Posts by Grunchy 1095 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2015
The company I used to work for was hit with a click bait virus, the virus got control of a workstation, the server was completely unregulated, the contents got scrambled over a weekend, AND the IT moron never heard of “backups.”
They got burned for $50,000. Also, the descrambling key didn’t work on everything (so a lot of CAD files were left corrupted).
But it was ok. Turns out the reason they had so much incompetence in management was because they were running their own “stolen intellectual property” scams. It’s hard to find competent staff that also has to be at least this much <======> unethical in order for your application to be considered.
(I blew the whistle with the association of professional engineers, now they are subject to frequent audit. Methinks “out of business” is their next play…)
Though I did appreciate Winamp being able to play MODs as well. Of course, I am referring to “Modplay” from the days of DOS.
One of the most “ear popping”, mind-blowing tracks would be Jogeir Liljedahl’s “Guitar Slinger,” which of course is (hopefully) immortal by now.
https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_player&query=42560
(I don’t worry about “obsolete” software, with virt-manager I can run any old version of Windows in a completely isolated sandbox, with full GPU hardware acceleration, and from there can run any old Windows software… all completely within Linux. If I ever feel like running Winamp, I’ll just run good old Winamp. I don’t care about “modern” operating systems anymore.)
Driving instructor here… the “anticipation” is the “P” in “SIPDE,” which stands for scan - identify - predict - decide - execute.
Which is asking a lot from a robot driver. Sure, it can scan (if a bird hadn’t soiled the sensor) and it can identify (it might distinguish among a few known shapes).
But as Python had taught, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
(I feel like Tesla doesn’t have a clear idea behind its FSD technology: what is their vision, is it HAL-9000? Is it Christine? Maximum Overdrive? “The Car”??)
As a young inexperienced driver, I had my first accident: driving directly into an extremely bright sunset. Well, the guy ahead went round the corner, so I glanced left, saw I could make it too if I treadled it, which I did, then turned to look forward again and saw .. shadow?! Yeah, he couldn’t see into the sun either. Crunk.
(I generally have “ok” eyesight but my brain seems to be constantly looking out for skirts, legs, bosoms, and cops.)
How come my PS3 can simulate an entire 3D world track environment plus vehicle and semi-convincing physics, and with its leftover processing power can simultaneously pilot up to 15 competing vehicles? And Tesla, with far greater processing power, struggles to control just one single car?
“The former commander of the the Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia, has revealed an unidentified drone swarm buzzed the facility for 17 days last December.”
Possibly a flock of seagulls? First they buzzed the base then they ran, they ran so far away…
Somebody’s gonna buy a “fun fly” stunt plane from Hobby King, rig it with 1 gallon jug of fruit cocktail and a one-way GPS wayfinder and is going to safely and courteously make deliveries to deserving individuals. Look, I didn’t invent it. Some guy already tried to serve Maduro with court documents at a street celebration via similar technique a couple years back.
We used to have Krazy Krazy store here in Western Canada, who went bankrupt (of course), but even up until the night before they locked the doors they were going hard to sign up layaway purchases.
So you go to Krazy Krazy to buy a VCR and they have one you want, but you can’t afford it right now, so the salesman guarantees to keep one for you if you start up a layaway purchase agreement, in which you leave them some money, and keep going back and pay a little at a time, until the whole purchase price is paid, and then you get the VCR (if they still had one).
Except if they go bankrupt, at which point you’re just another unsecured creditor who is never gettin’ anything.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krazy_Krazy
I run Win10 inside a container in Virt-Manager on my Ubuntu workstation, I actually have several of them in there for various purposes. What I did was I created one VM with the “Ghost Spectre” edition of Win10 which is pared down to the bone of upgrades, security, all that nonsense; then cloned it about 6 times. I have a single share folder that Windows can see, through which all data enters the Microsoft environments, and which I safely backup each time I ever fire up Windows (WAY less frequently these days). If some hacker figures out how to hack my windows and damage something I can restore the snapshot in about 30 seconds.
