Playing jigsaw on my roof: They can ID you from your hygiene habits Spies in space are watching me as I take a shower. I know this because I have just now worked out where the weak link in my home defences lies: it's the boiler. My neighbours only have to lock their front doors and they feel safe. Me, I'm at risk every time I turn on the hot tap. Perhaps I'd better explain. It all began with …
My folks used to shred their stuff into itty bitty little flecks so miniscule that I thought it would be impossible to reassemble it. I found out just how wrong I was when my little brother, for shits & giggles, sat down with a large sheet of cardboard, a pot of glue, a pair of tweezers, a magnifying glass, & a bag of said shreddings. It took him ages to finish, but eventually he had reassembled everything enough to pull out the personal data the shredding was supposed to have destroyed.
My folks then added "stuffing the shreddings into the bbq grill, soaking in lighter fluid, & torching the fucker" to the end of their regular to do list.
When I moved out & started collecting my own items for shredding, I made sure to burn it all afterwards as well.
So using the shreddings to heat the water you then use for your hot bath is not only a perfectly reasonable solution, it also gives you a happy squidgy feeling while you're playing pirates with your squeaky rubber ducky.
*Cough*
I, uhhh, I mean, ah, LOOK OVER THERE! A DISTRACTION! ---===>>>
<<<===--- runs away...
"I'm not joking but it would be interesting to build a shredder and incorporate a scanner too ... it would be a nice project for MI5 and NSA ... unless they turn the idea down because they are already using them."
I remember reading an SF story many years where part of the plot was shredding entire libraries and pumping the bits through a large pipe which scanned all the bits, reassembled the images and reproduced the shredded books as digital books.
The was an episode of UFO which described how their coded communication system worked. Orders were handwritten and signed, placed into a scanner where they were scanned and the card destroyed - the handwriting was verified by the encoder and sent encrypted to the recipient who used a key to decrypt and print out the orders.
Moneypenny, why do I get all the shit jobs?
Cold War Spies Sifted Through Used Soviet Toilet Paper In Search of Clues
In the final season of Lost In Space, the current reboot version, Doctor Smith warns Don not to hold the chicken too tightly because he might "choke the chicken". I'm not sure how the writers got that past the rest of the team or the censors :-)
It also makes me wonder if the entire reason for Dons attachment to that chicken throughout the entire series was to get that line in near the end.
From chickens to sausages....
My personal favourite euphemism that made it into the real world is this (NSFW).
It's not what the euphemism is for - I couldn't care less - but the fact that someone cared enough to come up with something innocuous enough for the conservative, yet still perfectly descriptive in a totally non-pejorative way...
I don't really know why they bothered, as there is a perfectly audible 'C' work a few seconds later...
Shredded paper and thin card can just be mixed into the compost heap/bin, soon get broken down & greener than burning.
As compost heap mixes often get a bit too "wet", then attentive composting management involves adding some drier stuff anyway so adding the shredded paper will typically benefit your composting
Do your folks wear tinfoil hats too?
No criminal trying to steal personal information is going to go through a bin, find crosscut shredded paper, and spend ages reassembling it. In fact I'll bet those who go through the bin at all are a dying breed. Not when you can get the personal information of millions with a hack, or if you aren't clever enough to hack buy personal information at a few bucks per head without leaving your house or getting dirty. Let alone taking the risk of getting arrested, or worse encountering a rat the size of a Yorkie!
There are days I'd quite happily have my identity stolen, assuming it meant the person that stole it had to deal with the drudgery of my life (parts of it anyway). My Uncle got solar panels a few years ago and STILL feels the need to tell anyone within earshot how much electricity he's making each sunny day. Thankfully in Scotland those are few and far between (and yes I'm aware today is one of them, even if it is still freezing outside)
A former colleague of mine bought into this solar panel malarkey, and very proud of it he was too.
For the first year, which was one of the better 'sun drenched' British years, he regaled us with his overgeneration and pushing back into the National Grid the excess (plus the 'money' he was making from it).
It all went a bit tits up in two steps.
Step 1. He told us when his ROI actually took effect - that was circa 15 years after installation, as he has a big family in the same house. His consumption is higher than average..
Step 2. The realisation the following year of a more typical British day/year reducing his 'generation'
After 2 years, we never heard of it again.
There is an element here that nobody thinks about. If you are a family, what is the likelihood you ever realise the benefits of the investment? You've a good chance of actually moving before you see it, because the family needs more space
I have had my system about three and a half years, 12 panels and a 48v battery composed of reconditioned traction cells. I live in Spain, today was a bit cloudy so I only made 5.43KWh, yesterday was over 8KWh more than I use.
I have no choice as the nearest grid supply is over 3Km from me, running new poles and cable would approach six figures going by the conversation I had in the Eberdrola office.
I have few problems, just have to keep an eye on the electrolyte and keep a genny on standby in case of more than three days of solid overcast, something that has not happened so far.
