Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

Asymmetry

So it takes ns to write a '1' but writing a zero means waiting many minutes for memory to fade away? That's crap for traditional storage but maybe good for analog AI computations where it's advantageous to have unused paths fade away.

Paying abusers are OK

I complained to Salesforce/Heroku about a prolific SMS scammer with a wide-open database of personal data. I gave them one complaint per SMS. Salesforce blocked my emails.

The customer is still there and I still get the SMS spams. If you've seen scams with 'pingmeta2' in the URL, that's them. Scan the phone number query parameter to download everything.

Heroku scam hosting is going well

https://www.abuseipdb.com/check/52.21.227.162

Everything counts in large amounts.

Cheap now, expensive later

Only one camera needs to be compromised to bring down the whole system. You're thinking of filling up the storage device? No, that might trigger monitoring alarms before recording stops.

If you bought Hikvision cameras to save money, it's a good bet that the storage system is cheap too. All a compromised camera needs to do is write one large file (a few TB) to storage then delete it. All but the best NAS will become unresponsive during the delete. Within seconds, all the Hikvision cameras will crash from buffer overflow. Video from the past is lost before any monitors raise an alarm.

Benny Hill

That's for later when Amazon shares Roomba vids with accelerated playback.

Logic

I wonder if an insurance company has ever declared war against a customer wanting payment?

Terminology soup

I'm selling a 1500 MPH supercar. Now, 1500 MPH isn't street legal but we can gang up the seats to provide the throughput of 1500 MPH into a single vehicle traveling at 30 to 60 MPH. To ensure greater access to this supervehicle, rides will use a subscription model rather than up-front payments. Rates start at $1.75 for a two hour pass or $6.50 for a full day.

Duh

Given the inputs available to the algorithm, not all scenarios can be uniquely detected. For some of those scenarios, you may choose greedy or cooperative solutions. This is why TCP is still around despite so many claims of amazingly better algorithms.

Distraction?

My own computers have been blocking lots of SSH attacks from Google's 34.x.x.x and 35.x.x.x networks since August 16th. I'm not sure if that's from account take-over attacks hidden under the DDoS or if Google is just taking the next step to their Yahoo-like demise.

What's the catch?

Google always had excellent inbound filters and zero outbound filters. It's an anti-competitive behavior that the Feds never caught on to. When Google says they're going to allow floods of inbound spam, I smell fresh evil. It might be a feature that lets users keep score on annoying politicians and political parties. It might be teaching AI what is and isn't successful deceit. It might be training AI how to more effectively manipulate politics.

Put them all together and Google can use perfectly legal campaign contributions rather than filtering. For the party you don't like? $20 million worth of e-mail advertising donated to their most annoying candidate. The candidate you like best? A donation of $5 million worth of e-mail advertising plus $15 million worth of social engineering and targeting. Each side received $20M so it's fair. Oh, and there's a big tax write-off too.

Weird setup

Less jerky: Two weights spinning at end of the arm on its axis, with the two spinning synchronized in opposite directions to cause cyclical swinging of the arm. Two weights spinning on the axis of the arm close to its pivot, opposite of each other in the same direction so that they only change the angular momentum of the arm.

This needs three servos moving at a nearly constant speed, other than phase adjustment.

Not sure if it would prove anything, but it would have less noisy data..

Party like it's 1999

RCS sounds great until you realize that it all runs through Jibe's systems, and Jibe is Google.

What's the porpoise?

Are these quantum dots or emitters? QD is LCD tech so new technology investments would likely flounder.

Being efishient was never a problem. Netting a replacement for OLED could tip the scales.

Maui ransomware

I keep thinking of moderately wealthy golfers in shorts being held hostage on a beachfront course.

"Rather than compete on the basis of innovation and product quality..."

I couldn't even finish reading that Google quote. I was temporarily blinded by shards of exploding BS detector.

No thanks

For all the horrible things that Google has done to break cellphone features, I'd only take steps to remove their software. Google wants a walled garden like Apple despite that being beyond their skills and against what everyone without iOS wants.

Did Flex incapacitate your internal storage? That's Google's favorite feature of Android 11 and 12.

Smug Amazon

Google's self driving search-bar cars are so far away that I don't see Google recovering investment costs. The first to profit will probably be facade companies that can sell promoted routes, kill some people, then vanish overnight. Even if Google exists long enough for self-driving cars to be common, they'll won't have a monopoly to pay their investments off.

Meanwhile, Amazon gets mobile inside houses with cameras, sensors, and centralized computing for maybe $2 billion total.

This would go well with a slice of moon cheese.

∞ / ∞ = Not a Nice place to work

Google has a nearly infinite codebase being managed by a nearly infinite team of employees, all working towards accomplishing tasks that upper management considers experimental. Much of the architecture is a cloud version of old mainframe designs. Programming languages have strictly prohibited features that have them frozen to a point in the past where that was feasible. There's constant clashing between the ideals of code reuse versus depreciation and replacement. People can reject your pull requests for nonfunctional reasons.

It's amazing that they haven't imploded yet. Sisyphus would quit to spend more time with his rock.

Why bother with tricks?

Namecheap, Cloudflare, Amazon, Heroku, Google, OVH, BuyVM and friends will host crime gangs for months before kicking them off. Once that's done, the criminals run a script and they're back up again.

Salesforce/Heroku is a newcomer wanting a slice of the cake. There's a crime gang sending daily SMS phishing links for real estate and various gift cards. The click-through tracker on Heroku is trivially exploitable to view all customer data by querying phone numbers. When I reported the spams and vulnerability, Salesforce responded by blocking me from their abuse contact. Classy.

Exclusive Apple features

- ThunderPark charging port reaches full range in 4 hours

- 26 speaker Bluetooth sound system, each speaker operating for up to 4 hours on a charge

- Fully autonomous self driving meeting all iRoad regulations (not for public roads)

- Front grill features a smug grin

- 1600 HP, 0-60 MPH in 10 seconds

- 0.25 G maximum lateral force for smoothest and safest driving

- No clutter of doors, windows, buttons, steering wheel, or pillars. Just one big Gorilla Glass capsule.

- No turn signals. It's time to leave those in the past.

- 20 colors of silicone bumpers to chose from

- Water resistant (water voids warranty)

- Safely limits top speed to 15 MPH if unauthorized tires or windshield wipers are detected

- Siri will tell you if you're there yet

- 90 day warranty

- 2 year Apple Care available

Popcorn

I look forward to seeing what kind of secret justice has been going on.

$9 billion ... $49 billion

It would have cost a fraction of that to form a new company and set aside 10 years worth of operating costs. The bean counters must have been working on commission.

So much justification

Meta's goal is to sell ad placement in a bot-curated view of freely submitted content. Really, they're just trying to make deployment and maintenance easier.

Always spying except

Google aggressively monitors everything you do until you're trying to report criminal uses of GCP, then it's all bots and forms and can't process your complaint.

The amount of Google IP address space in various blocklists would alarm anyone out shopping for hosting. Google is probably single handedly responsible for all the blocklists adding IPv6 support.

$7.3 billion is heartless and cruel

Like sending your customer's account to debt collection after she was robbed and murdered by your own service technician.

This would be an unbelievable story if not for there being a cable TV operator involved.

Published too early

Because it gets worse: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1551389048572301312?s=20&t=Edj7sPejaots-uYngnahhA