292 karma · joined December 29, 2015
I used to race cars, and I still have the old 2003 5-speed turbo, but the idea of an electric car without all the hoses and fluids and spinning pieces is attractive.
Both AT&T and Apple transferred (albeit both temporarily) ownership of my phone # (AT&T) and my Apple ID (OK you know the company) from purely social engineering.
The AT&T one was basically like this post. A phone call with a convincing person. Eventually (through threat of legal action) I was able to listen to the recorded call where it happened, and it was simultaneously infuriating and fascinating.
The Apple one was more sophisticated. Too much to write here, but essentially to pull it off all the thief needed to do was have Apple call my number on file and have me answer it. I suspect I know the attack vector, but all I got from Apple was a very quick reversal, not an apology but an acknowledgment, and an explicit message that the details on their end wouldn't / couldn't be shared b/c of corporate policy (which honestly I think makes some sense if a novel vulnerability via social engineering has been found & exploited).
"The meatbag in the loop is the weak link" is said often, isn't always true... but sometimes it is indeed.
N.b.: I work in firmware & electronics security & cryptography.
Hope common sense prevails and Adafruit can go back to doing what it does best instead of dealing with this (IMO) distraction.
I think Targus stopped making this model (maybe a trend towards smaller laptops), hopefully this one will keep working for a while before I need to find a good replacement.
I'm sure he deals with a lot of crap every day and I'm sure there's a grain of truth in this, but it's pure make believe. But it probably made him feel better writing it and he probably gets some clicks and some followers, so in the end it was probably a reasonable tradeoff. But anyone who thinks in 2026 that an office (government, private corp, etc.) has a stupid 9600 baud paper-eating fax machine spitting out pages is not living in the real world.
Most people here are tech savvy and understand VPNs, location sharing in apps, privacy agreeements, metadata in shared/posted JPEG files, etc but the episode I mentioned is like 20 minutes & provides maybe 100 different things you can do to reduce your footprint & increase your security while traveling abroad.
According to her, the biggest threats were fitness apps & dating apps (both of which are mentioned heavily here in the comments)
Right now my process is very manual but it's a labor of love. All 3 cats only show up after dark. Ring stick up camera, bowls out (clean them every day), run out on a motion alert, etc. problem is I also have racoons, opposssums and skunks. (I'm not in L.A. highrises, I'm close to the ocean).
Where can such feeders now be purchased (US customer). Thank you!
And no, this isn't going anywhere. I'm not going to contact anybody for an interview or write a blog. This is everyday life in the real world. So much stuff going on that no one ever thinks about...
https://www.cse.msu.edu/~cse470/Public/Handouts/Therac/Side_...
I think you mean: x -= 5, which indeed is different.
The "temporal freedom" I have in my work (Gad Saad, if you don't know the name). I love being the master of my own day, of my own time. I don't sit in Zoom meetings or have daily standups. I can get up at 5am and work until 11am, and then go hike, play with my dog, get ice cream with my daughters, workout, etc. and then work again from 7pm until midnight or whatever.
Having (almost literally) full control over my daily schedule, week-in, week-out, year after year, is invaluable to me.
One disclosure: a few times a year I do very hard things where I have very little freedom, but they allow me to have lots of freedom the rest of the year.
Not to be a jerk, but I won't be elaborating. And I realize this life isn't for everyone!
Prop 209, passed in 1996, "amended the state constitution to prohibit government institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity, specifically in the areas of public employment, public contracting, and public education."
If Prop 16 had passed, it would have allowed government agencies to deliberately and explicitly discriminate against people based on immutable characteristics.
The wording from Prop 16's advocates seems to embrace Kendi's punitive stance on using active discrimination to reach some kind of equity goal:
"Despite living in the most diverse state in the nation, white men are still overrepresented in positions of wealth and power in California. Although women, and especially women of color, are on the front lines of the COVID-19 response, they are not rewarded for their sacrifices. Women should have the same chance of success as men.
Today, nearly all public contracts, and the jobs that go with them, go to large companies run by older white men. White women make 80¢ on the dollar. The wage disparity is even worse for women of color and single moms. As a result, an elite few are able to hoard wealth instead of investing it back into communities. Prop. 16 opens up contracting opportunities for women and people of color. "
In 2020 I tried to find data and studies backing the laundry list of assertions but came up empty-handed. The wording seemed very slanted... "older white men"... "single moms"... Certainly there are disparities in society, but we must always consider, objectively, what are the root causes.
Where does it end? Does anybody want an NBA where the makeup of the teams is based on the racial percentages in society, or do people want the best players playing? Do you want the best surgeon or pilot? Absolutely I bet 99% of people on HN want everyone to have equal opportunity; in my experience, in the vast majority of American tech companies (I don't work in healthcare of finanace, etc. so I can't speak to them), if you had 2 equally qualified candidates, and one was a white man and one was a woman or a racial minority or perhaps even not-straight, the white man will usually be the one not getting the job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_16
I think what parent post was saying is that in Czech Republic (national not state level), foreigners can not only obtain firearms, but also carry (presumably concealed), which as I'm guessing you also know varies widely from state to state, and here in California from county to county.
Of course I'm mind-reading here, I could be totally wrong.
When my brother-in-law and his son come visit from Switzerland they love to go shooting. In fact they get bored with my stuff and rent things with more punch (e.g. .338 Lapua). We visited a friend of mine in TX, and the things you can rent there (e.g. .50 BMG), we've only heard myths of those in CA, no one's actually ever seen one.
Way back when I was a staff engineer at Motorola, we'd often have network problems from workstations caused by marginal cables. At first, the IT people would come over and replace the cable, and toss the bad/old one in the person's cubicle trash can.
