So be stealthy - encrypted photos are completely ignored by the on-camera browser. Take a few innocent unencrypted ones to allay suspicion.
More to the point, encrypting the photos isn't intended to stop you from getting caught - it's intended to protect your sources *if* you get caught. If you have the time you'll have already swapped out to a decoy SD card anyway, so that there's nothing suspicious in the camera. Encryption is for when you don't have the time, or they find your real card.
Actually, I suspect it was very far down the list - digital cameras were getting quite common before even really bad screens became standard. Digital took off because it was cheap and convenient, with basically zero incremental costs for each photo and no need to take it to somebody and wait a few hours/days to get it developed.
Screens are like the "instant" Polaroids of the photography world - quite popular among the hobbyists, but largely irrelevant to most professional photographers. If you have to look at the camera to tell whether you got a decent shot you don't know your camera.
So, make it not rare, and not obvious. Standard option somewhere in the settings to turn encryption on and off, and encrypted files just get totally ignored by the browse/review interface - if all you've taken is encrypted photos, the camera appears to be empty. Take a bunch of non-encrypted vacation photos, and you have a nice decoy - unless the jackbooted thug actually pulls the card and examines it on a separate diagnostic device, the encrypted stuff is invisible.
For added convenience you might list the actual free space while in encrypted mode so you get some advanced warning before getting a "no space for photo" error. That's slightly less obfuscated in that the thug wouldn't need a separate diagnostic device so long as they knew what they were doing - but that calls for a somewhat higher grade of thug.
Moreover, the point of encryption is not so much to protect yourself - if that's your goal then you don't try to break stories where encryption would matter. The goal is to protect your sources.
Possibly on some newer drives, but the original design was implemented in hardware/firmware - even with raw system control (no OS present) you couldn't write to a copy-protected floppy, the drive itself would return an error.
Problem is, they're a lot less likely to kill themselves, and a lot more likely to kill a lot of other people. Crazy hobbies become a lot less admirable when you start gambling with other people's lives.
Yeah, it's one thing to scam a bunch of flat-earther nut-jobs into funding your lunatic daredevil stunts... but what's the point if, after all that hard work, you're not going to actually follow through?
You'd still need to actually wipe the camera - deleting typically only mangles the filename. And without hardware support, reliably wiping requires completely filling the card with other images - and even that may not do it if the flash storage is over-provisioned so that it can maintain its capacity as flash cells begin to fail (I have no idea if that's common with SD cards, but it's standard procedure for SSDs)
An easier option - use asymmetric encryption, and leave your private key at home. You can't give them what you don't have, even if they break you and you really wish you could. Of course, if they break you then you can probably just *tell* them most of what they want to know, but it at least ensures that you are the weakest link.
It's not themselves they're trying to protect - if they wanted to stay safe then they wouldn't be in that line of work. They're trying to protect their sources and their evidence.
Why would the camera ask for an encryption password? Store the public key used to encrypt the photos on the card, and then just completely ignore any encrypted photos when browsing, since it can't decrypt them anyway.
A professional photographer has no particular need to look at the photos they just took - they didn't even have the option in the film days. It may be convenient for many things, but it's a small convenience to sacrifice to ensure their sources remain safe. Once they get back home, then they can use their private key to decrypt the photos. If they don't even take the private key with them, then there's no way it can be compromised.
How expensive would it be though? Cameras already have the necessary CPU power to do all sorts of image processing, encryption is no more difficult. All they need to do is load a public key from the SD card and, if in "encrypt mode" use it to encrypt the the photo rather than storing it unmodified on the SD card. Maybe that means it takes 5x longer to store each photo if the CPU is especially weak, but so what? If you're taking photos where encryption is important you should be willing to make compromises. And it doesn't have any impact at all if encryption mode is turned off.
You don't even need to do that - use asymmetric encryption and let the my.key file hold only the public encryption key and you can just leave it on the card - it can't be used for decryption, so it doesn't matter who else gets access to it.
Of course that would mean that you can't review your photos on the camera, but also means that the photos are protected even if someone takes your camera without giving you a chance to push the "wipe" button.
And really, there's very little need for on-camera reviewing in an evidence-collecting situation - at most you just need to be able to review the just-taken photo to be certain it clearly captures what you intended, and a professional photographer should have the skills and familiarity with their camera to make that unnecessary. Film cameras didn't have *any* on-camera review options, and did the job just fine for decades.
