PreInternet01

The 'point of contact' on a snowmobile is mostly the track, which is like, 40x350cm (15x150"), or whatever, plus some small front skis, but, really these don't do very much.

Still, the experience is exactly the same as a 'manual' bike (here's mine: https://www.gazelle.nl/puurnl).

Point is: you need to really steer beyond leaning? You either hit a over-40-degree turn (not uncommon even in Amsterdam!) or you did something wrong. You need to brake? Either an idiot crossed your path, or you definitely did something wrong!

Turning into a parking lot with a snow bike is quit feasible: you just need to go slow and plan ahead. And possibly back up a few times. Because making a 90-degree turn in snow really isn't any easier than on tarmac!

Mostly, you'll use your snow bike to go fast (60-100 km/h, 40-60 mph), and you really want to plan your trajectory pretty well at those speeds. Using your handlebars, or your 'brakes' just isn't a realistic option!

Sure, if you want to turn left a bit: lean heavily left, and steer slightly right. And vice versa. But making any sudden turns? Not going to happen, especially not with a passenger...

Nah. I have a cargo bike with a front carrier platform that allows/requires me to lock my front wheel when parking/loading.

If I forget to unlock my front wheel, I can go about my ways just fine: it's just unpleasant.

I also ride snowmobiles on a regular basis, and if you require any effort at steering (like at braking!), that's pretty much an error: you shouldn't need to do it! And that's even at 60km/h...

No, I hate to disagree so unequivocally, but you pretty much never pivot your front wheel on a bike to turn!

I have a cargo bike with a lockable front wheel, and even if I forget to unlock that, I can still drive, even though it's unpleasant.

That unpleasantness mostly comes from being unable to turn my front wheel in the opposite direction before leaning in to the actual turn direction, though.

This is on a manually powered bike, though, so maybe things are different on a motor bike? But I sort-of doubt it, since the physics are the same...

Why "good luck?" I'm an avid biker (the manually powered type, mostly, but sometimes also snowmobiles), and most 1-20 (I guess?) degree turns that I make do not involve turning my front wheel at all (in the sense that: I don't move my hands consciously).

Now, for wider turns, you do need to turn your front, but even then, it's usually in the opposite direction!

Anyway, on snow mobiles, you really don't want to need your steering handles, as they don't control a wheel, but skis! And staying on the trail mostly involves reducing speed and, well, leaning. By the time you really need your steering handles, or your brakes, you're really already in trouble...

Yeah, and then it turns out your chat group was all about breaking into all cars in neighborhood Z, or spearfishing all elderly in e-mail domain D, and you're all like "why didn't the police stop this?"

Well, guess what, the police is the government, and they need some intel to go on... (And, yeah, they also need to be restrained. But that's not what this particular submission, nor your reply, makes a strong point for)

Well, like any bike? By leaning into the direction you want to go in?

Granted, this particular bike might take some heavy leaning to make anything like a turn, but for a snow bike, that might not even be such a bad thing, since... that's not what these vehicles are about in the first place?

Lots of doom-speculation here, but I think the whole "ChatControl" controversy could be contained with One Single Measure: "If >X% of messages in a given group contain the term(s) 'Y', auto-report that group, and silently-add verified LE to said group if requested."

The sciency-part of the article seems a bit thin, but... cooler transformers absolutely imply a more stable power grid!

A good while ago, I got hired as part of a team by a local grid operator to analyze all the data they could get from their new transformers. These transformers were deployed to neighborhoods, and could report, like, 200 operating parameters in real-time.

This was pretty cool! So we quickly created an infrastructure to collect all these stats and feed them into a then-newfangled Machine Learning model.

Said model exercised its perceptrons for a while, correlating all possible parameters against the probability of experiencing an outage, and then came up with <drum roll> transformer oil temperature as the only reliable indicator of failure.

Which was sort-of a disappointment to the grid operator, as they already knew that, but it enabled them to not pay the license fee for all the 200 new metrics, and just continue with the one they already had, albeit with a bit more focus.

It's quite interesting how "install a one-time thing, get code, get access" turns out to be such a difficult and apparently unprofitable business.

TeamViewer has always been evil, due to their persistent-install-by-default policy, not to mention them clinging to 4-digits PINs for years after that ceased to be viable, and refusing to respond to security concerns with anything approaching transparency. I used to be a paid customer for many years, but had to abandon ship due to ever-increasing costs (yeah for mandatory viewer upgrades!) related to MSP features that I never asked for and were complicating even the most basic tasks.

