Running without a ad blocker is more akin to walking around with a open wound in a infectious area
I read an article a while ago about some scientist who decided that he wanted to go around investigating a certain species of leech that lives inside a hippo's butt, like attached directly to the colon. He suggested that, as big as the hippo is, it probably wasn't really all that aware that the leeches are even in its butt, but that's where the leech likes to be because there's a good source of blood there for the leech to feed on.
Now, the scientist is probably right, the hippo probably goes its whole life not really knowing that it has all these leeches in its butt. It might feel a little pain in the butt, but the hippo probably isn't concerned with why that pain is there, much less how or even if it can get rid of it, it's just something that the hippo has always lived with. The hippo accepts that one of the facts of daily life is that you just need to live with some pain in your butt.
Now, imagine (and believe me, this is a hypothetical), if the hippo let someone root around inside its butt and remove every one of the leeches, and even stop any others from attaching. It might take a day or two to get used to and get back to normal, but the hippo would wake up one day and realize that it no longer has a pain in its butt. It can still do everything it used to do, it can frolic in the water, it can roam around and find the tender little pieces of grass, it can do that thing where it poops and swishes its tail around to spread it all over its neighbors, and it realizes that it can do all of those things it likes without having that pain in its butt.
Now, maybe the leeches could talk. Maybe the leeches talk to the hippos and they say things like, listen, hippo, my life cycle depends on you letting me get into your butt when you're in the water. I need to drink your blood and drop out some eggs, so that other leeches can be born and start the cycle all over again. It's not really a big price you pay, I mean sure, there's a little pain in your butt, but I need you to do this. If you want to get in the water, it's just something you have to deal with. It's the price of admission. If you get in the water without letting me in your butt, it's like you're stealing the water.
I bet that the hippo would hear that, and would still want to continue going about its day without any pain in its butt. I don't think the hippo would feel very sorry for the butt leech. Sure, maybe the butt leech contributes to the aquatic ecosystem, maybe its eggs or the dead leeches get eaten by other things and fertilize the grass that the hippo likes to eat. But, if the leeches weren't there, the grass would just find other nutrients. Even though the leech is trying to argue that it's a necessary part of this ecosystem, it's actually just a pain in the butt. In reality, despite what it tells everyone else, the major beneficiary of anything that the butt leech does is the actual butt leech.
Anyway, I just had a thought that advertisers kind of sound like hippo butt leeches.
Seriously? You seriously think that's the reason why Apple flat-out rejects apps with names that include Android? So Apple's way to help get rid of "scammy" apps is to restrict the naming conventions? Not by actually curating the apps and determining whether or not they are "scammy", but by restricting the words that people can use in the app names. That's the explanation you're going with. Why did they single out only other mobile platforms as banned names?
But admit that this device, while not an explosive, was EXACTLY the same as a bomb trigger.
This device was not the same as a bomb trigger. One obvious difference is that a bomb trigger is attached to a bomb. If it's not attached to a bomb, then it's not a bomb trigger. Just like the fact that the cell phone in your pocket is not a bomb trigger until you decide to attach it to a bomb. Once you attach your cell phone to a bomb, then instead of being a cell phone it's a bomb trigger. A clock is not a bomb trigger, it's a clock.
This kid built, knowingly or not, an actual triggering device out of an alarm clock.
A "triggering device" is also not a bomb trigger. Note the distinct lack of a bomb to trigger.
We cannot loose sight of what this device COULD have been used for
Your car can be used to intentionally strike and kill a person. Should you be allowed to drive it? What about the knives in your kitchen? Do you perhaps own any guns? I hope you don't use acid to help maintain a pool, and god help you if you fertilize your lawn.
This wasn't just an innocent shop class project the kid says he intended it to be
Actually, yeah, it was. Would you be fine if he 3D-printed some fancy plastic case so that you couldn't see the wires, would that calm your heart rate and make your palms stop sweating? Because that's the only real difference between what he built and what sits on your nightstand.
until the authorities could firmly establish what his intent was their actions where justified.
