'No Stupid Questions' (NSQ) Internet & Technology Edition

[gangweedfan]

Hello I am thinking about getting the corsair ax1600i for future proofing my computer because my current PSU is shit and I hear that the corsair one is the best. I just need to know
1. Is it still a good option in 2020?
2.Will such a big PSU work fine if I use it on a normal outlet or dont use all 1600 watts
3. What kind of UPS/surge protector should I get with that thing? will any work?

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Okay, cooling questions.

The AMD Wraith Spire provides adequate cooling so far. However, it has bad harmonics, making its noise... unsettling. Not really loud, but under load, it sometimes sounds like it's about to blow up, while still providing adequate cooling. I'm going to replace it with "back-up" Deepcool Gammaxx 400, rated for 120W with AMD CPUs.

Questions: the pre-applied fan isn't specified, but I suspect it's a Deepcool Wind Blade, optimized for airflow. Would replacing it with a static pressure fan be preferable? I've also thought about a push-pull configuration, but ultimately decided against it, as the fan is blowing air at the top case outtakes (Zalman Z3 Plus), and according to tests, the gain would be minimal.

Your CPU isn't going to fry itself so test it out. It sucks unscrewing and remounting a cooler but do that and get a feel of how the other one seems. Depending on your case you can always flip your PSU to reverse the blow/drag, depending on what it is. Don't try to match up with benchmarks unless you have a clean system meant to create great benchmark scores.

 

[Boris Blank's glass eye]

Your CPU isn't going to fry itself so test it out. It sucks unscrewing and remounting a cooler but do that and get a feel of how the other one seems. Depending on your case you can always flip your PSU to reverse the blow/drag, depending on what it is. Don't try to match up with benchmarks unless you have a clean system meant to create great benchmark scores.

Any recommendations on the air pressure/airflow thing? Most of the guides I've found state AP is for obstructions like a hard drive cage or CPU cooler fins and AF is for completely unobstructed pathways, however, several tests and guides arrive at the conclusion "it doesn't really matter, in fact, CFM often doesn't even mean anything beyond a theoretical number".

One advice I got was basically "buy whatever you want, most of it won't even matter, except for PWM".

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Any recommendations on the air pressure/airflow thing? Most of the guides I've found state AP is for obstructions like a hard drive cage or CPU cooler fins and AF is for completely unobstructed pathways, however, several tests and guides arrive at the conclusion "it doesn't really matter, in fact, CFM often doesn't even mean anything beyond a theoretical number".

One advice I got was basically "buy whatever you want, most of it won't even matter, except for PWM".

Unobstroctured vs obstructed probably won't matter much for a regular build, I'm only talking about cables and obstructions here not positive/negative pressure and orientations of fans, you need to go GamersNexus for that. https://www.youtube.com/user/GamersNexus/videos.
Here's a video with the best/worst cases of 2020 that might help you a bit, it's a quick list of why different things are good or bad. Search their channel for cases, airflow or pressure after that. Maybe they have reviewed your case even and have some suggestions on how to make it better.

Here's also a stupid video fitting my world view. It start with measuring obstruction in airflow from bad cable management and it quickly goes downhill from there:

 

[TurdFondler]

I had a really stupid thought after reading the section 230 thread. What's the feasibility of a message board that doesn't store data? Something like a distributed editable torrent file that's simply viewed online?

If no one is hosting the message board it would make lawsuits a lot harder. I understand some of the technical difficulties with this but it wouldn't be too dissimilar from early BBS

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

I had a really stupid thought after reading the section 230 thread. What's the feasibility of a message board that doesn't store data? Something like a distributed editable torrent file that's simply viewed online?

If no one is hosting the message board it would make lawsuits a lot harder. I understand some of the technical difficulties with this but it wouldn't be too dissimilar from early BBS

That can work, if you don't mind having your IP exposed, and that you're resharing whatever anyone else posts

https://www.engadget.com/2019-08-08-peer-to-peer-8chan-mirror-zeronet.html

Apparently ZeroNet supports Tor now, but is it practical? Don't know, would rather not find out

 

[Gay_Frog]

Is there a thread archive? At least for the post?

