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TheCondor

1,500 karma · joined July 15, 2009

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TheCondor··on eMudhra to exit global SSL/TLS certificate business
“Oh you mean like PIN numbers?”

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZTqEHehcETo

TheCondor··on Plex vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild to drop a cryptominer
Did they start doing automatic updates?

I have a lifetime subscription, I use plex to share the media with the wife and kids on all of our devices, it does the job. I won't bitch about their streaming ambitions, but doing automatic updates and taking security seriously would go far for them.

TheCondor··on Why I Wrote PGP (1991, revised 1999)
PGP is special to me, I was a beta user when Phil uploaded it to some Colorado BBSes, way back when. He even made time to talk to teenage me about it on the phone.

What's crazy is when it was concieved, we didn't have trusted strong cryptographic primitives. We did have DES but it wasn't trusted. We did have some of these crazy ideas that we all would have "secrets" and you might put those secrets encrypted on a disk in a vault and you'd not even want the feds to get them. Now we have all sorts of much more vetted crypto primitives, but the idea of actual secrets you'd keep in cold storage is largely dead. You're spot on that modern use cases need different APIs and tools and specialized solutions.

TheCondor··on Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake
It was about 18 months back, with gitea, I was starting some new projects and went sha256 because I’m a nerd that adopts things early. I could do basic git stuff, but I was stunned by how much didn’t work. A lot of actions, maybe even the entire action runner itself wouldn’t/couldn’t/didn’t work. It’s a deep cutting change and an expensive one that doesn’t have a new feature value. I abandoned that effort and rebuilt my repos.

Intentional attacks and collisions aside, what do you say to the fact that Sha1 had a lifespan at design time? NIST has issued retreating usage guidelines for the last 15 years and they themselves say it should be completely phased out by 2030. It just seems like good hygiene to switch it out. I agree, it will have a long tail and be a big bowl of suck, especially for the not dead but rarely touched code.

I appreciate the intent of “modern” tools with no switches, no ways for devs to make bad security choices because the hash, cipher and encryption mode are fixed vs all the crazy looking asn.1 stuff in tls and openpgp to enable n-degrees of configuration but this very issue is the counter example.

TheCondor··on Backups Aren't Simple
It is a special sensation when you go to your hand rolled backup "solution" to make some simple recoveries and start finding problems. It is a complex mix of not dread but disgust, sick to your stomach, self-anger, and loss. I can only image what that's like with like all of your children's baby pictures being the lost material. Borg and restic are fantastic, it still seems like some sort of dummy proof mode might be desirable, all the features in the world and they have some some reasonably sane policy or something that includes verifications.

On the flip side of that though, really and truly, I've restored a laptop from a timemachine backup and it came back damn nearly identical and that was magical.

TheCondor··on A note on subscription prices from LWN
I've been a long term subscriber. I don't read it every day, but more like a few times a week and there is always good stuff.

I highly recommend subscribing if you can. It's really one of the great ones and it's still oldshool style, not a lot of fluff, just nerds presenting nerdy news.

TheCondor··on Hacking IKEA Furniture
If it’s even available.

I think most of America’s options are the big warehouse furniture places or an ikea if it near by, they do delivery well.

TheCondor··on Peter Cullen has died
He also voiced aspects of Voltron and Saber Rider, maybe “narrated” is the right description

Such a big part of my youth

TheCondor··on Being ambitious and being a dad
I'm a father. Best thing I ever did, but it is work, it is hard.

In ways, it really crisped up my time working on work. My wife and I have some bottom lines, we're invovled, we have dinner as a family every day. We go to school events, all of them. We go to sports and activities, all of them (although there have been some times we had to split up and each to a different one.) I'm at the table when my kids have breakfast, every day except when I travel for work which is a week or two per quarter. It's great for the kids, it's great for the family but suddenly it feelds like your day is shorter. Personally, I have tried to find other "thought time" and that has resulted in much better execution when I get to writing code or plans or whatever. I used to sit at the blank editor and start to compose but now I am forced to think more before hand. I've built a few things I honestly don't think I could have built before kids, just out of necessity, I've had to be more efficient and effective.