They could have firmly established his intentions by talking to his electrical engineering teacher and hearing that the kid showed the clock to the teacher. It would have been pretty obvious what his intentions were: to build a clock and show his EE teacher. They weren't interested in that though, they had a narrative that they wanted to reinforce and only had the evidence that he possessed something that had wires in it, his skin is brown, and he's Muslim. So instead of looking for actual evidence and intent, they just decided to arrest him. It's the lazy way to go, which is something that cops are pretty good at.
That some stupid teacher shoved the thing into a desk drawer, not withstanding.
Seriously. Obviously a clock goes on the desk, not in it.
Its just sad that that payout is gonna come from the taxpayer, NOT the idiots who perpetrated this. Theres a large number of people involved with this that should be behind bars, and have their pay garnished for the rest of their life to pay this kid for this...
The police and school officials all receive public money as their salaries. So the taxpayers kind of get the bill regardless of what happens.
There's a difference between mouse gestures, which are a rare feature, relatively new
When Opera released a version supporting mouse gestures, they were competing with IE 5. There are high school kids younger than mouse gestures.
The former is how it's used, the latter is what it does.
Way to completely miss the point.
Well, they also have testers to find the problems themselves and analysts to prioritize the problem themselves.
That's correct. And guess why they didn't find this particular bug before release, or why they decided to release it anyway before fixing the bug (hint: it's the same reason!). Go ahead, guess.
Again, it's not my job to fix their product. They aren't paying me.
Filing a bug report and adding your voice to the list of people wanting it fixed is in no way, shape, or form you fixing their product. They have programmers to fix the thing themselves. The only thing the bug report accomplishes is helping to make sure that the problem gets fixed quicker, if that's of any concern to you.
I'm not interested in making sure that microsoft fixes it. I don't benefit from that fix.
You don't benefit from your product working the way it was designed in the default browser of Windows 10? Well, OK.
My point was that you can't benchmark a partial browser against a complete browser.
You sure as hell can when the benchmarks measure things like Javascript and DOM performance and HTML 5 accuracy instead of the ability to print an iframe. It's just a stupid claim to state that the browser is useless because it has a bug that affects your particular application or use case, which you have incorrectly categorized as a missing feature. It's like if I tried to claim that since I use Opera, and it has mouse gestures, that any other browser that does not have mouse gestures is "useless". It's a stupid claim to make, because there are clearly many people out there using browsers that simply do not use them the same way I do.
Your definition of "doesn't work" is highly skewed. When someone sends you an email and says that the large system you've implemented "doesn't work", what's your response? I know what my response is to that non-bug-report. I ask them exactly what they're trying to do and what happens, because I know that the system as a whole works and they've just found a bug in some part of it. But, here you are, claiming that Edge "doesn't work". You're not filing bug reports to make sure the problem gets fixed on their end (thereby increasing the usability of your software on their product, in line with other products), you're just bitching.
It's useless because if it's missing one vital feature
This shows your skewed perspective. If that feature was as vital as you think it is then it would have been caught pre-release. If it's vital to you, then do something about it to make sure they fix it.
So would you say that Edge is useless as a web browser, or that it doesn't work very well for your specific use case? Because those are 2 completely different things, and it sounds like you're trying to claim that it is useless as a web browser. Obviously it's not. What's more, Microsoft is aware of the bug you've found and has promised a fix.
Yeah, a bug. Not "things missing for no reason", like they made a design decision to remove that, but a bug. Keep in mind also that Edge is not the new IE, it is a new browser. They did not remove anything, they've only been adding features and fixing bugs.
But I'm sure you've already added your voice to the bug report so that Microsoft knows that it is affecting people, rather than just bitching about it on Slashdot. After all, you're a developer.
Edge doesn't let me, or a script, print just one frame or iframe content or selection content. Making it useless
Right, because my #1 use case for the internet is to print web pages so a browser that can't do that is 100% useless. I'm glad I finally ran into the other person who uses the internet the same way I do.
I had to write this comment twice. I forgot that printing your post and writing my reply underneath it doesn't actually post anything.
Motion coprocessor is always-on now so using that feature heavily comes with no battery penalty.
