People don't advertise their mental illnesses in bars either. You usually find out that stuff by meeting them in person and getting to know them. And you're going to do that anyway, no matter how you met them, as that's the entire point, isn't it?
Is 'alcoholism' classified as mental or physical these days?
I'm just surprised because a brushed motor, which I was assuming this was, acts as a feeble arc gap under normal operation; but presumably had to pass regulatory muster when first manufactured, as well as remaining efficient enough to keep the fridge running, within the power budget provided by a domestic breaker while also putting out enough RF noise to escape(usually sealed to keep the refrigerant in) coolant loop and disrupt the cell towers.
I would have expected one perturbed enough to be a regulatory issue to have popped a breaker, caught fire, or just stopped cooling beer before getting to that point.
Incidentally, Australian beer fridges have the honor of being among the first commercially successful applications of refrigeration technology(the principles and some early prototypes were developed elsewhere; but Australia's not-exactly-robust ice-harvesting industry didn't imperil the cost effectiveness of the systems in the way that it did in places that actually have ice). Telstra should turn down whatever RF 'noise' the kids are listening too these days and let Grandpop play what he wants!
Irrelevant history aside, what kind of dodgy does a motor have to be to generate enough RF to degrade a cell system in the course of performing relatively modest compression duties for a small refrigerator?
IBM's attempts to do exactly that appear to occupy about 30% of Slashdot's ad space these days... At this point, they'll probably have to move a few mainframes just to pay their abstract-but-inspiring-clip-art bills.
If "'a person's data would be equivalent to their money... controlled, managed, exchanged and accounted for just like personal banking services operate today.'" is the optimistic-pie-in-the-sky vision of the future, I think it's safe to say that we are 100% fucked.
Financial services is not... exactly... a shining beacon of customer service, egalitarian contracting, and transparency, and the deal gets worse the smaller your scale. If that's the ideal, the outcome seems likely to be grim indeed.
I suspect that the effects would be unpleasant for our(already somewhat tattered) delusions of free will; but probably less socially dramatic than might be expected: after all, a nontrivial amount of human pair bonding throughout history has been driven by a combination of economic need, social pressure, and good, old-fashioned violence. The use of more sophisticated chemical/biological coercion, to subvert the individual's preference rather than overpower it, would be an interesting twist; but would probably lead to results not too dissimilar from those historically seen with overt coercion.
Voles are a good model because they relatively neatly elucidate the mechanism: you have access to both pair-bonding voles and (quite similar) non-bonding species, which narrows the search space considerably. Plus, bonobos are big, relatively rare, and have fairly long lifecycles, which makes doing potentially invasive and dangerous research(like determining that you've found the correct switch by patching a vole to change its behavior) without dedicating a decade or two, a substantial amount of money, and some unpleasant little chats with the IRB.
The voles' pair bonding, sharing of parental roles and egalitarian nest building in couples makes them a good model for understanding the biology of monogamy and mating in humans
A good model for ideal human behavior, sure, but actual behavior?!? One wonders if the researchers have met any actual human couples.
People like the vole model because prairie voles are(somewhat atypically) pair-bonded; but there is at least one closely related vole flavor that isn't. Makes narrowing down the elements involved (comparatively) pleasant and straightforward, by biology standards. Plus, 'vole' is pretty close to 'lab rat' in terms of size/cost/lifecycle-length/animal-rights-activists-setting-fire-to-your-lab, which makes it preferable to larger, more unwieldy, comparison animals.
So how does it install malware, send a bunch of keystrokes to open Notepad and type up a malicious BAT script?
I suspect that someone feeling clever could probably encode some malware such that it could be transferred and executed entirely with default system utilities and keystrokes, or they could use emulated keystrokes to execute a binary located on a USB MSC filesystem(they still automount by default, and guessing the drive letter prepend should only take a few seconds). Grabbing a payload from a malicious URL is also an option, if you are willing to risk the target not having internet access.
For promotional purposes, they make a rather similar device that emulates a keyboard and opens an arbitrary URL when inserted. For something that is such a terrible idea, they seem surprisingly popular, even with companies who really ought to know better.