There are also times of utter exhaustion but I had those before kids. I'll also went through the process of sort of cutting out extras to make time, once your kids are in that 10-11 age, they'll have friends and interests, I've added some of those extras back because they are busy on Sunday afternoons or whenever.

TheCondor··on License plate reader searches should require a warrant
I'll toss out another alternative idea. Not that I'm against the warrant requirement exactly but I just think it becomes a lot more fuzzy since the data will be managed by private companies that only accumulated it because they already have other ways to monatize it. And it's only one tool that they have to harass people.

This is fundamentally a police officer problem. You make it a felony and a terminable offense. You make all or part of the Brady List public and this automatically places an officer on it. ALPRs are just one tool for a police officer to stalk someone, they could just as well park outside their house or place of work and follow them around or do other things. We could require warrants to get the ALPR data but we'd still have these jerks pretending in to protect and serve.

In my perfect world, if we had an Amber alert or we knew there was a particularly violent criminal driving a specific car with a specfic license plate, I think it would be a step forward if all of the information was made available quickly and there was a quick and safe capture. Judges can issue warrants pretty quickly when motivated. Likewise, if some officer is stalking his ex-wife or something, cutting off the license plates is a nice step but I'd rather him not be involved in law enforcement at all.

I'd love for these datasets to be fully audited, but I suspect industry will balk that the very use of it is proprietary.

TheCondor··on Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?
My Insta360s have wifi builtin, you have to connect to it with their phone app to do some of the processing. It's kind of nice, especially away from home but I wouldn't know how you'd know if it connected to something else or something else connected to it.

I don't know how you'd get devices like that certified for certain higher security applications.

TheCondor··on Studio Canal Movies purchased on PlayStation Store removed without refund
A friend and I were talking about this. What would you pay for it?

When iTunes + came out, you had 2 options, you could buy a song for $0.99 or you could be the plus version for more, I don't remember but it was like $1.35 or something. Plus had a higher bit rate and it wasn't encrypted.

Suppose you could buy a movie for $12.00, how much would you pay for the forever version? $30?

TheCondor··on Mexican government unveils a prototype for a new homegrown, ultra-affordable EV
Where do interest rates factor in to your calculus? We've just had really cheap money for a really long time in the US and the car makers seem to have adapted and found ways to sell vehicles for more. A top of the line raptor has a tremendous amount of power and interior amenities. Oddly, they're not uncommon, I see landscapers driving them around. Maybe not the very top line Raptors, but I do see Raptors and that seems like an awful lot of truck to pull some lawnmowers and sprinkler parts around in. Low-interest financing and then we've never had high gas prices for terribly extended periods of time.

I don't know that I think the US manufacturers have taken "inexpensive, but good value" cars seriously for decades. The least expensive Ford vehicle, I think is a Maverick which starts around $28k, Hyundai, Kia, Toyota, Mazda and Honda all have cars under $25000.

TheCondor··on Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]
There is some truth in that. Like I said, I'm a fan, but I also remember some painful times where we were missing a physical terminator and at least twice adding a new device and had to check the jumpers on everything and someone one of the jumper blocks were upside down or maybe we couldn't tell which pin was 1 or something such that the devices were numbered wrong. We got it fixed and working every time though.

Aside from the time we lost a terminator for a few days, I never once felt like the scsi system couldn't work, it was just a matter of a really young me and my dad getting it sorted out. IRQ/DMA/ISA fuckery? There were multiple times I can remember getting a shiny new piece of hardware, that took months of begging my parents, and after getting things assembled thinking that "this configuration of devices" might not be possible to make work together.

