IphtashuFitz

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IphtashuFitz ,

Not necessarily. They may have identified all the serial numbers of terminals legitimately used by Ukraine then simply blocked all terminals not on that list.

Mac users served info-stealer malware through Google ads | Full-service Poseidon info stealer pushed by "advertiser identity verified by Google." ( arstechnica.com )

Mac malware that steals passwords, cryptocurrency wallets, and other sensitive data has been spotted circulating through Google ads, making it at least the second time in as many months the widely used ad platform has been abused to infect web surfers....

IphtashuFitz ,

Yup. Blocks ads on our iPhones, iPads, streaming services, etc. Between that & uBlock Origin on our laptop browsers we hardly ever see ads.

IphtashuFitz ,

Sending messages like this isn’t uncommon.

Back in the early 1960’s my dad had a high level security clearance at a defense contractor. He was one of a handful of people who knew the full details of a project to “identify, track, and destroy a hostile satellite”. This was in direct response to the Soviet Union launching Sputnik. The President of the US was another one of the handful that knew the full details of the project.

After a lot of R&D work a test was performed. A rocket was launched from somewhere in the South Pacific. It tracked a derelict satellite used as a target, closed on it, and disabled it. At that point my dad’s involvement on the project ended.

A few months later while at home he & my mom were listening to a speech by the President. In the middle of the speech he announced to the American public that the USA now had the ability to identify, track, and destroy hostile satellites. My mom says all the color drained from his face but she had no idea why since the entire project was still highly classified. In fact when my dad got to work the next day there was a memo waiting on his desk telling him that he was not to confirm, deny, or even discuss anything he may have heard on the radio or tv the previous night.

The President didn’t make that announcement for the benefit of the American people. He was sending a very public message to the leadership of the USSR.

(And my dad never told this story until well after the 25 year time frame established for routine declassification of such materials.)

IphtashuFitz ,

I don’t understand why Cloudflare gets bashed so much over this… EVERY CDN out there does exactly the same thing. It’s how CDN’s work. Whether it’s Akamai, AWS, Google Cloud CDN, Fastly, Microsoft Azure CDN, or some other provider, they all do the same thing. In order to operate properly they need access to unencrypted content so that they can determine how to cache it properly and serve it from those caches instead of always going back to your origin server.

My employer uses both Akamai and AWS, and we’re well aware of this fact and what it means.

IphtashuFitz ,

My wife and I plan 6-12 month out, and sometimes more. At least for the dates of our vacations. My wife runs a small dog boarding service out of our home, and limits the number of dogs she boards. As a result she has clients that will schedule boarding up to a year in advance. So we need to block out our vacation time early enough to prevent clients from making reservations at those times.

At some point after we block out the time we’ll figure out where we want to go.

IphtashuFitz ,

Some of us drive 48-wheeled vehicles.

IphtashuFitz ,

Ask Jeeves was doing this before Google existed…

IphtashuFitz ,

Ask Jeeves was a “question answering service” back then. They had a staff of human editors who curated answers to popular questions. Nothing they answered back then was done via search.

Source: I worked for a search engine startup in the 90’s that was acquired by Ask Jeeves when they realized they needed a true search technology since human editing wasn’t scalable.

IphtashuFitz ,

💩

IphtashuFitz ,

That would surprise me. Companies like Akamai maintain very up-to-date lists of Tor exit nodes, commercial VPN exit nodes, etc. My employer uses Akamai and blocks all traffic from Tor given the huge volume of malicious traffic coming from it. It would be trivial for us to block VPN traffic as well if we wanted to. Those blocks occur on Akamai’s systems before it ever makes it to ours. No browser-based tool is going to get around an IP based block like that.

No idea if Reddit is doing something similar here, but my guess is they are.

IphtashuFitz ,

Not to mention that lots of malicious attacks occur late at night or on weekends in an attempt to delay getting noticed. My company has rotating on-call schedules for our security, devops, and even engineering teams. I’ve had to hop on late at night or on weekends to help mitigate attacks. Luckily my employer is really good about letting folks take a day or two off after such events.

IphtashuFitz ,

That’s an optional software upgrade. It’ll cost you $12.95 a month.

IphtashuFitz ,

Just support contactless payments. Then people can just tap their phone, Apple Watch, credit card, etc.

This sounds to me like a solution looking for a problem…

IphtashuFitz ,

Tesla has both a gigafactory and a Supercharger factory in mainland China. Any semi-competent CEO would recognize that publicly advocating for tariffs on China would have a good chance of backfiring. China could easily turn around and slap 100% tariffs on everything coming out of those two factories in retaliation.

