Posts by DropBear 4735 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
"But the court, noting that it was possible for a registrant to provide the same data for each of the three contacts - and that this had not led to a registration being denied."
Carefully saved in my doom survival toolbox, to be used in case I ever need to well and truly lock up a malicious hive mind or AI.
"If this this AI gains sentience it is going to be well pissed off, if not totally insane. And, we all know how dangerous an insane AI can be."
So, you're basically saying it will be perfectly indistinguishable by any means from (and precisely as dangerous as) the average YouTube commenter...?
Huh? What 100 years? Did you mean ONE? Year after year, my local highway tax receipts are perfectly blank scraps of paper with barely the slightest (unreadable) hint of ever having had something printed on by the time I get the next one. And they sit inside an opaque cover all year round, undisturbed...
"Also in the case of a genuine business, all of the information is already going to be available publicly anyway."
You'll be surprised how many websites with a (more or less) genuine business behind them look perfectly legitimate right up until you attempt to find ANY kind of contact information - really advanced players make even discerning what the company name is impossible. You're simply faced with a brand, presumably fronting for Space Lizards, because you'll never find out anything more - for instance care to guess who "gismeteo.com" are...?
Not sure about that specific episode (or potentially conductive parts in obscure phone models), but the plain old telephone network does already send you nearly mains* voltage every time it makes your phone ring (try holding the bare wires in your hand when it rings - you won't be doing it twice unless you like getting shocked)...
* Yes I do know it's only a similar magnitude** not actually a closely near value.
** No idea what it amounts to in practice these days considering all the modern "spoof-a-POTS" kit converting fibre into a "landline" right outside your door - some of it apparently can't even make TWO phones on the same line both ring...
There's nothing "uniquely American" about the concept of pedestrians not simply walking across the street wherever they feel like it; try that shit in Eastern Europe, get fined all the way to oblivion if there's a cop around - as you should be*. There's a good reason the international "pedestrian crossing" traffic sign exists. Sane places use them.
* of course we still do it when the road is effectively empty far to the left and right - but everyone knows it's unmistakably our ass on the line if we failed to spot a cop** and our fault if anything goes wrong.
"There's the apocryphal story"
My one rule concerning any "haw-haw funny" stories is that unless credible proof to the contrary exists not a single one of them ever happened, all of them being the invention of some moron going "wouldn't it be a hilarious story if some guy... and then that happened... and they made it much worse by..."
"If I recall correctly, that was not a constructive move and scuppered Randy's attempt at more um, subtle action."
On the other hand, my brain halts and catches fire every time I remember that the author in his infinite wisdom had Randy attempt to be "subtle" sitting with his laptop in his lap smack on the roof of his freaking car, right next to an obviously busy op-staging area...
Not sure this is a Facebook-specific move - I don't think anyone involved from the bottom all the way to the top even wasted a single millisecond pondering whether this action has any chances of success or not; it's just one of these things that get matter-of-factly filed solely because they can be filed, and if by some miracle they succeed they're a free bonus. If it gets shot down nobody is surprised, nobody cares. Sort of a lawyerese "due diligence" thing, actual outcome is irrelevant...
A thing to note about the whole Z-wave security issue (quite well emphasized in the original source, strikingly less so in the article) is that a huge portion of the quoted <whatever large number> z-wave devices worldwide have not the faintest clue that secure z-wave even exists, full stop. And yes, that includes a fair number of the ones being sold right now. And some of those that do have to be specifically instructed in a special way to use any security at the time you add them to your network, by using a different procedure than what you'd normally use for a no security join (you did read the leaflet all the way to the end, right?).
More to the point, there are currently more unicorns in the world than S2-capable devices - specifically, a search of the central registry of z-wave compliant products is right now yielding a grand total of 6 (six) controllers that support it (also pointed out in the original source) - whatever you have now or see in any store you can think of is going include none of them.
Finally, the "downgrade option" is not so much a bug-type vulnerability but rather just intended interoperability - in the sense that a device that reports gets jammed and spoofed to "report" no support for the S2 mode is accepted to join in a less secure mode; yes, this may not be desirable but the alternative is "this controller only works with S2-capable devices (all fifty or so of them) and DOES NOT with anything S0 or less - boy I sure do hope you know what all those terms are" which is utterly anathema to the "most z-wave stuff typically just works with any other z-wave stuff, of any generation" foundational z-wave principle. I don't see anything like that selling all that well...
That's remarkable considering all the websites I've seen presented their cookie (or miscellaneous consent) begging popups with a sole "agree, puny human!" option and nothing else - some of them quite literally covering the bottom third of the screen with no other way* to make them go away.