But I noticed over time, they all started adding one extra step: they'd cut the cable in half before tossing it in the trash.
Before the cable cutting, engineers, being engineers, would fish the "bad" cable out of the trash as soon as the IT person left ("it works almost all the time...") and use it for the next lab build-out. And then integration tests would fail intermittently, etc.
About 12 years ago, I consulted, on-site, for about a year with a Japanese company with a very very very untrusting corporate culture. (I was consulting on electronics and firmware.)
Every USB port on every computer was super-glued shut (yes, I know...) And literally 100% of the internet traffic went over a T1 (for those of you just out of diapers, that is a 1.5 Mbps line) to Tokyo and back. Corporate saw every bit of internet activity.
This company, when I talked with the VP of engineering, told me "we have flexible work hours; you can take lunch 12:00-12:30, or 12:30-1:00pm. As long as you're back at your desk within 5 minutes of lunch end, we will not be required to make note of it"
Man that was a horrible gig. But I made enough $$$ to overcome the agony. I have so many consulting stories... my daughters keep telling me I need to write a book.
"When Bill and Michelle ruined a conference room table"
"When Jayanthi [no I'm not changing her name] had a meltdown and threw a sharp object at the head of a subordinate"
"When Tom impregnated his secretary during his divorce, and was basically forced to marry her the day after his divorce was finalized"
"When I put a choke hold on a corporate security guard who incorrectly identified a computer peripheral in my backpack as confidential company property"
I think the 100 people who bought the book would really enjoy it
BTW, there is a great book that is right up this alley -- maybe you know it -- "The New Turing Omnibus: 66 Excursions in Computer Science"[0]
I discovered "Omnibus" from Peter / Catonmat [1]
It's 66 short, manageable topics, each ~5-8 pages:
1 Algorithms
2 Finite Automata
3 Systems of Logic
4 Simulation
5 Godel's Theorem
6 Game Trees
7 The Chomsky Hierarchy
8 Random Numbers
9 Mathematical Research
10 Program Correctness
11 Search Trees
12 Error-Corecting Codes
13 Boolean Logic
14 Regular Languages
15 Time and Space Complexity
16 Genetic Algorithms
17 The Random Access Machine
18 Spline Curves
19 Computer Vision
20 Karnaugh Maps
21 The Newton-Raphson Method
22 Minimum Spanning Trees
23 Generative Grammars
24 Recursion
25 Fast Multiplication
26 Nondeterminism
27 Perceptrons
28 Encoders and Multiplexers
29 CAT Scanning
30 The Partition Problem
31 Turing Machines
32 The Fast Fourier Transform
33 Analog Computing
34 Satisfiability
35 Sequential Sorting
36 Neural Networks That Learn
37 Public Key Cryptography
38 Sequential Cirucits
39 Noncomputerable Functions
40 Heaps and Merges
41 NP-Completeness
42 Number Systems for Computing
43 Storage by Hashing
44 Cellular Automata
45 Cook's Theorem
46 Self-Replicating Computers
47 Storing Images
48 The SCRAM
49 Shannon's Theory
50 Detecting Primes
51 Universal Turing Machines
52 Text Compression
53 Disk Operating Systems
54 NP-Complete Problems
55 Iteration and Recursion
56 VLSI Computers
57 Linear Programming
58 Predicate Calculus
59 The Halting Problem
60 Computer Viruses
61 Searching Strings
62 Parallel Computing
63 The Word Problem
64 Logic Programming
65 Relational Data Bases
66 Church's Thesis
[0] https://www.amazon.com/New-Turing-Omnibus-Sixty-Six-Excursio...
We were good about doing code reviews, stacks weren't overflowing, etc. So it was puzzling. Finally, just like the article said, I figured the only way to find it was to catch it "red handed", in the act.
The good news is that memory locations getting corrupted were always the same.
Long story short, I set up a FIQ [1] -- some of you the FIQ -- which would check the location each interrup. I forget if it checked "for" a value or that it "wasn't" an expected value, ugh, sorry... If the FIQ detected corruption, it did a while (1) that would trigger a breakpoint in the emulator. Then I'd be able to look at the task ID -- we were running Micrium u/C OS-II as I recall -- the call stack, etc.
Originally I set up a timer at 1 MHz to trigger the FIQ, but the overhead of going in & out of the ISR 1 million times per second, at essentially a 10 MHz rate, brought the processor to its knees.
So I slowed the timer interrupt down to 100 kHz (!!), which still soaked up a lot of the CPU slack that we'd been running with. And time after time I'd hit the breakpoint in the FIQ, but the damage had been done usecs earlier and the breadcrumbs didn't finger a victim.
Then it happened. Remember, the hardware timer is running completely asynchronously with respect to the application. Finally, the FIQ timer ISR had interrupted some task's code in exactly the function, at exactly the place (maybe a couple instructions later) where the corruption had occurred.
Took about a day start to finish, I'd never seen or heard of using a high speed timer to try to "catch memory corruption in the act", but as they say, necessity is mother of invention.
And to non-embedded developers, this is an embedded CPU. No MMU or MPU, etc. just a flat, wild-west open memory map. Read or write whatever you want. Literally every part of the code was suspect.
Good times.
[1] On ARM 7/9, maybe 11, I think also Cortex R -- the Fast Interrupt Request, or FIQ, uses banked registers and doesn't stack anything on entry -- so it's the lowest-latency, lowest overhead ISR you can have. But you can only have one FIQ I believe, so you have to use it judiciously.
I'm incredibly sorry for your loss. I'm happy that you had the time with this wonderful woman and that you have the memories, even though I'm sure right now everything is still raw. Godspeed.
P.S. Do you remember the name of that auto app? Name and shame! ;-)