IphtashuFitz
@IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world
- Comment on Mac users served info-stealer malware through Google ads | Full-service Poseidon info stealer pushed by "advertiser identity verified by Google." 1 day ago:
Yup. Blocks ads on our iPhones, iPads, streaming services, etc. Between that & uBlock Origin on our laptop browsers we hardly ever see ads.
- Comment on Cloudflare is bad. Youre right. 2 days ago:
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.
- Comment on Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs 5 days ago:
Some of us drive 48-wheeled vehicles.
- Comment on Before Smartphones, an Army of Real People Helped You Find Stuff on Google 6 days ago:
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.
- Comment on Before Smartphones, an Army of Real People Helped You Find Stuff on Google 6 days ago:
Ask Jeeves was doing this before Google existed…
- Comment on Elon Musk Begs Advertisers to Return as Twitter's Revenue Plunges 1 week ago:
💩
- Comment on How to opt out of the privacy nightmare that comes with new Hondas 1 month ago:
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.
- Comment on Will self driving trucks hit the roads with nobody on board or will they keep a human supervisor? 1 month ago:
- 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.
- Comment on After 16 years, Ecobee is shutting down support for the original smart thermostat 1 month ago:
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.
- Comment on xkcd #2925: Earth Formation Site 1 month ago:
How do you know? Were you there?
- Comment on Recognize the mother of Wifi 1 month ago:
Saw Queen perform with Adam Lambert a few months ago. They played one or two pieces written by Brian May that really tied those two professions of his together. It blows my mind that he’s worked with NASA and the like quite a bit over the years.
- Comment on Musk moves Tesla's goalposts, investors happily move shares higher 2 months ago:
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.
- Comment on Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal - The Verge 2 months ago:
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:
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poses a risk to motor vehicle safety, and
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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.
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- Comment on Microsoft's Collapse in the Web Server Space Continued This Month 2 months ago:
Cloudflare, like Akamai and others, provides a number of services that include proxying, CDN, web security (WAF), bot detection & protection, image optimization, and more.
Cloud providers like AWS, Google, and MS provide similar services as well, but typically to a lesser extent. I’ve worked with Akamai, Cloudflare, and AWS, and find Akamai’s to be the most powerful/flexible/customizable.
- Comment on El Salvador Will Keep Buying 1 Bitcoin Daily Until BTC 'Becomes Unaffordable' With Fiat Currencies, Says President Bukele – Featured Bitcoin News 3 months ago:
Worse, what happens if cybercriminals are able to successfully steal a large number of the countries bitcoin, or if they somehow lose access to their bitcoin wallet(s)?
- Comment on If Askjeeves.com was invented today, chances are it would be a GPT Site. 3 months ago:
Back in the 90’s Ask Jeeves was a “question answering service” and not a search engine. They had teams of human editors that would curate snswers for popular questions. During the dot com boom of the late 90’s they realized they needed to automate that system so they started buying other small startups that were doing more with search technologies. They acquired one search company in New Jersey called Teoma and another in Massachusetts called Direct Hit.
The executives at Jeeves at the time were not very smart though. They were very hands on with these technologies they didn’t fully understand and made some stupid decisions. For example, Direct Hit had a simple advertising platform they had developed where anybody could sign up and bid for ad placement on search results pages. It was largely automated and generated a lot of revenue. The Jeeves CEO said “we’re not in the business of advertising so get rid of it”, so it was sold off. It was sold to that scrappy little startup you mentioned and transformed into AdWords. Jeeves squandered other tech advantages in similar ways.
In a similar vein, they had a huge internal project for many months to create an adult (porn) search engine that they were going to go-brand alongside the Jeeves character they used to use. They planned to call it “Ask Mimi” and had registered domains, created a French maid character to go along with the Jeeves butler character, etc. After a huge push the company deciddd they didn’t want to tarnish their image with porn and dropped it all pretty much overnight. There used to be an article about all this archived on CNet’s news.com site but I can’t find it anymore thanks to their terrible search engine….
Source: I worked for one of those startups that Jeeves acquired.
- Comment on YSK: it's not just Tesla, 1/3 of cars in built in the last ten years have passenger/rear windows that are almost impossible to break in an emergency. 3 months ago:
Even a purely mechanical door can be extremely difficult to open when partially submerged. The pressure of the water will hold the door shut until the water equalizes on both sides of the door.
But yeah, once totally submerged and flooded an electric door likely won’t open while a mechanical one will.
- Comment on DOJ quietly removed Russian malware from routers in US homes and businesses 4 months ago:
20+ years ago I managed the installation of a high performance compute cluster purchased from IBM. Their techs did all the initial installation and setup, right down to using their well known default password of “PASSW0RD” (with a zero for the ‘I’) for all root/admin accounts…. It took less than 29 minutes for it to be compromised by an IP address in China.
