If you could gate check the laptop bag, you would minimize the potential for mischief, and also make it possible to do something useful while waiting for the flight to take off.
Not only that - they just got through telling people that they didn't want people checking lithium batteries, because of the risk of a garden variety battery fire.
Now they are thinking of *requiring* these things to be checked because of some unspecified threat.
Well, you leave yourself wide open if you make such an open-ended request.
But you would think that they could fix it so it would look at what you ordered in the past instead of whatever vendor gives the largest kickback to Amazon.
In the very early days, they didn't have much big-name stuff, so they tended to air the offbeat sports that were inexpensive to get the rights to. You could watch Australian Rules Football or Sumo wrestling, and it was kind of entertaining for a change of pace.
But now it is all the big $$$ crap. And if there isn't a game on, you have a bunch of idiots bloviating about sports just to fill time until some game actually starts. It is probably the case that you could use AI to come up with a bot that just pontificates about sports all day long, and it would be about as informative as the knuckleheads that they currently have on.
And have you ever noticed that the blowhards never talk about the sports that aren't on ESPN? My wife is a hockey fan, and she sure noticed.
If you look at the average cable bill, a good chunk of it is just for the royalties for ESPN. And ESPN insists that it not be a premium channel - they want *everyone* to have it, and they want everyone to pay.
And to top it off, they keep paying astronomical sums of money for the broadcast rights to all sorts of dumb things, and how do they make it back? By jacking the fees that the rest of us pay.
If they want to take ESPN and make it a streaming service that you sign up for if you want it, I would be all for it. That's the direction that a lot of these things are going anyways,
For the most part, it seems like the intcentives are all wrong however. It seems like most of the AI that they are doing is centered around getting more advertising in front of potential suckers, errr, I mean users so they might buy more useless crap.
The only exception I can think of is the effort to make self-driving cars.
I suppose it was all predictable.
I kind of notice it when I go into Microcenter and look at the stuff they have, and while there is some overlap in the market, it seems like more of the focus is on gamers and far less of what they have is intended for people trying to actually do work. You especially notice it when you go to look at video cards. Lots of GeForce, not much in Quadro.
H&G used to be about home repairs and gardening. Now it is nothing but house flipping. Although a lot of these programs come from Canada where the housing bubble is only now just bursting.
Weather used to have more weather related programs. Then they started to fill it up with reality crap. At least until Verizon replaced Weather with Crapuweather, so I haven't seen it lately.
Travel once had potential. Now it is really more informercials for various resorts or cruise lines.
Smithsonian is usually quite tolerable. For now, anyways. But sometimes on "Mighty Ships" the programs are really just infomercials for a cruise ship. They haven't figured out a way to turn "Air Disasters" into an informercial yet.
Yeah, funny how they always seem to overestimate.
About the only thing they are good for is relative comparisons from one day to the next. But they ought to remove the word calories and put some other word there - how about "donuts".
Power meters for bicycles aren't cheap either - maybe 1000$ or so. If you are a pro I could see getting one, but that's way out of the range of what average people are going to spend.
The salaries are poor as there are lots of others willing to do the job as well. The ones I think took it in the shorts are the ones that bought their own rigs.
Unfortunately management oftentimes doesn't want to pay for the proficient expert - they see programmers as interchangeable cogs, and they frequently go with what on the surface seems cheapest.
Not only that the libraries exist, you need a sense of which ones are of decent quality and which ones are not. And you start to get very complex dependency trees, with multiple versions used by the same application.
And then you get the bloat that is caused by the fact that some library gets included because you need a very small subset of functionality.
Or WU that literally runs for 24 hours with the CPU pegged at 100%. I haven't seen that in a while - maybe they finally have it fixed.
Or if your C:\ drive is full - then you get all sorts of weird failures. You go and clean some space up, and within a day it has gone and downloaded more junk to fill it back up again.
Or your WU databases have somehow gotten corrupted, and WU just runs and runs and never actually does anything. I have seen that one as well.
I used to learn about pop culture from South Park. But that jumped the shark a few years back, and I don't really bother with it much any more. And really I stopped caring. My wife tries to tell me about someone or another, and my response is always "Whozat".
If my wife wasn't a sports nut, we might have been able to cut the cord years ago. And while various leagues are starting to offer streaming of one thing or another, for the time being you are stuck paying for some sort of cable equivalent. In the long term, I can foresee people streaming and not bothering to buy the baseball/hockey/basketball/football package.
Maybe some are patched. Some are taken offline or air-gapped until patched. Some might have SMB turned off or blocked by the firewall. IT departments will be specifically watching for TOR connections, and might actually try blocking them.
Yeah, there will be some new infections. But the first wave gave people a wake-up-call that this one was serious.
The reason which was suggested is that the domain is a “kill switch” in case something goes wrong, but I now believe it to be a badly thought out anti-analysis.
In certain sandbox environments traffic is intercepted by replying to all URL lookups with an IP address belonging to the sandbox rather than the real IP address the URL points to, a side effect of this is if an unregistered domain is queried it will respond as it it were registered (which should never happen).
I believe they were trying to query an intentionally unregistered domain which would appear registered in certain sandbox environments, then once they see the domain responding, they know they’re in a sandbox the malware exits to prevent further analysis. This technique isn’t unprecedented and is actually used by the Necurs trojan (they will query 5 totally random domains and if they all return the same IP, it will exit); however, because WannaCrypt used a single hardcoded domain, my registartion of it caused all infections globally to believe they were inside a sandbox and exitthus we initially unintentionally prevented the spread and and further ransoming of computers infected with this malware. Of course now that we are aware of this, we will continue to host the domain to prevent any further infections from this sample.
My recollection is that MS was doubling the price of the support every year - they really want to force people off of these old OSes.