Sadly not. First - that's not even remotely the point of a write-protect tab, it has nothing to do with read-access at all.
Secondly - unlike floppy drives where the write protection tab prevented the drive from writing to the disc, SD cards use software based write "protection" - i.e. the tab is only a request that the card not be written to, and offers absolutely no protection against faulty or malicious software.
Exactly - it reduces your shipping costs. You could already whatever you want shipped today, it would just cost a bit more, meaning you'd have to charge a bit more. There is no shipping capacity shortage in this country, except at any particular price point. If all you're doing is selling something that people wouldn't buy at a slightly higher price point, then you're not generating any extra wealth, you're just redirecting purchases that would have been made for something else instead.
It makes absolutely no difference what a selling company's capacity is - only what the *consumers'* collective purchasing capacity is. And that will change only by the amount that prices are lowered. If shipping costs were 50% of the sale price of something then cutting the cost substantially would make a big difference - but there's almost nothing where that's the case.
Except, pretty much everything we buy is already shipped across the country, if not halfway around the world. Industrialization radically reduced the manufacturing costs, dramatically increasing the buying power of the populace. Shipping costs though are already only a small fraction of the purchase price of most goods - cut shipping costs in half, and you only reduce purchase price by a few percent, and can thus only reasonably expect to increase sales by a few percent.
How do you know they were shooting for "doing"? Could have been "How you do all those sexy drunken games when your roommates aren't in". Those apostrophes can be surprisingly stretchy.
Oh, I'm sure plenty of people could learn them - but what would be the point? Those jobs are already filled by people who already have the knowledge, as well as a large head start in experience. And even if some of the newcomers are able to win a place at the table, that just means some old timers just lost their job. No net benefit.
Agreed as to wealth distribution being the problem - and as automation takes over there's going to be a great deal of new wealth created with very minimal contribution from anyone. The question is whether we let all that wealth accumulate in the hands of the people who just happened to be in the position to buy the robots, probably through little merit of their own, and allow them to create an unassailable monarchy, or demand that at least some of that wealth be distributed to the rest of humanity, who contributed only very slightly less to generating it.
Fair enough, though I doubt there are many such fasteners that would be considerably easier for a human to disassemble than a robot. Even where you could theoretically simply reverse the process, you'd probably still want to take a more nuanced approach - simply twisting off that frozen nut without regard for corrosion is likely to twist off the entire stud as well.
I do actually agree that intricate repairs are likely to be one of the later things to be automated, but they may not often be necessary. Like parts being discarded - absolutely that's one of the added costs of simplistic robotic repair - but why fix what you can replace, when production carries little human cost? In cases where refurbishment is desirable you could attempt to perform the considerably more complicated tasks immediately (a thorough cleaning is probably easy, and repairs many transient problems like corrosion, gummed-up lubricants, etc), or simply harness the stream of discarded parts for refurbishment for future use. If human judgement is needed, it's far easier to train someone to decide whether an alternator armature is worth refurbishing than to rebuild an engine. Then you sit them down to do nothing but screen alternator armatures all day. Along with a thousand other people making similar limited-domain judgements about their own single part, and an army of robots simply replacing the out-of-spec parts, you could eliminate millions of skilled mechanics. Far more so if you began designing things to be easily maintained by robots - which frankly would probably be a big improvement for human mechanics as well. I've run into far too many maintenance-unfriendly rivets, snaps, and glues for my liking. To say nothing of non-standard parts - why exactly do we have more than four models of alternator in the world?
Heck, in general repair really only makes sense when the cost of repair is dramatically lower than the cost of replacement - when's the last time you saw a TV repair shop? And as production is increasingly automated, and the cost of energy continues to plummet (solar is already cheaper than coal, and falling fast) the cost of replacement will continue to fall rapidly for most things.
But exactly what is the context of that 5-sigma confidence interval? They may have ruled out neutron stars, quark stars, and other degenerate-matter objects postulated to exist with the context of accepted GR, but I *really* doubt there's enough detail in those observations to positively determine that the merger happened at exactly event-horizon distance. They had to do a horrendous amount of processing to even be sure they had actually detected a signal, and not just noise that looked like a signal. Have you looked at the raw data? The maximum peak is only a few times higher than the background noise. I'm confident they detected something, and willing to accept they teased out enough detail for to broadly categorize the stellar objects involved. But to characterize the nature of those objects with sufficient detail to be used as confirmation among slight variations of GR? That seems *extremely* unlikely.
