There's probably an update to fix most of those things since they don't seem to have been observed much by others. The "white shirt" thing makes me wonder if you are just taking the piss instead discussing something real - I have not observed such a thing even in full subtropical sunlight (where an LCD is useless - bring on the eink phone so I don't have to go into the shade just to see the virtual button to answer a call). However the PDF thing could be a real issue since some require a ridiculous amount of processing power to render and some are even encapsulated bitmaps that look like crap at anything other than native resolution - epub, mobi etc are formats that ereaders are better at rendering. Also the size of most of them is designed for "light paperback reading" since you can't fit an A4 sized journal article on the things without being too small or losing formatting. The larger devices like the Boox M92/96 are for that sort of thing and can rotate sideways, zoom to a box defined by two points etc and have enough CPU grunt to handle a lot of badly formatted PDF files
but sometimes there is such a thing as too much information
Then you just don't activate the dictionary function on the thing you don't care about.
They *could* get the definition instantaneously through a link and move on, but is that actually learning?
If you clicked on "learning" to get a definition you would find that is is:) For example, I used to read a bit of stuff by Morris West on paper and I did need to keep a paper dictionary handy, and I did learn things as a consequence. Sadly there's too much flashing and moving shit on the typical web page for e-ink web browsers to be a seamless experience so the bit about forking off onto the net in the middle of a book is currently moot - browsing is a relatively clunky exercise requiring effort and not a simple distraction. There's offline wikipedia applications for ereaders to make it less painful.
Guys when you send your resume in and they demand it be in an editable form such as MS Word be prepared to deal with the consequences of a bit of resume padding or stripping by people that do not quite understand what the words in the resume mean or who have a more sinister agenda. I went to one interview and found that a few years of relevant experience was cut and pasted from my resume onto someone else's applying for the same job via the same agency. I'd brought copies of my resume to hand out at the interview and the interviewers got a bit of a shock comparing it to the ones they had been supplied with. They didn't use that recruiter again.
The other things are little more than placebos. If the kid can get to a search engine it's not going to slow them down much. A solution advocated for years has been to put the computer in a public space until you no longer care what the child looks at.
I met a spammer once when I was out of work and thought I'd take anything. He had a similar attitude to the above quote and said he was just informing people of the options available for porn and penis enlargement. Turns out I wasn't quite ready to take anything, but maybe mostly because it didn't look like I could trust him to pay me either.
That Uber department is a whole lot of other stuff mashed together and then expanding. Enforcing copyright on Rubik's cubes - that's them. Disaster recovery - that's them.
You assume that homeland security do something useful
They run FEMA - heck of a job! They also send people around to toy shops to check for copyright violations on Rubik's cubes. They also... I've got nothing.
The NSA has probably been using it as a backdoor. Oh wait, they are the guys with the Star Trek set designer building their operations room? Maybe not then, maybe just focusing on rewarding ex-employees with very lucrative outsourcing gigs.
None are made out of polished stainless steel plate
It works exactly the same way with plain carbon steel with a rough surface or even mill scale still on it. They just used polished plate to reduce the variables. Stainless is also a bit of a bastard to etch so the usual method of just acid etching to recover serial numbers is less likely to work on stainless than with your carbon steel automobile and firearm parts.
s/n milled into the substrate
That will still distort the metal underneath though probably not a deep as stamping.
Far older than you'd think - blacksmiths of antiquity put stamps on things, polished the surface, then applied a weak acid so, their stamp would be seen on a nice polished surface. This new technique is for when the old one doesn't work.
It's also using an SEM but in a different mode - collecting a backscattered image from under the surface instead of a direct reflection from the surface.
Yes. The usual method uses acid to preferentially attack the stamped areas that are more stressed than the surrounding metal. That needs a bit more damage than the SEM could pick up with this alternative.
What happens when you use a nasty low grit number sandpaper
If you use if for long enough you can completely remove the layer damaged by the stamp. With weld testing (an extreme case of it using microscopes in high temperature high pressure pipes) you have to go pretty deep to remove the damage from an angle grinder, then a bit of time with fine grit to remove the damage from course grit, then finer again until you polish to get rid of the damage from fine grit. If you haven't gone anywhere near deep enough your mirror finish will still show obvious grinding marks all over it once you put some weak acid on it to make the crystal structure visible. By obvious that can mean with the naked eye at arms length. So then it's back to the 120 grit, 240, 600 etc or a similar sequence before a polish.
2: ground off
Deep enough and it's just gone. Not deep enough and you can polish the ground surface and either hit it with acid (which will attack the stressed areas more deeply) or use a SEM like in the article and see where the metal is stressed from being stamped.