 

[TurdFondler]

If you're using a VPN (and you should be) exposing your IP shouldn't be an issue though. I'm gonna look more into this, thanks!

 

[Never Scored]

I had a really stupid thought after reading the section 230 thread. What's the feasibility of a message board that doesn't store data? Something like a distributed editable torrent file that's simply viewed online?

If no one is hosting the message board it would make lawsuits a lot harder. I understand some of the technical difficulties with this but it wouldn't be too dissimilar from early BBS

I thought of the same thing a few times. I figured it would have to be text-only to avoid the risk of storing child porn. I feel like there would be no usernames, just a message list, messages, and peer list stored in plaintext files. Your instance would compare its list of messages and list of peers to the lists of people you are connected too and add peers you don't have to your peer list and download messages you don't have, sorted by date. If a peer can't be reached it won't be added to your list. Encryption is not necessary because you wouldn't be able to tell where each message originated anyway. Peer 1 could send a message to peer 2 for his message file, but peer 1 could have gotten the message originally from peer 3, and it could have originally been written and added to the message text file by peer 4. You would get on the network by someone who trusts you giving you a lost of peers. I don't even think it'd be that complicated of a program.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

I thought of the same thing a few times. I figured it would have to be text-only to avoid the risk of storing child porn. I feel like there would be no usernames, just a message list, messages, and peer list stored in plaintext files. Your instance would compare its list of messages and list of peers to the lists of people you are connected too and add peers you don't have to your peer list and download messages you don't have, sorted by date. If a peer can't be reached it won't be added to your list. Encryption is not necessary because you wouldn't be able to tell where each message originated anyway. Peer 1 could send a message to peer 2 for his message file, but peer 1 could have gotten the message originally from peer 3, and it could have originally been written and added to the message text file by peer 4. You would get on the network by someone who trusts you giving you a lost of peers. I don't even think it'd be that complicated of a program.

If you were doing something like this it would make sense to run close to the model of 'Secure Scuttlebutt'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt

You could even allow moderation for messaging groups someone 'owns'- 'owners' could sign a delete message (a-la NNTP cancels) and send that out to wipe out the original record from everyone's message stores.

 

[Least Concern]

I thought of the same thing a few times. I figured it would have to be text-only to avoid the risk of storing child porn.

It's possible to encode binary data like images as plain text, though (Uuencode being one such method from back in the day). In fact, that's how file trading was and, to a certain extent, still is being done on Usenet newsgroups, which are technically "text-only." I think this is how it's done on IRC too though I'm not sure. It needs to be taken for granted that if you devise a way for people to communicate, people will find a way to trade illegal files on it. That's just the way of the world.

In fact, maybe newsgroups are the answer to replace something like the Farms, since they're both discussion-oriented and distributed. They don't have nearly as many features as something like this message boards (sorry, no stickers/reactions) or as easy for normies to find and use, but who knows, maybe that latter point would actually work in its favor.

 

[Pissmaster]

I thought of the same thing a few times. I figured it would have to be text-only to avoid the risk of storing child porn. I feel like there would be no usernames, just a message list, messages, and peer list stored in plaintext files. Your instance would compare its list of messages and list of peers to the lists of people you are connected too and add peers you don't have to your peer list and download messages you don't have, sorted by date. If a peer can't be reached it won't be added to your list. Encryption is not necessary because you wouldn't be able to tell where each message originated anyway. Peer 1 could send a message to peer 2 for his message file, but peer 1 could have gotten the message originally from peer 3, and it could have originally been written and added to the message text file by peer 4. You would get on the network by someone who trusts you giving you a lost of peers. I don't even think it'd be that complicated of a program.

So everybody would just download and sync the entire forum? Sounds like a blockchain but with messages as the transactions

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

So everybody would just download and sync the entire forum? Sounds like a blockchain but with messages as the transactions

The whole forum- or the parts of the forum they're interested in.

You also wouldn't necessarily have to sync everything back to the beginning of time. That's necessary (to at least some degree) for a cryptocurrency where all transactions matter to come to a correct result as to who owns what- less so for something like this.