TheCondor··on Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]
You may not have ever had to deal with SCSI termination errors before. Earlier system had to have the device numbers manually assigned, if they were wrong, all sorts of weird things could happen (of just nothing would work)

I'm a SCSI fan, but it took a few revs to get it righted.

TheCondor··on Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants
Then surely when they started pushing back on Yucca Mountain opening up, the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened? There are 49 other states that could, in theory, be bidding on a contract to house nuclear waste. There are some states that have a large amount of land relative to their population too.

For the record, this thorium reactor waste isn't harming anyone in Colorado, but they've also refurbished the plant in to a natural gas power station and it's still actively run. Should that be decommissioned, then I'm not entirely sure what it costs to maintain the waste storage facility. They're adding a couple new turbines to this plant so I expect it has a decently long life ahead, but what happens in like a century if DoE doesn't move this waste?

Regardless of the engineering, and I think we've made tremendous advances in nuclear design and have much better safety than before, I think it's more than low-information voters and regulatory issues, fundamentally we don't have a strong answer for the waste. A nuclear powerplant has a relatively fixed production life, but there is no end to the cost life.

TheCondor··on Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants
Did waste management become a solved problem?

In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think the deadline to move it is still nearly a decade away.

TheCondor··on Fox to buy Roku
That's what I took notice of... About half their revenue is subscription and about half is advertising. 100m users. $220 per home? I would think that's high.

They certianly have enough to ice the carriers out. I wonder what an HBOMax subscription will cost in a year, I bet a fair bit more.

TheCondor··on GitHub is sinking
It absolutely is.

The only concerns are if it were exposed to the public internet and scale. For personal stuff? It's spectacular.

TheCondor··on GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay
Well, a month ago was my last use for about a year. A user with a 96% positive feedback and definitely a lot of sales slow played and then issued a fake UPS tracking number. The negatives in their history sounded mostly like communication issues so I assumed they were okay. They sell a lot of things in the $30-$90 range, this was a $200 item they had listed for $145, and they supposedly had a couple of them. A local store ran a sale around the same time that has it at $150 so it wasn't crazy. Upon deeper inspection of their reputation once things got fishy, they have 150+ sales, 4 negatives, 1 neutral. There are real looking positive feedbacks but about half are automated positive feedbacks. Not sure entirely what that means.

A refund has been granted but ebay's computers show that someone in my zipcode has also recieved a package (mine should have been 20lbs, the one sent was 2lbs and received by someone with a different name) so I'm kind of expecting a little more drama before it's all said and done. To be fully transparent, it was marked shipped without tracking and has an estimated arrival date of 10 days; after 10 days I asked if it had shipped and was told no and offered a refund and then it became marked shipped with a fake tracking number and "was delivered." The short of it is they're a somewhat prolific seller, I can't think of any reason it issue a fake tracking number and they had my money for about a month. I'm getting the money back but I'm back to square one. The sale at the local store ended.. It's not that big of a deal, just annoying.

It seems like there are sort of 2 classifications of bad experiences. There are poor descriptions, slow transactions, shipping mix-ups, mis-communications and things of that nature. A reputation ding is probably appropriate. Then there are more fraudulent things and ebay has chosen to not really punish those things and let them go, same way Amazon will gladly list and sell fake goods.

TheCondor··on GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay
I try not to use it and then something will come up and I use it. Could be my market, or who knows what but there seems to be more scams.

It’s the only place someone can give you a fake tracking number (somehow people get these from UPS) get caught and other than a refund after weeks and a negative reputation ding, they get to keep on doing it. The fake tracking number scam has been going on for years too, it’s still happening. Permanently ban for people caught doing this, preferred shippers with eBay as a managed tracker or something like that.

TheCondor··on Let's Buy Spirit Air
Not a fan of spirit. I used to kind of like Frontier, but they ended that.

I was doing a two hour flight monthly for business, 2 hours each way. Frontier was about half the cost of more premium airlines. The times were good and predictable. I never checked anything and maybe rarely I’d buy a snack. Now I won’t claim that it was “comfortable” but it was predictable, inexpensive and kind of efficient all of which sort of creates a ‘comfort.’ It was a flying bus and it was ok at that.