Or if it is in a place that can be heated and cooled... like annealing
Then it's gone - but with steels the time and temperatures required not only make it impractical but would also make the thing the numbers are stamped on useless. Even though iron (thus steel) is not a good conductor it's still enough of a conductor that if you anneal one part of it the rest of the engine block (for example) is going to be heated up enough for long enough that it will ruin the structure that makes the steel useful. Annealing steel is a lot more time consuming than many other metals. However, if it's an aluminium alloy it's probably even worse because it conducts much better and is even more dependant on cooling/heat treating to get a useful structure - you can anneal it but end up with a large area not strong enough or tough enough to do the job. Grinding it out deeper than the damage done by the stamp is a different story.
A very very old smithing trick, maybe Hittites old, is to stamp the metal grind it flat, polish and then apply a weak acid, even vinegar, which will preferentially attack the metal that was damaged by the stamp and make whatever pattern was applied visible on the polished surface. With iron and steel it's a darker grey on a light grey surface.
I hadn't heard of ASUS either when they appeared to come from nowhere. Turns out they had been building nearly everything from Dell that wasn't complete crap, and they came out on their own after they put a distribution network together and no longer needed Dell. Similar thing with Lenovo, they were making stuff for IBM but had no international distribution network of their own. Now they are a mulitnational and for all we know this stupid MITM policy could have come from New York or San Francisco instead of Beijing or Hong Kong.
It's a wake up call - now can we get rid of those fucking stupid "SSL accelerators" that do the exact same man in the middle attack and are prone to the same problem if somebody who wants your banking details has or gets hold of the details of the cert.
If it's for "business reasons" that a workplace sniffs all the traffic that's supposed to be encrypted then they should consider what a hit Lenovo's business is going to take over this, and how their business would cope if the lawyers from a couple of major banks go after them for interfering with transactions when a hack happens. They'll want blood, and if the perpetrator can't be tracked down they'll happily take the blood of whoever put the stupid "SSL accelerator" box in and the company they work for.
It's fucking insane to listen in to other people's supposedly secret communications unless you are immune to the legal system. That's without even getting into moral implications.
I am discussing PR material which ignored such things as not all potassium being potassium40 - there was a lot of it about before TMI got people asking questions instead of swallowing the PR material whole. The original "banana dose" was part of that. Even at the current corrected level it's still a little bit of bullshit (instead of a LOT of bullshit as it originally was) because it doesn't accumulate - eat a truckload of bananas and your bodies potassium level doesn't rise.
Slashdot Mirror
There's probably an update to fix most of those things since they don't seem to have been observed much by others. The "white shirt" thing makes me wonder if you are just taking the piss instead discussing something real - I have not observed such a thing even in full subtropical sunlight (where an LCD is useless - bring on the eink phone so I don't have to go into the shade just to see the virtual button to answer a call).
However the PDF thing could be a real issue since some require a ridiculous amount of processing power to render and some are even encapsulated bitmaps that look like crap at anything other than native resolution - epub, mobi etc are formats that ereaders are better at rendering.
Also the size of most of them is designed for "light paperback reading" since you can't fit an A4 sized journal article on the things without being too small or losing formatting. The larger devices like the Boox M92/96 are for that sort of thing and can rotate sideways, zoom to a box defined by two points etc and have enough CPU grunt to handle a lot of badly formatted PDF files
Then you just don't activate the dictionary function on the thing you don't care about.
If you clicked on "learning" to get a definition you would find that is is :) For example, I used to read a bit of stuff by Morris West on paper and I did need to keep a paper dictionary handy, and I did learn things as a consequence.
Sadly there's too much flashing and moving shit on the typical web page for e-ink web browsers to be a seamless experience so the bit about forking off onto the net in the middle of a book is currently moot - browsing is a relatively clunky exercise requiring effort and not a simple distraction. There's offline wikipedia applications for ereaders to make it less painful.
Guys when you send your resume in and they demand it be in an editable form such as MS Word be prepared to deal with the consequences of a bit of resume padding or stripping by people that do not quite understand what the words in the resume mean or who have a more sinister agenda.
I went to one interview and found that a few years of relevant experience was cut and pasted from my resume onto someone else's applying for the same job via the same agency. I'd brought copies of my resume to hand out at the interview and the interviewers got a bit of a shock comparing it to the ones they had been supplied with. They didn't use that recruiter again.
The other things are little more than placebos. If the kid can get to a search engine it's not going to slow them down much. A solution advocated for years has been to put the computer in a public space until you no longer care what the child looks at.
Good stuff.
Including the certs?
But does it actually remove it or just ring the alarm bells? I haven't been very impressed with Windows Defender but maybe it has improved.
I met a spammer once when I was out of work and thought I'd take anything. He had a similar attitude to the above quote and said he was just informing people of the options available for porn and penis enlargement. Turns out I wasn't quite ready to take anything, but maybe mostly because it didn't look like I could trust him to pay me either.
It's Californian spyware.
That Uber department is a whole lot of other stuff mashed together and then expanding.
Enforcing copyright on Rubik's cubes - that's them. Disaster recovery - that's them.
