samtho

Regardless of the impact of this breach in particular, your point still stands and is one I do share: this is a major downside to centralized identity providers. Their existence creates a centralized point of access that all an attacker must do is bypass once for some sort of benefit.

“Security” as a practice within a company comprises of technology, process, and culture. Should one of these pillars be subverted by leadership in anyway, the organization security stance becomes crippled.

In my experience, this security kneecapping happens because some bonehead exec looks at ways to cut costs or doesn’t like having to pull their phone out to login, and decided on a layoff or loosening of policy because, “we haven’t had any problems so far, so why do we have these staff members or this highly obstructive 2FA in place?” I mean, people used to die with greater frequency in car accidents prior to seat belts, too, maybe we can eliminate those next?

Not sure why you are preoccupied with this being a video - that’s just the medium. There is already, rightly, a lot of scrutiny with how much law enforcement is allowed to get away with and the public is very receptive to this message at the current moment. This information combing to light is enough to effectively make a case to the public.

Putin was actively attempting to repair relations with western democracies during the early 2000s. 9/11 happened and helped spur two American-led, endless wars from which no clear goal could be defined. “The West” focused its geopolitical efforts and energy into these conflicts instead of dancing with the Russian President.

Meanwhile, Putin was intent on making his mark in history and likely became disillusioned to playing nicely with “The West.” He likely did not feel comfortable with the lukewarm attitude towards Russia and the US’s preoccupations with war combined with the EU’s indifference towards Russia allowed Putin to arm unsupervised.

We saw him beginning to seek to close off all ingress points into Russia, but we didn’t understand its significance at the time. The huge swath of land that encompasses modern day Russia has been invaded a multitude of times through history and via these geographic “gateways” that exist on land that were mostly under soviet control during the Cold War, but now cannot be adequately controlled by Russia without conquest.

Putin put Russia into a state of readiness for future invasions, banking on the fact that quick takeovers would receive limited backlash from western powers and the international community. The invasion of Georgia closed off one of these gateways, a successful invasion of Ukraine would have closed three including the one in Crimea that Russia “annexed” (read: stole) in 2014.

I do not blame the Russian people for Putin’s actions - which he needs to be held responsible for - and only wish the Russian people could finally enjoy democratic elections and they can finally put the days of needing a “strong man” in charge behind them. I think at that point will be able to welcome Russia back into the global community.

In a similar vein, the corecursive podcast[0] covered the Sloot Digital Coding System[1] in which it is hypothesized that he attempted something very similar but for video. Unfortunately, it seemed like overestimated his ability to produce this and resorted to smoke and mirrors for demos. It’s a facinating story that reads like a tale of industrial espionage.

[0]: https://corecursive.com/sloot-digital-coding-system/

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System

It does take many years (in the timeframe of decades) for CFCs and other ozone depleting molecules to reach a point where they do damage as it’s heavier than air. 2010 was only 13-14 years ago at this point and those gasses have mostly not made it up that high yet. We won’t know the full scale of the damage that this has done for another 5-15 years.

What we are seeing now is a separate event that had likely originated with excessive, high-altitude water vapor being blasted into the sky due to volcanic activity.

I, too, found this out about myself, but on AncestryDNA originally. I did find a previously unknown cousin my the other side of family thanks to 23&me.

It’s a shame because the relative matching is a really fantastic tool and has been able to connect a lot of people who would otherwise not have met.

Nothing, you abandon many viable samples of it wherever you go.

This relates to the biggest problem with biometrics: it represents an effectively static attribute about an individual. It cannot be reset and therefore we place this enormous responsibility on the reading mechanism and pipeline to the authentication process to attest that the human using it is doing so with consent.

Lying about it would expose them to a lot of legal trouble. Im guessing they are choosing their words carefully as they have likely been worried about being sued from day one.

> How easy is it to submit random DNA (cow, cat, dog, chicken, etc. or even fake?) and get yourself enrolled in their system to then legitimately have access to the next 1500+ "relatives?".

You really must not fundamentally understand how this works. You are matched to people who also took a 23&me test and share DNA with you. The amount shared is how they infer relations.

There are people who do not even have 1500 matches, submitting a sample of animal DNA will quickly result in sequencing failure as the test is based upon the human genome and is effectively “written in the hardware”.

Fabricating a DNA is extraordinarily difficult because you need hundreds of cells with genetic material in order to even produce results. It would be so much easier to steal a sample from a known relative than it would be to genetically engineer some cells.