As for gravitational lensing - as I've said, that says *nothing* about black holes versus supermassive non-luminous objects. Heck, if this take on modified GR is right (I have zero faith in that, I just think it's interesting) there might well still be singularities if the maximum gravitational force exceeds quantum degeneracy pressure, but they would be naked singularities without an event horizon. Of course, the merger of naked singularities would likely create a very different LIGO signal than what was detected, the signals were consistent with objects having definite physical extents.
If AI's are going to destroy substantially more jobs than they create, then what exactly do people want retraining *for*? How to be unemployed? I mean yeah, some percentage of people will potentially be retrainable for the new jobs created, but everyone else... the jobs were destroyed, where do you think there is to go? You don't need a lot of training to be a capitalit's boot-licker - just a complete lack of dignity, or enough desperation to fake it.
Roboticists are making great advances in intricately articulated bodies, a topic orthogonal to AI. Doesn't have to be anything remotely humanoid to do any of those jobs. Repairing the car and AC are probably the most physically challenging, but those things were probably assembled by robots in the first place, and could generally be disassembled just as easily by running the assembly program in reverse. Then it's just a matter of identifying and replacing the flawed parts and reassembling.
The most profitable investment decisions are already mostly made by AI, and frankly even the best human advice is has been shown, repeatedly, to be on par with random chance. General purpose medical diagnostic devices are already being tested in real-world settings, and generally substantially outperform doctors, while needing no more than a med-tech to operate them. And heck, even the current myopic and mostly-incompetent AIs couldn't do much worse than most politicians (ba-dum-tish)
I'll admit, the LIGO observations nagged at me after that post. However, given the rather poor signal-to-noise ratio, I rather doubt that they had sufficient resolution to determine if the merging objects were actually black holes rather than something with, say, a 10% larger diameter than a black hole. Nor whether the acceleration immediately prior to merging was perfectly consistent with inverse-square gravity.
More fundamentally though, my point was that every theory prior to General Relativity has been proven false at the extreme limits of its prediction, and it's pure hubris to assume GR is 100% perfect, which is pretty much what you have to do to have any faith in theoretical constructs built at the extreme limits of the theory.
Especially considering the massive amount of gravitational anomalies we can observe. *Something* is messing with galactic rotation curves, and dark matter is getting increasingly improbable with every failed experiment to detect it. The obvious alternative is that our theory of gravity is still incomplete.
Mostly because athletes get glorified in our society, encouraging mimicry by impressionable youth and idiots, while their celebrity insulates them from the consequences of their actions. That hits on two fronts.
First, you get a bunch of kids too young and stupid to know better inflicting brain damage for the chance at home-town celebrity and the perks that accompany it. And oft-times their parents aren't a whole lot better informed.
Second, that brain damage makes it much more likely that Joe McSportsball player is going to violently beat his girlfriend or that guy who looked at him funny at the bar, while his celebrity will get him off with a slap on the wrist and a lot of publicity. That sends a message to people everywhere that such violence is actually acceptable behavior.
Seriously though, that is one of the many alternative theories of gravity. Basically in standard GR every energy field - electrostatic, magnetic, weak or strong nuclear, etc. creates a gravitational field based on its energy density. Any energy field that is *except* gravity - Einstein felt it would be double-counting the original gravitational source. However, it's possible to modify his equations to assume that the energy stored in a gravitational field is treated like any other field energy, and creates a "secondary" gravitational field. The resulting predictions are basically indistinguishable from normal GR in most situations, but when you get to the extreme gravitational fields around a degenerate star, well beyond the point where neutron stars form, the secondary field ends up counteracting the primary field and gravitational intensity plateaus at a level somewhat lower than necessary to create an event horizon, regardless of how much mass is concentrated at the center. Not sure if you'd still get a singularity, or if the forces are low enough that it would stabilize in some form of degenerate quark matter, but according to the alternate theory, black holes are impossible. (I think there are also some differences over extreme long ranges as well, but I don't recall for certain)
Meanwhile, we have no direct evidence for the existence of black holes, only of supermassive non-luminous objects such as Sagittarius A*. We can determine its mass and limit its maximum possible size from the motion of nearby non-occluded stars, but since we don't see any definite occlusion stars, we can't determine its actual size - and the maximum limit we've established is orders of magnitude larger than the event horizon of a black hole with that mass, so we can't say for sure that that is in fact what it is.
