Attie Grande5d ago

I'm finding the recent Veritasium videos are a bit weird... they mention a recent "thing 1", then do a super-deep historical dive into a somewhat related "thing 2" (presenting it as "the origins of thing 1").

This one [1] is "The Secret Spy Tech Inside Every Credit Card", where they briefly poke at NFC and then wind back to talk about the Soviet's listening device, gifted to the US Ambassador in 1945 [2].

They explain in some detail how the device works, showing it as what many woud recognise as Frequency Modulation, before calling it Amplitude Modulation(?!)

... the Wiki page states "the membrane and the post formed a variable capacitor acting as a condenser microphone and providing amplitude modulation (AM), with parasitic frequency modulation (FM) for the re-radiated signal", which is... I mean... okay, I guess... but isn't any FM broadcast actually AM too by this definition?

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSJY3DvnybE

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

Show threadAttie Grande5d ago

The last one I watched [1] was "The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew", where they drop the scary bomb with no real details, and then run back to "the story begins with a jammed printer" and an interview with fecking Stallman and talk about FSF... (?!)

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoag03mSuXQ

The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew

YouTube
Show threadSoatok Dreamseeker

@attie Yeah, it's diving into the history of the Linux kernel and the free software movement in a very hand-wavy way so as to establish the backdrop through which the xz-utils attack was orchestrated.

It's not the obvious way to tell the story, and it assumes both a) the audience's ignorance on open source and b) a metric fuckton of other computer history details, but, eh.

They also talked a lot about RSA encryption and completely balked at signing and elliptic curves, when Jia Tan's exploit used Ed448.

It could be worse.

Mar 28 at 8:31pmWeb
Show threadAttie Grande5d ago

@soatok

> They also talked a lot about RSA encryption [...], when Jia Tan's exploit used Ed448.

Ha, I missed that detail... I must confess it was playing while I was doing housework.

> It could be worse.

Oh, completely agree. It's not *bad*, but just felt unexpected / weird.

Show threadSnoopJ5d ago
@attie @soatok it ain't what it used to be, that's for sure