You can see this sort of thing in action with SSB (with more of a Twitter-like model) here

https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork

they also have stuff like Git running on SSB and are supposedly dogfooding it

git ssb - cel🌟/git-ssb@master

 

[TurdFondler]

Originally this idea was for a packet radio bbs, so I was thinking instead of pulling down the entire forum it would be compartmentalized. Over the internet it really wouldn't matter you could re download the entire message board fairly quickly.

If it's a dedicated peer to peer client running this program, it would be easy to just upload individual messages. Maybe use a coded numerical incrementation system so if you initially have message 4, get 6 and 7 but only much later get 5 it would fall into place.

Edit:

After reading about secure scuttlebutt I think it already does everything I'd want it to. Would any of you spergs be interested in an IRC channel and we can work on a doomsday proof kiwifarms?

 

[Kosher Dill]

4. You would get on the network by someone who trusts you giving you a lost of peers.

Who here trusts anyone? How many people are going to share some sort of offsite identity to get hooked up to this new network?
I guess you could do it via PMs here, if you're assuming this could all get set up before a hypothetical shutdown.

It seems to me that you'd have to be exceedingly careful with Secure Scuttlebutt since it's one of those "everyone hosts everyone's content" things. How are you going to deal with the oldest trick in the book, poisoning the network with CP or other illegal content?
Or for that matter, what if someone accidentally doxes themselves and can never delete it from the log?
How do you deal with someone using spam as a denial-of-service attack? Since there's no delete (only ignore), what's stopping someone from dumping a few terabytes of garbage into the feed? Doesn't even have to be all at once, this attack is cumulative.
And how's the peer-to-peer going to work, is everyone going to need to run this through Tor and 7 proxies to avoid leaking their IP to any malicious party that manages to get an invite? I assume anyone running a pub would get hounded off the internet.

You have to go in assuming "Distributed Kiwi" is going to be attacked from the inside and outside, constantly. This protocol seems like it's designed for people who are mostly honest and sincere. You know, naive.

EDIT: is there even a ban function on Scuttlebutt or if you let a bad user in is there no way around it except forking the entire feed?

 

[Never Scored]

I'm by no means actively developing anything. It's just how I pictured decentralised a torrent-like forum in my head. The thing I'm talking about afaik does not exist and I'm not making it. Some of the issues you brought up are basically solved by it being text only. I was picturing something along the lines of a distributed telnet BBS that runs in the terminal. No html or inline images, just ascii characters.

 

[TurdFondler]

Maximum allowable update size would solve a lot of issues. If your update exceeds a few MB (it's text data so there's no reason it would be more than that) then have the client reject it.

Limit hosting size as well, as in, if you join late you only get conversations from that point on, so your client is only hosting most recent updates. You'd have to get the backlog from a trusted source or arrange temporary and sporadic hosting of the entire chain.

Do all the uploads and downloads from a VPN that doesn't keep logs.

 

[gangweedfan]

Looking at getting a new motherboard. The 2 im interested in are the z490 taichi by asrock and the MSI meg Z490 ace. Which one should I get lads?

 

[Kosher Dill]

Some of the issues you brought up are basically solved by it being text only.

Sure, I'll just dump stolen credit card numbers and death threats against federal judges onto the log instead.

Seriously, I think moderation is going to be one of the big hurdles to any decentralized forum. There's always going to be something you're going to need to scrub from the record. There will always be problem users that need banning. And so on.

Twitter is a good example, actually. People already try to build their own "private forums" on top of what's effectively a write-only feed, using things like Blocktogether as "admin tools". How well does that work?

 

[General Disarray]

So my mom has an 8-year-old Dell laptop and it's acting up on her. She is not tech-savvy, but not "old and senile" either. I was wondering what is the best brand insofar as reliability and ease of use. I love my HP but I wanted to get more up to date information from the people who know best!
Perhaps an all-in-one? She just orders things and uses her Email, not a heavy user at all. Thanks in advance I appreciate any advice.