I assume that the lighting auth chip makes the behavior even more complex, under the surface; but I think that the network-like behavior happens on all iOS devices, regardless of connnector type. The ipods(aside from the Touch, which is more or less a cost-reduced iphone without the cell modem) were slightly eccentric mass storage class devices, or the firewire equivalent; but none of the iOS devices ever exposed their storage directly, you have to go through their OS for access.
I've seen this going back years with USB keyboards etc from China, they install all sorts of crap on your PC without you knowing.
Wow, a sleazy USB device from China that has more flash memory than the specs indicate, rather than substantially less? Where can I find this miraculous creature?
Physical access to a device allows for far too many attack vectors to protect against. News at 11
I think the issue here is that 'plausible, easy-to-engineer, physical access allows a demonstrated attack against a device'.
Also, at an architectural level, having an idevice plugged in is much closer to having a network connection to a computer than it is to having 'physical access'. It's a bit weirder than a pure USB network adapter; but it's essentially a chat, over TCP, with a remote computer, not total control over a USB MSC device or something of that flavor.
It's a pity that the 'lighting' connector's dependence on an in-cable processor likely makes it more complex to use the old power-only mod...
Not all USB devices play nicely(some phones require either a full USB host or some goofy resistor-coding nonsense on the data pins, and some USB hosts don't power USB ports, or only provide 100ma, unless the USB peripheral negotiates appropriately on the data pins); but it is generally possible(sometimes with resistor hackery, and for 'dumb' chargers and USB ports that don't need negotiation for power) to use a USB cable with the data lines cut and just power and ground attached for charging. Certainly the only thing I'd trust when plugging into some arbitrary port...
I'm thinking of converting my Hummer to run on whale oil.
According to this, contemporary sperm whale oil production peaked at almost 39 barrels/whale in 1952. At current US daily consumption of ~19 million barrels(and assuming that whale squeezin's are equivalent to inorganic oils), a mere ~488,000 whales per day could entirely eliminate our wasteful demand for oil!
That would exhaust the estimated pre-hunting wild population in about two days; but I'm sure that bold advances in aquaculture will step in to fill the gap.
Monoculture, essentially, is the issue. If Amazon was one of a half-dozen ultra-low-margin online retailers, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
What I find curious, given the fear of monoculture, is how publishers continue to let fear of pirates(who, at last writing, don't seem much deterred by current DRM schemes, and who often have access to scanned versions in any case) drive them right into the same mistake that Team Music made.
While there effect on pirates is muted, DRM schemes certainly do help encourage a winner-take-all market by tying a customer more heavily to a given store the more he has used it in the past. With computers and high-capability tablets it's more of a nuisance(since most of the DRM flavors have clients for them, and you have the resources to run 6 different shitty storefront apps if that's what it takes); but the e-ink reader market is damned barren unless you either have a DRM-free format or are using the vendor's own store.
Why do the gaming servers respond to requests from non-players?
I assume that there is, at very least, some sort of authentication service that has to evaluate a request to determine whether or not it comes from a player...
Is it a crime in this case? It varies by jurisdiction, of course; but party primaries are often technically just of the same legal standing as somebody's Friday poker club voting about something. They are, of course, magnified by history and institutional inertia; but the elections by which parties decide on their own candidates for office and elections where voters decide on candidates to actually put in office are quite different things.
I have to wonder who green-lighted the plan in the first place. Especially in the summer heat, it's not the sort of city where you find yourself going "Damn, this place is plagued by trees, where can I find a good, soothing mall?"
Is this magical alternate reality where twitter is the most menacing issue of the day accepting applications? It must be pretty nice to have solved so many actual problems!
Slashdot Mirror
People don't advertise their mental illnesses in bars either. You usually find out that stuff by meeting them in person and getting to know them. And you're going to do that anyway, no matter how you met them, as that's the entire point, isn't it?
Is 'alcoholism' classified as mental or physical these days?