That's a pretty funny way of saying that if you don't use the motion co-processor you're now going to have extra battery drain anyway. You sound like you paid attention in marketing school. Framing a negative as a feature, well done.
The worst experience I've had was, in all places, Texas. They didn't want to let me fly out of the airport with a shotgun case that was literally wrapped in heavy-duty chains, with a large lock. They thought the case was still able to be opened too much even with the chains wrapped around it (no matter that the only people who could take advantage of that, and have shotgun shells in their pocket just waiting for a weapon, would be their people). They made me go to the gift shop and buy a flimsy cable and lock to satisfy them. This was on the return trip, too. When I flew to Texas from Phoenix they looked at all the chains and just laughed at how ridiculous it looked.
1. No, they're not ineligible. 2. John McAfee isn't a felon.
No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
a psychopath dropping pennies off the Eiffel Tower
Pennies have a terminal velocity between 30-50 mph in light wind and weigh 2.5g. Go ahead, do the math to imagine what it would feel like to get hit by one. Here's your "psychopath" dropping pennies.
Weight required to kill someone from a free fall of 10 feet =.04 lbs
You must be kidding..04 lbs is 18.1 grams and change. 3 quarters totaling 17.01 grams, plus a dime at 2.268 grams, are plenty more than 18.1 grams. So you're suggesting that if I tape 3 quarters and a dime together and drop it on someone's head from 10 feet I'm going to kill them.
That's always the first thing I think of when I hear "Belkin". I haven't bought any of their products over the last 12 years. I didn't know many people still did, I'm a little surprised they're still making things with their brand on them.
Look at Citi's motivation. They are trying to plan their investments for the future. They have come to the conclusion that investing in renewables, wind, nuclear, energy efficiency, etc is both a better investment and also avoids the potential major consequences of continuing to invest in coal. Where do you find the flaw in their research?
I think that some are more obvious than others. I was on OK Cupid, for example, and I met people just fine without paying anything. The fact that AM charged men to read messages should be a major red flag. It's kind of hard to legislate though, especially when the fine print says that many accounts are there just for entertainment. It's a pretty thin line, especially when those accounts aren't marked as being a bot.
This is also a record, though not one the warmists like to talk about.
"Warmists". Huh. I don't know if National Public Radio frequently engages "warmists", but that's where I heard the story. You might even say they liked talking about it, how unusual these weather patterns were.
I do know that the summer weather here in Phoenix has been pretty strange. We had a mild June and July, I don't think it ever hit 110. In June it even rained (average monthly rainfall for June in Phoenix: 0.02 inches), hardly any rain in July (average 1.05 inches), and a few storms in August. Last night my roof got damaged by the wind while it poured rain for an hour or so, a lot of power outages around town. That storm dropped between a little less than an inch to 1.29 inches (average rainfall for all of August: 1 inch). I heard multiple transformers explode near my house and I've gotten some pictures from friends of downed trees from wind gusts well over 60mph (74mph is a category 1 hurricane). While June and July were mild, August has been very hot and we've been setting records, I believe we hit an all-time record high for August as well as record highs for several individual dates. I heard that it was the hottest August globally, and we definitely saw that here.
I'm not trying to sound like a "warmist" or anything, I'm just trying to figure out what I need to repair on my house thanks to the hot weather producing high-powered storms.
That seems pretty interesting, I'm kind of losing confidence in the woman writing those articles though. She's making statements like this:
Looking at the code, there appear to be several database tables where the system keeps track of when humans chat or message with other humans. It also seems that Ashley Madison even keeps records of what each member says to the other in chat sessions.... So much for Ashley Madison's guarantee that they'll keep your affair hushed up. Right now, the company has reams of incredibly incriminating personal information about everything its human users are doing and saying.
I mean, where are they supposed to store that data if not in a database? She sounds a little bit alarmist and relatively non-technical for someone trying to analyze a database dump.
