nathanlied

You know what's next - sell audiophile-grade RAM. Gold-plate everything.

It's quite interesting to me to see something like this here. A few years back (turn of the decade) I discovered a similar problem in the equipment of a fairly large ISP, albeit a little bit more serious (think root access). Their fix was to put that port behind a whitelist, with the only IP address able to access it remotely belonging to the ISP.

The problem is, this is one of those ISPs that have an extra SSID on their CPEs for "free" internet, think Xfinity, but this wasn't Comcast, and this vulnerability stems from an HTTPd misconfiguration, so if you can access the equipment's HTTPd (all you need to do is a single, unauthenticated request, so, really any access will do), you've got full access.

I went through some trouble to contact, via third parties, an insider at this ISP with the power to get things fixed - they did fix the remote part (via the aforementioned firewall whitelisting), but I was told, in no uncertain terms, that they didn't care enough to fix the root of the issue, as long as it wasn't massively exploitable, and it wasn't public.

I like my freedom/money too much to publicize details, and so it's still there, all these years later. I wonder how many vulnerabilities like this are out there, fully known by the vendors/providers, but nothing gets done about them because people are too scared to disclose, until eventually someone comes along and blows the whistle, or the equipment is obsoleted?

I get the feeling Elon might need someone to reign him back on some of his tweets. I've heard he suffers from bipolar disorder, which, even if medicated, can sometimes flare up.

If that's the case, and some of his episodes bring this about, he really does need to either recognize this in himself, and exert some self-control, or straight up have someone else check it over.

This is especially dangerous because, since his companies' valuations are so intrinsically tied to his 'cult of personality' (I'm using this term neutrally - I believe 'both sides' will agree that a large percentage of Musk's companies' valuation does come from his bombastic personality and presence), this behaviour can only damage his work, which may put him into a negative feedback spiral, with each subsequent outburst plunging it all further down.

I've heard from some people in Portugal that MEO is affected, as well as the Spanish Vodafone. A friend working for the Portuguese Vodafone is saying that, so far, they're unaffected.

This seems to be quite serious.

University these days is gross in certain places, especially in anything related to IT - Computer Science, Engineering, Electric Engineering, etc.

There's a stupidly heavy emphasis on group work, with the superficial justification that "it's how the real world works", discounting that, in the real world, if you're in a team but don't actually do the work, you're going to get screwed.

It seems to me, though, that teachers are mostly pushed to do that because it's being done everywhere else, and because IT students have a reputation for being antisocial, so they need to be pushed to work together, in real life, if possible.

It's an entirely wrong approach to the problem.

It's not a very good example, because making food halal requires businesses to change the way they do things. One of the things required for food to be halal (AFAIK) is that the person doing the slaughtering must be Muslim. I can see how this requirement would prevent most businesses from "making all things halal", just by itself.

Besides, France's population is 5 to 10 percent Muslim, which negates the "three to four percent" 'dictating' claim of the article, especially because, last time I visited France, most meats I saw weren't halal.

It is, but I don't see why it can't have a different meaning for people on a different technical/theoretical area.

I'd further elaborate on your answer with:

Even if you can only monitor things, instead of directly issuing commands, it's still information you're leaking.

Information leaks are still a class of vulnerability for a reason. It can give an attacker information on your network topology that he wouldn't usually have.

The less attack surface exposed, the better. Generally, if something is exposed to the Internet that has no (good) reason to be, it's a vulnerability.

I agree fully. We need a big, BIG revamp of copyright laws, but that's "The War", this is -a- battle in that war, and in order not to fully alienate the 'other side', we must be aware that large-scale commercial copyright infringement, with our current system, is really, really bad.

Getting the courts/legislators to make the anti-circumvention clause only apply to commercial efforts, instead of absolutely anyone and anything (including researchers, oftentimes), would be a great victory.

I've seen that sentiment in a couple of places, and the answer is fairly simple: The first season gave us a show about a heterogeneous team of hackers (plenty of ages, both males and females, different personalities, etc.) trying to "fight the man", so to speak.

The hacking, portrayed as fairly realistic, especially for people used to Hollywood craziness, and the fight (against financial institutions) pulled quite a lot of people.

Then, fairly suddenly, you get hit with a mental illness angle. A lot of people didn't ask for it, and don't really welcome it. It's not just a show about hacking now. It's a show about a very mentally ill man with a particular set of baggage trying to cope with it, while being part/the leader of a very notorious hack team.

So yeah, if you really like the first season, you might not like the second one much. At least so far.

Because if you do that, someone will fork your codebase, and patch it out. Or, failing that, code a new adblocker from scratch, without said feature.

If you're talking about giving legal power to websites' ToS to define what software may parse the data you download from their servers before/after rendering it to you, you're opening a gigantic can of worms, and I don't think most users would be particularly happy with that.

Not all encryption. There is such a thing as self-destructing data/keys. Once it's gone, it cannot be recovered, even if your life is threatened and you really don't want to die.

Whether you're willing to go that far for your data or not is up to you, though.

I'd wager a driverless car can afford to go a little faster, given its reaction speed is likelier much, much faster than anything a human can put out.

In fact, a driverless car may be capable of estimating its own stopping distance given road conditions and other measurements, account for some margin of error, and then use that to calculate how fast it can go down a road, while still adhering to the posted speed limits.

Not all countries would be included there. The US? Russia? North Korea? Sure. Finland? Iceland? Not so much.

There is something to be said about a country's foreign policy and how 'arrogant' it is. A country can have a solid foreign policy (read: not be a pushover) and still not act like a giant bully.

If the algorithm's nooks and crannies were fully known, website owners could manipulate it to display their results at the top, which may not be in the web's best interest.

Rules about advertising could just end up like it did in Portugal. ISPs were advertising unlimited data (on fiber/cable), but the small print stated that there was a limit, which was dependent on congestion/etc.

Essentially, in any given month, you could get throttled/yelled at for going over an arbitrary data cap, which could (and did) vary every month. Given, it was usually above 1 TB, but it was still there.

ISPs got a book thrown at them by the FCC equivalent, saying that if they advertise their product as unlimited, it must be truly unlimited. Literally the next day that decision came out, all ISPs changed their adverts from unlimited to "at will" data caps, which essentially conveys the same marketing message, but isn't a regulated term.

Welcome to the new world, same as the old world, except where we've replaced a word.

Perfectly acceptable. I believe it's within everyone's right to filter what hits their browser (and what their browser gets in the first place) as much as it is the website's right to serve whomever they want.

They should attempt to use technical means, though, as it's unlikely that a simple 'Do you use adblock?' prompt is going to work very well.