I'm just surprised because a brushed motor, which I was assuming this was, acts as a feeble arc gap under normal operation; but presumably had to pass regulatory muster when first manufactured, as well as remaining efficient enough to keep the fridge running, within the power budget provided by a domestic breaker while also putting out enough RF noise to escape(usually sealed to keep the refrigerant in) coolant loop and disrupt the cell towers.
I would have expected one perturbed enough to be a regulatory issue to have popped a breaker, caught fire, or just stopped cooling beer before getting to that point.
Incidentally, Australian beer fridges have the honor of being among the first commercially successful applications of refrigeration technology(the principles and some early prototypes were developed elsewhere; but Australia's not-exactly-robust ice-harvesting industry didn't imperil the cost effectiveness of the systems in the way that it did in places that actually have ice). Telstra should turn down whatever RF 'noise' the kids are listening too these days and let Grandpop play what he wants!
Irrelevant history aside, what kind of dodgy does a motor have to be to generate enough RF to degrade a cell system in the course of performing relatively modest compression duties for a small refrigerator?
As quoth the dubious but attractively glib folk wisdom: "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?"...
IBM's attempts to do exactly that appear to occupy about 30% of Slashdot's ad space these days... At this point, they'll probably have to move a few mainframes just to pay their abstract-but-inspiring-clip-art bills.
If "'a person's data would be equivalent to their money ... controlled, managed, exchanged and accounted for just like personal banking services operate today.'" is the optimistic-pie-in-the-sky vision of the future, I think it's safe to say that we are 100% fucked.
Financial services is not... exactly... a shining beacon of customer service, egalitarian contracting, and transparency, and the deal gets worse the smaller your scale. If that's the ideal, the outcome seems likely to be grim indeed.
I suspect that the effects would be unpleasant for our(already somewhat tattered) delusions of free will; but probably less socially dramatic than might be expected: after all, a nontrivial amount of human pair bonding throughout history has been driven by a combination of economic need, social pressure, and good, old-fashioned violence. The use of more sophisticated chemical/biological coercion, to subvert the individual's preference rather than overpower it, would be an interesting twist; but would probably lead to results not too dissimilar from those historically seen with overt coercion.
"If we crack down on 3rd party developers, that means we don't have to measure our software against the standard they set, right?"
Voles are a good model because they relatively neatly elucidate the mechanism: you have access to both pair-bonding voles and (quite similar) non-bonding species, which narrows the search space considerably. Plus, bonobos are big, relatively rare, and have fairly long lifecycles, which makes doing potentially invasive and dangerous research(like determining that you've found the correct switch by patching a vole to change its behavior) without dedicating a decade or two, a substantial amount of money, and some unpleasant little chats with the IRB.
The voles' pair bonding, sharing of parental roles and egalitarian nest building in couples makes them a good model for understanding the biology of monogamy and mating in humans
A good model for ideal human behavior, sure, but actual behavior?!? One wonders if the researchers have met any actual human couples.
People like the vole model because prairie voles are(somewhat atypically) pair-bonded; but there is at least one closely related vole flavor that isn't. Makes narrowing down the elements involved (comparatively) pleasant and straightforward, by biology standards. Plus, 'vole' is pretty close to 'lab rat' in terms of size/cost/lifecycle-length/animal-rights-activists-setting-fire-to-your-lab, which makes it preferable to larger, more unwieldy, comparison animals.
So how does it install malware, send a bunch of keystrokes to open Notepad and type up a malicious BAT script?
I suspect that someone feeling clever could probably encode some malware such that it could be transferred and executed entirely with default system utilities and keystrokes, or they could use emulated keystrokes to execute a binary located on a USB MSC filesystem(they still automount by default, and guessing the drive letter prepend should only take a few seconds). Grabbing a payload from a malicious URL is also an option, if you are willing to risk the target not having internet access.
For promotional purposes, they make a rather similar device that emulates a keyboard and opens an arbitrary URL when inserted. For something that is such a terrible idea, they seem surprisingly popular, even with companies who really ought to know better.
