Like Amazon and eBay?
So, fake reviews, laundered seller IDs, dodgy return policy, commingled inventory...
And don't forget "track you relentlessly" (so you can later be approached with a "I know what you did last night" message).
1439 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2009
No Volkswagen (or other vehicle) manufactured today is even remotely likely to start and run in 2173 (or 2073). It's antique 27G IPV6 network will be unable to contact modern servers to get permission to transport the scruffy meatsack that hopped in. Sure, it will have a DNA sample from what you thought was an errant seatcushion spring, but the Java application that translates it to do the "criminal/deadbeat/voter-wannabe" check will be _way_ behind the current libraries.
More like "keep my tea (luke) warm". Like most computers, the total quantum computer (or smartphone, or watch, or "magic no-touch payment machine") system will be sourcing heat, not sinking it. Bringing order into one part of the multiverse involves bringing disorder into another. Rust Never Sleeps.
IANAL, but IIRC, the "corporations are humans for the purpose of benefits normally reserved for flesh and blood, but cannot be jailed or executed" stance is a pile of interpretations tracing back to a "note" added by a clerk to a 19th-century decision. It survives because it serves its masters well.
OTOH, some mischief makers concentrate on computers and software made by a company known to be favored by folks with more money than the average bear. A company that lately seems hell-bent on achieving parity with MSFT in the "how much damage can we do with an update" contest.
@John Brown
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Isn't that as much of an Apple issue as a a car issue? Do iPhones routinely connect to any random Bluetooth device without asking permission or is that a setting you have changed yourself?
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Almost certainly at least partially an Apple issue. There was no reason for me to faff with BT settings, as I do not enable BT at all. Then again, I also try my best to disable iCloud, but Apple gets more clever about stealth re-enables with every "upgrade". I will say that the Apple computers (i.e. MacOS rather than iOS) have some of the same annoying iCloud behavior, but so far have paired with BT mice and keyboards only as and when explicitly directed to do so. Of course, "Tomorrow is another day"
It is the whole ecosystem of cars, phones, appliances, dustbins, dog-collars etc. that gets me wondering if Douglas Adams was a time traveller.
"Keyless entry" has been a thing for _decades_, and I recall that handy capture/replay devices were available to thieves within months.
Meanwhile, the advice to not pair ones Bluetooth devices to random rental cars is good, but ignores that some modern cars (I refrain from naming the maker, as I suspect my new car is snooping all my comms :-) will pair with a device (such as my iPhone) without asking for or getting permission.
Why specifically "Diet" coke?
Is there something about Sugar (or HFCS, or Manitol, or...) that changes the behavior?
As David 132 remarked, this is more a physics thing than a chemical reaction, so I'd expect, e.g. Seltzer to work as well. So why a particular witch's brew of artificial sweeteners?
Yes, I can understand the benefit to society at large from one less bottle of that vile brew finding its way into a human digestive system.
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weren't doing the same re restricted materials.
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Well, if they were using the zoom app, rather than the web client (which zoom tries _really_ hard to prevent you finding out about), the persistent surreptitious web-server with access to your mic and camera could be grabbing conversations being held in a room when the occupants _thought_ they were not "on zoom". Perhaps all zoom meeting should be held in a dedicated Cone of Silence.
Ah: further research
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/9/20688113/zoom-apple-mac-patch-vulnerability-emergency-fix-web-server-remove
says this (_particular_ "bug") only affects Macs, and there is a patch. So if either No 10 is Windows only, or they diligently apply patches, No problem...
In the U.S. the ATMs of at least some banks allow you to set the language to be used for your account. One fellow of my acquaintance set his to Italian, because he was studying Italian and wanted a bit of light "immersion". Apparently his bank stored (for his account or possibly on his card) not the language per se, but the index into a table of languages supported by a given ATM (or group of ATMs?)
At least that is the best we could guess for what happened when he was across town in a Polish neighborhood.
As I read the article, you don't _have_ to open it. All you need to do is fail to catch one of the many "features" that include Preview (E.G. Lookout or Windows Exploder). That _preview_ will invoke a series of unfortunate events.
Last time I had to use Windows at work, the Outlook preview pane seemed to be the main enabler for malware. And yet many (most?) in the office found it too convenient to lose. Apparently nothing has changed in a decade.
(Yes, other handy applications, and websites (gmail?), will obligingly load images etc. "just in case" you want them. It is the usual Whack-a-Mole to keep disabling it after "upgrades".)
What a novel concept. How I wish this could be more common.
Of course, _saying_ it is rather different than _doing_ it.
Meanwhile:
"...looks like JS is being used exactly as it's supposed to be..."
For now, maybe, but the future comes fast on the web (as long as it's a future that prioritizes developers and corporations over users)
Parity?