* ...unless of course you routinely use a pick-and-kill add-on like HackThis or uBlock Origin's "zap", which swats** them off the screen post haste - until you hit refresh or click on anything, when you have to start anew.
** ...unless it doesn't, because the element in question is somehow un-pickable / does not get detected at all; in which case selecting "Inspect object" from the context menu then "delete node" once you found it achieves the same thing. Yes, only until you click anything. Yes, I AM pissed, verily, thanks for asking.
"That looks like a lightly regurgitated press release, not actual journalism."
You mean news outlets* are supposed to do anything beyond regurgitating press releases in the 21st century? What a novel idea...! Has anyone told them...?
* Present company excepted. Ish.
I'd like to see some evidence backing up those so-called tremendous CPU performance jumps in the last ten years - glossing over the fact that apparently everyone discreetly just stopped graphing flops performance past circa 2010 for some reason, all the material I've seen seems to indicate that progress of single-core performance all but stalled around that time, and "more cores" doesn't seem have done much either ever since quad/hex/octa-cores suddenly replaced single cores, also a while ago.
So. Would you like to hear a scary story about how plain, ordinary surface-mounted MLCC capacitors on a PCB have a non-zero aural response...?
"That bloke on YouTube happens to be Phil Mason, PhD"
It doesn't matter one damn bit what kind of PhWhateverthehellyouwant he may or may not have - until he sits down in front of a vacuum chamber, cranks up the amps and observes the outcome, he has NOT "proven" or "debunked" anything; he merely offered his educated opinion on why it's not supposed to work. Which has precisely zero relevance to whether or not it actually does.
Science stops being science the moment a claim is dismissed purely on the basis that our current theories say it can't happen. Sure, there are definitely nuances concerning how much effort you might be inclined to invest in studying a specific claim, but ultimately the only thing that matters is multiple experiments confirming or disproving that claim, not what we think "ought to" happen.
As long as you opt me in by default into anything, opting out is all you're going to see from me, even if your goddamn survey is going to magically save all Somalian children forever. ASKING is fine; the moment you PUT YOUR FOOT in the door and assume consent I'm reaching for the shotgun, pal.
"I'm trying to figure out what the difference is between something like this and VirusTotal."
You and me both. The most I can think of is Virustotal might be using scanners that let the scanner's maker take a look at anything that triggers an alarm - which would be rather counter-productive for a malware writer - while this guy probably used strictly offline scanners. Still nowhere near law-breaching IMHO, but it's all I got...
That's why I closed Google Maps and never opened it again after it told me "enable location services or go away", and use OpenStreetMap-based fully offline maps with a free third-party navigation app that I didn't even give network access to. Yes, it can route me straight across the entire country. No, I don't get live traffic reports and such - so far I seem to have survived without them just fine. And yes, it's conceivable Google might still be tracking me but certainly not with my consent or participation.
Maybe this is specific to me and my bonkers-paranoid default settings for everything I touch, but Thunderbird has been asking me "there's linked stuff in this email, want me to load it?" (while showing me the bare-bones skeleton of text and missing images) for far longer than I can remember. Is this not a general phenomenon...?
I always find it entertaining whenever mass simply gaining a particular altitude from a planetary surface gets confused with mass at the same altitude also possessing orbital velocity. The difference is more than superficial, for purposes of harvesting said mass for later use (not to mention colliding with). If one could merely impart acceleration upon it as a way of "pushing off it" so to speak - well, good luck with that, but you can only do that as long as you are flying through said plume...
What kind of a joke of an outfit are these clowns running where major pieces of infrastructure (like, oh, the entire community communication backbone) are only accessible for maintenance by one. single. person...?!? You don't need a full complement of gaffer boys and personal assistants and catering crew in an open source project, but there's no excuse for not having at least one or two other people trusted with admin access (including the data backups), who only ever need to do anything at all (as admins) in exactly these kinds of situations when the admin-in-charge is MIA at the worst possible moment.
As others have pointed out, blown / sucked is a bit relative; however, if one were to use the "closest to normal" pressure as a baseline reference, in this case the unusual pressure would be the low one outside, so it would be "sucked". Still a matter of perspective though.
Wonderful idea! Would you be interested in this here hollow but ultra-heavy-duty thick cast iron enclosure, spherical for perfect omnidirectional protection with a convenient ankle chain you can attach to yourself so you cannot possibly ever lose it...? It even comes with free lube to (mostly) silence the chain during daily use...!
I have written software at some point for a client then later just happened to meet someone who worked there at the time and got to see my code - when we realized this, you know what was first thing he mentioned? Not that the code was shit or that it was great, no. "Your comments were quite funny you know..." Humour is part of who we are and therefore of what we make. It needs to stay!
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