Wow, sounds like a good celebrity-cameo reboot for Logan's Run. Let's do this!
I assume that the lighting auth chip makes the behavior even more complex, under the surface; but I think that the network-like behavior happens on all iOS devices, regardless of connnector type. The ipods(aside from the Touch, which is more or less a cost-reduced iphone without the cell modem) were slightly eccentric mass storage class devices, or the firewire equivalent; but none of the iOS devices ever exposed their storage directly, you have to go through their OS for access.
I've seen this going back years with USB keyboards etc from China, they install all sorts of crap on your PC without you knowing.
Wow, a sleazy USB device from China that has more flash memory than the specs indicate, rather than substantially less? Where can I find this miraculous creature?
Physical access to a device allows for far too many attack vectors to protect against. News at 11
I think the issue here is that 'plausible, easy-to-engineer, physical access allows a demonstrated attack against a device'.
Also, at an architectural level, having an idevice plugged in is much closer to having a network connection to a computer than it is to having 'physical access'. It's a bit weirder than a pure USB network adapter; but it's essentially a chat, over TCP, with a remote computer, not total control over a USB MSC device or something of that flavor.
It's a pity that the 'lighting' connector's dependence on an in-cable processor likely makes it more complex to use the old power-only mod...
Not all USB devices play nicely(some phones require either a full USB host or some goofy resistor-coding nonsense on the data pins, and some USB hosts don't power USB ports, or only provide 100ma, unless the USB peripheral negotiates appropriately on the data pins); but it is generally possible(sometimes with resistor hackery, and for 'dumb' chargers and USB ports that don't need negotiation for power) to use a USB cable with the data lines cut and just power and ground attached for charging. Certainly the only thing I'd trust when plugging into some arbitrary port...
I'm thinking of converting my Hummer to run on whale oil.
According to this, contemporary sperm whale oil production peaked at almost 39 barrels/whale in 1952. At current US daily consumption of ~19 million barrels(and assuming that whale squeezin's are equivalent to inorganic oils), a mere ~488,000 whales per day could entirely eliminate our wasteful demand for oil!
That would exhaust the estimated pre-hunting wild population in about two days; but I'm sure that bold advances in aquaculture will step in to fill the gap.
Monoculture, essentially, is the issue. If Amazon was one of a half-dozen ultra-low-margin online retailers, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
What I find curious, given the fear of monoculture, is how publishers continue to let fear of pirates(who, at last writing, don't seem much deterred by current DRM schemes, and who often have access to scanned versions in any case) drive them right into the same mistake that Team Music made.
While there effect on pirates is muted, DRM schemes certainly do help encourage a winner-take-all market by tying a customer more heavily to a given store the more he has used it in the past. With computers and high-capability tablets it's more of a nuisance(since most of the DRM flavors have clients for them, and you have the resources to run 6 different shitty storefront apps if that's what it takes); but the e-ink reader market is damned barren unless you either have a DRM-free format or are using the vendor's own store.
*sigh*
You need to log in to the game at some point.
But only once, unless you are the sort of coward who logs out!
All it means is that a Bitcoin angle to this story will be revealed later.
The raspberry Pi is working as fast as it can; but the angle isn't quite finished yet...
Why do the gaming servers respond to requests from non-players?
I assume that there is, at very least, some sort of authentication service that has to evaluate a request to determine whether or not it comes from a player...
What kind of intricate in-game machinations will this turn out to be connected to?
Is it a crime in this case? It varies by jurisdiction, of course; but party primaries are often technically just of the same legal standing as somebody's Friday poker club voting about something. They are, of course, magnified by history and institutional inertia; but the elections by which parties decide on their own candidates for office and elections where voters decide on candidates to actually put in office are quite different things.
I have to wonder who green-lighted the plan in the first place. Especially in the summer heat, it's not the sort of city where you find yourself going "Damn, this place is plagued by trees, where can I find a good, soothing mall?"
Is this magical alternate reality where twitter is the most menacing issue of the day accepting applications? It must be pretty nice to have solved so many actual problems!