes sense to use them for that. They're unreliable at generating new content, but asking for a description of text that's just below it is reasonable.

They're goal is to sell to each person for exactly the most that they can get the person to pay.
A lot of people get the medication through insurance, meaning they're just gouging another leach.
The insurance will pay because the medicine is just cheaper than what it would cost them if you didn't get it.

If you don't have insurance, they have programs to try to gouge you at more plausible rates that they refer to in compassionate language.

If you're a third world, they try to price gouge in terms affordable for the market.

About the only place they charge a fair price is in places they think the government might just set price ceilings.

Soap does destroy some bacteria, and a not insignificant portion. By destroying those fatty bonds the cellular membranes of many bacteria are destroyed, and many viruses denatured and rendered inert.

The removal is the primary action though, you are correct. Not all bacteria are destroyed by soap, which is why the leather, scrub, and scrub while rinsing steps are important to hand washing, since that mechanical action is what removes everything.

https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/why-soap-works/

Certainly. I'm not saying soap is bad by any means. It's a tool for bathing just like any other. Not using soap to wash your body doesn't imply unhygienic anymore than not using a scrub brush makes you unhygienic.

What matters is that you wash regularly, get rid of grime, dirt, excess oils and dead skin buildup.
There's many paths to hygiene. For most people, the one with soap is the easiest and the only downside is "now moisturize".

Persistent advertising from cleaning product companies since the 50s have heavily pushed a level of cleaning and perfuming well beyond what's actually necessary for hygiene.
My body wash company would like me to use a silver dollar sized portion. I get better results from a dime sized portion and a moderate firmness silicone brush.