Posts by Kevin McMurtrie

I worked on an online photo and document rendering codebase many years ago. The original photo rendering server was some really rough C. It wasn't thread safe, it didn't use memory efficiently, and its error handling was exit(-1). I started converting it into C++ for the bitmaps and Java for the rendering pipelines and storage abstractions. One thing that really needed improvement was diagnostics. I added a bit of Java code that would watch the JFIF data stream coming out of the C++ and inject a ton of diagnostics as a JPEG comment when the right location was reached. This was perfect. Customers would call about a bad image, we'd find it in the cache, extract the diagnostics, track down the bug, and purge everything that was corrupted. Even if the cache expired, they could send us the image.

Now it starts getting weird. When I Googled for the company's name, I see other photo web sites with my diagnostics dumps. People had been scraping the web site and posting their photos elsewhere. The diagnostics comment became the photo caption, and that became search results. This was happening a lot. 50% hilarious, 50% scary.

"How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?"

Maybe treat them nicely and provide value? Haha, I know. Too wealthy for that! Use shock collars.

2000?

Max Headroom fake AI from 1985 was more fun than 2023 clumsy AI.

Ok, I'll be down vote bait

It's beautiful hardware but I find that MacOS is just a bit too weird. Instead of having a geat desktop UX or a dumb iPhone UX, it has a chaotic jumble of both. Just getting app notifications working is a journey. Getting software development tools installed and playing nice together is days of trial and error. There are Apple apps on the immutable OS partition that get system updates and there are Apple app-store apps that only update if you sign in to a cloud account. Most apps leave behind a scattered mess of libraries and resources if you attempt to uninstall them. It's making Linux look simple.

Already exploited

The Cloudflare phishing gangs have been recently sending so much spam through Outlook accounts that something-Microsoft has to have been compromised. I put Outlook's address ranges in my rejection list to stop it all.

Do the CUs get a refund?

One advantage of "the cloud" is that you should be able to delete the main hosting account and bring up a clean replica in a day. Most serious companies practice bringing up a replica annually. It's part of a process called disaster recovery.

If I was buying cloud services from a disaster recovery business that can't do this, I'd want a retroactive refund.

Why a Musk movie now?

The live series is still running and viewing is free. The FY episode was pretty good.

EVs sitting idle on lots?

Maybe people are waiting for stealerships to stop marking up over MSRP. MSRP already includes a nice dealership profit.

Sure, no more $99 oil change specials where the oil is topped off but not changed. Can't charge $60 for a mysterious fuel system treatment either. They can still do CV boot, brake rotors, and shock absorber scams.

The Chocolate Factory collective says

You're not being very Googly. Let us meet somewhere to chat. We know when and where, and we'll see you there.

The obvious move

Yaccarino needs to lock Musk's account for promoting hate speech and tarnishing the business image.

If Musk fires her, she'd be leaving with a somewhat redeemed reputation while X loses business and slowly suffocates in debt. If Musk apologizes, Yaccarino is cementing a bit of power and X might survive a little longer.

Some good news

My experience with Hikvision cameras is that it's trivial to crash them and they don't automatically recover.

Broke with a Snap

Snap hate is well deserved. It's like a copy of everything that's a failure in Google's ecosystem.

I've never seen a Snap app install and just work. There are always missing features and random errors until you discover what fine-grained permission is incorrect. Even if you do know about the little permissions button in the Snap store, do you know what in that enormous dashboard needs to be toggled? And then there's Snap encapsulating settings and caches in who-the-hell-knows-where. Backing up settings but not caches is always manual work.

Cool, but

This probably falls into the same category as mmWave 5G. It's technically amazing and useful but the percentage of active users is close to zero. It won't get the numbers it needs to be profitable.

8GB is plenty if your walled garden is small enough

People think they're power users the moment the shiny new tech lands in their hands. They have no idea what a difficult computing task is and they have no idea whether it's running locally or in the cloud. Tell them 8GB isn't enough and suddenly they're an expert in how it magically is.

My personal server is running various things for me and other groups that I donate CPU time to. It sometimes consumes up to 40GB for just the filesystem cache. Yeah, it need a cache because it has a mix of SSD and spinning rust because nobody in their right mind buys 26TB of flash for a personal system.

The number 45 just can't catch a break.

"overtly illegal activities are rarely offered on the public internet"

Hosting it on AWS is a good start but it needs Cloudflare in front to look more legit. Give it TLD like .pro or .xyz and you know it's the real deal.

Digital magic

People envision magic when they hear about a digital product that is unique and impossible to copy. All the NFT startups are hyping that you can buy, collect, and sell NFT media with no risk. Some even use the ledger for pyramid hierarchical payments.

Of course anything can be copied. All you're buying is a space on a tamper-resistant ledger claiming ownership, and that claim may never have been valid.

Google? Safety?

All these scam VPN client apps exist because the built-in Android VPN client sucks. What is it even compatible with? I once spent a two days trying different servers and never had a stable connection. Not even Google uses it for their VPN product.

I've been using Wireguard on Android and liking it. Not usually for privacy, but for creating a stable virtual network when I'm at a place that is running NAT independently on each one of their WiFi access points.

Now scraping under the barrel

401k and other retirement accounts are huge scams in the US. They show you a graph of your money exponentially growing over time. That's only true for rare accounts with limited or no fees. On top of that, it has to be a company not using normal people's investments to manipulate stock prices to benefit preferred investors. It's not unusual for bad employers to offer 401k services with long term yields of -10% annually.

Yet that's not bad enough for IBM?

Some 2FA apps are not like others

Some companies use a 2FA token generator called "VIP Access." It's really secure. Super duper secure. It's so secure that you can't back up its internal token. Lose your phone data, lose your 2FA.

Companies using it know this happens all the time so they're fast at fixing it. All they do is ask some trivial questions and verify your identity with SMS.

Joke's on the criminal

Are any victims getting more money as restitution than if it hadn't been stolen?

Hide/flag the ads

Hide or flag all the ads every time you use Facebook. After about 1000 or so are hidden, their ad engine starts failing. Soon it's completely ad-free. I'm guessing it has a very short query deadline to prevent overloads.

Facebook responded by e-mailing me all the ads and refusing to let me change my e-mail address. Deleting my account was the sensible fix.

The Old Instruction Set Computer

I have the impression that x86-64 is in an awkward position between RISC and CISC where it doesn't optimize well. An option for Intel might be letting ARM win the RISC market and go for a new CISC design. Create a high level instruction set that can do common computation, AI, and graphics work. Intel can leverage their expertise on ultra-complex processors to put JIT compilers into a broad range of chips. They'd all have varying hardware abilities but support one instruction set. It might actually optimize very well.

x86 seems like a dead-end.

All fun and games until...

At some point hackers will officially be found connected to a government and a declaration of war will follow. The escalations of attacks to critical public infrastructure and government operations are begging for it.

The worst part of that happening will be nobody being able to verify when those connections are truth, poor assumptions, or lies.

Better late than never

https://www.theonion.com/the-onion-stands-with-israel-because-it-seems-like-yo-1850922505

That's going to give French Polynesia an impressive 20000x speed boost. The very nicest hotels there have maybe 15Mbps of free WiFi in the middle of the night. Everything else is a dense mesh of 2G, 3G, LTE, 5G, and PAYG WiFi with speeds in the Kbps range.