It sounds like we’re either measuring the wrong thing or putting too much weight behind a measurement that sums up an inherently complex system. This measurement matters enough to be able to petition days to be excluded, why can’t we just codify the exclusion of clearly out-of-normal datapoints? Ignoring everything else, a random spike caused by anything transient is not useful information to us, our goals need to be aligned to the trend over time.

I find it difficult to believe that people would be shocked to discover that datapoints can be removed as a result of the spike identified as non-human-caused pollution.

We can’t regulate acts of nature, even if these acts are made worse by carbon emissions, as it’s useless to include data about these events as the EPA regulations are focused on voluntary emissions.

The real problem is that we rely on the blunt instrument of overall air quality to measure elective pollution in a shared atmosphere. This is far from my area of expertise so I don’t know how or if it’s possible to fix this measurement problem.

Another junk fee that disproportionately impacts people who do not have a ton of cash sitting around: reconnect fees.

In the past, a utility had to come out to your property and physically disconnect a wire or close a valve with a lock if you didn’t pay your bill. Now with smart metering devices (for utilities) and computerized billing automation, the relay or solenoid is often integrated into the metering system or the service can be suspected electronically because there is no physical connection anymore.

The $15-$30 per cell phone line or $60 for power to be restored is an inconceivably expensive excuse to collect money from those who can afford it the least. Paying the reconnect fee doesn't forgive any past due balance - that amount is still due. It also puts increase pressure for customers to agree to payment that they have no hope of making because they just really need power on to be able to cool their home or cell phone to be able to do their job, which creates this cycle of disconnect/reconnect every month that becomes a tax for being poor.

I agree, if I could uncheck a box that says “coloring” when buying food, I would uncheck that every time. The only issue I have is that we don’t live in a world where that is possible, and food dyes inhabit anything that is wrapped in plastic. It’s very much a “take it or leave it” deal and increasingly more often, I leave it.

I suspect that a major problem is the fact that everything is focus group driven and when given the choice between a frozen drink dyed red with beet juice and the same drink dyed neon red with food dyes, people will gravitate towards the neon red drink because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to believe is higher quality.

This is more a reflection of the organizational structure that allows or tolerates such behavior rather than anything to do with the 12 factor app methodology. I think most reasonable people would agree that if you were able to incorporate most of the list, you’re doing alright.

> How many of those devices actually had 5V batteries inside? (Are there even credible 5V Li-poly battery banks)?

That’s a good point and revealed that I conflated battery capacity with source-able/usable power. You are correct (as far as I am aware as well) that you cannot use a lithium ion/polymer based battery chemistry and have between 4.75 and 5.25 volts output.

Thinking about it some more, the battery packs seem to represent a special case where the function of the device is to provide power and, as per your point about squeezing out maximum power, we probably need to have two separate power ratings: one for the battery and one for the usable output.

I seriously cannot tell whether food dyes will be this era’s “refined sugar” in terms of epidemiological impact or a massive red-3 herring.

> Consumers use batteries that are a specific voltage.

Nowadays with sealed, non-serviceable batteries, it is not always abundantly clear what voltage the device takes for power (which can be different from its charging voltage) unless it’s in your hand and you can read the specifications that are printed on the back (if it is at all). Breaking out these two datapoints into voltage and amp hour no longer makes sense given that most batteries where consumer-advertised capacity are product specific.

Our relationship with battery powered devices has changed since the days of 1.5V cells that we tossed in at varying amounts (2x = 3V, 4x = 6V, 6x = 9v, etc). Pre-“USB-PD”, it still kind of made sense to use mAh because we knew it was always 5v but that too has changed.

The mistake is not changing to mWh once we stopped describing 5v devices.

The problem is rarely cash flow, it's credit worthiness and access to a one-time down payment. Additionally, the types of mortgages people take out are fixed rate and your payment never changes (so long as you do not refinance) regardless of inflation, as such, you are paying less over time for your housing, especially compared to renting where rents tend to out pace inflation. Additionally, the money you put in for rent is just flowing down the drain as you receive no long term equity or value benefit once it leaves your bank account. As the saying goes, it's expensive to be poor.

My partner and I have a number of animals and volunteered at a shelter for many years pre-pandemic. We worked with vets and vet techs and are roughly aware of the associated costs.

