ipython

The show currently running inside the sphere is focused on the negative human impact to the environment. So clearly the owners of the sphere are interested in spreading that narrative, if that helps you feel better about their use of resources.

Obviously selling ads is a mechanism to pay the bills and defray the massive building costs. It’s not like the rest of Vegas is some sort of moral high ground, so ads on its exterior kind of fits right in.

I see one issue with this app: the app page clearly says it’s only for 4+ yet your target audience is only 2 :)

Nicely done!

You can blame a different megacorp for the desktop.ini files: those are artifacts from windows explorer (I’m assuming you’re using a windows machine with the google drive mounted)

But how do they validate the request came from the sender?

As long as it’s signed in some form- dns is trivial to mitm (save for dnssec)

I enjoyed the stair story here quite a bit - I find that I always have a newfound appreciation for the “real” jobs when I find a fine craftsman at work.

We had a curved staircase fabricated for our house and it was absolutely fascinating to watch the planning and execution go into this task. The original measurements were plugged into a cad drawing where we could adjust the number of treads and the position of the top and bottom steps based on our preference. Then they fabricated the entire assembly offsite and brought it in via crane in one piece. Even building the handrail was fascinating as there was a jig built in place to bend the wood to the curve required.

The physical constraints and fractal complexity is fascinating for someone like me who is used to deterministic machines moving bits on a daily basis.

What about legal threats from government representatives when they don’t like your speech and attempt to force the social media platforms to reveal your burner identity?

Devin Nunes attempted to doxx a “cow” for example: https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/devin-nunes-subpoena-ai...

If the DoS prevents the attacked service from “speaking” itself (by exhausting resources) then I would assert the DoS is analogous to assault and not protected speech.

Also, intent fits in here. The name itself gives a hint- denial of service as in taking something away from the victim.

What about the use of legal threats and NDAs by wealthy individuals and corporations to silence speech? Take what happened with the whistleblowers at theranos for example.

“Sure, here’s your office - cell #510J”

https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/11/13/aws_prison_office...

One of the best practices endorsed by the us government to protect yourself from persistent malware on iPhone is to power it off and on periodically: https://media.defense.gov/2021/Sep/16/2002855921/-1/-1/0/MOB...

Ha! I love it.

I'm so glad someone has called this out. I bought my kids Nintendo Switches and was appalled at the sad state of the Switch parental controls. No PIN locking, so my little ones can just swipe my teenager's Switch (which I don't bother with parental controls with). You can't specify "no time today" - your minimum time choice is 15 minutes. It's just plain awful.

Apple TV is just as bad- I have Apple TVs throughout the house... but there's no way to lock them down either! Want to enforce no TV until a certain hour of the morning on Saturday? Too bad!

I've just resorted to physically moving the errant devices into what we call "Switch jail" - aka my lockable network rack in the basement. Trouble is... I bought my teenage daughter a lockpicking set for Christmas... guess what happened next... I guess I should be proud of the effort!

I would never plug a smart TV into any network, but regardless of that - when you have an individual endpoint like the smart TV (or the Apple TV, Android device, etc), what's the practical advantage of a 2.5Gbit port on that device? You aren't able to watch the movie/TV show any faster.. so you're constrained to the data rate of the content you're consuming at ~1 to ~1.5x speed (if you are in to that sort of thing).

Taking a 4k stream as an example, a compressed 4k stream is not going to exceed about 50Mbps, so even a 100Mbps data rate will have a 2x safety factor - and since you're wired, you're going to get full use of that data rate unlike Wi-Fi. You're not streaming uncompressed video as that would require more than 2.5Gbps, and if you want to upgrade to 8k video, you'll need a new TV anyway...

I always wire in my TV and other fixed infrastructure because, since they aren't moving, there's no advantage to using a data layer protocol that, by definition, enables mobile access. In addition, latency and jitter is always better on wire versus wireless, and keeping these devices off the wireless frees up precious airtime that the rest of my devices that do move can use instead. It's a win-win-win all around.

I simply said “thank you for the report but I’m not paying”. The “researcher” responded by spamming the rest of the board and the property manager for the community with hundreds of messages filled with expletives.

I didn’t write a blog or do anything to “trigger” anyone. Heck the only reason I replied is because they kept emailing the other non tech people in an attempt to extort money out of them.

I don’t find their behavior excusable and have no problem calling them out.

