We have come so far since feminism began, but then stuff like this still happens... How could anyone, in 2014, have thought this was acceptable?
I can't help but feel like this whole thing is getting horribly blown out of proportion, more than likely due to a SJW invasion (does it have some absurd hash tag yet?)
I haven't read the book, but based on TFA:
It looks like they decided to put Barbie in a design position with other people doing the actual computer programming. This is not unusual in the real world.
The roles of designers and developers are in some many polar opposites. Is it that hard to believe that the female brain might often be better at aesthetics, usability, gameplay, and what the target audience (which, based on "cute puppies and colored blocks", sounds predisposed towards younger girls) thinks would be fun? And perhaps the male brain is better at abstract logic and systems interaction? I'm not saying everyone falls into those buckets, just that it's common. And from what I've seen on the job, this is not unusual in the real world.
The two programmers Barbie enlists happen to be male. Since a large majority of software developers in the world are male (especially in school), this is not that unusual.
The side-story about the computer virus is absurd, but it just sounds like it was written by someone who doesn't know anything about computers or viruses, other than what they hear on the evening news ("A new lethal computer virus is sweeping the globe, deleting files and murdering kittens! Film at 11." The portrayal of computer maladies in fiction is pretty bad in general, so this is also not that unusual.
Finally, this is Barbie FFS. Anyone who buys into that franchise and expects cutting-edge challenge of social norms is just self-deluded (might explain the attraction to SJWs...).
All in all, it looks like a cutesy little story written by someone who knows almost nothing about computers, probably has no interest in computers themselves, and subconciously wrote the story around their personal experiences of (1) most computer geeks are male, (2) computer viruses are scary, and (3) "it's Barbie, so who's going to really give a damn?"
This kind of stuff just isn't worth the heartache and venom people are throwing at it. Take a breath, put it in perspective, and move on.
(Besides, what people should be up in arms over is the picture of Tux on the front cover! A virus taking over Linux? Inconceivable!:)
Yeah, as it turns out, "from time to time" means (in the dev's words): "At the moment it's whenever you need to conduct a server moderated transaction like trading." and "The servers handle more than just the data, they handle all the key processes for interaction in the game, so trading, mission generation and background simulation to name a few."
Oh hey, so it's exactly like every other MMO, including WoW. The client is basically a dumb terminal which renders graphics and plays sound, but as soon as you do something like sell to a vendor, or cast a spell or use an ability, a check is fired off to the server to make sure that your character is in a valid state to perform those actions, and then the result of the actions are sent back to the client for rendering. To do it any other way is just inviting people to cheat.
From what I can tell, their "single player" sounds more like the normal MMO, except that you can't see any other players even though their actions continue to have an effect on the game world. Seems like they're using baldfaced lies to do damage control.
When you stop and think about the fact that the Rosetta project was launched over ten years ago (something I didn't realize until recently), it's hard not to feel sorry for the scientists and others on the project.
The statements the ESA is putting out have a positive spin on them (for multiple reasons, I'm sure), but at the end of the day this has got to be a pretty hard blow to the people personally invested in the project. After the effort required just to get it launched and a decade of waiting, it must be hard on them. Wish them the best of luck for a second chance when the comet nears the Sun.
What is Firefox thinking? From the last paragraph in the article: "Firefox users should 'expect a lot more experimentation in advertising,' Mozilla Senior Engineering Manager Gavin Sharp told VentureBeat."
If you want to raise your blood pressure and really ruin your outlook of Firefox's future, go read some of Gavin Sharp's comments on various Bugzilla bugs. Seeing the justification for the removal of features and the addition of toxic features ruins my day every time I'm driving there to try and understand why something changed.
Gavin and the others like him that simply want to turn Firefox into Mini-Chrome are the biggest threat to Firefox today.
Looks like team fortress 2, albeit with less hats.
I kinda got a feel of TF2 + World of Warcraft, at least for gameplay and art direction. The energy/magic effects, armor style, and voice acting were very WoW while the combat, classes, cartoony cell-shading, and gameplay looked very much like TF2. There's a damned Gnome building a sentry gun FFS.
I'd guess it will be one of those games that's poorly received (or completely flops) because it's really just a conglomeration of ideas from previously successful games and most players will get a strong feel of "been there, done that." Whatever happens, hopefully they can avoid the horrible micro-monetization that's poisoned TF2 but knowing Activition-Blizzard that seems unlikely.
While this article did kinda make me roll my eyes, it's not quite as simple as that.
