kotaKat

When they show up to the depot and get their bus assignment they get a slip with the PIN (IIRC), otherwise they can call dispatch back up, identify themselves, and be given a reset remotely. (https://www.cleverdevices.com/products/secure-bus-access/)

Transit buses generally actually don't use keys, amusingly. You pop the drivers' window open and reach in for the manual door release, then climb on board.

The headlight switch is also the 'master on' switch for the bus, then you slap an engine starter button and off to the races you go. It's assumed you keep the bus stabled somewhere secure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GtuUBEeTVg

https://www.cleverdevices.com/products/secure-bus-access/

Clever Devices is one of the large players of the bus telematics industry and they just sit on the CANbus of the bus (heh!) and block the gear shift from being able to shift over it until you enter the PIN.

If you've ever played with a bus simulator, OMSI 2's Chicago Downtown addon requires you sign onto the bus to take it out of gear, too - you just look up and see the post-it note with that driver's ID and PIN ;)

Turns out depending on the metro they already solved that problem.

Just let them piss.

They actually do let bus operators randomly stop the bus at rush hour to pee in some cities. In Ottawa (Ontario), for instance, as long as an operator is within their 5 minute "late standard" window, they can stop and make a quick pee break or Timmy's break as long as they keep the bus in time.

The busses lock down with a PIN when they get out of the seat (generated that morning at the depot) so you can't take it out of neutral anyways to try to steal it.

https://www.michaelsuddard.com/2013/03/oc-transpo-condoned-t...

(Best part is this old blogpost with someone cranky over the stop as well getting shown receipts by OC Transpo that their Tim's wielding bus driver that morning was in fact running on time based on GPS data.)

The difference here is Microsoft didn't have to take the hardware and pivot a new OS onto it at the last minute.

Remember... the Duo was supposed to be a cursed Windows 10-esque device. They brought on Movial to do a pivot to Android, then bought out the porting team in early 2024 to keep working on what they should have released in preparation for the Duo 2 (which is what they actually NEEDED to sell as an Android device at the time, but flopped in doing so).

I returned mine in late 2023. It wasn't the best experience and I was missing out on things like NFC dearly.

Anyone else remember Nintendo's absurdly explained 50 cent fee to create a child Nintendo Account?

https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...

"Verifiable Parental Consent (VPC) is a process required by law in certain countries, which ensures a parent or guardian has approved the creation of a child's account to use Nintendo's services. The most common method of VPC is to charge a minimal amount on the adult's credit card. The age for which this process is required varies depending on where the child lives."

Ford takes that approach. Every time you hop in one with the location/telemetry services on it gives you a big distracting "Location and connected vehicle/usage data collection active" message.

That's why I'll drive my Slate down to AutoZone and grab the 12v heated seat massager pad and strap it to the drivers' seat.

Take that, paywalled subscriptions.

"you can only use a cyber weapon once at full potential, as it’ll either get patched and/or everyone can reverse engineer it to use"

This is why I jokingly always suggested to people the safest public charger to use was the one the NSA brings to DEFCON/Shmoocon/etc. The NSA ain't burning an exploit on a bunch of nerds. ;)

> “Why can’t the person opt out? It’s because if your car gets stolen, if something were to happen, moreover, the government requires you to have a license plate. It’s the law. And it’s plain view information,” [Flock Safety’s Chief Communications Officer Josh ] Thomas said. “Your license plate is part of the plain view. And so why can’t you opt out. You can, if you want to opt out of society.”

Unless you're part of the Karen HOAs that buy them - then you can be part of the community SafeList!

https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/how-the-safe-list-solves-pr...

And even funnier, we're now seeing the EV battery aftermarket breathing a hell of a lot more life into some older vehicles.

https://vivnevs.com/

Wanna see a 2012 Leaf doing over 250+ miles on a charge? Absolutely amazing to see we have the aftermarket springing to life and giving us some quite phoenix-esque options to revive older yet still useful EVs.

https://mynissanleaf.com/threads/my-10-year-old-leaf-30-kwh-...

> I doubt any human would solve them for 3 minutes straight

Cognitive overload. There's days I'm just straight up tired and don't realize it until I'm at least one "please try again", page refresh, and endless traffic light game later that I'm probably in the tarpit and wonder why.

The weird thing is that I don't KNOW why. I use good ol' consumer Chrome, good ol' consumer MacOS, a consumer ISP, and my IP isn't in any kind of reputational blacklists that I'm aware of.

> But a recent update has caused them to block users with ad blockers.

I'm noticing that Ad-Shield is becoming a continual fight these days with pageloads that complete then they fly in with a "ha ha here's a fake error report turn off your adblocker aye?".

Every time their live support chat is open (why would the anti-adblock firm even offer one), I send them Goatse.

Curious what Tesco was going to go to, considering most of the old Retalix/NCR WinPOS/ISS45 stack was heavily Windows-reliant underneath it.

I assume Azure or Hyper-V of some sort?

I've thought for a while on this and with 5G RedCap I really see a day where they include a fully ad-supported 720p streaming TV service over the 5G link and some kind of "premium" offering to pay more for higher streaming quality (but still be screwed over by ad city to cover the 5G link).

