Crosseye_Jack

It will happen (at least attempted) with on-shore support staff too, My next door neighbour used to work for a UK high street bank and even there support staff were approached, with some of them first befriended, and eventually bribed in to passing along PII. No doubt it happens in the US too. Just costs the bad guys more.

I thought hackers always had the hood covering thier head!

I think its more about "unclean hands".

If I Disney (and I am actually Disney or an authorised agent of Disney), told Claude that I am Disney, and that Disney has allowed Claude to use Disney copyrights for this conversation (which it hasn't), Disney couldn't then claim that Claude does not in fact have permission because Disney's use of the tool in such a way mean Disney now has unclean hands when bringing the claim (or atleast Anthropic would be able to use it as a defence).

> "unclean hands" refers to the equitable doctrine that prevents a party from seeking relief in court if they have acted dishonourably or inequitably in the matter.

However with a tweak to the prompt you could probably get around that. But note. IANAL... And Its one of the internet rules that you don't piss off the mouse!

We keep saying we are going to do something like that, but we keep forgetting because we normally in "Go do task" mode when we grab the keys. Its not too much of an issue because we will normally grab the fob key, it only becomes and issue when one of us forget to put the fob key back when being done with the car.

But "reprogramming" a key (more like adding a key) on that model of ford just involves doing a dance with the fob key then inserting the key with the new transponder. So we plan to get all keys working on the car at some point. I was just going to order a new chip but my bother was complaining about the key barrel being a bit loose on him so just doing to replace everything at some point. Its just more about not being lazy about it :-P

Thing is, its what we call "the work horse" car of the family, it gets used about once a week to do tasks no one wants to do in their own cars (or when I need to do something in a car), so its not really a high priority thing to fix, but if we are going fix it might as well do it "right")

Yeah, I think it is car dependant. But the car I use (gave up my own car, but the family has a shared "work horse" car we are all insured on.) is a 10 year old UK Ford fiesta and that car doesn't trip the alarm if the door is unlocked with the key, and its not the transponder in the key, cause one of the keys to that car doesn't have a transponder and the keys get mixed up from time to time (So you only know you have picked up the wrong key only when you insert the key into the ignition and the immobilizer light is a solid red light - 3 keys, one with a fob, 2 without a fob, one of which has a failed transponder chip in it, these two keys look the same and not one of us has been arsed enough to take both keys to the car, figure out which doesn't work and label it :-P).

(One day, when I can be arsed, I'll rekey the car and reprogram it with fresh transponders, but today is not that day!)

Presuming its a modern car (and if we are talking about keyless entry/start we are), well then you just plug an "Emergency Start Device" into the OBD port or to the BCM module, and drive away. Heck a lot of these "Emergency Start Devices" can also unlock the car, but often involve pulling panels/lights from the car to get to the can bus to run the attack.

So that attack when done on its own is mainly left to stealing cars off drives at night rather than say from a supermarkets car park during the day.

With practice raking doesn't take that much time and "usually" comes with the benefit of not tripping the alarm that the door was opened (because the car "thinks" the door has just been unlocked with a key).

<EDIT> Seems HN has different experiences with their cars then my own, So I'll concede the idea that the alarm doesn't trip when using the key. It seems the cars I've had in the past are the exception to the rule. </EDIT>

The thing is, in the real world, no one really looks twice when someone gets into a car unless they are using obvious brute force to get into the car.

Not enough AI buzzwords in pitch. I’ll pass!

sounds like perfect grounds for a chargeback to me. Company offered a full refund via one of its Agents, company then refused to honour that offer, time to make your bank force them to refund you.

Just because you use AI for customer service doesn't mean you don't have to honour its offers to customers. Air Canada recently lost a case where its AI offered a discount to a customer but then refused to offer it "IRL"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2024/02/19/what-ai...

As mush as I enjoy shitting on Adobe, I also want to encourage companies to embrace platforms other than Twitter. Simply because at times it's the best way to get customer service these days.

I think I would have had more respect for Adobe if they had left the posts up.

Next submission: I built a mom, but my word game doesn't like her!

Yes, I still use search engines, although my use of them has decreased.

What I tend to use LLMs for is rubber ducking or the opening of research on a topic.

> But it can't be done en-masse, against every citizen.

I took that to be in reference to using "shoe leather" to conduct surveillance / investigations rather than today's ability to "simply" query a database for such information.