At least other vendors like HP use random root/admin passwords printed on cards physically attached to new equipment…
- Comment on Passkeys might really kill passwords 4 months ago:
I never screwed up entering my PIN or failed my hand scan, so the trap door never opened up while I was in it…
- Comment on Passkeys might really kill passwords 4 months ago:
Exactly. See my reply in another thread where I describe a “person trap” that I used to go through to get into a secure facility. Its biometric check analyzed the geometry of your entire hand. It wasn’t just a fingerprint scanner.
- Comment on Passkeys might really kill passwords 4 months ago:
Years ago I worked for a company whose servers were in a highly secure facility. I had to pass through a “person trap” to get in, which required three independent things to get through: something you have, something you know, and something you are.
Imagine a booth about the size of a phone booth, with doors on both sides. To open the outer door you need a card key. Once inside the outer door closes. To open the inner door you need to put your hand on a hand scanner, then enter a PIN. Only then will the inner door unlock and let you inside. I was told that the booth also weighed you and would refuse to let you through if your weight was something like 10% different from your last pass through. That was to prevent other people from piggybacking through with you.
Lots of people think that’s all overkill until I explain that it’s all to ensure an authorized person, and nobody else, could get through. A bad actor could steal my card key & might guess my PIN, but getting around my hand scan & weight would be extremely difficult.
The closer we get to this sort of multi-layer authentication with websites the happier I am. I want my bank account, etc. protected just as well as that data center…
- Comment on Gel and lithium-ion tech could enable 1000-mile EV range on one charge 4 months ago:
After driving non-stop for 200+ miles I’m more than happy to take a break for 15-30 minutes to stretch my legs, hit the bathroom, grab some food, etc. My wife and I have done precostly this on multiple road trips that we’ve taken in our EV.
- Comment on Gel and lithium-ion tech could enable 1000-mile EV range on one charge 4 months ago:
How many gas powered cars can go 1000km without refueling?
- Comment on Me after I got fired 4 months ago:
Decades ago I had to debug a random crash. It only happened on Wednesdays. On Wednesdays in September. On Wednesdays in September after the 10th…
- Comment on How Quora Died 4 months ago:
Quota was just Ask Jeeves 2.0… Both relied on human “experts” and neither could figure out a long term monetization plan.
- Comment on ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain 4 months ago:
I use .home for my home network…
- Comment on Reddit might be forced to hand out IPs of users frequenting piracy subreddits: how does programming.dev compare? 5 months ago:
The company I work for probably doesn’t see as much traffic as Reddit, but we provide services via the web in the US and roughly 15 other countries. We make use of Akamai for CDN, security, etc. and one of the things they do is provide us with raw logs of every request made to our sites. That generates a lot of data that we feed into Splunk for analysis, debugging, etc.
One of the nicer things Akamai does in their logs is to classify if they believe the request came from a bot, and if so then what bot it was. They are able to identify over 1000 individual bots, and can also detect traffic from new/unknown bots. There is a LOT of bot activity on the internet these days, and many originate from cloud providers like AWS, where it’s clear it’s a machine making the request and not a human.
If we had a legal request for logs I’d have to look at the data to see how to respond. If Akamai showed a lot of bot activity from consumer ISP IPs then I’d likely include that data in an effort to show that end users may be victims of botnets. But if bot activity was mostly originating from cloud providers etc. then I probably wouldn’t include it. Let the lawyers try to figure out from the raw data what traffic originated from humans vs bots.
- Comment on NYPD faces backlash as it prepares to encrypt radio communications | New York | The Guardian 5 months ago:
When I was in the USCG Auxiliary in Boston in the 90’s they used the same VHF radio as all boaters for most comma, but they also had an encrypted radio they could switch to if they needed to discuss anything sensitive. The encrypted radio was crap though and only worked over short distances. But they’d use it when relaying personal details of boats/people they stopped, dealing with drunk boaters, etc.
As time progressed they switched to using mobile phones when they wanted privacy. Cell coverage along the coast proved far better than the proprietary encrypted radio…
- Comment on Pornhub blocks North Carolina and Montana as porn regulation spreads 5 months ago:
No they won’t. Virtually every tech company in the world uses them. If any legislation was proposed then companies from the likes of Google and Microsoft down to hundreds of companies with fewer than 100 employees would all fight it.
- Comment on A cargo plane flew 50 miles with no pilot onboard using a semi-automated system. An aviation expert says the technology could address the pilot shortage. 5 months ago:
If you fly commercially then you’re flying in an airplane that flies mostly autonomously. The vast majority of the pilots interaction is during takeoff and landing. The rest of the time it’s pretty much flying itself.
One huge difference between commercial aircraft & cars is that the air traffic is highly regulated. There are specific corridors & altitudes, distances between aircraft that must be maintained, and ground based controllers are monitoring and directing everything. It’s not even remotely like the free for all on the highways.