Then, I turned to Splashtop, which was glorious for a while. Until they decided to assign me a "customer success representative" and wanted to do the same MSP upsell, even though I explicitly and repeatedly asked them to leave me alone.

Since then, I've mostly been using Windows QuickAssist, and it's OK: you still need to be on the phone with the party you support to guide them through various permission prompts, but that's probably unavoidable.

The list of failed products in this space is impressive, by the way! Anyone remember Fog Creek Copilot? Weird, because "I'll pay you $99.95 on an annual basis to do 2-3 remote sessions every month" sounds like it should be lucrative...

To be honest, I sort-of-expected a lot more conversation around the mechanics of the ceremony (after all, with a lonely funeral, you're the director!), which is a fascinating topic on its own.

Instead, reactions were more like those to a viral video: how dare you pay attention to someone who clearly doesn't deserve it? I did not manage to complete all responses I started typing out because of, well, feelings, but that strangely helped to justify the handful of hours I spend on this particular project every year...

See http://www.eenzameuitvaart.nl -- there are contact details for various regions

> using a dead person as as a prop to make you feel better about yourself

No, "feel better" is definitely not what myself (nor anyone else involved in this program, as far as I'm aware) is trying to achieve here.

I know that a deceased person doesn't care about pretty much anything. Yet, that doesn't preclude me from caring about them, does it?

No, I'm not making stuff up, and yes, it's weird.

But: if you die, and nobody is around to eulogize you, would you rather be completely forgotten, or have a total stranger think about what happened to you and make a short-and-ultimately-meaningless speech accordingly?

For me, it's the latter, but then, I'm biased :)

Hmm, well, imagine this turning up on HN! I attend 1,2-maybe-3 funerals every year because of this exact project, and while every one of these is very different, the experience is always humbling.

Most of the time, literally nobody will show up. So, you'll pay your respect to the deceased using a short speech that is based on the information provided (which is usually pretty scarce, like: "found abandoned, identified, but no next-of-kin responded") complemented with Google and your imagination, and that's about it.

Then, there are the occasions where one or two people will attend. These are usually the hardest: you have to make clear that you don't actually know the first thing about the deceased, other than what Google told you, and that might be ENTIRELY wrong, but still have to deliver a coherent eulogy. Poems work best for these situations, and sometimes talking to the visitors is quite revealing as well.

And then, there are surprises, like a room full of people turning up, and you being able to elicit stories from family and friends, and basically having a regular funeral. But I admit that happened once in like the past decade or so.

Anyway, I think it's important that nobody is left to their final resting place without witnesses, and I also find avoiding that is a good way to engage with your community...

OK, so first the DongleHider (1 device), now the DongleHider+ (3 devices, although I think many beyond the originally intended Logitech transceiver won't fit?). Can't wait to see what Gillette-style innovation the end of the month will bring!

Meanwhile, if you have dongle management problems on a truly grand scale, there's always something like https://www.seh-technology.com/uk/products/usb-dongle-server...

> much of the emerging narrative about this backdoor that you can read all over the net is based on idle speculation

...which sums up the situation quite nicely.

This was a pretty bad attack on a certain ecosystem. The ecosystem will recover, or not, regardless of your feelings. Unless you're in a position to truly make a difference, just sit back and enjoy the ride...

Horrific confession time: I have several .sqlite files that exceed 1.5TB in size and consist of a single table with a single field called JSON (guess what it contains!).

Early days, I just used 'JSON LIKE '%json-substring-match%' for queries, and that did get a bit slow after a while, but mostly the syntax was just really gross when doing aggregations. Fortunately, these days, you can do:

    CREATE INDEX IDX_Foo_Bar ON Foo (json_extract(JSON, '$.Bar'));

...which makes subsequent SELECT queries on that function nice and quick again.

This has been going on since (checks create time on one .sqlite file) July 2018, with pretty much zero perf or downtime issues.

The reason given on the show was that the celebrity-chef judge did not appreciate the taste.

That didn't (and doesn't) make an awful lot of sense though, since they used the same spice in very similar quantities in another dish the week before, and were praised for that by the same judge.

So, everyone's best guess is that the "reality show" script writers decided it was time for them to go, to give more screen time to more interesting contestants...

I love saffron! Not because of its taste (which I kind-of hate) or other properties (like staining, which I definitely hate, or security-theatre-triggering, but more about that below), but mostly due to the rituals around it, and because a friend of mine once got booted off a TV cooking show as a result of using it.

So, visiting the famous (and horrible, but thank you!) Spice Market in Istanbul recently, I just could not resist learning everything I could about saffron (mostly: how to spot the fake stuff -- spoiler: the paint sinks in hot water), plus, of course, taking home some of the real stuff for said friend.

