Re: Exit the Cleaner
I seem to remember that a motorcycle was the actual "demo page" of a certain brand of plotters. Don't ask me which brand, but I believe I still have that page somewhere. And those are definitely biker goggles -->
4733 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
Actually... no. While what they were doing was not particularly advisable, it is established fact that the inherent and extremely dangerous instability of reactors of that design at very low power levels was not known at the time, and certainly wasn't known to anyone working at the plant. You might want to do some more reading...
And there goes any remaining credibility of those savvy commentards who insist that site-specific variation schemes are the best thing since sliced bread and the answer to everything, each time the futility of modern password management is being discussed. I'm sure someone arguing that it can all be fixed with an even more convoluted site-obfuscation algorithm that nobody could possibly ever guess will come along shortly...
Surely the colonists were no angels (yes they did indeed do all that) - but if you suggest prior to them those Noble Natives were conducting all their conflict resolution by anything remotely resembling the Geneva Convention then I'm going to need the entire rest of the day off to laugh it off properly. Pot, kettle, they needed no "teaching" - and I'd wager most folks on the "less savage" side, as bad as they were, tended to stop short of doing certain things including but not limited to collecting skin off the heads of their vanquished foes.
Yes and no. While it may be all but impossible to grab a handful of sand in such a way that none of it escapes past your fingers, it's perfectly possible to get most of a handful of sand from point A to point B. When you're in the business of crowd control, that's quite sufficient - there is a plethora of tools to deal with whatever "escapes".
"check if a post is from a historical document"
That would be actually even worse, leading to the situation where mindlessly parroting sacrosanct quotes being protected but discussing them and the general ideas involved in your own words would be verboten. Don't worry though, we're getting there. Maybe with web 3.0 or 4.0...
"I've not met anyone who puts the presence (or not) of a notch as a dealbreaker when it comes to phone choice"
Now you have. Nice to meet you too. Also, the point of an IR blaster is not to pretend it's an IrDA communications port, but to give you the ability to use your phone as an IR remote which I would very much like to have indeed except my phone is way too old to have one of those and I'm not going to upgrade just for that alone. Oh, and for the record - according to some twenty thousand peeps, only about a quarter of them find any kind of notch acceptable.
I fully expect IGG to rely on the vast majority of its backers never having heard about the whole Vega thing - and be right. It seems that generally speaking it doesn't matter how badly a ship is taking on water, as long as large enough bits of it are still above the water the band can continue to play as if nothing was amiss...
It's a mindset. If people cracking such safes would routinely come and go all around the place, the safe being unsafe would be self-evident and well understood. Seeing as how that's not the case, the safe used to be "fine" (sufficient against all actual threats, by virtue of there being hardly any) all the way until he showed up and proved it not so. The kind of people who think that reasoning like "it would still be fine if you hadn't messed with it" makes perfect sense tend to love to shoot the messenger, just so they can go back to "nobody capable to mount a credible threat left standing (that we can see), so we're perfectly safe again".
That said, nobody ever will shake your hand and thank you for embarrassing them - and the unusually enlightened exceptions who do are incredibly few and far between; so if you plan on doing that sort of thing to someone, you better be damn sure that either they are definitely in that minority or that you're bulletproof, before you hand them a loaded gun and announce you pwned them...
They deserve every single cent on that bill for the utter lack of any sort of diligence on the matter. If you think you're entitled to a carefree stroll through a construction site, no need for a hard hat, just because you're "just a little old lady" and can't be bothered to care, you absolutely deserve to get your head taken off.
You have an honest winning ticket for $1000, con man offer to give you $4000 for it. You get more $$$$, he gets to keep $1000 of clean money and regards the rest of $3000 he paid you as the cost of laundering an illicitly gained $4000 into a clean $1000.
"The other is that under certain circumstances Google support lacks human judgement"
There is no such thing as Google "support". Google is the cloud, and it offers exactly as much "support" as one. Your jetpack is out of fuel? Awww, tough luck: down you go and I hope you like craters. The Wall in the North from GoT is dwarfed by the edifice Google puts between its employees and its "customers".
"But at least they can't send back via the aerial"
Wait a few decades until everything runs on dynamically reconfigurable universal silicon (as a more general version of current FPGAs) and your hacked TV will spontaneously grow a transmitter if hacked...
Well guess what I want a reasonable bezel too. Aesthetics aside (which are murder on my OCD requiring neat, straight and symmetrical things) it's annoying enough never quite knowing whether just grabbing or holding my (currently quite traditionally bezel-ful) phone on its sides will result in activating something accidentally - or quite the opposite, blocking an intentional slide because the phone senses my hand near the edge and it thinks I'm "holding" the slide...