My biggest problem was in the beginning, the idiot who made the panel frames was not remotely a welder so the first big blow ripped the lot apart, the supplier had to replace 4 panels and I made him pay me to reconstruct the frames. My belt and braces rebuild has so far withstood gusts that bent my neighbour's TV aerial mast.
Nobody I have spoken to who has a hybrid 'grid and panel system has gained by it, better to go off grid so that the power co's can't screw you.
It solved the problem of dealing with direct marketing letters that used to turn up in the post.
My chimney does that well, with the bonus side of providing a few fractions of Joules to heat the house.
I was hoping from some industrial metal at the end of the article. I am a little bit disappointed.
Address labels, delivery advice pages and pre-printed returns notes all get used as kindling for our log burner too. With the exception of labels stuck to polythene mailing bags or labels made waterproof by the sender's use of selotape which get burned in the garden incinerator when we have a clear out. Our temporary store for these is a large paper bag marked "dirty burn" but now known (thanks to a chisel-tipped marker pen and my poor handwriting) as the "dirty bum" bag.
Up until a few years ago, you could zoom in on Google Maps satellite mode on my old house in central central London, and you could see me very clearly on the roof terrace. You can tell from the photo, jigsaw-id-style, that it was taken mid-morning-ish on a sunny summer's Sunday morning, and I'm reading the Weekend FT with the Sunday Times waiting on the table, having a mug of tea in a particular mug, and wearing the t-shirt my mum sent me for Christmas a coupla years prior.
That level of detail and specific identifiability was both a hilarious discovery, and... unsettling.
Google Earth is free-ish so you don't get the really high resolution stuff.
Back around 2000 our son started at a new high school that used converted office buildings. These buildings dated from the 1970s and originally housed a company specializing in electronic warfare countermeasures. The windows had what looked like decorative sunshades built into them but were actually there to prevent Russian spy satellites from looking in. I'd guess that modern satellites can see a lot more and by using the appropriate near infra-red wavelengths can 'see' through clouds.
(When the school built a theater in the basement of the building they had to first remove a high security emissions proof conference "room within a room". Just like the ones you see in movies.)
Shame it was a school building a theatre in the basement. I've been involved in a hotel building a ballroom (i.e. wedding reception room) in a basement that used room-in-room to cut down on noise transmission to the remainder of the hotel. Trouble for us was that the outside room was already built...
> Trouble for us was that the outside room was already built...
Eh? You _can't_ build a room-in-room unless the outside room is already built. By definition.
If you haven't got a room to put your room in, it's just a room.
If you try building the outer room second, then you have room-around-room. Which is the complete opposite of room-in-room.
I think you're being silly.
I can't say I'm too worried about that, for some reason. First of all, I live beyond the suburbs in a quaint little village à la campagne. If someone is rifling through my trash, they already know where I live. And if they absolutely want to know my water bill from last month, I'm nonplussed that they burden their neurons with that information.
I doubt that they'll hijack my water company account to have the privilege of paying the bills instead of me.
On the Web, though, that is another matter entirely. I have an non-negligeable amount of activity in the virtual information highway, and I have no idea how someone could piece together enough information to pinpoint my indentity from my various posts and web habits. That said, I never use the same password twice, so I guess any hijacking will be limited in scope.
I hope so anyway.
Qué sera, sera
My wife is not allowed to use the shredder, due to the fact she ignores the "5 sheets" max warning and ends up jamming the thing solid. I have managed to rescue a few shredders, but we seem to be buying a new one every year. After the last one where something inside actually snapped, I told her that shredding paper is now my job.
I did try putting through a sheet of bubble wrap thinking that would be cool, but it was rather disappointing (but at least didn't jam it.)
I always end up breaking mine.
Everything starts off OK when the shredder is new, but then I get greedy and overdo how much I put through in one pass.
Then I start wondering why I actually needed to shred that thick piece of cardboard my last motherboard and CPU came in (vaguely recalling it had something to do with trying to fill the Wheelie Bin up more economically in terms of space constraints).
Over here we have recycling bins to discard paper etc in.
You put the bin once a month at the curbside and they get emptied.
Paper/cardboard only, no general waste allowed.
Miscreants get fined.
Therefore all bins are labeled with you home address
Plus anyone who has my name and knows the village I live in can lookup my address and phone number in the online phone directory
Was on the edges of a prototype to do data transfer down normal water pipes with modulated pressure waves for water smartmeters. Worked quite well for about 1kb-5kb or so, surprisingly. So modulating a smart tap would absolutely work without the ir sense, assuming a receiver quite a ways away.
"Worked quite well for about 1kb-5kb or so"
That's pretty good. In mud pulse telemetry, used in the oil industry to transmit data from the bottom of the well to the platform, they get much lower data rates. Admittedly over a greater distance and a rather challenging environment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_while_drilling#Mud-pulse_telemetry
Don't encourage Mordechai the gang at Ben-Gurion University - as JB has commented before...
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2020/02/06/lcd_pwn_system/#c_3969662
I wonder if they've analysed Coronal Mass Ejection rates - may be ET is modulating the Sun to phone home
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