Perhaps one of the most poignant parts of reading the engineers' comments in the code was when I uncovered a set of descriptions for how the engager bots should act. I found these in a database devoted to engager activity. Here are a few of them:
host bot mother creates engagers
birth has been given! let the engager find itself a man!
randomizing start time so engagers don't all pop up at the same time
for every single state that has guest males, we want to have a chat engager
Annalee, you found those in code comments or a database?
They operate by inhabiting, as a demon might, previously existing fake profiles
Yes, it's all witchcraft and sorcery.
The Angels, also called "hosts" by the company’s engineers, lay dormant until a bot animates them and uses them like a skin to contact a male user.
I think that Annalee thinks that her target audience is politicians.
It's unclear what else the engager would say - either the bots really are this simple, or further chat phrases weren't in the code. Most likely, based on what I saw from other bot code, the bot would urge the man to pay credits to talk further.
The most genius part of this entire scam is that the men will never go to the authorities if they figure it out. If a man gets messages from 10 different women all saying this:
I'm sexy, discreet, and always up for kinky chat. Would also meet up in person if we get to know each other and think there might be a good connection. Does this sound intriguing?
He's going to know that he's being scammed. He's not going to tell anyone about it though, beyond complaining to the site. He's not going to the media. It's like the druggie who gets his drugs stolen. He's not going to call the police to report that.
All told though, it's an interesting article with some better analysis. Upon hearing about the leak this was what I was most excited about - getting a real insider peak at how a dating site actually operates, from an analytical perspective it's great that both the source code and some or all of the database was leaked. From a privacy perspective that's obviously a horrible thing, but I'm definitely interested in the broad (non-personal) conclusions that come from seeing all of this information.
She posted another article here that shows the profit motive for running the bots, from email:
Slashdot Mirror
an eternity of "sponsored rectal content".
This comment probably would have been a better parent for my analogy.
Running without a ad blocker is more akin to walking around with a open wound in a infectious area
I read an article a while ago about some scientist who decided that he wanted to go around investigating a certain species of leech that lives inside a hippo's butt, like attached directly to the colon. He suggested that, as big as the hippo is, it probably wasn't really all that aware that the leeches are even in its butt, but that's where the leech likes to be because there's a good source of blood there for the leech to feed on.
Now, the scientist is probably right, the hippo probably goes its whole life not really knowing that it has all these leeches in its butt. It might feel a little pain in the butt, but the hippo probably isn't concerned with why that pain is there, much less how or even if it can get rid of it, it's just something that the hippo has always lived with. The hippo accepts that one of the facts of daily life is that you just need to live with some pain in your butt.
Now, imagine (and believe me, this is a hypothetical), if the hippo let someone root around inside its butt and remove every one of the leeches, and even stop any others from attaching. It might take a day or two to get used to and get back to normal, but the hippo would wake up one day and realize that it no longer has a pain in its butt. It can still do everything it used to do, it can frolic in the water, it can roam around and find the tender little pieces of grass, it can do that thing where it poops and swishes its tail around to spread it all over its neighbors, and it realizes that it can do all of those things it likes without having that pain in its butt.
Now, maybe the leeches could talk. Maybe the leeches talk to the hippos and they say things like, listen, hippo, my life cycle depends on you letting me get into your butt when you're in the water. I need to drink your blood and drop out some eggs, so that other leeches can be born and start the cycle all over again. It's not really a big price you pay, I mean sure, there's a little pain in your butt, but I need you to do this. If you want to get in the water, it's just something you have to deal with. It's the price of admission. If you get in the water without letting me in your butt, it's like you're stealing the water.
I bet that the hippo would hear that, and would still want to continue going about its day without any pain in its butt. I don't think the hippo would feel very sorry for the butt leech. Sure, maybe the butt leech contributes to the aquatic ecosystem, maybe its eggs or the dead leeches get eaten by other things and fertilize the grass that the hippo likes to eat. But, if the leeches weren't there, the grass would just find other nutrients. Even though the leech is trying to argue that it's a necessary part of this ecosystem, it's actually just a pain in the butt. In reality, despite what it tells everyone else, the major beneficiary of anything that the butt leech does is the actual butt leech.
Anyway, I just had a thought that advertisers kind of sound like hippo butt leeches.