IphtashuFitz ,

My only problem is our driveway is 700 feet long, uphill & through trees. I seriously doubt my WiFi reaches it…

IphtashuFitz ,

Doesn’t prevent Amazon from occasionally sticking smaller packages in our mailbox…

IphtashuFitz ,

Once the infrastructure (conduit, circuit breakers, cable, etc.) is in place then swapping out the charger at the end of it is pretty much trivial.

IphtashuFitz ,

Something like outside Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park, and they’d probably be destroyed in minutes…

IphtashuFitz ,

She’d just argue that it’s “art” probably…

IphtashuFitz ,

Yeah, but if they end up contagious before kicking it then we could end up in another pandemic…

IphtashuFitz ,

As opposed to the innocent civilians in Ukraine that are being raped, tortured, kidnapped, and murdered by Russian forces?

IphtashuFitz ,

We use Akamai where I work for security, CDN, etc. Their services make it largely trivial to identify traffic from bots. They can classify requests in real time as coming from known bots like Googlebot to programming frameworks like python & java to bots that impersonate Googlebot, to virtually any other automated traffic from unknown bots.

If Reddit was smart they’d leverage something like that to allow Google, Bing, etc. to crawl their data and block all others, or poison others with bogus data. But we’re talking about Reddit here…

IphtashuFitz ,

Gotta start somewhere. Hopefully this opens up the floodgates.

IphtashuFitz ,

Personally I’d call that a safety issue. A few years ago my wife and I were driving a rental car that was rear ended on the highway by a drunk driver. The impact caved in the left rear wheel and spun us 360 degrees across 3 lanes of the highway. Within a few seconds of coming to a stop an OnStar person was talking to us, asking if we were ok and confirming our location.

We had no clue ahead of time that the rental car had one of these services, but at that moment we were very happy it did. I honestly have no idea about the privacy ramifications, etc. but having been through that experience I’d think long and hard about disabling it outright. I do take my privacy seriously, but I’d have to weigh that against the safety of me & my family in that kind of situation and disable it only as an absolutely last resort… Just my own personal $0.02 on the matter.

IphtashuFitz ,

I admit I own a Tesla. Given all the recent erratic behavior:

  • Not only will I not recommend Teslas to anybody who might ask about it, I will warn them to look at company & CEO behavior over the years, and actively discourage others from buying one.
  • When the time comes, I will not be replacing my current car with another Tesla. I will still likely go with an EV, but by then there should be significantly more good (better) options available.

About the only way I’ll change either of these will be for Elon to step down and completely remove himself from any control over Tesla. But I don’t see that happening and I certainly won’t be holding my breath.

IphtashuFitz ,

‘21 Model Y long range. Overall it drives well, and the supercharger network is really nice. We took it on a trip up & down a good portion of the east coast last year and never had any issues charging it. We have a couple 30 lb dogs that love going for rides, so things like dog mode are really nice as well.

Things I really do not like:

  • The reliance on cameras for all sorts of features like auto high beams and auto wipers on top of traffic aware cruise control (aka autopilot) (and full self driving, if you have it). I regularly have the wipers go off on clear, sunny days. The auto high beams are so unreliable I don’t use them, and that means no autopilot at night. I have no faith in even trying out FSD because of how glitchy everything else is.
  • The minimal use of physical controls. I have to take my eyes off the road just to switch wiper speed/mode.
  • Software updates have, more than once, changed my settings for things like autopilot without warning, and I’ve only discovered it when driving and turning autopilot on.
  • The maps have lots of routing issues. It shows roads in my neighborhood that don’t yet exist (new development under construction), regularly routes me wrong ways (there’s a left turn near my home that it thinks it can’t take so it tries to route me two sides if a triangle as a result), and on our road trip we found a stretch of highway that it thought it couldn’t drive on and kept trying to route us along side streets. And there’s no way I know to report these issues so they can be fixed. Apps like Waze make that trivial.

Pretty much all of these are reasons why I refuse to even try FSD and discourage others from using it. About the only way I’ll give it another chance is if a truly independent third party tests it and says all these issues have been resolved.

IphtashuFitz ,

My last breakdown was when all the transmission fluid in my car drained out because the mechanic that did my tuneup didn’t replace the drain plug properly. What tools should I carry in my car to do a complete transmission replacement while on the side of the highway?

