Re: I spit on your socialist paradise...
...as if there was more proof needed that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
4735 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
Relative rarity of the requisite skills aside, the thing is that type of insult is meant for the benefit of others of comparable stature who witness it, while being completely lost on the target. It only works when those who see it are the majority, by lowering their esteem of the victim if the scorn is deserved. When those who see it are in the minority or completely absent however, wits are supremely ineffective and do none of what an insult is supposed to achieve. So it's hardly surprising it's not a popular pastime these days, and that whole "never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance" thing...
Assuming we as a race somehow inexplicably fail to destroy ourselves for long enough, there will be a moment in the (far, far) future where access to information by those who govern people - things like what should NOT be collected, what should NOT be searchable under ANY conditions - will be strictly regulated and limited as much as possible, with a draconian rigour; this will be happening* as a reaction to the utterly, unspeakably horrible atrocities committed earlier, enabled by large scale availability and collection of any and all data about everything - a thing that needs to happen first, so people have something to point at in horror saying "never again**!".
* That is, of course, assuming it doesn't all go the Orwell route where the (im)balance of power breaks so completely that removing said boot from people's faces becomes truly impossible forevermore.
** Also assuming we don't just flat out end up denying any of it ever happened after a single generation or two, encouraged by those who very much like having all that data and immense power and would very much love to see it happen again.
There are no "good" countries left. I could literally not name a single country I would be happy to move to given the chance; there used to be a few not-so-bad ones but in time they all revealed sharp teeth one way or another - mostly against their own citizens. Sanity has left the building - all the buildings - long ago...
Reminds me of that scene of Indy almost falling to his death due to ambiguities related to the spelling of the name of God. I can kinda imagine an alternate scene where dates are involved instead, and upon realising this Indy flat out goes "oh HELL no, screw this!" turns around and just walks out...
A DIY/tools store I use is doing 1) on its web catalogue quite brazenly - when the product you are looking for can only be reasonably identified using two or three words and they throw at you absolutely everything having _any_ of the words in their description somewhere (no option for "expression search") so the result list is never shorter than 48 pages, heuristically sorted by irrelevance... well, you get pretty damn annoyed really quickly. Unfortunately, the other options I have locally don't allow me to just ditch these guys...
Not really odd, no. What these muppets are doing wrong is not going "look, we tried and failed to decrypt, you're either paying the ransom or you're hosed. The ransom would be $900, and we would be happy to mediate on your behalf, for a fee of $3050. Would you like us to do that?". Legal minutiae aside, they definitely wouldn't be in the news if they did that. You don't get to charge a fee for the exact same thing your client could have done themselves unless you're very much up-front about that being all you do and they know that's what they pay you for. Pretending to be a security company and paying off a protection racket behind your client's back is still just participating in a protection racket...
"They would, if the scenario had been played out to the last, have taken receipt of "decriptor" software from an unknown source, logged in with admin privileges to their client's systems, and run that dodgy software."
Minor quibble, but we don't actually know that. They might just as well log into the client, just image his disk, and run the tool they received inside the most locked down of VMs they can construct at home. Still, a really poor business practice overall and of course we don't know what they would have actually done with that login.
Not exactly. Apparently all they said is that they'll do what they can to keep the (Steam / Wine / 32-bit) lights on, but in effect it would be a band-aid: no 32-bit Ubuntu -> no 32-bit Mint either...
So, considering that a "solution" like 18.04 that is end-of-life _and_ end-of-the-road in a few years is not worth wasting another word on, what is the current "best option" / "most mainstream" for people who need a low-friction distro that "just works" but who also need to keep running Steam and Wine? Will future versions of Mint avoid this problem? Would one need to go back all the way to Debian? Something else...? And none of the "first, start a virtual machine..." / "just use Docker" / "in Snaps we trust" / whatever other nonsense, please...
Re-read the sentence with the "wearable monitor" about five-six times trying to figure out how one is supposed to be working using one of those before I finally figured out these are likely not of the Full-HD or 4K kind. Anyway, about the reduction of personal contact - hardly surprising. If I'm trying to push you off a ledge, you'll be grasping for support a helluva lot more frenetically than if you just stood there out of your own will or were allowed to not go closer to it than you had to in the first place...
I'm not worried. When you see what the high purity peroxide needed to run it just for a minute costs, you know they'll never be able to fuel it. Unless they snatched your card and figured out how to use it - but in that case just give up and accept you're working for Rovio and Facebook now; you're doomed...
"if someone with 100 million followers shifted to Voice and brought with them 50 million followers"
Had a good LOL at that one - this is just another form of the classic "if only everyone..." fallacy. There never is an "everyone", for anything, ever, period. And the important thing is, that's the understatement of the century - actually, on the internet, there's never more that some small fraction. Take a look at a random video of a channel with millions of subscribers (viral hits excepted), some generous amount of time after publishing - it will not have even a tenth in views of the number of subs. Likes? Somewhere between a hundredth and less than a thousandth of the number of subs, even if almost nobody seems to be disliking it. I'm fairly sure there exists no internet celebrity who could mobilize anywhere near half of their "subscribers" (heck knows how many are still actually even listening) for anything more complicated than a click or a comment, even if they tried...