Seriously? You seriously think that's the reason why Apple flat-out rejects apps with names that include Android? So Apple's way to help get rid of "scammy" apps is to restrict the naming conventions? Not by actually curating the apps and determining whether or not they are "scammy", but by restricting the words that people can use in the app names. That's the explanation you're going with. Why did they single out only other mobile platforms as banned names?
I don't work for Apple
With that explanation, you could have fooled me.
This just in: Android and Samsung are not the same thing.
You can find your unlocked flagship Android phone here for less than $350:
https://oneplus.net
Check section 3.1 of the Apple app store review guidelines:
Apps or metadata that mentions the name of any other mobile platform will be rejected
So maybe you could publish an app that transfers your data from iOS to Android, you just can't use the word "Android".
What's the reason why Apple would simply ban apps that mention Android in the title? What's the point? Anyone have a good answer for that?
But admit that this device, while not an explosive, was EXACTLY the same as a bomb trigger.
This device was not the same as a bomb trigger. One obvious difference is that a bomb trigger is attached to a bomb. If it's not attached to a bomb, then it's not a bomb trigger. Just like the fact that the cell phone in your pocket is not a bomb trigger until you decide to attach it to a bomb. Once you attach your cell phone to a bomb, then instead of being a cell phone it's a bomb trigger. A clock is not a bomb trigger, it's a clock.
This kid built, knowingly or not, an actual triggering device out of an alarm clock.
A "triggering device" is also not a bomb trigger. Note the distinct lack of a bomb to trigger.
We cannot loose sight of what this device COULD have been used for
Your car can be used to intentionally strike and kill a person. Should you be allowed to drive it? What about the knives in your kitchen? Do you perhaps own any guns? I hope you don't use acid to help maintain a pool, and god help you if you fertilize your lawn.
This wasn't just an innocent shop class project the kid says he intended it to be
Actually, yeah, it was. Would you be fine if he 3D-printed some fancy plastic case so that you couldn't see the wires, would that calm your heart rate and make your palms stop sweating? Because that's the only real difference between what he built and what sits on your nightstand.
until the authorities could firmly establish what his intent was their actions where justified.
They could have firmly established his intentions by talking to his electrical engineering teacher and hearing that the kid showed the clock to the teacher. It would have been pretty obvious what his intentions were: to build a clock and show his EE teacher. They weren't interested in that though, they had a narrative that they wanted to reinforce and only had the evidence that he possessed something that had wires in it, his skin is brown, and he's Muslim. So instead of looking for actual evidence and intent, they just decided to arrest him. It's the lazy way to go, which is something that cops are pretty good at.
That some stupid teacher shoved the thing into a desk drawer, not withstanding.
Seriously. Obviously a clock goes on the desk, not in it.
Its just sad that that payout is gonna come from the taxpayer, NOT the idiots who perpetrated this. Theres a large number of people involved with this that should be behind bars, and have their pay garnished for the rest of their life to pay this kid for this...
The police and school officials all receive public money as their salaries. So the taxpayers kind of get the bill regardless of what happens.
There's a difference between mouse gestures, which are a rare feature, relatively new
When Opera released a version supporting mouse gestures, they were competing with IE 5. There are high school kids younger than mouse gestures.
The former is how it's used, the latter is what it does.
Way to completely miss the point.
Well, they also have testers to find the problems themselves and analysts to prioritize the problem themselves.
That's correct. And guess why they didn't find this particular bug before release, or why they decided to release it anyway before fixing the bug (hint: it's the same reason!). Go ahead, guess.
Again, it's not my job to fix their product. They aren't paying me.
Filing a bug report and adding your voice to the list of people wanting it fixed is in no way, shape, or form you fixing their product. They have programmers to fix the thing themselves. The only thing the bug report accomplishes is helping to make sure that the problem gets fixed quicker, if that's of any concern to you.
I'm not interested in making sure that microsoft fixes it. I don't benefit from that fix.
You don't benefit from your product working the way it was designed in the default browser of Windows 10? Well, OK.
My point was that you can't benchmark a partial browser against a complete browser.