It’s funny, I finally discovered the perfect environment in which to run Microsoft, and now I barely even use it anymore! Go figure.
FUNNY. But the first thing I thought of was Lister being bedeviled by several forms of AI as the ship computer Holly, his dead roommate Rimmer, and the one that can actually rip him to shreds, Kryten.
The only other living creature is "cat," which could be imagination fabricated by insane psychosis.
For instance: I got an offer from LinkedIn in which I could pay for their AI to write for me job application letters, which would be received by AI "human" resource reviewers, and presumably the more I pay the more favorably the AI letters are received. Then, I began to feel insane psychosis kicking in...
It looks more like a bait car.
(Speaking of cars: I am surprised by the duration of the ongoing “crypto.com” sponsorship scam of Formula 1. I still enjoy watching the racing spectacle because of two rules: 1. Never pay any fee to anybody to watch F1 races, 2. Never transact any business with any company associated with F1 in any capacity.)
I have not bought “new” equipment for many years now, to be honest I already have far more compute power than I will ever need. It is with immense pleasure I drop by the local recycling depot and peruse the latest & greatest industrial computational equipment from a few years ago, often selling for 1% original cost OR LESS.
Don’t mind if I do!
I took my commerce elsewhere.
(Also, the “computer” they locked with proprietary algorithms is nothing but a PLC running glorified ladder logic. Guys are successfully rewiring their cars by disposing of those cost-cut “black box” brains and snapping in a home-built “speeduino”. I’d guess a small consortium or syndicate of farmers scrape up a little bit of bounty cash and set loose some hackers to sort out the John Deere mess, open-source the DIY alternative, and otherwise stop being a customer. Mazda has made heated seat resistors a subscription service, are you kidding me?! As if I don’t have a 12V cigarette lighter socket directly adjacent to the heater circuit. Also: just avoid Mazda, folks. Don’t be a loser!)
They’ve got autonomous robot vehicles ripping around Mars at speeds up to, like, 1 mph! Because it would be a real disaster if they were to crash into no person nor any valuable property (kidding: more like 1/2 mile per WEEK).
I wonder how these robotaxi companies can just “let loose” their barely-in-control models at highway speeds with the barest comprehension of what’s around them let alone identifying people, property, hazards, etc. They have absolutely zero ethics. They’ve been menacing and killing people for years now, I’m glad somebody in law enforcement finally noticed the crimes being committed.
If the device ran on diesel, it would probably be ok.
What if they made, like, a “general purpose” kind of vehicle, that could go almost anywhere while hauling some gear.
Even better if it had machine guns that popped out the taillights, and could emit a cloud of smoke, or puddle of oil, on command.
“they no longer see the employees as a source of their continued profitability…”
You know what I find interesting is how these companies one the one hand seek to divest themselves of the good old employees who already know how to do everything, yet on the other hand ask for the exact same experience education and credentials from the new hire.
They want to hire the exact same person as the guy they just fired, so long as it’s somebody else.
(Well I guess it’s obvious: they want the exact same person except the replacement works for a starter wage.)
I want a ban on ALL connected tech. I want, at bare minimum, any and all “connected” tech to include a mandatory option to be completely and utterly free from ALL connections.
That includes your friggin Apple, your friggin Microsoft, your friggin Sony, your friggin Google, your friggin WHOEVER!!
If your friggin tech can’t work unless it’s connected to your friggin company, then that tech device should be friggin BANNED.
End of line.
It’s some kind of Studebaker, or something?
I have no “clew” who uses it or for what. I have no basis for judging how relevant any of this is. The necessary evidence has not been “shewn.”
(I traverse the path in my butt-nosed Avanti like it’s sailing “threw” the cloud, coming in for a high-angle interception with a gigantic immovable rock! Or some-such.)