The basic idea they're saying is that if a user can create a directory with an arbitrary name (which is normal for a file-server), and that later on an Admin runs a maintenance script which doesn't quote input correctly, arbitrary user commands can be executed with administrative permissions.
So user does:
D:\Users\b\bob123> md "Foo&evil_command"
Days, weeks, months later, an admin decides to run a cleanup/repoting batch file that was written in 1996:
D:\Users> C:\Scripts\cleanup.bat
If the script descends into the filesystem and somewhere in that script is the line: SET CurDir=%CD%, then the effective command SET CurDir=Foo&evil_command is executed.
The end result is that evil_command is invoked by the admin. If the admin is a domain admin and that command happened to be net localgroup "Domain Admins" domain\bob123/domain, then bob has just been added to the Domain Admins group.
It's an absurdly tiny problem compared to the Bash shell exploit, but it is in fact a violation of security boundaries. Raymond's airtight hatchway stories are when no boundary has been crossed.
IANAB, but I think the crux of this article is on the phrase "in strong white light".
Because green light can penetrate further into the leaf than red or blue light, in strong white light, any additional green light absorbed by the lower chloroplasts would increase leaf photosynthesis to a greater extent than would additional red or blue light.
So perhaps green light is more effective outdoors, but in an environment only lit by artificial light, green light is probably not the most effective (unless maybe you use both a powerful white light AND a green light?).
Try browsing around with your browser's Referer header disabled (or spoofed to be empty/google/etc). You'll run into sites that either (1) won't load at all, only showing a "CloudFlare security page" that totally blocks access, or (2) have content that won't load due to CloudFlare's default referrer blocking settings. I assume (2) is to prevent "hotlinking" (aka - "using the Web"), but it prevents scripts, styles, etc from loading. However the first behavior (blocking anyone without a Referer header) is complete bullshit.
Using NoScript on a CloudFlare site can also be a nightmare. They have their own absolutely batshit absurd scripting thing call Rocket Loader. The only impression I've gotten from it so far is that it makes script whitelisting difficult and user-scripts even worse.
I can appreciate the primary selling points of CloudFlare (CDN, DDoS protection), but they do a lot more to interfere with site web traffic. The default settings for a site are also probably too aggressive.
It's nice Apple responded, but the outrage over this whole thing (especially for people who have already bought into the iTunes garden) seems way overblown.
Atheism is the lack of belief in a god or god. Nothing else.
Ideally, yes, but we all know that that's not all there is to it these days.
Only because theists have done everything in their power to change the common meaning of the word "atheist". It's so much easier to persecute someone if you can twist their stance into being the exact opposite of your own because this allows you to set up "us versus them" and "attack on our way of life" straw men.
It doesn't help that for many people (in English anyway), the phrase "I do not believe X" has come to be equal to "I believe against X". Declaration of a lack of a thing does not, in any way, declare that you hold to its antithesis. It's this crucial point that theists miss -- some due to ignorance, but most due to an explicit intent to mislead.
Of course, this applies to topics other than (a)theism, and is pretty much the standard MO of most conservative pundits. Why have a rational discussion when you can fabricate a one-sided fight instead?
Did he also decide to produce the Hex output that is entirely useless and without merit? I understand that's for debugging purposes, but who decided that was a good idea to leave in for a consumer-level OS? Seriously.
Ah yes. Everyone should have to set up a second machine, connect it to the other via a serial cable (having remembered to enable serial port debugging on the host prior to the crash), and then fire up their kernel debugger just to get the bugcheck code.
Putting a numeric error code (which usually comes with the symbolic name as well) on a consumer-facing fatal error is absolutely the correct thing to do. Once you've reached the kernel panic failure point there's not much most consumers can do anyway, so providing some diagnostic information can't hurt anything. If you don't then you may as well just restart the machine and not bothering to show an error at all. That sure sounds friendly.
A lot of interesting and infamous material ends up on 4chan, some of which might be illegal in certain jurisdictions for reasons ranging from copyright infringement to child pornography.
Have any of the 4chan staff/admins think they've found a real honeypot on the site created by a government or corporation with the intent to prosecute or harass 4chan users (or the site/owners itself)? If so, what actions did you take?
4chan has been a popular high-trafic site for a while now. I'm curious: how many buyout offers have you received from outside parties? Who were they and how much did they offer?
You should be careful -- you're well on your way (if not there already) of becoming infamous around here. We've already got APK, "Guardian of the Hosts File". We certainly don't need narcc, "Defender of Chromifox".