IphtashuFitz ,

That truly depends on how secure Ecobee made it… I’ve seen some smart devices that use SSL (https) for all communication and do some sort of certificate authentication, making it virtually impossible to decrypt its communication protocol without a valid private key…

Having said that, it’d be nice if Ecobee took the initiative and opened up these older devices, if they could do so without comprising the security of all their others.

IphtashuFitz ,
  • The AI will shut off before an impending accident just to transfer the blame onto the human.

I may be mistaken but I thought a law was passed (or maybe it was just a NHTSA regulation?) that stipulated any self driving system was at least partially to blame if it was in use within 30 seconds of an accident. I believe this was done after word got out that Tesla’s FSD was supposedly doing exactly this.

IphtashuFitz ,

I own a Tesla and was offered 30 days of free full self driving. I refused to try it for a number of reasons.

  • The routing in the navigation system has numerous issues like thinking it can’t turn left at intersections where you actually can. It results in less than optimal routes, and there’s no way to report those sorts of issues.
  • FSD relies on the same camera system that Autopilot (traffic aware cruise control) uses. I’ve had Autopilot slam on the brakes for no obvious reason, swerve to avoid nothing, etc. If it has issues like that then chances are FSD will be just as bad.
  • The cameras are also used to control the automatic windshield wipers, and they can turn on without warning in bright sun, etc.
  • Same with the auto high beams, which are required by Autopilot & FSD. I refuse to use them because they can turn on & off a lot when there are cars approaching me.
  • I regularly get alerts that cameras are obscured by bright sun, low sun in the sky, etc.

In other words, the systems that FSD rely on are clearly still buggy. So I refuse to use FSD until it’s clearly demonstrated the bugs in those systems are fixed.

IphtashuFitz ,

What's confusing about it? A recall in the automotive world has a very specific definition, and it covers not only software related issues but hardware related ones as well.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is a part of the US Department of Transportation, and they publish a 20 page pamphlet that describes what a recall is. Here are the relevant parts from that brochure:

The United States Code for Motor Vehicle Safety (Title 49, Chapter 301) defines motor vehicle safety as “the performance of a motor vehicle or motor vehicle equipment in a way that protects the public against unreasonable risk of accidents occurring because of the design, construction, or performance of a motor vehicle, and against unreasonable risk of death or injury in an accident, and includes nonoperational safety of a motor vehicle.” A defect includes “any defect in performance, construction, a component, or material of a motor vehicle or motor vehicle equipment.”
Generally, a safety defect is defined as a problem that exists in a motor vehicle or item of motor vehicle equipment that:

  • poses a risk to motor vehicle safety, and

  • may exist in a group of vehicles of the same design or manufacture, or items of equipment of the same type and manufacture.

Furthermore:

The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act gives NHTSA the authority to issue vehicle safety standards and to require manufacturers to recall vehicles that have safety-related defects or do not meet Federal safety standards.

In other words, federal law gives NHTSA the authority to issue recalls for any defect that is considered a safety defect. There is no qualifier for it having to be mechanical in nature.

I've had software-related recalls issued for both a Toyota and a Honda that I used to own. The Toyota one resulted in them sending me a USB stick in the mail and telling me how to install it in the car (basically plug it into the entertainment system and wait). The Honda one required a trip to a dealer to update the software in the ECU to prevent the cars battery from dying due to the alternator being disabled improperly. Just because these were software related in no way means they weren't recalls. They were both mandated by NHSTA, both resulted in official recall notices, etc.

Edit: Just for fun you might want to go to https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls and do a search there. If you enter "Tesla" in the field for "VIN or Year Make Model" you can browse all their recalls. The very first one on this page is titled "Incorrect Font Size on Warning Lights". That's most definitely a software recall. It's assigned NHSTA recall , and they list the affected components as "ELECTRICAL SYSTEM". If you read further it also shows the remedy was an over-the-air software update.

IphtashuFitz ,

Many years ago I had to try to debug a memory manager written by a really talented software engineer, with an interesting take on naming things…

  • He referred to blocks of memory as “cookies”.

  • He had a temporary variable named “handy” because it was handy to have around.

  • He had a second temporary variable that referenced the first one that he called “son_of_handy”.

  • If corruption was detected in a block of memory then it would set the flag “shit_cookie_corrupt”.

  • If too many cookies were corrupt then the system would halt by calling the function “oh_shit_oh_shit_oh_shit”.

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