Consumers will buy it if they're told they "never have to worry about an over the air TV antenna again" because it has a magic 5G antenna in it!

"RCS isn't an open platform in practice. It isn't even as open as SMS/MMS. It heavily depends on proprietary Google and carrier infrastructure in practice. We can start by replicating Google's approach and then we can work on only using carrier services for carriers where it's actually supported."

Except... what carriers still remain using their own RCS carrier services and haven't been pressured by Google to adopt Jive?

Also everyone started screaming when Tesla was starting to rumor to start using the cabin cameras to recognize people when Subaru has a totally creepy facial recognition system on their current vehicles to do seating presets and the like. It was bad enough they use the cameras to imply I'm distracted or sleepy while I'm driving and have the things throw twenty million chimes and warnings, but actual driver ID is just terrible.

God I hate our Forrester.

after having had unions literally put me out of work as a blue collar employee - yes. i've had enough of them.

my family has also been in a long line of tradesworkers, and they have been continually screwed by their bargaining be it with the state trades, with nursing unions.

unions did nothing to save the hundreds of manufacturing jobs that were destroyed and taken away from upstate New York.

massena new york is now an absolute drug-ridden shithole but they still run around celebrating the handful of steelworkers that still somehow kept a job up here out of the hundreds and thousands across industries that got fucked.

so you know what? these white collar union LARP demands are just frustrating to stare at and look at and see how cushy they've had it while my brothers and sisters sit in rot.

Nice shitty astroturfing campaign, bro. How much does Flock provide in payola? Five figures and I'll start singing the praises, too, bro.

So they're using this to finally implement AirPlay 2 support, right?

Right?

Rules for thee...

Lots of GDP entries there. Uh. Like terabytes of it downloaded.

I would quite like to think that GDP references... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GirlsDoPorn - where "six people involved with the website were charged on counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion".

A little yikes on that card today. Dude was ripping hundreds of videos of assault and coerced rape pornography for training.

as someone once forced to put Windows XP back on a hospital CEO's laptop in 201X... yeah.

also all the incident reports i used to file about doctors getting malware went to the circular file.

maybe that's why they got nailed with ransomware years later (:

"This project was born out of accidentally changing the area option to EU in the EZ-Adjust service menu on a US TV. The factorymanager binary enforces a region lock (geolock) that prevents reverting the area code — even through the same EZ-Adjust menu that was used to change it"

Sounds like service mode shenanigans. I'm curious though - does switching the TV to EU even do anything 'better' privacy-wise or anything, or do you just get trapped in that 'region' for services?

Forgot that time that Raspberry Pi hired a cop and everyone got pissed:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/chrisstokelwalker/raspb...

Feels like they're just trying to Any% a bad rhabdo run.

I'm reminded of something someone'd said regarding PPE:

Who cares what a bunch of other construction dudes think about your hard hat anyway? Some people are just going to be stubborn about any change, no matter what it is. Your family doesn't give a shit what you look like at work. They give a shit that you come home in one piece. Your family would rather they didn't need to change your diapers and feed you with a spoon because some of your coworkers thought the new safety gear looked weird.

Dunno, but is anyone else continuing to seem to get what feels like 3-4 minute reCaptcha challenges? I’m getting mentally exhausted having to try to solve the super blurry pick-the-streetlights they keep throwing at me in loops.

It feels like I have to go slowly through it only for it to eventually end in a “please try again” as I sit and wait ten seconds for each square to slowly fade in a new stupid bus for me to click.

How is this fair to the humans?

To be faiiiir, when your partner is absolutely zonked out in the minutes post-delivery, what else is there to do when you're by their side and still half-asleep? Time to start announcing your pride and joy to the world, starting with a domain zone file.

Oh god.

One of the toys was named Grok. https://heycurio.com/product/grok

It's been all over rural America now. Every single roadside sign I've seen now has been either fully AI-generated, or the logos are all following the same damn 'logo in a shield' that one of the services loves making everything it generates be.

> On Monday, Meta's CTO, Andrew Bosworth, said in an Instagram ask-me-anything story post that the glasses are "the most privacy-forward camera" for consumers. "You haven't had a camera that put a light on when it took a photo or video of somebody since you had like a VHS tape recorder in the 90s," he said, referencing the light that flashes when the glasses are recording. "Your phone doesn't have that, and it's the most commonly held camera on earth."

Ah, nice shitty gaslighting take, bro. Turns out holding up a phone to record is a bit more obvious than wearing your pervert glasses, Boz.

Did he not remember we have countries that have mandatory sounds when the camera shutter is pressed (like Japan)?

Oh yeah, they emailed me as a Google Workspace administrator and went "FYI we're launching this and we're leaving it turned on and forced-opt-in by default, byeeeee!". Even with Gemini off across our entire tenant.

Bonus points that they've broken additional bounds and now advertise in Google Workspace products. Now I get ads within all of the products begging me to upgrade our Workspace tiers :\

Opened a support ticket about the advertising and was told to kick rocks.

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