Firefox 28 (with tabs-on-bottom if you please), Windows 7, and Linux with Gnome 2 (aka MATE).
I'm basically just holding out with old (or "old") software to avoid the current plague of horrible user interface design. The entire "UX designer" movement we're seeing right now is nothing more than a user-hostile circle jerk, doing the perpetuating the same ideas because everyone else is doing it. It's frankly a cancer upon computing, and my only hope is that we eventually see enough pushback from users that the morons at Mozilla, Microsoft, Google and elsewhere realize their mistake, fire all the useless UX blowhards, go back to real usability studies, and let us all get on with a life where we won't always worry that clicking "update" will almost certainly royally fuck everything up.
After the travesty of the first two films, I'm not looking forward to the third movie.
While far from perfect, I felt that Peter Jackson at least made an attempt to stay true to the original story in Lord of the Rings. For the Hobbit he didn't hold anything back as sold out to the suits at Warner Brothers. Both he and the Tolkien family should be ashamed they agreed to this abortion screenplay.
The Turing Test was not passed, and the only people who claim it was are ignorant reporters looking for an easy story with a catchy headline and tech morons who also believe Kevin Warwick is a cyborg.
The test was rigged in every way possible:
- judges told they were talking to a child - that doesn't speak English as a primary language - which was programmed with the express intent of misdirection - and only "fooled" 30% of the judges.
And, even after all that, Cleverbot did a much better job back in 2011 with a 60% success rate.
This Eugene test outcome was a complete farce -- something to remind everyone that Warwick still exists and to separate the ignorant and sensational tech news trash rags from the more legitimate sources of information.
I remember you posting the voicemail of the Microsoft employee asking you to remove the images of the Xbox ROM from your website -- something I got a good laugh out of. What other kind of fallout from Microsoft that you have to deal with?
I don't agree that multiple question marks necessarily == multiple questions, but I'll take the advice of my anonymous friends and restructure my question:
During your original Xbox expose, was there a memorable experience you had that stands out -- perhaps a particular part of the hardware that you found especially well-designed (or laughably poor), or maybe a method that yielded unexpected success (or failure)?
One of my first forays into the realm of hardware hacking was following along as you recorded your exploration of the original Xbox console. I was fascinated by the hardware, but enjoyed your analysis and methods even more. It was you that got me interested in hardware and hacking. (Aside: Thank you very much for releasing your book as a freely-available download and for the open-letter about Aaron and MIT)
What was the most memorable experience for you of your Xbox expose? Was there a particular part of the hardware that you found especially well-designed (or laughably poor)? A method that yielded unexpected success (or failure)? What kind of fallout from Microsoft did you face? I remember you posting the voicemail of the Microsoft employee asking you to remove the images of the Xbox ROM -- something I got a good laugh out of. And as a follow-up: do you have a feeling for how "secure" hardware has changed in the decade since the original Xbox launch?
Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions, and also for all the work you've done pushing for a world with both open software and open hardware.
I noticed something the other day when looking for a copy of the install on my own system. It turns out that when you install TrueCrypt for Windows, it puts a copy of the installer in the destination directory! If you're on Windows, take a look in your %ProgramFiles%\TrueCrypt directory. You will probably find a TrueCrypt Setup.exe file (at work so not sure of the exact filename). This can be used to install/repair/reinstall TrueCrypt on any computer.
There have been some good attempts to create a trustworthy TrueCrypt archive, but nothing beats your original installation source, which you can use to verify against various signatures found online.
How can I make this clear? Do. Not. Fucking. Want. Yet another reason to avoid "smart" TVs, I guess.
You really can't as far as I can tell.
You still can, though it might depend on what size of TV you're looking for. I'm in the market for a new TV right now, and I've noticed that Costco carries "dumb" TVs up through the 40" range. There are both smart and dumb sets at 40", with the dumb sets being about $75 cheaper.
But yes, if you're looking for a large set you may have a hard time avoiding them at this point.
Okay, so far so good, but how about the signal amplifying and transmitting part?
TFA discusses that:
a $250 1-watt amplifier could cover a 1.4 square kilometer area. [...] By positioning the retransmission gear at a decent height within line of sight of a tower (on a drone, say, or on the roof of a tall building), a hacker in Flushing, Queens could deliver malicious payloads via the Home Shopping Network to a potential audience of 70,000 people per square kilometer. Or he could also hijack 10 different stations including CBS , NBC and Fox from a single antenna in the Inwood neighborhood of upper Manhattan that reaches 50,000 people per square kilometer. With a more powerful 25-watt amp (about $1,500) the hacker can cover more like 35 square kilometers, taking the reach of the attack into the hundreds of thousands of people.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy hell, Slashdot.