Uh oh I smell a scam debacle brewing. Some swine is about to make a dirty deal with corrupt government officials to deliver some garbage public IT project that is going to be minimum 10x over budget and extend 3x beyond the project time span, accomplishing at best 25% of the agreed scope before being cancelled as a massive boondoggle and delivering absolutely nothing at all, and we learn in the forensic investigation that everything was hopelessly outdated and incompetently managed for every single second. And everybody responsible evades culpability by retiring to the Canary Islands.
The troubles extended back to itanium: a premium product developed to cash in on wealthy industrial customers (who were unexpectedly presented with a much cheaper yet equally as powerful 64-bit concept). Oh, the humiliation of Intel forced to adopt AMD64!
Intel was like the Evil Witch of West shrinking to a $90 billion emaciated shadow while AMD has swelled to a shaky $244 billion valuation. Intel isn’t exactly conquered, but battered and belittled.
Meanwhile nVidia is a $2,800 billion dollar target…
“Funny that not so long ago I was heavily downvoted for saying that unfriendly state could install a backdoor in EV cars allowing it to remotely control the car causing it to crash or even cause battery to catch fire.“
I don’t see how this is far-fetched. The pagers beeped for several seconds prior to exploding, so there was a software hack that caused the pager to attract attention before blowing up in someone’s hands. Also a hardware hack to incorporate both the explosive and the trigger.
People scoff at the potential but the fact is many nations have forbidden Huawei from providing 5G network equipment. So why was that, if not because of some malicious activity?
Read it for yourself:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/huawei-5g-explainer-1.6461391
Bin Laden avoided cellular for years and years because he knew that’s how he would be identified and targeted. Modern EVs are the same, hell any GM has an On Star radio that can be used to surveil and target the vehicle just as it sits! This very publication has reported numerous times on the ability of hackers to attack and disrupt these very cars: this is fact, not fiction!
If bad actors can hack and booby trap a tiny little pager radio (or thousands of them), they can definitely do the same to an EV.
My favorite simple cipher is the “book cipher,” because nobody can possibly figure it out unless you know precisely which book is being referenced. Although I suppose you could just look for the most worn-out book on the shelf… (or, to foil that, pick anything from project Gutenberg).
My “fill the band” scheme goes like this: the ‘key’ is a seed value for some RNG that generates values up to 100. That number is the bit-count of noise bits per single data bit. So the message becomes up to 99% waste. Anyway, what you do is take the sparse data stream (data bits surrounded by random stretches of zeroes) and just pick random phrases, words, and letters that happen to have the same data bit set while filling in the emptiness with plausible information. Even better, every once in awhile you include within the message a special instruction to reset the RNG seed, etc.
(Of course this is a specialty cipher for particular people that want something more than commodity crypto. The algorithm can be as nuts as you want, and the plausible data could be audio, video, noise, repeating patterns, anything your imagination dreams up!)
You know what happens when you disrespect the court is you generally wind up paying a very hefty penalty. Even a ridiculously rich guy like Leon, his BBS company is suddenly banned from an entire country.
What is fascinating is when a COURT INSIDER like Giuliani goes, "Oh, Yeah??????" and doubles down, and doubles down, and doubles down.
And is punished so severely he finally shuts his fool mouth up!
These are nothing but canned “expert systems” that know about 10 common problems and only give you enough symptoms to choose from that are designed to fence you into the 10 ineffective canned solutions (that are never what the actual problem is).
The way I see it, the company has committed suicide by abandoning its core function: to provide service to the paying customer. I avoid these “zombie” businesses. When something really goes wrong, there will be nobody able to fix it. Why struggle with dead businesses? Take your trade somewhere better, I say!