This, on an unplanned detour through Germany on my way back, got me into a bit of trouble. Apparently, the post-9/11 scanners that determine whether your hand-luggage contains anything troublesome, have some of their own issues with saffron...

The opposition is not based on trade policy (nor Russian influence). In fact, if your assessment of cabinet members in general were even remotely accurate, they would love 60% tariffs on China! After all, escalating that kind of trade war into hot war would be straightforward...

> DN$ only supports DNSSEC for customers in the ENTERPRISE tier

OK, so how much do I pay you to change that message to "DNSSEC is pointless and you should feel bad for making this request"?

> Because 95% of journalists oppose that candidate

Well, as do like, 100% of the high-level bureaucrats that served said candidate in their previous presidency.

So, given that little tidbit, are those journalists actually unreasonable? And as a followup: if their position is mostly supported by facts, isn't "comforting and easy to promote" a secondary concern?

Yup. And it's good. My aspiration, though, it to migrate to https://leanrada.com/htmz/

The article (the point of which is: 'just ignore this', which is sort-of the opposite of the conclusion you seem to have gotten to) specifically mentions that their egress is free via Cloudflare.

But, sure, if you have public-facing services on AWS that have the ability to send large amounts of data on demand, absolutely make sure that you limit access to those! (E.g. using a unique download token that is only available from a separate rate-limited and valid-source-checking service).

So, funny story, a major reason why abuse reporting became pointless (unless done at the right level, i.e. when there is a direct and significant business relationship between the parties involved) is... abuse of the abuse reporting process!

Sometime around the dawn of this millennium, for example, 'consumer firewalls' at just about every OSI layer became a thing, and a lot of these had the great feature where they would automatically email WHOIS contacts for domains and IP blocks (plus all of their upstreams, for good measure) every time something bad happened, like receiving a single UDP packet on port 139.

Stuff like that, predictably, put a bit of a dent in the availability of useful technical contact information, and as much as I would like to go back to the "I have the beeper number of the guy who runs the national backbone" Internet, I'm afraid that Cloudflare is the best we can do these days, sorry.

Back to the topic at hand: "fight" on the 2024 Internet means refusing service to abusive parties as much as possible. That responsibility is best outsourced (see 'Cloudflare' above...), and a hard undertaking if you want to do it yourself without causing collateral damage (which, yes, Cloudflare also does, but at least you get someone to point at!).

Expecting to somehow get in touch (or worse, 'get even') with the myriad of bulletproof hosters (who simply don't care), admins of bug-ridden/misconfigured systems (who often don't even understand the issue) and assorted detritus is unproductive. And, as with any "the ideal amount of fraud is nonzero" discussion, that can be a hard pill to swallow, but a necessary one nonetheless.

The TL;DR of my comment is "I personally enjoy implementing automated solutions to relatively-low-volume abuse, but as long as it doesn't cause you any capacity concerns, I fully understand ignoring it, since it's hard"

Using that as a reason to assign me responsibility for the state of the internet seems... slight hyperbole?

I'd hardly call that a DDoS attack: from the description given, the extra 8TB-or-so of monthly traffic seems to fall under "annoyingly pointless abuse of services"...

As long as such abuse doesn't cause monetary or resource exhaustion concerns, it's quite OK to ignore it, but stories like "whelp, turns out that 80% of the capacity of our auto-scaling fleet is not doing anything useful" are depressingly common enough to at least keep an eye on things.

My annoyance with this kind of abuse revolves mostly around logging: a majority of logs just showing the same set of hosts displaying the same pointless behavior over and over again. Again, not a huge issue if your log storage is cheap and plentiful (as it should be), but having some kind of way to automatically classify certain traffic as abusive and suppress routine handling of that is definitely a good idea.

It's also a lot harder than it sounds! I can't count the number of times I've added classification logic to my inbound SMTP server that should pick up on outright, silly abuse (of which there is a lot when dealing with email), only to have it triggered by some borderline-valid scenario as well.

Spending way too much time on going down successive rabbit holes is a great way not to get any real work done -- a great reason to outsource, or, if that's too much work as well or just too expensive, indeed just ignore the abuse, annoying though it is...

Well, my only experience with commodity trading is that blocking any emails that come from a previously-unknown sender and contain the substring 'commodit' cuts back spam significantly...

But, good luck with that, I guess?

Thank you so much, as you can see, I truly didn't know that. Maybe tuning out Microsoft messaging to the max wasn't the best decision after all...