#commentlisting li {
list-style: none outside none;
margin: 0 0;
}
Well that's just beautiful. Take the effort to add bullets and instead get a massive wall of text. Thanks.
We have come so far since feminism began, but then stuff like this still happens... How could anyone, in 2014, have thought this was acceptable?
I can't help but feel like this whole thing is getting horribly blown out of proportion, more than likely due to a SJW invasion (does it have some absurd hash tag yet?)
I haven't read the book, but based on TFA:
All in all, it looks like a cutesy little story written by someone who knows almost nothing about computers, probably has no interest in computers themselves, and subconciously wrote the story around their personal experiences of (1) most computer geeks are male, (2) computer viruses are scary, and (3) "it's Barbie, so who's going to really give a damn?"
This kind of stuff just isn't worth the heartache and venom people are throwing at it. Take a breath, put it in perspective, and move on.
(Besides, what people should be up in arms over is the picture of Tux on the front cover! A virus taking over Linux? Inconceivable! :)
Yeah, as it turns out, "from time to time" means (in the dev's words): "At the moment it's whenever you need to conduct a server moderated transaction like trading." and "The servers handle more than just the data, they handle all the key processes for interaction in the game, so trading, mission generation and background simulation to name a few."
Oh hey, so it's exactly like every other MMO, including WoW. The client is basically a dumb terminal which renders graphics and plays sound, but as soon as you do something like sell to a vendor, or cast a spell or use an ability, a check is fired off to the server to make sure that your character is in a valid state to perform those actions, and then the result of the actions are sent back to the client for rendering. To do it any other way is just inviting people to cheat.
From what I can tell, their "single player" sounds more like the normal MMO, except that you can't see any other players even though their actions continue to have an effect on the game world. Seems like they're using baldfaced lies to do damage control.
When you stop and think about the fact that the Rosetta project was launched over ten years ago (something I didn't realize until recently), it's hard not to feel sorry for the scientists and others on the project.
The statements the ESA is putting out have a positive spin on them (for multiple reasons, I'm sure), but at the end of the day this has got to be a pretty hard blow to the people personally invested in the project. After the effort required just to get it launched and a decade of waiting, it must be hard on them. Wish them the best of luck for a second chance when the comet nears the Sun.
What is Firefox thinking? From the last paragraph in the article: "Firefox users should 'expect a lot more experimentation in advertising,' Mozilla Senior Engineering Manager Gavin Sharp told VentureBeat."
If you want to raise your blood pressure and really ruin your outlook of Firefox's future, go read some of Gavin Sharp's comments on various Bugzilla bugs. Seeing the justification for the removal of features and the addition of toxic features ruins my day every time I'm driving there to try and understand why something changed.
Gavin and the others like him that simply want to turn Firefox into Mini-Chrome are the biggest threat to Firefox today.
Looks like team fortress 2, albeit with less hats.
I kinda got a feel of TF2 + World of Warcraft, at least for gameplay and art direction. The energy/magic effects, armor style, and voice acting were very WoW while the combat, classes, cartoony cell-shading, and gameplay looked very much like TF2. There's a damned Gnome building a sentry gun FFS.
I'd guess it will be one of those games that's poorly received (or completely flops) because it's really just a conglomeration of ideas from previously successful games and most players will get a strong feel of "been there, done that." Whatever happens, hopefully they can avoid the horrible micro-monetization that's poisoned TF2 but knowing Activition-Blizzard that seems unlikely.
While this article did kinda make me roll my eyes, it's not quite as simple as that.
The basic idea they're saying is that if a user can create a directory with an arbitrary name (which is normal for a file-server), and that later on an Admin runs a maintenance script which doesn't quote input correctly, arbitrary user commands can be executed with administrative permissions.
So user does:
D:\Users\b\bob123> md "Foo&evil_command"
Days, weeks, months later, an admin decides to run a cleanup/repoting batch file that was written in 1996:
D:\Users> C:\Scripts\cleanup.bat
If the script descends into the filesystem and somewhere in that script is the line: SET CurDir=%CD%, then the effective command SET CurDir=Foo&evil_command is executed.
The end result is that evil_command is invoked by the admin. If the admin is a domain admin and that command happened to be net localgroup "Domain Admins" domain\bob123 /domain, then bob has just been added to the Domain Admins group.