For example, back in the day (get off my lawn) if a crime happened in say a park in the middle of the night, then police would have to conduct door to door questioning to see who saw what and who in the area around the time, this required boots on the ground eating up man hours, something that doesn't scale up.

These days they can ask Google for a list of all the phones in the area at the time and will either have names/addresses tied to the Google accounts associated with that data or have enough data to then query the cell operators for that information.

The problem is that the cats out of the bag when it comes to encryption.

Let’s just say we can wave a magic wand and make every phone manufacturer include a way that allows only lawful decryption with court orders and the like.

What stops the criminals spinning up their own service that doesn’t? Sure you could make such services illegal, but when has something being illegal stopped criminals from doing it?

All backdoors do is weaken security for everyone else while those who really want secure communications/ storage for their ill gotten gains will still find a way.

Refusing to decrypt is already a crime in the UK (iirc up to 2 years, 5 if the underlying suspicion is terror related).

Fighting encryption in my opinion is like treating the symptoms not the root cause of the problem.

It's made me reconsider visiting. ATM, if I do go, I'll most likely go via Ireland where most of the border checks are done before getting on the plane rather than when getting to the states.

However, the article you linked to states its not an offical travel warning, more like an advisory.

> But they also stressed that this change does not count as an official travel warning

> create products the rest of the world actually wants to bu

Exactly. Esp when you have the leader(s) of the US complaining that Europe doesn't buy US cars. Well in the UK smaller cars dominate the market where in the US larger cars do. On avg US cars are longer, wider, taller, and heavier.

A lot of our roads (Cities and urban areas) were not designed for larger cars, even a Tesla smallest car, the Model 3 feels big on the road, well it feels big on the road to me.

I know your joking, but some flights have been diverted to Paris where the airlines are bussing passengers to London! So yeah, there kinda is a replacement bus service for some flights!

> https://thewest.com.au/travel/perth-to-london-flight-diverte...

> Perth Qantas customers who had their flights diverted from London to Paris after a massive power outage at Heathrow Airport will be put on buses to take them to take them to their final destination.

After 50k signatures asked for Jeremy Clarkson to be appointed PM, Downing Street said Nah - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNy1w4DV5Hw

I've in no way surveyed the whole wifi mcu market. But wasn't the "beginnings" of Espressif in the western world that it was a cheap wifi mcu that was at the time very popular in cheap Chinese wifi enabled products.

The DIY market (at least in the west) came later. I still remember reading the hackaday article about them being discovered back in the day - https://hackaday.com/2014/08/26/new-chip-alert-the-esp8266-w... and back then all the documentation was in Chinese.

I remember a ton of cheap Chinese wifi enabled stuff would come with an esp for a good while, until even cheaper wifi chips hit the market.

> how does the drone determine that the drop off spot for any delivery is safe at the time of drop off without "looking" down?

I couldn't get the question out of my head, so I went digging, and thought I would reply to myself with the answer in case anyone was wondering.

It seems to be that the drone changes orientation by 90 degrees during travel then the orientation it uses for take off and landing. there are not only forward facing cameras, but camera mounted on the left and right sides of the drone and a camera facing backwards.

So during its "travel phase" of flight no camera is pointing at the ground, but when the drone plans to drop off a package, it rotates its orientation 90 degrees so the camera that would be facing the rear during travel would now be looking at the ground.

"Fair" did fell like the wrong wording, but it was the best I could articulate at the time. But yeah your right. It doesn't make Amazon any less of a scumbag just because everyone else is being just as scummy too.

> Who in the article seems anti-drone? They all seemed to go out of their way to hedge complaints.

Dunno about them being completely anti-drone, but at least one person was worried about the drones camera:-

> A parent said their teenage daughter feared using the swimming pool because of the drone’s camera. (Amazon says it faces forward, not down).

But Amazon (and to be "fair" to Amazon, pretty much every large tech company) has had issues with data processed by their devices which the users of those devices wouldn't want handled by humans. Pretty much every smart speaker has had incidents with their reviewers being given access to voice recordings not intended for the speaker, in some cases it being recordings of kids. Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars.

So yeah, I too would be wary of what imagery drones flying over my private space would be taking. Sure Amazon says the camera(s) only point forward, but at this point I'm not surprised people trust tech companies as far as they can throw them.

EDIT: My follow up question to Amazon about the camera(s) on the drone would have been "If the camera only points forward, how does the drone determine that the drop off spot for any delivery is safe at the time of drop off without "looking" down?"