They run FEMA - heck of a job! ... I've got nothing.
They also send people around to toy shops to check for copyright violations on Rubik's cubes.
They also
The NSA has probably been using it as a backdoor. Oh wait, they are the guys with the Star Trek set designer building their operations room? Maybe not then, maybe just focusing on rewarding ex-employees with very lucrative outsourcing gigs.
It works exactly the same way with plain carbon steel with a rough surface or even mill scale still on it. They just used polished plate to reduce the variables. Stainless is also a bit of a bastard to etch so the usual method of just acid etching to recover serial numbers is less likely to work on stainless than with your carbon steel automobile and firearm parts.
That will still distort the metal underneath though probably not a deep as stamping.
Far older than you'd think - blacksmiths of antiquity put stamps on things, polished the surface, then applied a weak acid so, their stamp would be seen on a nice polished surface.
This new technique is for when the old one doesn't work.
It's also using an SEM but in a different mode - collecting a backscattered image from under the surface instead of a direct reflection from the surface.
Yes. The usual method uses acid to preferentially attack the stamped areas that are more stressed than the surrounding metal. That needs a bit more damage than the SEM could pick up with this alternative.
If you use if for long enough you can completely remove the layer damaged by the stamp.
With weld testing (an extreme case of it using microscopes in high temperature high pressure pipes) you have to go pretty deep to remove the damage from an angle grinder, then a bit of time with fine grit to remove the damage from course grit, then finer again until you polish to get rid of the damage from fine grit. If you haven't gone anywhere near deep enough your mirror finish will still show obvious grinding marks all over it once you put some weak acid on it to make the crystal structure visible. By obvious that can mean with the naked eye at arms length. So then it's back to the 120 grit, 240, 600 etc or a similar sequence before a polish.
Deep enough and it's just gone. Not deep enough and you can polish the ground surface and either hit it with acid (which will attack the stressed areas more deeply) or use a SEM like in the article and see where the metal is stressed from being stamped.
So there you go - people cause crime and there's not a lot of it when they are not many people. Who would have thought?
If you have to drive half an hour to shoot that neighbour that is pissing you off how many would bother?
Then it's gone - but with steels the time and temperatures required not only make it impractical but would also make the thing the numbers are stamped on useless. Even though iron (thus steel) is not a good conductor it's still enough of a conductor that if you anneal one part of it the rest of the engine block (for example) is going to be heated up enough for long enough that it will ruin the structure that makes the steel useful. Annealing steel is a lot more time consuming than many other metals. However, if it's an aluminium alloy it's probably even worse because it conducts much better and is even more dependant on cooling/heat treating to get a useful structure - you can anneal it but end up with a large area not strong enough or tough enough to do the job.
Grinding it out deeper than the damage done by the stamp is a different story.
A very very old smithing trick, maybe Hittites old, is to stamp the metal grind it flat, polish and then apply a weak acid, even vinegar, which will preferentially attack the metal that was damaged by the stamp and make whatever pattern was applied visible on the polished surface. With iron and steel it's a darker grey on a light grey surface.
I hadn't heard of ASUS either when they appeared to come from nowhere. Turns out they had been building nearly everything from Dell that wasn't complete crap, and they came out on their own after they put a distribution network together and no longer needed Dell.
Similar thing with Lenovo, they were making stuff for IBM but had no international distribution network of their own. Now they are a mulitnational and for all we know this stupid MITM policy could have come from New York or San Francisco instead of Beijing or Hong Kong.
Yep, Chinese like Peter Hortensius who appears to be responsible.
Sorry did I ruin your rant by pointing out that Lenovo is a multinational?
It's a wake up call - now can we get rid of those fucking stupid "SSL accelerators" that do the exact same man in the middle attack and are prone to the same problem if somebody who wants your banking details has or gets hold of the details of the cert.
If it's for "business reasons" that a workplace sniffs all the traffic that's supposed to be encrypted then they should consider what a hit Lenovo's business is going to take over this, and how their business would cope if the lawyers from a couple of major banks go after them for interfering with transactions when a hack happens. They'll want blood, and if the perpetrator can't be tracked down they'll happily take the blood of whoever put the stupid "SSL accelerator" box in and the company they work for.
It's fucking insane to listen in to other people's supposedly secret communications unless you are immune to the legal system. That's without even getting into moral implications.
Peter Hortensius is a bit of a funny name for a Chinese national.
I am discussing PR material which ignored such things as not all potassium being potassium40 - there was a lot of it about before TMI got people asking questions instead of swallowing the PR material whole.
The original "banana dose" was part of that. Even at the current corrected level it's still a little bit of bullshit (instead of a LOT of bullshit as it originally was) because it doesn't accumulate - eat a truckload of bananas and your bodies potassium level doesn't rise.
A small business owner doing this would go to jail. Let's see the acrobatics used to justify why the people at Lenovo don't.