It's an absurdly tiny problem compared to the Bash shell exploit, but it is in fact a violation of security boundaries. Raymond's airtight hatchway stories are when no boundary has been crossed.
Any particular reason you linked back to this very article
He just messed up and made the link relative.
Green Light Drives Leaf Photosynthesis More Efficiently than Red Light in Strong White Light: Revisiting the Enigmatic Question of Why Leaves are Green
IANAB, but I think the crux of this article is on the phrase "in strong white light".
Because green light can penetrate further into the leaf than red or blue light, in strong white light,
any additional green light absorbed by the lower chloroplasts would increase leaf photosynthesis to a
greater extent than would additional red or blue light.
So perhaps green light is more effective outdoors, but in an environment only lit by artificial light, green light is probably not the most effective (unless maybe you use both a powerful white light AND a green light?).
CloudFlare is a f.ing nightmare for anonymity
Not only anonymity, but privacy as well.
Try browsing around with your browser's Referer header disabled (or spoofed to be empty/google/etc). You'll run into sites that either (1) won't load at all, only showing a "CloudFlare security page" that totally blocks access, or (2) have content that won't load due to CloudFlare's default referrer blocking settings. I assume (2) is to prevent "hotlinking" (aka - "using the Web"), but it prevents scripts, styles, etc from loading. However the first behavior (blocking anyone without a Referer header) is complete bullshit.
Using NoScript on a CloudFlare site can also be a nightmare. They have their own absolutely batshit absurd scripting thing call Rocket Loader. The only impression I've gotten from it so far is that it makes script whitelisting difficult and user-scripts even worse.
I can appreciate the primary selling points of CloudFlare (CDN, DDoS protection), but they do a lot more to interfere with site web traffic. The default settings for a site are also probably too aggressive.
You should be able to disable Aero Peek, or you can use a fantastic third party tool to customize how the taskbar behaves.
It's nice Apple responded, but the outrage over this whole thing (especially for people who have already bought into the iTunes garden) seems way overblown.
Some perspective might help.
Atheism is the lack of belief in a god or god. Nothing else.
Ideally, yes, but we all know that that's not all there is to it these days.
Only because theists have done everything in their power to change the common meaning of the word "atheist". It's so much easier to persecute someone if you can twist their stance into being the exact opposite of your own because this allows you to set up "us versus them" and "attack on our way of life" straw men.
It doesn't help that for many people (in English anyway), the phrase "I do not believe X" has come to be equal to "I believe against X". Declaration of a lack of a thing does not, in any way, declare that you hold to its antithesis. It's this crucial point that theists miss -- some due to ignorance, but most due to an explicit intent to mislead.
Of course, this applies to topics other than (a)theism, and is pretty much the standard MO of most conservative pundits. Why have a rational discussion when you can fabricate a one-sided fight instead?
Did he also decide to produce the Hex output that is entirely useless and without merit? I understand that's for debugging purposes, but who decided that was a good idea to leave in for a consumer-level OS? Seriously.
Ah yes. Everyone should have to set up a second machine, connect it to the other via a serial cable (having remembered to enable serial port debugging on the host prior to the crash), and then fire up their kernel debugger just to get the bugcheck code.
Putting a numeric error code (which usually comes with the symbolic name as well) on a consumer-facing fatal error is absolutely the correct thing to do. Once you've reached the kernel panic failure point there's not much most consumers can do anyway, so providing some diagnostic information can't hurt anything. If you don't then you may as well just restart the machine and not bothering to show an error at all. That sure sounds friendly.
A lot of interesting and infamous material ends up on 4chan, some of which might be illegal in certain jurisdictions for reasons ranging from copyright infringement to child pornography.
Have any of the 4chan staff/admins think they've found a real honeypot on the site created by a government or corporation with the intent to prosecute or harass 4chan users (or the site/owners itself)? If so, what actions did you take?
4chan has been a popular high-trafic site for a while now. I'm curious: how many buyout offers have you received from outside parties? Who were they and how much did they offer?
You should be careful -- you're well on your way (if not there already) of becoming infamous around here. We've already got APK, "Guardian of the Hosts File". We certainly don't need narcc, "Defender of Chromifox".
Firefox 28 (with tabs-on-bottom if you please), Windows 7, and Linux with Gnome 2 (aka MATE).