You have to wonder how many of them were really using any form of SMB - a band-aid would just be to turn it off for systems that don't use it.
I had this thought that one could disable the Microsoft SMB and replace it with Samba ported to Windows. That would at least get you a relatively modern protocol version.
Slashdot Mirror
Smelting aluminum would be easier than mining bitcoins.
They will just issue TSA-approved hospital gowns for everyone to wear. The ones where your butt hangs out for everyone to see..
If you could gate check the laptop bag, you would minimize the potential for mischief, and also make it possible to do something useful while waiting for the flight to take off.
Not only that - they just got through telling people that they didn't want people checking lithium batteries, because of the risk of a garden variety battery fire. Now they are thinking of *requiring* these things to be checked because of some unspecified threat.
Well, you leave yourself wide open if you make such an open-ended request. But you would think that they could fix it so it would look at what you ordered in the past instead of whatever vendor gives the largest kickback to Amazon.
In the very early days, they didn't have much big-name stuff, so they tended to air the offbeat sports that were inexpensive to get the rights to. You could watch Australian Rules Football or Sumo wrestling, and it was kind of entertaining for a change of pace. But now it is all the big $$$ crap. And if there isn't a game on, you have a bunch of idiots bloviating about sports just to fill time until some game actually starts. It is probably the case that you could use AI to come up with a bot that just pontificates about sports all day long, and it would be about as informative as the knuckleheads that they currently have on. And have you ever noticed that the blowhards never talk about the sports that aren't on ESPN? My wife is a hockey fan, and she sure noticed.
If you look at the average cable bill, a good chunk of it is just for the royalties for ESPN. And ESPN insists that it not be a premium channel - they want *everyone* to have it, and they want everyone to pay. And to top it off, they keep paying astronomical sums of money for the broadcast rights to all sorts of dumb things, and how do they make it back? By jacking the fees that the rest of us pay. If they want to take ESPN and make it a streaming service that you sign up for if you want it, I would be all for it. That's the direction that a lot of these things are going anyways,
For the most part, it seems like the intcentives are all wrong however. It seems like most of the AI that they are doing is centered around getting more advertising in front of potential suckers, errr, I mean users so they might buy more useless crap. The only exception I can think of is the effort to make self-driving cars. I suppose it was all predictable.
I kind of notice it when I go into Microcenter and look at the stuff they have, and while there is some overlap in the market, it seems like more of the focus is on gamers and far less of what they have is intended for people trying to actually do work. You especially notice it when you go to look at video cards. Lots of GeForce, not much in Quadro.
H&G used to be about home repairs and gardening. Now it is nothing but house flipping. Although a lot of these programs come from Canada where the housing bubble is only now just bursting. Weather used to have more weather related programs. Then they started to fill it up with reality crap. At least until Verizon replaced Weather with Crapuweather, so I haven't seen it lately. Travel once had potential. Now it is really more informercials for various resorts or cruise lines. Smithsonian is usually quite tolerable. For now, anyways. But sometimes on "Mighty Ships" the programs are really just infomercials for a cruise ship. They haven't figured out a way to turn "Air Disasters" into an informercial yet.
Yeah, funny how they always seem to overestimate. About the only thing they are good for is relative comparisons from one day to the next. But they ought to remove the word calories and put some other word there - how about "donuts".
Power meters for bicycles aren't cheap either - maybe 1000$ or so. If you are a pro I could see getting one, but that's way out of the range of what average people are going to spend.
The salaries are poor as there are lots of others willing to do the job as well. The ones I think took it in the shorts are the ones that bought their own rigs.
I saw that coming..
They already have an incredibly difficult remediation.
Unfortunately management oftentimes doesn't want to pay for the proficient expert - they see programmers as interchangeable cogs, and they frequently go with what on the surface seems cheapest.
Not only that the libraries exist, you need a sense of which ones are of decent quality and which ones are not. And you start to get very complex dependency trees, with multiple versions used by the same application. And then you get the bloat that is caused by the fact that some library gets included because you need a very small subset of functionality.
I wonder if it also works on Server 2003.
Or WU that literally runs for 24 hours with the CPU pegged at 100%. I haven't seen that in a while - maybe they finally have it fixed. Or if your C:\ drive is full - then you get all sorts of weird failures. You go and clean some space up, and within a day it has gone and downloaded more junk to fill it back up again. Or your WU databases have somehow gotten corrupted, and WU just runs and runs and never actually does anything. I have seen that one as well.
I used to learn about pop culture from South Park. But that jumped the shark a few years back, and I don't really bother with it much any more. And really I stopped caring. My wife tries to tell me about someone or another, and my response is always "Whozat". If my wife wasn't a sports nut, we might have been able to cut the cord years ago. And while various leagues are starting to offer streaming of one thing or another, for the time being you are stuck paying for some sort of cable equivalent. In the long term, I can foresee people streaming and not bothering to buy the baseball/hockey/basketball/football package.
Maybe some are patched. Some are taken offline or air-gapped until patched. Some might have SMB turned off or blocked by the firewall. IT departments will be specifically watching for TOR connections, and might actually try blocking them. Yeah, there will be some new infections. But the first wave gave people a wake-up-call that this one was serious.
The person who found the previous "kill switch" believes that it was actually an anti-sandboxing feature, not a kill switch.
My recollection is that MS was doubling the price of the support every year - they really want to force people off of these old OSes.
You have to wonder how many of them were really using any form of SMB - a band-aid would just be to turn it off for systems that don't use it.
I had this thought that one could disable the Microsoft SMB and replace it with Samba ported to Windows. That would at least get you a relatively modern protocol version.
When I looked at it years ago, it seemed like they placed a huge burden on compiler writers to get decent performance.
The instruction set had some really interesting features however. The x86 backwards compatibility was the fatal flaw.