That guy sounds kinda full of it. There's a specific reason GPUs are structured the way they are, and yes any other CPU-based algorithm operating on large sets of non-interrelated data could benefit from more massively parallel data processing, but that's an awfully specific condition. Just because every computer operates on data it by no means follows that those operations can always - or even most of the time - be performed simultaneously, and speculative execution is the only thing that can help you there, kinda by definition. We can decide to give it up if we're okay with the performance hit it would cause, but we should stop pretending it's just a matter of "doing it differently" and we can have all that performance right back...
Unfortunately most sites really do work like "you may or may not want to fiddle with some settings, but ultimately everything we decide to call 'necessary' will be forced on you and all you can do is click 'I agree' or go away".
Google is currently harassing me with a "click ok to acknowledge we will continue to do whatever we want to do to you - just to be clear, it's an acknowledgement of taking notice, we are not asking you for permission to do it" note-wall "obstacle" (which I continue to DOM-delete each time) on multiple of its own services while Search / Mail / YouTube sees me as logged in and leaves me alone - go figure...
Disqus is currently insisting it has the God-given right to record my IP and hell knows what else as "necessary" and I must consent or else fuck off. Seeing as how the half of the internet that isn't using Facebook for comments is using Disqus, that used to be a bit of an issue until I got fed up and taught my blocker to bypass it.
Frankly, I'd really like to see most of these mammoths hit with max penalty several times and taken down several dozen notches in attitude - the smaller sites actually tend to turn out to be the more civilized ones in my experience. Ultimately though, if you're not a fan of cookies in general and wipe pretty much all of them each session you end up clicking through a forest each time you go to any website, again and again...
Because it's not worth the effort for all of the five files in existence that the VirusTotal collective of scanners unanimously finds clean. Everything else gets flagged by at least three of them, and that occasionally gives pause even to the more seasoned players never mind how confused Joe Bloggs would become...
"happy technically capable to have 10s or 100s of tabs open" sounds more like it; I have FF set to "don't load inactive tabs" and it still looks like it's downloading the Internet for a while each time it starts up, visibly going through immense effort constructing the tabs that aren't supposed to be anything other than a literal set of tabs on top of a single window. And that's a quad core on an SSD (which FF is killing at a brisk pace btw. by virtue of infinity NAND writes each day)...
"I'm sure when it gets a bit down the line he will have extra charges added to his sheet."
Ehhh, don't even bother with those, just add "wire fraud" at the end - that seems to be the one that truly gets everyone these days, and he _was_ using the internet after all...
I have to assume the "additional" dots come manually added to the user data to be printed whereas the "encoded" dots are applied by the printer firmware, which raises a huge question mark about whether "your" dots end up indistinguishable in every way from "theirs". If there's the utterly slightest misalignment in the obfuscating dot pattern compared to the built-in one you're busted; if the yellow is not the exact same shade, you're busted. If the dithered sub-structure of a dot (if any) is in any way different, you're busted. And that's assuming you identified with 100% confidence which template you should use on the printer you're printing on (especially if it isn't even your own). Taking a poor-ish resolution photo of those papers instead of printing them starts to sound better and better (at least as far as anti-dot measures are concerned).
...for the record, some independent corroboration - I wasn't kidding even a little bit when I said that an "empty" page can comprehensively murderize your older PC. Yes, it's still there, yes, it still axes Firefox ESR. I may have botched the class name, it might just be random - my bad.
"how many users out there actually NEED eight cores"
Every single one of them if they don't fancy their Firefox eating 100% CPU as soon as you open the plain empty Google search page* which just happens to contain an invisible but constantly animating progress indicator that Firefox ESR is apparently dutifully keeps rendering even if invisibly so. Just search for the "g-loading-icon" of class "GuPFE"...
* countless other apparently innocuous pages have the same effect.
While the added privacy is appealing, the looming threat of anything going wrong with the volume (not if, but definitely when) making it completely inaccessible is certainly off-putting for me. I have edited files in sectors that weren't even officially belonging to a partition at the time (thanks a lot MS fuckers for deleting it without a single word), but if the keys go missing I'm suddenly looking at just noise. That's not maintainable data storage in my world where based on experience things break even more inevitably than death and taxes.
Every single so-called "democracy" around the world is actually an oligarchy. All assumptions concerning any degree of control people are supposed to nominally be able to exert break down when all actual power is concentrated in the hands of the wealthy AND (politically) powerful (which are in practice inextricably linked) who present a uniformly corrupt range of options to choose from universally based on lies that are immediately forgotten on election day so much so most people never believe any of it even to begin with.