I'm basically just holding out with old (or "old") software to avoid the current plague of horrible user interface design. The entire "UX designer" movement we're seeing right now is nothing more than a user-hostile circle jerk, doing the perpetuating the same ideas because everyone else is doing it. It's frankly a cancer upon computing, and my only hope is that we eventually see enough pushback from users that the morons at Mozilla, Microsoft, Google and elsewhere realize their mistake, fire all the useless UX blowhards, go back to real usability studies, and let us all get on with a life where we won't always worry that clicking "update" will almost certainly royally fuck everything up.
After the travesty of the first two films, I'm not looking forward to the third movie.
While far from perfect, I felt that Peter Jackson at least made an attempt to stay true to the original story in Lord of the Rings. For the Hobbit he didn't hold anything back as sold out to the suits at Warner Brothers. Both he and the Tolkien family should be ashamed they agreed to this abortion screenplay.
It was passed as defined
The Turing Test was not passed, and the only people who claim it was are ignorant reporters looking for an easy story with a catchy headline and tech morons who also believe Kevin Warwick is a cyborg.
The test was rigged in every way possible:
- judges told they were talking to a child
- that doesn't speak English as a primary language
- which was programmed with the express intent of misdirection
- and only "fooled" 30% of the judges.
And, even after all that, Cleverbot did a much better job back in 2011 with a 60% success rate.
This Eugene test outcome was a complete farce -- something to remind everyone that Warwick still exists and to separate the ignorant and sensational tech news trash rags from the more legitimate sources of information.
And the second half of my question:
I remember you posting the voicemail of the Microsoft employee asking you to remove the images of the Xbox ROM from your website -- something I got a good laugh out of. What other kind of fallout from Microsoft that you have to deal with?
I don't agree that multiple question marks necessarily == multiple questions, but I'll take the advice of my anonymous friends and restructure my question:
During your original Xbox expose, was there a memorable experience you had that stands out -- perhaps a particular part of the hardware that you found especially well-designed (or laughably poor), or maybe a method that yielded unexpected success (or failure)?
One of my first forays into the realm of hardware hacking was following along as you recorded your exploration of the original Xbox console. I was fascinated by the hardware, but enjoyed your analysis and methods even more. It was you that got me interested in hardware and hacking. (Aside: Thank you very much for releasing your book as a freely-available download and for the open-letter about Aaron and MIT)
What was the most memorable experience for you of your Xbox expose? Was there a particular part of the hardware that you found especially well-designed (or laughably poor)? A method that yielded unexpected success (or failure)? What kind of fallout from Microsoft did you face? I remember you posting the voicemail of the Microsoft employee asking you to remove the images of the Xbox ROM -- something I got a good laugh out of. And as a follow-up: do you have a feeling for how "secure" hardware has changed in the decade since the original Xbox launch?
Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions, and also for all the work you've done pushing for a world with both open software and open hardware.
Luckily I have a copy of 7.1a for x64 linux
I noticed something the other day when looking for a copy of the install on my own system. It turns out that when you install TrueCrypt for Windows, it puts a copy of the installer in the destination directory! If you're on Windows, take a look in your %ProgramFiles%\TrueCrypt directory. You will probably find a TrueCrypt Setup.exe file (at work so not sure of the exact filename). This can be used to install/repair/reinstall TrueCrypt on any computer.
There have been some good attempts to create a trustworthy TrueCrypt archive, but nothing beats your original installation source, which you can use to verify against various signatures found online.
How can I make this clear? Do. Not. Fucking. Want. Yet another reason to avoid "smart" TVs, I guess.
You really can't as far as I can tell.
You still can, though it might depend on what size of TV you're looking for. I'm in the market for a new TV right now, and I've noticed that Costco carries "dumb" TVs up through the 40" range. There are both smart and dumb sets at 40", with the dumb sets being about $75 cheaper.
But yes, if you're looking for a large set you may have a hard time avoiding them at this point.
Okay, so far so good, but how about the signal amplifying and transmitting part?
TFA discusses that:
a $250 1-watt amplifier could cover a 1.4 square kilometer area. [...] By positioning the retransmission gear at a decent height within line of sight of a tower (on a drone, say, or on the roof of a tall building), a hacker in Flushing, Queens could deliver malicious payloads via the Home Shopping Network to a potential audience of 70,000 people per square kilometer. Or he could also hijack 10 different stations including CBS , NBC and Fox from a single antenna in the Inwood neighborhood of upper Manhattan that reaches 50,000 people per square kilometer. With a more powerful 25-watt amp (about $1,500) the hacker can cover more like 35 square kilometers, taking the reach of the attack into the hundreds of thousands of people.