Actually it is, we do use both network cells and other public beacons for navigation when GPS is unavailable. It’s just not available everywhere – you need a map available of cell locations and usually this mandates open datasets for companies to use. Navigation works underground in e.g. Helsinki metro as a personal anecdote. We don’t need strict triangulation underground as cells are already so small. The metro tunnel is filled with picocells in practice (smaller than 200m coverage area cross-section).

We also use the cell network to push rough satellite locations to cellphones, in A-GPS, or more generally A-GNSSb as the same functionality is available for other systems as well. This way the phone can pinpoint the required satellites much faster, which is the main reason you can get such quick and accurate readings from your phone after starting to check your location.

Edit: AFAIK location services also enrich the information with databases of publicly visible WiFi SSIDs, using their visibility as a beacon. Scanning WiFi hotspots typically consumes less power than getting a GPS signal that’s as accurate, and is also often more reliable in urban settings and higher latitudes where the satellites aren’t as visible (though the constellations have enough satellites nowadays that this issue isn’t nearly as bad as it used to be)

The cursed Linux alternative of this is usually putting things directly in the home folder – I used to do this until I got better. Desktop is simple to keep clean when you don’t have one in your “desktop environment” by default.

Some people who’ve used MacOs before OSX dump everything to the root filesystem out of habit. It works just as poorly as a file management strategy as one might expect, albeit better than putting everything on the desktop. Not sure how often that happens but I’ve known multiple people to do that.

Yep, that’s a bit of a sketchy thing, and probably indeed has to do with marketing and getting more funding. Overhyping their quantum stuff might also have something to do with them trying to hide the poor image of their latest AI “achievements”.

But I’m mainly worried all these companies crying wolf will cause people in relevant fields to push back on implementing quantum-proof encryption – multiple companies are making considerable progress with quantum computing and it’s not a threat to be ignored.

There’s still noticeable incremental progress, and since liboqs is out now, and the first somewhat quantum-proof algorithms are out with working initial implementations, I see no reason why you wouldn’t want to move to a hybrid solution for now, just in case. Especially with more sensitive data like communication, healthcare and banking.

Just encapsulate the current asymmetric stuff with oqs, e.g. ed25519 inside LM-KEM. That way you’ll have an added layer of security on top of the oqs implementation just in case there are growing pains, and due to the library not yet passing audits and as it’s yet to be fully peer-reviewed.

Cryptography has to be unbreakable for multiple decades, and the added headroom is a small price to pay for future security. Health data e.g. can have an impact on a person even 30 years later, so we have a responsibility to ensure this data can’t be accessed without authorization even that far in the future. No one can guarantee it’ll not be possible, but we should at least make our best effort to achieve that.

Have we really not gotten past shooting ourselves in the foot collectively with poor security planning, even AWS was allowing SHA-1 signatures for authentication as recently as 2014, over a decade after it was deemed to be insecure. Considering how poorly people do key management it’s feasible to expect there are old AWS-style requests with still working keys to be brute-forced out.

No, we don’t have working quantum computers that threaten encryption now. Yes, it is indeed feasible this technology matures in the next 30 years, and that’s the assumption we need to work with.

Not sure about others in fennoscandia, but at least Finland has multiple large co-ops. One of the largest banks, OP ( literally named co-op bank) is a co-op which many own a part of. Many of my friends are part of the co-op.

Also, Finland’s largest retail conglomerate (with 48.3 % market share of retail in Finland) is a consumer co-op, which is also causing a very difficult situation for all other businesses in retail, as they’re able to undercut practically everyone since they have less of a profit incentive. 2.4 million people have a membership, which is quite a sizable amount in a country of under 6 million (though I’m not sure if the number includes Estonians as well)

Yep – it’s actually possible IRL. Unfortunately real life is a bit more boring than the Simpsons, and the tomatoes themselves will only have trace amounts of nicotine in them. Most of it will be in the leaves like in the tobacco plant.

Also tobacco and chilis. Nightshades got range.

So many different plants being genetically close (ish) makes it possible to do all kinds of fun experiments with grafting. Something like tomatoes and eggplants that have nicotine (though still mostly in the leaves) or potatoes that also make habanero peppers.

And we’ve nowadays taken it even further, in spoken Finnish we’ve even got rid of the “hän” and mostly use “se”, which is the Finnish word for “it”. The same pronoun is used for people in all forms, animals, items, institutions and so on, and in practice the only case for “hän” is people trying to remind others they consider their pets human.

Context will tell which one it is.