And the "run yourself for office then and fix things" crowd is delusional to a disturbing degree if they truly believe people get to just decide to get into politics and do it - one does not simply walk into politics, that's not how the world works, mkay? The process is designed to make sure anyone who succeeds doing that is at least as big of a sociopath as those already there (and a personal pet of those already in power, because that's the only way you get pushed forward). As far as we can tell it's working flawlessly, and the only ones who would have the power to change it are the ones with every interest never to do so. We're fucked, full stop.
I have to assume you are aware of the reason the expression "back-seat driver" exists - and it would wreck this approach comprehensively. You will never, ever get two entities of any kind to drive a vehicle in any kind of vaguely similar style outside a strictly choreographed short run, regardless of how much you might try to "instruct" them to use a specific style. You need one of them to have absolute control authority and the other one to shut the hell up about how the first one is doing it all so horribly wrong.
Soooo... let's assume I believe the letter. Seeing as how it's threatening to begin "encrypting" (what the fuck would it do that for if they promise data _won't_ be recoverable after it does that?) at some point in the future... what exactly is supposed to prevent me from copying all my data to safety before it does...? Data at rest in cold storage won't just self-destruct, even if it really is infected...
Wait, it isn't the name of that TV series with Judy the chimp...?!?
There seem to be more caveats to this than trees in the forest, honestly. Yes, record keeping can be invaluable protection in certain situations, but... not if you ever wavered or caved to the pressure from above to do something you shouldn't have agreed to do. Not if you were ever in the situation of not being able to afford to test how far you can stretch your rope before it snaps. Not if you ever made a mistake in the "how to get other people do what I want" game which is definitely manglement's home turf, and very likely not yours. Not if "they" were savvy enough to invent a plausible excuse to keep communication out of the sphere that would allow you any meaningful record keeping beyond "I assert that this is what he told me but I have zero proof".
And while you're at it, you better have the unerring judgement of a God each and every single time even under the fuzzy conditions of real life, because if you vigorously object to something that turns out to not be a problem they'll burn you to ashes, and if you fail to object to something that does end up being a problem you'll burn again. Record keeping: good advice? Sure, but also incredibly overrated...
Not necessarily - I would expect the sort of range the latter is expected to exist at to be utterly "too late" for any kind of attempt to intercept the former (and vice versa - you'd expect a window of opportunity of more than a few minutes for an asteroid, less so for an ICBM). I would also expect a significant mismatch in mass and velocity of the incoming target, so I'm not sure how much of an overlap there actually is...
It's easy to pin this on the Big Bad Companies more than willing to take your money peddling sub-par unfinished wares left and right - and they totally do deserve everything they get blamed for and more; but the truth is* all their cost-cutting and greed contributes to the problem of insecure software only peripherally - it does not create it.
Simply put, I don't think there's any field of human endeavour where piled-up complexity is comparable even within orders of magnitude with what is happening inside computers today; and it has long ago reached and far exceeded the limit of what we - or the tools we were able to create - can cope with.
Once it was feasible to write a piece of code on a Spectrum that did all you wanted done and exactly that, without any bugs. It was incredibly hard, but it could be done. It still can be done with a microcontroller with a few kilobytes of RAM and ROM. But not with any OS-driven PC or smartphone, with its gigantic spider-web of layers upon layers of libraries and frameworks and services all full of unforeseen edge cases and imperfect joints.
And that's only the parts that - against all our efforts such as they are - end up too rickety to support their own weight; we have yet to account for the myriad of other places where the bracing is more or less reasonably sound, but not armour-plated: all the code that manages to not collapse on its own but remains vulnerable to deliberate malicious interference. How much time does it take to create the best, most solid code we can possibly create, such as that governing spaceships and aeroplanes and weapons...? Years and years - and even so that code doesn't typically need to withstand getting picked apart and abused by adversaries, since most of it remains inaccessible to tampering.
Bottom line, since this rant is getting to long anyway: we would need to stop releasing ANY new software for a whole decade. Everything frozen in time. NO new features whatsoever - none. The world's entire IT industry, only hunting and fixing bugs and vulnerabilities. And you know what? After ten years, having gotten rid of everything we could find, there would still be countless bugs and countless vulnerabilities still remaining in all that code, only now a number of "Y" instead of "X". Not "some". Not "few". Not even necessarily "fewer".
I don't know what the solution is - what I do know it's definitely not "focus harder", nor "patch harder". Neither of those will ever get us anywhere NEAR "no-bugs" or "no-vulns" nirvana. Not soon - EVER. We need something completely different if we are to ever get there, assuming it is even possible at all...
* Needless to say, all of the above is "IMHO".