I recall a talk on the early Cray 1 computers. They were originally designed with only parity, but soon (after experience with the "production" use of Serial #1) switched to ECC. Serial #2 was too far down the assembly line to be worth the retrofit and was scrapped. All later systems were a bit taller than #1, to accommodate the ECC mod.
(I assume the case of Leinenkugel beer intended for shipment with #2 was properly disposed of :-)
Or massing?
Not sure I can tell because the limit is stated in pounds (unit of weight), but "translated" to grams (mass).
I'm sure if .55 Slug was mentioned, a few more gun enthusiasts would "weigh in".
If the requirement specifies weight, who's up for a 1/10th scale Zeppelin?
(A friend's father flew in coastal defense blimps. Spot a sub? Motor on over while they spot you and frantically dive, drop the two depth charges you carry while radioing for the fixed-wing bombers to come drop their loads, probably leading to German sub crews believing the subs were very well armed)
Another possible reason for "conservatives" to be unconcerned is that a lot of the (most active) ones are lawyers, who can monetize outrage via lawsuits or cut-and-paste legislation to benefit a specific class of people they just happen to be members of. (Look Fred Phelps for example)
Much like "liberals", that way. Neither label really means much anymore. Liberals are much more about "Free Beer" than "Free Speech", while all conservatives seem to want to conserve are their own hard-won (aka stolen by their predecessor) privilege.
Maybe we _should_ welcome our insect overlords f they promise to eat the current lot.
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"bit banging" style...
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Or just get a Kryoflux unit. Works with a variety of disk formats, but only directions for 5.25 an 3.5 drives.
A typical older (soft sectored) 8-inch drive is electrically very similar to the early 3.5 drives, so could be just a cable re-mapping of wires. The unit does, IIRC, have an ARM or some such but it does not decode the disk. Rather, it ships a stream of timed flux transitions (imagine something like the Roland MIDI interfaces) to the host, where software of varying sophistication does the actual decoding (and for some formats, encoding).
That's the good news. The not-so-good is that at least when I got one several years ago, they were pretty WIndows-centric and a bit user hostile. And a bad combination of "won't state system requirements" and "Well of course, you idiot, we expect you to use the exact same OS and hardware we do".
I recently revisited the website, which has changed, and is a bit more forthcoming, so maybe the cowboy coders have moved on. I'll be giving them another try when the stack of 8 and 5.25 disk makes its way to the top of the (virtual) to-do stack.
Sort-of.
I am not a big Windows user, but IIRC, the Mosaic (via Spyglass Software, an amazingly prescient name) based Internet Explorer has been replaced by the Chromium based Edge browser. I'm pretty sure this "child of Chrome" is at least the default browser for Windows 10.
But, yeah, you _can_ run IE on Win10, much as you _can_ swim in the SF Bay in January. That said, most employers will not require you to do that (the swimming bit, not the "use IE until we can fix some crucial company sites". That's still a thing)
IIRC, back in the 1950s there was a guy (presumed, although yes, I believe I have met some con-women) who took out classified advertisements in newspapers.
"Learn how I make money! Send $5 and SASE to P.O. box <whatever>"
The Self Addressed Stamped Envelope would come back containing a note:
"That's how I make money".
Technically, not illegal. The customers got what was promised. Note that $5 was a day's wages for some at that time.
(I may be foggy on the details, as I read about it in the newspapers about that time)
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Backwards in that its unable to update a small bit of data without rewriting...
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Let me introduce you to my little friend "Shingled Drive". Long before HDDs become obsolete for nearline storage, the rush to "SSD in the box, Shingled HDD for long-term backup" will probably make "OK" (for price per bit and data rate) HDDs hard to find. You have to read the advertisements with a lawyer's eye to be able to tell if the wonderfully priced drive will be useful for anything beyond "Write Once, read by somebody else when I'm gone" backups.
SSDs are really nice in general, but I fear the "race to the bottom" has already started. Which may be OK because "why should my disk last any longer than support for my computer, which means in practice 3-5 years?"
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I'm surprised there isn't at least a third safe!
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With the current ICANN, I would not be surprised to hear that there was a third safe, and it was in the undersea lair of some fabulously wealthy Bond Villain.
(I also question the premise that "things" are currently working "properly", with the plain-English definition of the word, but that's another thread.)
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Loosens up all the dirt and rust and such, and the pin slides right out.
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I have found that "starter fluid" (light oil propelled by ether) is the best aid to rusted bolts etc. Far more effective than WD40, IMHO. Got that trick from a retired locomotive maintenance guy, and been using it ever since, although I haven't been in a steam locomotive cab for over 40 years.
Those of us who get senior citizen discounts without asking may remember a time when "PC" simply meant "Personal Computer".
This was a bit before PC was re-purposed to mean only "bit for bit and bug for bug compatible with the IBM 5150 [1], complete with the BIOS and DOS not being able to agree whether the COM ports were numbered from zero or one, and for the love of all that is holy, _NEVER_ press the Turbo button"
[1] Those in the intersection of (computer nerds) and (union of (Van Halen fans), (law enforcement personnel), (police scanner obsessives)) got a laugh out of that designation. I guess Rat Mouth Florida never has any instances of people acting crazy in public (or has so many that they are not noticed).