$10,000 feels high at first glance but consider the size of the skewer compared to a small animal. There is likely damage done to other areas including major internal hemorrhaging which is not super straight-forward to track down completely (even in humans). If the skewer was single-use bamboo (which I suspect given how much wood will retain food smell and how puppies love destroying garbage cans), the puppy would have likely chewed on it a bit causing splintered mess internally.

This would result in a multi-hour procedure with at least 2 surgical staff (surgeon and tech) and anesthesiologist (due to the complicated nature of this, we can’t have the animal regurgitating as well as active life support monitoring). In addition to the standard tools, they would be using X-rays, dyes, internal (dissolvable) sutures, etc. Internal organs would be mended, stomach fluid would need to be removed from the abdominal cavity, and there would be at least 12 hours of monitoring post op.

Expensive, yes, but I don’t think it’s that unreasonable unfortunately.

Something that seems absent these days in American political discourse is the assumption that the other party, in general, has a similar north start to your own, i.e. both conservative and liberal ideals (in the recent past) seemed well-intentioned enough to claim that they each just want what’s best for the country. Now it seems like we have four factions and the centrist left and centrist right just seem to be merging while the far left and far right are moving further away from everyone.

Isn’t the bigger issue that the fund itself was fake? If they made the decision to set aside some amount of money to be untouchable based on a random number, that is, uh, unconventional to say the least, but they very purposefully chose not to have an insurance fund despite advertising that they did which makes this all the more sinister.

I’m fully aware of the difference. The only parallel I’ve drawn is the fact that it uses gases as a result of the combustion as propulsion rather than spinning a fan. Whether it has its own oxidizer is irrelevant for the purposes of this analogy as I don’t see this vehicle achieving any sort of space flight.

He is doing a full series on the engineering of railroads and mentioned this is just the basics. He did not cover locomotives (propulsion, types, differences among passenger, fright, etc) in this video and focused solely unpowered rail cars.

This not a typical low-bypass, cigar-type turbofan jet engine you see on airplanes, rather, it’s a modified turboshaft jet engine used for helicopters, intended to provide longitudinal rotational energy. The air it moves from the intake is a fraction of what it produces as the combustion process itself results in gasses being chemically formed. There is no propeller or fan on this engine - it’s closer to a rocket than what we think of as a jet.

Yeah, I think the problem is that we’ve been taught that pre-optimization is the root of all evil and that we should getting it working before improving upon it.

Pre-optimization became a thing because enthusiasts liked the challenge of creating an elegant solution, but I posit that it continued because devs knew they were not going to be getting back to fixing inefficient code if it mostly worked. Usually stuff like this doesn’t matter when you’re leaking 5mb an hour on a 128gb dedicated server and you’re deploying at least twice per week. But when the devices that connect to you go from 10,000 to 1,000,000, you’re leaking 500mb an hour and then you have a problem very quickly.

This is also acceptable to me, especially if it’s X per month for service and device (including device replacement if needed). I also like how it reduces capex for a business that is looking to connect their devices and just needs a plug-and-play system.

I work in IoT and my single goal working in the industry is to do as much as I can (which will likely still be small) to make devices that are entirely separable from the cloud by enabling the use of different services and by being local-fist.

Imagine if private organizations built their own road network and then sold you a car that can only be driven on that road. Once that company goes out of business, the road vanished and your car is now a very heavy paperweight that literally cannot turn on. This would be totally unacceptable to us, yet we tolerate home automation vendors selling garbage that is locked to their propitiatory systems and will happily brick itself once those systems go offline.

> People look at that? I'm nowhere close to 10 years and people already don't care. It was only relevant for my first job out of college.

This was my experience as well. A lot of places that previously had a hard requirement for a degree will now say “4 year degree or equivalent experience in the field.”

For most jobs, the degree is not required but acts as a convenient filter for the company to narrow their candidate pool. They are starting to realize that it’s no longer a reliable indicator of job success.

In my experience, that requirement seems to have be added by HR whether the hiring manager wanted it or not. Most of the jobs I’ve held “required” a 4-year degree but they were either fine with the “some college” I actually had or explicitly told me they didn’t care.

Lest we forget the very systems enabling this behavior of banal evil were created and maintained by perhaps the most evil of them all.

Aren’t most light sources (unintuitively) measured by the light output of an equivalent incandescent light source? I certainly don’t expect a light labeled as a “40 watt” using anything close to that.