Ah yes, lithobreking.
Ah yes, lithobreking.
I will say that a good scammer will circumvent a lot of the “earning trust” stage.
Through social engineering or just sheer luck, they will catch you at a time when your guard is down and they will manipulate a sense of urgency.
“Hi mom, my phone fell in the toilet and I really need it for work tomorrow. I’m using a friends phone right now, all my bank access was on that phone. I’m so stressed. Can you send me $800 via (dodgy website) so I can buy a new phone and get to work”.
Instantly hits on an emotional pressure point. Adds a huge sense of urgency, with good reasons for an untrusted number and a dodgy payment method, and makes it seem difficult to corroborate with the mom’s kid.
“Hello, this is your real estate agent. Unfortunately there has been a complication with the purchase of your new house. Due to extra fees, $10,000 needs to be transferred to X by midnight, otherwise the banks will reject the purchase/mortgage/whatever. Sorry for the out-of-hours contacts, I’m currently in (city) on other business and not in the office”
Another hugely stressful scenario. Massive sense of urgency with a disastrous deadline.
People don’t buy houses every day, and may not be fully aware of the process. They might take this as an unexpected but legit part of the process.
Obviously, this requires significant social engineering to set the scam up in the first place (knowing someone is buying a house and roughly when). But the payout can be significant.
The biggest piece of advice I can give is:
If someone is applying a sense of urgency on any decision: STOP.
Take a breather, think about the scenario. And then contact “the person/company” via another way through means you research yourself.
If it’s on the phone, ask for a case number, Google the company and phone them directly. By text or email, same thing. Find their phone number via Google.
If it is legitimate, an extra 30m isn’t going to harm anything. Especially if you say “sorry about that, I wasn’t sure if it was a scam or not”.
Same for wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear energy generation then?
I can tell you that big data centers likely have a 4 year hardware cycle, where it is all under warranty and service contract.
After which, it gets sold to refurbishers who refurb it and resell it. Or the datacenter may repurpose it for labs, OOB hardware, or donate it to schools.
A lot of smaller companies don’t need the latest and greatest, and are quite happy running old 2nd hand hardware.
Even after they are done with it, there are plenty of hobbyists that will buy it. I have a couple 8 year old servers that run absolutely fine for what I need.
Old servers are also kept around as parts for companies that refuse to update old hardware (and will just keep buying spares, or like-for-like replacements).
The last step is ewaste, where the good stuff gets boiled in acid to extract the gold, or whatever they do.
The only things that are generally destroyed during hardware cycles are the storage, and that’s normally for compliance reasons.
The salt water won’t come into contact with anything except pumps, a heat exchanger and the exterior of the container.
The servers live in a nitrogen environment, so it reduces corrosion, I doubt there would be any dirt or dust. It’s going to be an incredible sterile environment.
I don’t care about Manifest V3. I care about ublock origin.
When that stops working, then I’ll swap.
Ah, the new Lemmy switcharoo!
DVI and HDMI are actually the same video signal. Which is why adapters are so cheap.
DP can carry an HDMI encoded signal (and thus a DVI signal), which is why DP->HDMI and DP->DVI adapters are so cheap. It’s called DP Dual Mode or Multi Mode or something like that.
I haven’t encountered a device that outputs DisplayPort that cannot output the Dual Mode HDMI encoded signal as well.
HDMI/DVI->DP is an active conversion - ie it is re-encoding it. Which is why the converters are significantly more expensive.
However, it’s all digital. If the signal quality degrades, it will be very obvious because it stops working (sparkles on a black screen, lines, flashes, all sorts).