Somewhere, I think when there became competition for the ultra discount airlines, the staff culture changed and it seemed not uncommon to encounter an employee that resented the customers. Spirit had multiple reported incidents of crew filming customers and just being generally antagonistic. Basically they hire service people that generally don’t have to provide much service and it becomes ”extra work” when they do;worse they often see a price tag associated with the “extra work” and it’s not reflected in their compensation

TheCondor··on Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
I’m at peace with the memory and PCIe basically flows over thundebolt. At one point external gpus were a thing. I think what I’d really love would be a couple or few m.2 slots in my studio for storage expansion.
TheCondor··on Afroman found not liable in defamation case
Look up castle doctrine.

It's the laws that we have. Basically, if someone breaches your home, you're under no obligation to back down and if you respond with lethal force you have a lot of the benefit of the doubt, fear is implied in that situation. The police are treating it as if they were breaking in to one of their own homes, because if you or I did that, we'd get shot and killed. The only difference it that they have a legal document that allows it in that case, you have to serve that document though.

I had a coworker that lived on a street like "N 13th Avenue" and I guess there was some sort of crackhouse at "S 13th Avenue" one night the police served a no-know warrant, he was pissed and demanded to know what was going on, they shot his dog and killed his dog, he was shot in the hip and had permanent damage from it, his wife was marched out in cuffs half naked in-front of the neighborhood. When the dust settled the police realized they went to the wrong address. The police reached some sort of settlement with them, it never seemed remotely fair. (Think $700k in the mid-1990s) He was in his 50s when I worked with him, this happened in his late 30s or early 40s. He looked like he was 80 though, walked with a cane. He ultimately passed away at a fairly young age.

TheCondor··on Astral to Join OpenAI
Does OpenAI use a lot of python?

There is the literal benefit of "we use the hell out of this tool, we need to make sure it stays usable for us" and then there is what they can learn from or coerce the community in to doing.

TheCondor··on ArcaOS 5.1.2 (based on OS/2 Warp 4.52) now available
You couldn't convince me that IBM lost it..

The licensing would be my guess, Microsoft owned some of the code, there may have been other third party code in there too.

TheCondor··on Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon
‘Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these’
TheCondor··on The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran
And perhaps more importantly, “Suggestions otherwise are fake news”

https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/06/irans-nuclear-fa...

TheCondor··on How Did the FBI Get Nancy Guthrie's Nest Doorbell Footage?
I have that sort of arrangement. I've been wondering though. What's the proper data access protocol? Like I want it available, easily, if the police need it and I'm not there but at the same time, I don't want anyone to just screw around with it because I've got directions and password printed on paper somewhere.

We did have some repeated night time visitors (long story, but it was some mistaken identity that took a while to sleuth out) it wasn't difficult to export data for the police but it wasn't something I'd just ask my wife or kids to do either. Scan the footage, find the timestamps, export the data then upload the data somewhere where they can get at it. It wasn't hard but it was chores and it took time with high emotions.

First off, it's not inexpensive. It's not a giant investment either but my cameras cost in the same range as the Nest cameras do and then there is a relatively powerful mini pc, and an accelerator for AI detection and then drives to store the data, PoE switch, network segmentation... I'm rocking home assistant and frigate and 8 8k cameras. Then the much more subtle part is I have a pretty good idea when I'd like the police to have all the data and when I don't want that. That's not so easy if I was abducted. Perhaps an off the shelf complete solution is better and has that sort of law enforcement access situation sorted out. This is sort of the 0.000001% kind of thing though. Over the years, I've replaced drives a couple times too, it's becomes a living and breathing system that needs support and love.

TheCondor··on We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
The assembler seems like nearly the easiest part. Slurp arch manuals and knock it out, it’s fixed and complete.
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