Until your phone pings and you open it to see a photo of your child dangling over a tank full of sharks with friggin lasers. Pretty much everybody over-estimates their own capacity for acting bravely (and effectively) against a better provisioned set of villains.
Historically, we know about the ones who actually did, because they were rare, and thus noteworthy.
Let's parse this:
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Thyla van der Merwe, cryptography engineering manager at Mozilla, said: "We plan to keep the override button for now; the telemetry we're collecting will tell us more about how often this button is used. These results will then inform our decision regarding when to remove the button entirely.
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So, collecting telemetry to see how often the override button is pressed, _but_ also making that button-press a one-shot global (per browser) thing, so that telemetry will only ever see a single button press per browser instance, probably wildly under counting button presses. In other words, throw out the very data that would enable a rational, evidence based decision, so we can count to 42 and proceed to do what we intended to do all along. Note that this is nominally an _engineer_ making that statement.Thankfully not a nuclear engineer or architect of major bridges.
This may be a correct decision, but the effort put into making the decision process flawed does not suggest that conclusion.
I used to think that _if_ we ever started to teach critical thinking skills to teenagers and below, after 20 or so years we might have people in power who knew how to make rational decisions. I think that ship (Vasa?) has sailed.
The most famous French participant in the U.S. War of independence, the Marquis de Layfayette, was a French Nobleman, and was apparently put up to it by Mad George's younger brother. _Much_ later (1830?) although he helped dispose of one (corrupt) french king, it was to install another (less corrupt) one (Louis Phillipe?), albeit as a constitutional Monarch. So it was not exactly full throated anti-monarchism that motivated him (and others).
Depends on the use-case. My "media computer" has an internal DVD drive, but I also added an external drive. Why? Because the public library insists on slapping "inventory control" widgets on the DVDs, and despite their apparent "low profile", they sometimes have issues with the internal slot-loading drive. Plus it seems that player software (or maybe the OS) delights in revving the drive to where I imagine relativistic speeds at the rim, and the imbalance of the stick-on fink-tags can create scary vibrations. If that happens to tear the gizzard out of the external drive, a replacement is cheap and easy. The internal drive? Not so much.
"not everything is life or death", exactly.
I already have to rename "peculiar" file extension to .txt just to get some browsers to download them at all (anything that isn't found in their list of extensions for special handling might as well not exist). So here is the scenario:
Some enthusiast has set up an http site documenting everything you could ever want to know about some obscure computer from the 70s. (alternatively, a homebrew computer with exactly one instance. Yes, I know of such, and if you do too, please don't name it here lest it be SlashDotted, er, Registered)
As an extra thrill, they actually have a restored instance of that rare beast serving that site.
Now, completely aside from the question of how long there will be more than one browser, and how mere mortals can use Let's Encrypt without professional help (putting themselves at the mercy of that professional help forever), who gets to patch a webserver from the 90s to run on a system that runs http just fine, but has something like 512K of RAM and has not had an OS update since everybody was doing the Macarena
Not another fan of this system finds this wondrous trove and make a page with links to all that lovely content (http links, of course), and publishes that page on their own "managed" site, using https because that's how it came. Bingo! "No old .txt for you!"
If you try to do the obvious, and just serve that page of pointers on http, you have just become invisible to <major search engine> that will put you (f it shows you at all) a few hundred pages behind pages serving JS bitcoin miners. So the _third_ fan will never even know this cool site exists.
Just a mix of opinions and thought-experiments from someone who would really like to know why slick corporate malware is OK, but amateur "created with ed" websites are clearly the devil's spawn.
Jaguar was only sorta 64 bit, and others were selling "sorta 32 bit" devices at the time. Tom and Jerry (The Jag custom chips) were buggier than a cheap hotel (under any brand name). But one could do some cool stuff, if willing to endure VCS levels of development pain. I was, and then I wasn't.
Unfortunately, email service to FCC accounts receivable is via an "unlimited data" account that gradually throttles rate, and is currently running at 45.45 baud. Since the check itself is one of those 3x12 ft checks often shown off by politicians and "philanthropists" to show their dedication to all things wonderful, and is being sent as a 4K dots/inch uncompressed ,BMP file, it _may_ arrive before the 2020 election, and may encounter an unfortunate error that requires complete retransmission.
Well, the main advantage is that data centers don't have their power sources sealed such that after 3 years of use you just have to build an entire data center. For maximally rosy statements about power efficiency, please to ignore the embedded energy of building a Facebook or Google scale data center.
Yes, I believe the real meaning is "maximally efficient at transferring power over data from users to corporations". See Also: Chrome, iCloud, Office365...