bonton89

Way back in the early 2000s before DVD burners were cheap my buddy downloaded what appeared to be a handicam rip of the Fellowship Of The Ring off limewire (or kazaa or whatever was popular at the time) and burned it on 7-8 or 8 CD-Rs which we could watch on his DVD player in the living room. The quality was poor but watchable, but I think this had more to do with the clandestine source than the medium. He had above average computer literacy but probably just used a common program in a way I've never used before to do this. DVD burners became cheaper later and I never saw or thought much about this stunt again.

Do they make any dummy boards that can stop the light?

I've noticed my smart TV has a separate wifi module on a card that I've been meaning to yank.

With how expensive California electric is I'm not sure why they would be there in the first place honestly.

Sure, but I don't have access to the other numbers.

Basically everything becomes a market for lemons because identifying quality takes to much time or is outright impossible. Reputations are fleeting resources that are mined of value, if you're paying attention you realize they have little meaning anymore.

So as a consumer you basically just have to assume everything is crap. And then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because the non-crap brands can't be found and go out of business or turn to crap as well to compete with other crap.

Seeing this title was like a blast from the past for me. I'm remember being into overclocking in the 90s and early 2000s and electromigration being frequently discussed as a concern to be aware of. Then I can't recall anyone talking about it for about 20 years, even as CPUs started overclocking themselves based on thermal limits by default.

Probably because governments can just buy the corporate surveillance results, bypassing any shoddy protections that even exist completely. So corporate surveillance is government surveillance.

> Assuming, of course, that the platforms don't somehow intercept the passkey requests and refuse to allow KeepassXC to do its job.

My understanding is the ability to do that is built directly into the spec with the attestation feature. The only thing that might slow it down is Apple choosing to not implement it and zero out their device string. Others can piggy back on that to protect themselves behind Apple's skirt, at least until Apple changes their stance anyway.

Platforms of course could just not allow Apple passkeys and only allow Apple users to use other 2FA options as well. Rest assured that small players like KeepassXC will be the first ones to have their passkeys blocked or not supported.

The whole thing is a trap IMO.

The trouble is if it is on the service to do the support, they can revoke support at any time. They could use start tightening the screws on device attestation tomorrow for business reasons and drop support for your browser or phone.

> At least raise the barrier for this kind of action to being able to run your own llm or something.

I think that would result in the average person being less aware of the capabilities existing and therefore being less prepared to defend against it. It isn't like this would be a world law that was universally enforced anyway.

Windows 11 is only marginally worse than the baseline terrible set by 10. They screwed up the UI again and continued gradually ratcheting up Microsoft account requirements and new ads. If 11 hadn't have been released the later items would have just come to Windows 10 in the form of a feature update.

10 was full of spyware from the outset but for some reason people argue that it is better than 11 in this regard in a weird bit of revisionist history. The biggest problem with Windows 11 is it dumps hardware support for anything remotely old.

Especially now that companies that previously weren't big on this business (Microsoft for instance) have moved into it in a big way.

Even my state's DMV sells my data as a side business. I guess if I want out of that I can ride my bicycle in the woods.

People who are looking for relationships in a serious way probably aren't on the apps very long before they're in some other kind of relationship. The majority are going to be those screwing around (figuratively but I guess also literally) because they never exit the main loop.

> So there’s no kind of existential danger to Quest here, but it remains to be seen if the hardware licensees can bring anything relevant to the table either.

Why would I, as a potential hardware maker, wish to compete in a market where the existing main producer is a mega wealthy entity that is already dumping product below cost and is capable of doing so indefinitely?

Propaganda, political manipulation, narrative nudging, regular scams and advertising.

Even though most of those things are illegal you could just have foreign cat's paw firms do it. Maybe you fire them for "going to far" after the damage is done, assuming some even manages to connect the dots.

I expect this type of system to be implemented in my lifetime. It will allow whistleblowers and investigative sources to be discredited or tracked down and persecuted.

I can understand not spending resources trying to focus on collection if it is to complicated, but coming right out and saying you aren't going to enforce it seems ill conceived. Wouldn't this promote the creation of more and more complicated schemes to allow for tax evasion?