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So be stealthy - encrypted photos are completely ignored by the on-camera browser. Take a few innocent unencrypted ones to allay suspicion.
More to the point, encrypting the photos isn't intended to stop you from getting caught - it's intended to protect your sources *if* you get caught. If you have the time you'll have already swapped out to a decoy SD card anyway, so that there's nothing suspicious in the camera. Encryption is for when you don't have the time, or they find your real card.
Actually, I suspect it was very far down the list - digital cameras were getting quite common before even really bad screens became standard. Digital took off because it was cheap and convenient, with basically zero incremental costs for each photo and no need to take it to somebody and wait a few hours/days to get it developed.
Screens are like the "instant" Polaroids of the photography world - quite popular among the hobbyists, but largely irrelevant to most professional photographers. If you have to look at the camera to tell whether you got a decent shot you don't know your camera.
So, make it not rare, and not obvious. Standard option somewhere in the settings to turn encryption on and off, and encrypted files just get totally ignored by the browse/review interface - if all you've taken is encrypted photos, the camera appears to be empty. Take a bunch of non-encrypted vacation photos, and you have a nice decoy - unless the jackbooted thug actually pulls the card and examines it on a separate diagnostic device, the encrypted stuff is invisible.
For added convenience you might list the actual free space while in encrypted mode so you get some advanced warning before getting a "no space for photo" error. That's slightly less obfuscated in that the thug wouldn't need a separate diagnostic device so long as they knew what they were doing - but that calls for a somewhat higher grade of thug.
Moreover, the point of encryption is not so much to protect yourself - if that's your goal then you don't try to break stories where encryption would matter. The goal is to protect your sources.
Possibly on some newer drives, but the original design was implemented in hardware/firmware - even with raw system control (no OS present) you couldn't write to a copy-protected floppy, the drive itself would return an error.
Problem is, they're a lot less likely to kill themselves, and a lot more likely to kill a lot of other people. Crazy hobbies become a lot less admirable when you start gambling with other people's lives.
Yeah, it's one thing to scam a bunch of flat-earther nut-jobs into funding your lunatic daredevil stunts... but what's the point if, after all that hard work, you're not going to actually follow through?
You'd still need to actually wipe the camera - deleting typically only mangles the filename. And without hardware support, reliably wiping requires completely filling the card with other images - and even that may not do it if the flash storage is over-provisioned so that it can maintain its capacity as flash cells begin to fail (I have no idea if that's common with SD cards, but it's standard procedure for SSDs)
An easier option - use asymmetric encryption, and leave your private key at home. You can't give them what you don't have, even if they break you and you really wish you could. Of course, if they break you then you can probably just *tell* them most of what they want to know, but it at least ensures that you are the weakest link.
It's not themselves they're trying to protect - if they wanted to stay safe then they wouldn't be in that line of work. They're trying to protect their sources and their evidence.
Why would the camera ask for an encryption password? Store the public key used to encrypt the photos on the card, and then just completely ignore any encrypted photos when browsing, since it can't decrypt them anyway.
A professional photographer has no particular need to look at the photos they just took - they didn't even have the option in the film days. It may be convenient for many things, but it's a small convenience to sacrifice to ensure their sources remain safe. Once they get back home, then they can use their private key to decrypt the photos. If they don't even take the private key with them, then there's no way it can be compromised.
How expensive would it be though? Cameras already have the necessary CPU power to do all sorts of image processing, encryption is no more difficult. All they need to do is load a public key from the SD card and, if in "encrypt mode" use it to encrypt the the photo rather than storing it unmodified on the SD card. Maybe that means it takes 5x longer to store each photo if the CPU is especially weak, but so what? If you're taking photos where encryption is important you should be willing to make compromises. And it doesn't have any impact at all if encryption mode is turned off.
You don't even need to do that - use asymmetric encryption and let the my.key file hold only the public encryption key and you can just leave it on the card - it can't be used for decryption, so it doesn't matter who else gets access to it.
Of course that would mean that you can't review your photos on the camera, but also means that the photos are protected even if someone takes your camera without giving you a chance to push the "wipe" button.
And really, there's very little need for on-camera reviewing in an evidence-collecting situation - at most you just need to be able to review the just-taken photo to be certain it clearly captures what you intended, and a professional photographer should have the skills and familiarity with their camera to make that unnecessary. Film cameras didn't have *any* on-camera review options, and did the job just fine for decades.
Sadly not. First - that's not even remotely the point of a write-protect tab, it has nothing to do with read-access at all.