PS. Let's assume I'm not going to question why such a price was paid - but a price is a function of demand _and_ supply; why was it _that_ expensive in the first place...?
Although now I'm wondering if one could legitimately upload one's own, clearly original, you-own-the-copyright content, get it content id protected, then try attacking it by uploading alternate versions that hopefully don't trigger the protection - this way, the whole thing (both original and alternate versions) should be freely presentable at the end. Then again, I have no idea how hard is it to become "content id protected", so that could be unrealistic for research...
Regarding that last part, I'm a bit puzzled here - I assume it's not actual dollaroos being asked for by the extortionists, those should be much too traceable, but maybe bitcoin. Which raises the question what exactly can they do with the two billion's worth of bitcoin they're sitting on - because if anyone tried to cash out any significant fraction of that, I'm fairly sure we'd have heard about it...
Considering that contrary to the typical tens to hundreds of dollars in most games, the value stored in a Star Citizen account is usually from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, I'm glad I don't hear about this sort of thing happening all that often there. Though to be fair, they _do_ allow you to use two factor authentication, and even a successful hijack might see the ships transferred back to their original owner. Or maybe it's just _still_ too niche...
Unfortunately, I have long given up trying to understand the byzantine way exposed offers to deny/spoof/allow stuff to various apps by profiles or individual settings. And there's not a lot of tech I can say that about. No idea which position of which toggle hides or shows something. Nice tech, but the UI is incompatible with my brain on some fundamental level...
When one says "oy, you have no consent for that!" people hear "we want you to stop doing it while continuing to provide the service" but corps hear "we need to add an appropriate roadblock (that counts as consent) before letting anyone use the service so we can continue to do exactly what we did before". And yes, even though GDPR explicitly forbids doing the latter, that didn't seem to have stopped anybody from doing it nonetheless. Yet...
Finally got around to actually look at the Zuck video - voice/tone discrepancies aside, hooooooooly crap is it bad. The mouth movement is barely in the most tenuous of relationships with the sound - if I were watching this at home I'd be reaching for the "shift voice sync +/-" button after the third second of it, and it still wouldn't match. I have no doubt lots of people would take it at face value, but anyone feeling a modicum of scepticism should immediately realize it's a) a fake and b) a pretty bad one.
The very frequency with which these things emerge these days prove it's almost inconsequential what you do with this kind of tech; the point is, assuming you can just bury it or something and the world will be safe for the foreseeable future is flat out delusional. Someone else right behind you will perfect it very soon after you, and will end up using it for whatever you didn't want to see it used. Which is not to say you should dump it on the world because "oh well", but you should be aware it makes almost zero difference whether or not you do.
I have zero need to look at any list of vulnerabilities no matter how long or scary: yes, it absolutely IS more important than security. The one thing security, uh, "enthusiasts" never fail to fail to understand is that security is never more than second - first and foremost any tool has to WORK, and it only needs to be as secure as possible after that. A browser must first accommodate my workflow and all the deal-breaker extensions integral to it, anything else can only ever matter once that is satisfied first.
Today, yes. I have had literally that happen (brace broke, heatsink fell off) and have the machine survive with no observable ill effects, I'm using it to this day with a new brace.
Back in the day, that's another matter - I recall seeing a YouTube video specifically testing sudden heatsink detachment on Intel and AMD CPUs - the Intel one got throttled down instantly, the AMD one went up in smoke, also instantly: they did have a similar mechanism, but it was polled relatively rarely on the assumption that thermal runaway does take some time. That was true if the fan died; it was most certainly not true if the heatsink itself departed wholesale...
Incidentally, mine was an AMD and all this flashed before my eyes in the millisecond I realized the funny thump immediately followed by a 747 at takeoff I heard coming from the case could only be one thing - luckily, this happened much later, by then I was covered too apparently.
"AI" or any other kind of Machine Police should never be allowed to de-activate accounts. It's welcome to flag them up, down and sideways internally for human review all it wants, and the corp behind it is welcome to improve it until its human mods can cope with the volume of flagging it generates, or hire more of them. But "AI" should never have access to the Big Red Button. If a hacker or IP thief causes an outage or disruption of any length whatsoever they're immediately charged with causing eleventy trillion billion million dollars of "damages" - how come corps are allowed to get away with doing exactly the same without having to have anyone actually accountable for it?!? No, "because you've agreed to it" is not a valid answer. And neither is "assume guilt automatically and shoot deactivate by default, ask questions later reactivate only if and when the Twitter shitstorm hits, then apologize for the mistake of having inconvenienced someone of high enough profile".
Guess again. Currently Apophis seems to be predicted to pass closer than one-tenth of that to Earth in 2029, at 31000 Km - no millions there.
I don't doubt scammers having an interest of getting off the website into a parallel channel as soon as possible - the problem is I have never ever seen any account on any site that wasn't keen on doing exactly the same just as quickly. And while I certainly didn't pursue all of them far enough to know how many may have been fakes, I know for certain that at least some of them definitely were real...
"Sandbox" and "survival" are swear-words in my book (and I do have a bunch of others that do not apply here), regardless of how overwhelmingly popular they apparently are these days; if I wanted to be an insignificant cog in a giant meat grinder, that's what real life is for, and I play games to get away from that. An opportunity to become a bigger cog does nothing for me. But to each their own - if you like this, more power to you...