You sure as hell can when the benchmarks measure things like Javascript and DOM performance and HTML 5 accuracy instead of the ability to print an iframe. It's just a stupid claim to state that the browser is useless because it has a bug that affects your particular application or use case, which you have incorrectly categorized as a missing feature. It's like if I tried to claim that since I use Opera, and it has mouse gestures, that any other browser that does not have mouse gestures is "useless". It's a stupid claim to make, because there are clearly many people out there using browsers that simply do not use them the same way I do.
Your definition of "doesn't work" is highly skewed. When someone sends you an email and says that the large system you've implemented "doesn't work", what's your response? I know what my response is to that non-bug-report. I ask them exactly what they're trying to do and what happens, because I know that the system as a whole works and they've just found a bug in some part of it. But, here you are, claiming that Edge "doesn't work". You're not filing bug reports to make sure the problem gets fixed on their end (thereby increasing the usability of your software on their product, in line with other products), you're just bitching.
It's useless because if it's missing one vital feature
This shows your skewed perspective. If that feature was as vital as you think it is then it would have been caught pre-release. If it's vital to you, then do something about it to make sure they fix it.
So would you say that Edge is useless as a web browser, or that it doesn't work very well for your specific use case? Because those are 2 completely different things, and it sounds like you're trying to claim that it is useless as a web browser. Obviously it's not. What's more, Microsoft is aware of the bug you've found and has promised a fix.
Yeah, a bug. Not "things missing for no reason", like they made a design decision to remove that, but a bug. Keep in mind also that Edge is not the new IE, it is a new browser. They did not remove anything, they've only been adding features and fixing bugs.
But I'm sure you've already added your voice to the bug report so that Microsoft knows that it is affecting people, rather than just bitching about it on Slashdot. After all, you're a developer.
Edge doesn't let me, or a script, print just one frame or iframe content or selection content. Making it useless
Right, because my #1 use case for the internet is to print web pages so a browser that can't do that is 100% useless. I'm glad I finally ran into the other person who uses the internet the same way I do.
I had to write this comment twice. I forgot that printing your post and writing my reply underneath it doesn't actually post anything.
Motion coprocessor is always-on now so using that feature heavily comes with no battery penalty.
That's a pretty funny way of saying that if you don't use the motion co-processor you're now going to have extra battery drain anyway. You sound like you paid attention in marketing school. Framing a negative as a feature, well done.
all you need is an ink pen
Take the ink pen
Only an ink pen
Ink as opposed to what other kind of pen, a pig pen?
The worst experience I've had was, in all places, Texas. They didn't want to let me fly out of the airport with a shotgun case that was literally wrapped in heavy-duty chains, with a large lock. They thought the case was still able to be opened too much even with the chains wrapped around it (no matter that the only people who could take advantage of that, and have shotgun shells in their pocket just waiting for a weapon, would be their people). They made me go to the gift shop and buy a flimsy cable and lock to satisfy them. This was on the return trip, too. When I flew to Texas from Phoenix they looked at all the chains and just laughed at how ridiculous it looked.
1. No, they're not ineligible.
2. John McAfee isn't a felon.
No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
Why? Computers only do what the programmers tell them to. What exactly do you hate about them?
a psychopath dropping pennies off the Eiffel Tower
Pennies have a terminal velocity between 30-50 mph in light wind and weigh 2.5g. Go ahead, do the math to imagine what it would feel like to get hit by one. Here's your "psychopath" dropping pennies.
Weight required to kill someone from a free fall of 10 feet = .04 lbs
You must be kidding. .04 lbs is 18.1 grams and change. 3 quarters totaling 17.01 grams, plus a dime at 2.268 grams, are plenty more than 18.1 grams. So you're suggesting that if I tape 3 quarters and a dime together and drop it on someone's head from 10 feet I'm going to kill them.
Since the person who stole the code was un-affilliated with the police
How can you prove that?
That's always the first thing I think of when I hear "Belkin". I haven't bought any of their products over the last 12 years. I didn't know many people still did, I'm a little surprised they're still making things with their brand on them.