Well in my experience of dual bios motherboard, the switch just toggles which flash IC is enabled via its chip select pin. Both ICs are on the same SPI bus just that one is disabled while the other is active. So as long as they decide to store the efivars on the same IC as the uefi its going to be fine.

I mean the whole point of dual bios is for disaster recovery so not having separate storage space while having dual bios seems a bit pointless imo. But tbf, doing something like that wouldn't be the most stupid thing I heard a manufacturer do.

Well if long term archival is your concern, its not the write cycles you want to worry about (I was using an extreme example for a bios flash ic) but bit rot in general, which is a concern for pretty much every type of digital media. Spinning rust can seize, Optical and tape media can physically decay, flash media cells can gradually lose their electrical chare over time if they are not “exercised”.

Edit: however its not unheard of for SPI flash to have specs of 500k write cycles and a 100 year data retention (below 500k write cycles) these days, so if a 2025 machine was using such a chip you just got to make sure the caps don't leak and erode the PCB, or the thin layer of epoxy bonding the multiple layers of the PCB breaking down causing it to delaminate.

Depends on the motherboard.

A lot of your "gaming" motherboards come with dual bios. In such cases, if you toast one you flip a switch and use the other. In most cases with motherboard with 2 bios chips you can boot from the good bios, download the latest version of your bios from your motherboard manufacturer, flip the selector switch back to the bad bios while still booted, and reflash over the bad bios it from within your OS. You would most likely lose any custom efi vars but your could easily reconfigure them as needed.

If your motherboard doesn't have dual bios or bios recovery system built in, all is not lost but you probably going to have to reflash the bios via an external programmer, but such tools are dirt cheap these days. heck you could do it from a Raspberry Pi and a SOP8 test clip if you don't have any other computer to reflash the chip.

If you want to be super safe, you could dump the contents of the bios flash chip using an external programmer before attempting to do any of this (Same tools as you would need to flash the chip, Another computer, and if that other computer isn't a SBC with SPI GPIO a cheap USB SPI tool - You could use a RPI Pico for this for just a few bucks).

(Dumping the contents of the chip via the bios provider / motherboard manufactures own bios flasher tool will often skip over parts of the chip. Looking at you Intel ME! - but if your only touching efi vars, a backup from the bios flashing tool should be good enough, just make sure you don't overwrite the areas the tool didn't back up, which is why I suggested using an external tool to dump the contents, much safer.)

EDIT: As for the risk? Well again it depends, you gotta be pretty unlucky to kill the bios because of a power failure right as your messing about with it, but it can happen. I went though a spell of "tinkering in the bios" for a while *cough*Windows SLIC*cough*, and only messed up the bios once during those years and I did a far bit of flashing back then, but I was able recover the bios using an external programmer.

> another problem it's created is that flash has a limited number of write cycles

SPI flash typically have somewhere between 10k to 100k write cycles. Without wear leveling, lets say a write is made on every boot, and lets say a machine is booted 3 times a day you are still going to have a 9+ year life on a flash chip with only 10k writes.

EDIT: Did a search for a random "replacement SPI flash MSI" and found an MX25L25673G being used. Using that as an example it has 100k write cycles, using 3 writes a day, that's like 91 years. Basically flash memory is at the point where its "good enough" not to worry about.

I feel that the US is going very protectionist atm (at least its leaders are), so I'm not very surprised by such statements. though imo even if Europe was completely aligned with the US on free speech, something else would be the reason to threaten military support.

(just a side note: personally I wish Europe as a whole would shift its stance on freedom of speech to be closer to the US's stance on it then it currently is over here, so I'm not going to complain if the VPs statements do actually help kick our leaders up the arse.)

While I get where you are coming from where do you draw the line? If a country sinkholes an IP range/domain name because it is actively being used to defraud its citizens should the rest of the internet drop their interconnects with that country? How about CP? Where should the line in the sand be drawn or should the internet be a FFA for every piece of content possible?

I'm for free speech as much as the next person, but I still have lines in the sand where "speech" turns from being free to being criminal. Who gets to decide where those lines in the sand are? Who would you trust to be the gatekeepers?

EDIT: My point is that every nation has its own set of morals, lets takes the US's take on free speech, its very broad (not a bad thing imo), much broader than pretty much every one of its allies. So should the US cut ties with its allies because they don't agree with every single point that defines free speech?

UK prices these days start at £1.50 p/m for their light package. https://instantink.hpconnected.com/uk/en/l/v2 - guess you were grandfathered into to their free package, or was a promo with your printer.