I remember laughing about anecdotes of farmers in rural areas all riding their horse and wagon into town to get drunk at the local bar. When it was time to leave they'd just lie down in the back of the wagon and the horse would simply return home where his food was.

This explains why the only currently functioning answer to many questions I have often has 0 votes and is half way down the page.

I adopted XP64 kind of late IIRC (after Vista introduction) so the driver situation seemed fine to me. I had a cheap USB 56K modem I had to replace but otherwise all my hardware worked.

IIRC one of 2000s main design advantages is that when a installer tried to crap various dlls into the windows directory it redirected them back to their own install and only used them for that program. This basically solved the dll hell problem that tended to rot 9x installs after 6 months.

I was a cheap ass but I remember ponying up for extra ram and switching to 2000 quite early which is something I never do these days.

This process was super cumbersome since floppy disks were well on the way out even when XP was introduced and by the end of its life they were gone.

Floppy is the only universal driver the installer can count of having for storage media, besides the media it installing itself. I always thought it would be smarter if this process allowed you to insert a CD temporarily in the same drive keeping the installer in memory.

There's still hope! Star Trek has a societal collapse and a world war 3 before we get to the communist utopia so it seems like we might be on track.

My connection was poor at the time and perhaps I never really got the big double swing timing down so I often used explosives against saberists. Can't deflect a thermal detonator, and if you pull it I'll just grab another out of the bag.

I remember finding it funny that the 4 star force speed and jump would injure you from running into walls or bonking your head.

IIRC the check was something even weaker than that. It just counted the number of verbs in the cog script and if it matched you were in. Cheating in online games was a pretty new concept though since online games in general were still a pretty new concept. Games would advertise themselves as being for hacks and people would come in and use all their weird scripts on each other.

I was never a really big Star Wars fan (enjoyed them just wasn't super into them) but spent a lot of time on DFII: JK modding. The cog language could really do a lot if you leaned on it hard enough. The game engine's ability to do absolutely huge outdoor spaces without crumbling in performance was kind of unique at the time. There was a real sense of vertigo for me. I remember having a lot of fun with the cheesy grappling hook mods in multiplayer, flying around and slingshotting around ledges.

> It's immediately and self-evidently obvious that no end-user in 2007 consented to photos of their 2007 era teenage self being used to train an AI how to identify an emo kid.

I can think of worse things than that which might be hidden away for public scraping.

> Once Microsoft realized that the intruders had used a theoretically expired 2016 consumer signing key to forge tokens for an enterprise customer, it launched an "all-hands-on-deck" investigation that went through the night, June 26–27. The company arrived at 46 hypotheses for the intrusion, including "a theoretical quantum computing capability to break public-key cryptography."

I feel like this is a twist on the denial stage of grief. Sure, our house is on fire...but maybe it is because a asteroid just struck the earth.

Yes, real estate tips always seemed full of self serving nonsense to me and usually talked big about the tax savings. But with my modest house and mortgage I calculated that even at the start of my mortgage I saved a whopping $800/yr on taxes with deductions versus the standard deduction. I spent well more than that on furnishings and repairs every year. And that tax advantage (for me) disappeared entirely after maybe 5 years or something.

For a long time I would read money saving tips articles and a tip that frequently came up in these and in pro real estate pieces was that paying a single extra mortgage payment per year would let you pay your mortgage off 12-15 years early.

When you did the math you realized it was bogus. As near as I can tell, this actually was true for one brief period in the 1980s when mortgage rates were at their zenith. Articles were written about this amazing tip well into the 1990s before the BS was transcribed to the internet and then repeated well into the super low interest rate era where it wasn't even close to being true.

Of course it wasn't even really true in the 1980s either. Once interest rates went down you'd have been wise to refinance at the newer lower rates instead of prepaying the mortgage as it would improve your cash flow and lock in the savings. So in reality, it would have only made sense if interest rates had stayed at that same high rate for the whole length of the mortgage!

The the 1980s the deduction for mortgage interest would have been significant, I suspect most people itemized then. And the huge standard deductions we have now are a fairly recent tax change.

Less creepy being watched by actual people I think. They'll usually just forget about you after a few days instead of cataloging every time you lingered at a shelf selling hemorrhoid cream and storing it in a database forever.