Look at Citi's motivation. They are trying to plan their investments for the future. They have come to the conclusion that investing in renewables, wind, nuclear, energy efficiency, etc is both a better investment and also avoids the potential major consequences of continuing to invest in coal. Where do you find the flaw in their research?
I think that some are more obvious than others. I was on OK Cupid, for example, and I met people just fine without paying anything. The fact that AM charged men to read messages should be a major red flag. It's kind of hard to legislate though, especially when the fine print says that many accounts are there just for entertainment. It's a pretty thin line, especially when those accounts aren't marked as being a bot.
This is also a record, though not one the warmists like to talk about.
"Warmists". Huh. I don't know if National Public Radio frequently engages "warmists", but that's where I heard the story. You might even say they liked talking about it, how unusual these weather patterns were.
I do know that the summer weather here in Phoenix has been pretty strange. We had a mild June and July, I don't think it ever hit 110. In June it even rained (average monthly rainfall for June in Phoenix: 0.02 inches), hardly any rain in July (average 1.05 inches), and a few storms in August. Last night my roof got damaged by the wind while it poured rain for an hour or so, a lot of power outages around town. That storm dropped between a little less than an inch to 1.29 inches (average rainfall for all of August: 1 inch). I heard multiple transformers explode near my house and I've gotten some pictures from friends of downed trees from wind gusts well over 60mph (74mph is a category 1 hurricane). While June and July were mild, August has been very hot and we've been setting records, I believe we hit an all-time record high for August as well as record highs for several individual dates. I heard that it was the hottest August globally, and we definitely saw that here.
I'm not trying to sound like a "warmist" or anything, I'm just trying to figure out what I need to repair on my house thanks to the hot weather producing high-powered storms.
That seems pretty interesting, I'm kind of losing confidence in the woman writing those articles though. She's making statements like this:
Looking at the code, there appear to be several database tables where the system keeps track of when humans chat or message with other humans. It also seems that Ashley Madison even keeps records of what each member says to the other in chat sessions. ... So much for Ashley Madison's guarantee that they'll keep your affair hushed up. Right now, the company has reams of incredibly incriminating personal information about everything its human users are doing and saying.
I mean, where are they supposed to store that data if not in a database? She sounds a little bit alarmist and relatively non-technical for someone trying to analyze a database dump.
Perhaps one of the most poignant parts of reading the engineers' comments in the code was when I uncovered a set of descriptions for how the engager bots should act. I found these in a database devoted to engager activity. Here are a few of them:
host bot mother creates engagers
birth has been given! let the engager find itself a man!
randomizing start time so engagers don't all pop up at the same time
for every single state that has guest males, we want to have a chat engager
Annalee, you found those in code comments or a database?
They operate by inhabiting, as a demon might, previously existing fake profiles
Yes, it's all witchcraft and sorcery.
The Angels, also called "hosts" by the company’s engineers, lay dormant until a bot animates them and uses them like a skin to contact a male user.
I think that Annalee thinks that her target audience is politicians.
It's unclear what else the engager would say - either the bots really are this simple, or further chat phrases weren't in the code. Most likely, based on what I saw from other bot code, the bot would urge the man to pay credits to talk further.
The most genius part of this entire scam is that the men will never go to the authorities if they figure it out. If a man gets messages from 10 different women all saying this:
I'm sexy, discreet, and always up for kinky chat. Would also meet up in person if we get to know each other and think there might be a good connection. Does this sound intriguing?
He's going to know that he's being scammed. He's not going to tell anyone about it though, beyond complaining to the site. He's not going to the media. It's like the druggie who gets his drugs stolen. He's not going to call the police to report that.
All told though, it's an interesting article with some better analysis. Upon hearing about the leak this was what I was most excited about - getting a real insider peak at how a dating site actually operates, from an analytical perspective it's great that both the source code and some or all of the database was leaked. From a privacy perspective that's obviously a horrible thing, but I'm definitely interested in the broad (non-personal) conclusions that come from seeing all of this information.
She posted another article here that shows the profit motive for running the bots, from email:
http://gizmodo.com/one-chart-t...