The company I worked for paid a $50k ransom and TONS of geometry models didn’t work anymore after recovery. I only found out about a month after I had started. I sorta had developed a feeling they were a bunch of amateurs, which was rapidly becoming a strong conviction. Interestingly, there had previously been an entire engineering and design department of whom there was one drafter left. I remember part of the job description was “solve differential equations,” I asked what they had in mind, because even Newton’s reaction equation F=m.A is a differential equation. They never asked me to solve any such equations (too bad!) but they did ask me to recreate a design from a bankrupt competitor’s blueprints… which they said they bought at the bankruptcy auction. Well, for the wrongful dismissal lawsuit I found out, no, it was the other guys had bought the intellectual property assets, and not only that, had paid almost $2 million for the works. Yeah, they elected to settle out of court.
(Personally, I found a discarded Netgear NAS for $20, 3D printed some caddy shells, loaded up with HDDs, and keep it as an offline backup. Yeah, I just shut off the power between backups. I’d like to see the hacker who can hijack my unplugged NAS backup!)
“Cartridges use a propellant not an explosive.”
Semantics? Our colleagues at Gun Zone mistakenly think ammunition can somehow “explode” if it catches on fire. Where did they get this bonkers notion when ammo have no explosive whatsoever?!
https://thegunzone.com/what-happens-to-ammo-in-a-house-fire/
“The real problem” is that regular folks have no way of disqualifying the kooks in politics! All you can do is vote for the other kook. Well, the two major political parties have dominated the political landscape and you have to be this much [=====] corrupt to be invited to participate.
There is just one kind of democracy that allows opposition and that’s the Plebiscite. What we need to do is bring the opposition power of the Plebiscite to the ballot box, and EVERYTHING is solved.
Ever wonder why famous celebrities can challenge elections despite bringing nothing but recognition? Because nobody is allowed to oppose any candidate, is why!
Hey here’s my manifesto.
https://youtu.be/1WiPbLgMHSQ
Oh, books have been printed with boilerplate disclaimers (“nobody is allowed to scan this work and store it within a digital distribution system without the publisher’s permission,” yada yada) for decades now.
Sadly, I am a book-hoarder. Have been for decades now. I *love* the Gutenberg library for two reasons, one it’s all there and it’s all free, and two it’s all freely available! I don’t need to load up my hard drive, I can access anything in there whenever I want.
I enjoyed the archive collection while it was available but they were breaking the terms of the book. Sigh.
“Perhaps your motherboard manufacturers included a TPM header on the board, in which case you can buy the TPM modules. Should you really want Windows 11...”
Hey did you guys hear there’s a nearly complete ISA bus in that TPM header? Some guys have been busy hackin’ away and managed to get old Sound Blaster audio cards working on a modern PC! Some think it might even be possible to get a floppy drive controller card working, too!
Well I switched over to Ubuntu but I still run “classic” windows 7 and 10 by installing the ghost spectre versions in Virt-Manager. They run with full video acceleration because my motherboard has a second full length PCI-e slot for a dedicated Video card, which is passed through to the virtual machine.
It’s a legacy setup but the nice part is that I can easily take snapshots, make full system backups, clone the system as many times I feel like. I isolate the VMs from the internet so they can’t be hacked or meddled with by Microsoft. Zero need for any anti-virus. I keep all working data in a special folder on the Linux host as a Samba share. I run legacy programs on Microsoft so it’s ok if nothing ever gets “updated” (meddled with). Those programs already work good enough.
It actually harkens back to “good old” days before Agile forced people to run shitty buggy defeatured beta copies and endure years of constant updates while trying to get something done. I have zero intention of buying anything from Microsoft Apple Google Sony ever again. If Microsoft buys Ubuntu, I’ll switch to another Debian implementation I reckon.
It’s an iPhone 12 and locked down pretty hard. Ostensibly it’s an email appliance, but really it’s a surveillance device (must be, because they terminated my contract but left me the surveillance device). My working theory: they think I might be dumb enough to carry it around and possibly bring it to a competitor’s facility? It’s still 100% activated. Maybe they are surveilling my kitchen cabinet. Mystery!
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