Secondly - unlike floppy drives where the write protection tab prevented the drive from writing to the disc, SD cards use software based write "protection" - i.e. the tab is only a request that the card not be written to, and offers absolutely no protection against faulty or malicious software.
Exactly - it reduces your shipping costs. You could already whatever you want shipped today, it would just cost a bit more, meaning you'd have to charge a bit more. There is no shipping capacity shortage in this country, except at any particular price point. If all you're doing is selling something that people wouldn't buy at a slightly higher price point, then you're not generating any extra wealth, you're just redirecting purchases that would have been made for something else instead.
It makes absolutely no difference what a selling company's capacity is - only what the *consumers'* collective purchasing capacity is. And that will change only by the amount that prices are lowered. If shipping costs were 50% of the sale price of something then cutting the cost substantially would make a big difference - but there's almost nothing where that's the case.
Except, pretty much everything we buy is already shipped across the country, if not halfway around the world. Industrialization radically reduced the manufacturing costs, dramatically increasing the buying power of the populace. Shipping costs though are already only a small fraction of the purchase price of most goods - cut shipping costs in half, and you only reduce purchase price by a few percent, and can thus only reasonably expect to increase sales by a few percent.
How do you know they were shooting for "doing"? Could have been "How you do all those sexy drunken games when your roommates aren't in". Those apostrophes can be surprisingly stretchy.
Well now, there's a whole different interesting conversation. Perhaps some other time.
Oh, I'm sure plenty of people could learn them - but what would be the point? Those jobs are already filled by people who already have the knowledge, as well as a large head start in experience. And even if some of the newcomers are able to win a place at the table, that just means some old timers just lost their job. No net benefit.
Agreed as to wealth distribution being the problem - and as automation takes over there's going to be a great deal of new wealth created with very minimal contribution from anyone. The question is whether we let all that wealth accumulate in the hands of the people who just happened to be in the position to buy the robots, probably through little merit of their own, and allow them to create an unassailable monarchy, or demand that at least some of that wealth be distributed to the rest of humanity, who contributed only very slightly less to generating it.
Fair enough, though I doubt there are many such fasteners that would be considerably easier for a human to disassemble than a robot. Even where you could theoretically simply reverse the process, you'd probably still want to take a more nuanced approach - simply twisting off that frozen nut without regard for corrosion is likely to twist off the entire stud as well.
I do actually agree that intricate repairs are likely to be one of the later things to be automated, but they may not often be necessary. Like parts being discarded - absolutely that's one of the added costs of simplistic robotic repair - but why fix what you can replace, when production carries little human cost? In cases where refurbishment is desirable you could attempt to perform the considerably more complicated tasks immediately (a thorough cleaning is probably easy, and repairs many transient problems like corrosion, gummed-up lubricants, etc), or simply harness the stream of discarded parts for refurbishment for future use. If human judgement is needed, it's far easier to train someone to decide whether an alternator armature is worth refurbishing than to rebuild an engine. Then you sit them down to do nothing but screen alternator armatures all day. Along with a thousand other people making similar limited-domain judgements about their own single part, and an army of robots simply replacing the out-of-spec parts, you could eliminate millions of skilled mechanics. Far more so if you began designing things to be easily maintained by robots - which frankly would probably be a big improvement for human mechanics as well. I've run into far too many maintenance-unfriendly rivets, snaps, and glues for my liking. To say nothing of non-standard parts - why exactly do we have more than four models of alternator in the world?
Heck, in general repair really only makes sense when the cost of repair is dramatically lower than the cost of replacement - when's the last time you saw a TV repair shop? And as production is increasingly automated, and the cost of energy continues to plummet (solar is already cheaper than coal, and falling fast) the cost of replacement will continue to fall rapidly for most things.
But exactly what is the context of that 5-sigma confidence interval? They may have ruled out neutron stars, quark stars, and other degenerate-matter objects postulated to exist with the context of accepted GR, but I *really* doubt there's enough detail in those observations to positively determine that the merger happened at exactly event-horizon distance. They had to do a horrendous amount of processing to even be sure they had actually detected a signal, and not just noise that looked like a signal. Have you looked at the raw data? The maximum peak is only a few times higher than the background noise. I'm confident they detected something, and willing to accept they teased out enough detail for to broadly categorize the stellar objects involved. But to characterize the nature of those objects with sufficient detail to be used as confirmation among slight variations of GR? That seems *extremely* unlikely.