The problem is that they do have real consequences for others. It is a kind of zero sum game where their gains come from the loss of others. I have no sympathy for them.

If you want to help them, why not just send them $$?

Another thought on this, coming from someone whose phone number has ended up on some large number of scammer lists, to the point where I would have about 1000 scam calls per month around open enrollment time (think targeting seniors):

You are advocating for feeding the troll. The troll will not be satisfied with table scraps. Larger trolls will see the opportunity and scale up.

I get what you’re saying. I don’t have a solution to the inequality you point out. But rewarding the bad behavior doesn’t help rectify the inequality, it just makes more bad behavior.

“But I already washed your window while sitting at the stop light”

It’s one thing to go begging, it’s another when they feel entitled to some sort of payout. I never asked for their “services” - and in my limited experience, they lash out at you too, when you explain you’re not paying.

I run a domain for our community association. I had an “ethical hacker” discover that I had neglected to set up spf records for that domain. I had to deal with him sending a bunch of nasty emails to our other board members after I refused to pay him for his “discovery”. (Actually I offered him a cut of my salary as a board member, which at $0, came out to be… less than he was hoping for)

I’ll definitely keep a link to this for next time this happens.

I have been struggling for a long time to identify what you just so succinctly described in one sentence. Thank you.

This has been used for decades by malware and shellcode that needs to be compact and position-independent (loaded at any virtual address). It is clever and as a side effect is that the string is already loaded on the stack, so if your next step is to call a function with that string as an argument, you can just call that function directly.

It used to confuse a lot of disassemblers, where you'd have to re-synchronize the disassembly after the string and disambiguate between 'code' and 'data' by hand.

I am not familiar with the tools and cost associated with terminating fiber, yet I can easily do that for copper cable.

Also- I am a big fan of PoE. My ceiling mounted aps depend on that for power. With fiber now I need to also run power to access points, whereas I only have one cat6 cable for power plus data.

For what it’s worth I looked him up on LinkedIn. One of his bullets for his time at Microsoft reads:

> Author of "Halloween documents" - analyzing Linux & Open Source software ;-)

Sounds like he’s “embraced” his infamy after all these years :)

Like I said before, two things can be true at the same time. I haven't shifted the goalposts here.

You bring up an interesting point: why can't you be just as effective - if not more so - by just doing the things rather than doing the things and shitposting non-sequiturs? By sucking all the oxygen out of the room, you're right, the general discourse is focused on distractions and not the real issues. If, for example, he agrees with you that the real issue is oil companies and climate change, why doesn't he focus his public energies pointing that out???

There is a lot of daylight between the arguments you posit and "Sorry pedo guy, you really did ask for it"

Nice attempt to strawman my argument. Clearly he has all the rights in the world to express himself. Conversely I have all the rights to express my displeasure with his actions :)

Unfortunately I don't have $40b to throw around to amplify my speech, but that's what you get by being one of the richest people on the planet.

Clearly Elon does otherwise he wouldn’t do it?

To me it reeks of a certain lack of self awareness, respect for others and questionable decision making. You can be interesting and edgy without being a total asshole.

I also question his actual interest in sustainability. How exactly does paying $40 billion for Twitter fit into that grand strategy? What about driving a wedge between large groups of people by promoting hate speech helps any positive societal level change? Even if he did, do I want to put that power in one rich man?

Or perhaps two things could be true at the same time; SpaceX saves the government money on launches and Elon is a crazy shitposter on “X”

I listened to wondery’s multi part podcast “spellcaster” about sbf.

One of the most fascinating takeaways I had from that show was the fact that he used to play the game Diplomacy with a specific strategy: he would intentionally make alliances with other players, then stab them in the back. He would do this over and over. Why nobody figured this out, I don’t know.

So when I go back and view his actions through this lens, it makes perfect sense.

Are there public references/resources with more information? Would love to learn more

The mitigation for sql injection attacks is to parameterize your queries- in other words, separating the “program” (the sql query syntax) from the “data” (the parameters to the sql query)

I am unaware of a similar mechanism for llms. Anthropic’s documentation talks about using xml tags to separate parts of a prompt, which sounds promising. However I’m not clear if that is really triggering a deterministic process in the llm to process that data differently, or if it’s just another “hint” to a non deterministic model.

Curious to hear from folks way more experienced than I am on this topic.