bad idea: A mouse cursor that's not just a simple floating pointer, it's a cat/dog paw... but it stretches all the way to an edge of the screen like it's a really long leg
The 37C3 talk on TEA1 encryption (used by police and military units in europe) is hilarious.
The hackers announced they found a vulnerability in the encryption, and one of the ways the organization that standardized TEA1 downplayed the breach was by saying that it wasn't viable, because it required "high powered GPUs".
So they ported their algorithm to a Toshiba Satellite running Windows 95, and re-cracked the encryption there.
but that's some hilarious pettiness. "oh, this isn't really a risk because it requires new hardware, and it was sensible when it was designed back in the 90s? Well, screw you, we'll hack your shit on a 90s laptop we bought off ebay!"
I managed to completely screw up editing my "I'm broke until I get hired" post when I was turning it into my "I'm broke because I'm not hired" post. Whoops.
It's kinda depressing how tumblr is imploding now and I'm seeing half my follow list go "man, after seeing both twitter and tumblr do this, it's really showing how it's a bad idea for a social media network to be run by a company who can make arbitrary changes without user consent.
it's weird because it's not like bsky is any more tumblr-like than mastodon. and there are activitypub-based socials designed to work more like tumblr... but nope, mastodon is scary, so when tumblr dies, we'll go to bsky. what'll happen on bsky in a year or do? don't worry about it!
@foone fucking yes. I've been lobbying for the fediverse on Twitter for two years now, offering help and tech support and explanations to anyone wanting to migrate, I've been emphasiszing that there are software (softwares?) other than Mastodon and pointing out GoToSocial, PeerTube, Pixelfed, etc.; I've been pointing out that Bluesky originated as a Dorsey-led Twitter spin-off, I've been highlighting Bluesky's tech and moderation failures, etc. etc.
...and I've gotten zero. Nothing. People either bring up superficial discourses like "but the admins read your DMs!", follow influencers who came to "Mastodon" and ragequit when their attempts to impose their Twitter habits on the network didn't work, or at best people signed up to mastodon.social, had bad experiences because it's mastodon.social, and quit.
But people hand out Bluesky invites left and right. Even people I know are on the fediverse and enjoy it here.
If a corporate platform restricts who can join, it's "exclusive", when they impose bad rules, it's "growing pains", when they have technical failures, it's "innovative".
When we do it, it's "elitist", "censorship", and "only for nerds".
The worst part about being a company that builds AI products is having to hire all the security to kill the time travelers who keep trying to stop you.
Seriously, our budget for FY 2024 is like 60% security at this point
@bearloga@foone If you did that the universe may decide the easiest way to prevent the paradox would be to remove the planet, like in Niven's short story "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation"?
I'm a "full stack developer", in that my stack is full and if you try to push any more tasks on me I'm gonna overflow it and start corrupting my own memory
There's a special hell for sites which have password requirements that are like 16 letters, one or more numbers, upper case and lowercase, at least one special character, and we disabled pasting/password managers
You know, in the 80s people often said things like "in 40 years, everything will have computers in them", and while they weren't wrong, they severely underestimated the situation.
Our computers have computers in them. Those smaller computers often have even smaller computers inside them.
We didn't get a "everything is a computer" future, we got a future with fractal computers. The fuckers have metastasized
@foone Very true. I happen to write code for one of the computers that runs inside of a CPU handling voltages, frequencies, temperature, etc. Looking forward to the day when it gets its own little computer.
@foone Will never forget the moment when I discovered that the "5G module" in my router is actually another ARM CPU running (wait for it...) Android! So a phone, basically, as the path of least resistance to a shipping product. This means that not only is there a computer inside my computer, but there's a Linux inside my Linux. And that's before we get onto the ARM CPU embedded in the microSD card...
@foone what about those of us who just happen to have an ATSC encoder and possibly even enough working pieces of exciters lying around to make something work
(it's my eventual plan to try lighting that up on the 70cm ham radio band just to see if that even works)
It seems every company I've worked at has a person who looms large in their legend.
Like, they're often the person who built the core systems, everything was originally their design, but they left recently and in their absence they've had to hire like 5 more people to try and take over all their responsibilities.
I think next time I'm gonna track down that person, find out where they moved to, and go work there instead
Pretending here the answer isn't "you had a 3x engineer and made then work like they were a 20x engineer and this burnt them out in like two years and now they're doing woodworking in a log cabin on the top of a mountain in Montana and if you mention computers to them, they'll shoot you in the face"
computers are a completely normal field where there are still existing databases built on descendants of something called PICK OS, an early database made in the 60s to organize parts for a helicopter that never existed, for a system called Generalized Information Retrieval Language System (GIRLS), as created by a guy named Dick Pick.
@foone
As a fledgling dBASE programmer in the mid 80s, I ran across a PICK guy. So, if this is a hoax, it is a very elaborate one that's been around since PICK OS was created, allegedly.
@foone It was nearly as hard to google[*] for info about Pick DBMS online as it was to find stuff about IBM AS/400s after IBM renamed them to System i …
[*] In the Before Times when google could find things.