As for gravitational lensing - as I've said, that says *nothing* about black holes versus supermassive non-luminous objects. Heck, if this take on modified GR is right (I have zero faith in that, I just think it's interesting) there might well still be singularities if the maximum gravitational force exceeds quantum degeneracy pressure, but they would be naked singularities without an event horizon. Of course, the merger of naked singularities would likely create a very different LIGO signal than what was detected, the signals were consistent with objects having definite physical extents.
If AI's are going to destroy substantially more jobs than they create, then what exactly do people want retraining *for*? How to be unemployed? I mean yeah, some percentage of people will potentially be retrainable for the new jobs created, but everyone else... the jobs were destroyed, where do you think there is to go? You don't need a lot of training to be a capitalit's boot-licker - just a complete lack of dignity, or enough desperation to fake it.
Roboticists are making great advances in intricately articulated bodies, a topic orthogonal to AI. Doesn't have to be anything remotely humanoid to do any of those jobs. Repairing the car and AC are probably the most physically challenging, but those things were probably assembled by robots in the first place, and could generally be disassembled just as easily by running the assembly program in reverse. Then it's just a matter of identifying and replacing the flawed parts and reassembling.
The most profitable investment decisions are already mostly made by AI, and frankly even the best human advice is has been shown, repeatedly, to be on par with random chance. General purpose medical diagnostic devices are already being tested in real-world settings, and generally substantially outperform doctors, while needing no more than a med-tech to operate them. And heck, even the current myopic and mostly-incompetent AIs couldn't do much worse than most politicians (ba-dum-tish)
I'll admit, the LIGO observations nagged at me after that post. However, given the rather poor signal-to-noise ratio, I rather doubt that they had sufficient resolution to determine if the merging objects were actually black holes rather than something with, say, a 10% larger diameter than a black hole. Nor whether the acceleration immediately prior to merging was perfectly consistent with inverse-square gravity.
More fundamentally though, my point was that every theory prior to General Relativity has been proven false at the extreme limits of its prediction, and it's pure hubris to assume GR is 100% perfect, which is pretty much what you have to do to have any faith in theoretical constructs built at the extreme limits of the theory.
Especially considering the massive amount of gravitational anomalies we can observe. *Something* is messing with galactic rotation curves, and dark matter is getting increasingly improbable with every failed experiment to detect it. The obvious alternative is that our theory of gravity is still incomplete.
Mostly because athletes get glorified in our society, encouraging mimicry by impressionable youth and idiots, while their celebrity insulates them from the consequences of their actions. That hits on two fronts.
First, you get a bunch of kids too young and stupid to know better inflicting brain damage for the chance at home-town celebrity and the perks that accompany it. And oft-times their parents aren't a whole lot better informed.
Second, that brain damage makes it much more likely that Joe McSportsball player is going to violently beat his girlfriend or that guy who looked at him funny at the bar, while his celebrity will get him off with a slap on the wrist and a lot of publicity. That sends a message to people everywhere that such violence is actually acceptable behavior.
Well, I have eaten recently...
Seriously though, that is one of the many alternative theories of gravity. Basically in standard GR every energy field - electrostatic, magnetic, weak or strong nuclear, etc. creates a gravitational field based on its energy density. Any energy field that is *except* gravity - Einstein felt it would be double-counting the original gravitational source. However, it's possible to modify his equations to assume that the energy stored in a gravitational field is treated like any other field energy, and creates a "secondary" gravitational field. The resulting predictions are basically indistinguishable from normal GR in most situations, but when you get to the extreme gravitational fields around a degenerate star, well beyond the point where neutron stars form, the secondary field ends up counteracting the primary field and gravitational intensity plateaus at a level somewhat lower than necessary to create an event horizon, regardless of how much mass is concentrated at the center. Not sure if you'd still get a singularity, or if the forces are low enough that it would stabilize in some form of degenerate quark matter, but according to the alternate theory, black holes are impossible. (I think there are also some differences over extreme long ranges as well, but I don't recall for certain)
Meanwhile, we have no direct evidence for the existence of black holes, only of supermassive non-luminous objects such as Sagittarius A*. We can determine its mass and limit its maximum possible size from the motion of nearby non-occluded stars, but since we don't see any definite occlusion stars, we can't determine its actual size - and the maximum limit we've established is orders of magnitude larger than the event horizon of a black hole with that mass, so we can't say for sure that that is in fact what it is.