My wife recently reconnected with a friend from college (20+ years ago) who is legally blind & living in MA. And I recently worked with a MA resident that is legally handicapped. Both of them have, through some state service, access to some number of free Uber rides each month. I know in the Boston area there is/was a state run car service for the handicapped, but using Uber apparently provides much more coverage & flexibility.

As long as the Uber drivers are being paid appropriately for this service I see it as a great service for the handicapped. I’d hate to see them lose it…

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.

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

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.)

I’d be hard pressed to pick anybody to go before him.

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.

Speaking of slot machines, every slot machine, electronic poker machine, etc. are just state machines that operate based on a stream of random numbers fed into them by another device.

The random number generators (RNG’s) used for gaming are highly regulated (at least here in the US) and only a small handful of companies make them. They have to be certified for use by organizations like The Nevada Gaming Control Board. RNGs have to be secured so only NGC officials and other key people can access them. If they are opened unexpectedly or otherwise tampered with then they need to go into lockdown and stop generating numbers until an official resets it.

The RNGs also need to be able to replay sequences of numbers on demand. If the same sequence of numbers are fed into a game and the user plays the same way then the result of the game should be 100% identical each time.

I burned myself out at a startup about 20 years ago. Walked into my bosses office & told him I quit. Was on the other side of the planet a few days later. I did eventually return home though.

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.

I’ve heard of all sorts of issues with my fiber ISP (Verizon Fios) rolling out IPv6. It’s been years that they’ve been slowly rolling it out for testing in a few places. There’s virtually no useful documentation on their website about it. And it’s still not available where I am.

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.

Some of us drive 48-wheeled vehicles.

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.

Ask Jeeves was doing this before Google existed…

I learned COBOL programming on that system. COBOL’s sequential file data type was all about space-delimited text files. Part of a program would define the various input & output files. For example a numerical userid might take up columns 1-8 then the first initial would be in column 10 then the last name in columns 12-20 and so on…

I have no idea if this is true or not but I was told it harkens back to very early multi-user operating systems where user credentials were stored unencrypted in plaintext files that used white space as delimiters.

I tend to believe this might be accurate because I learned programming back in the 1980’s on an Onyx Systems microcomputer. There was a bug that some of us learned about in its rudimentary email program that would dump you into its otherwise-protected system directory. In that directory was a file containing both usernames & passwords in clear text. I don’t recall if it used white space as a delimiter, but given everything was in clear text and not encrypted I think that might have been the case.

Reminds me of The Password Game…

Warning: you have been warned!

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.

💩

Yeah, but enough of a turn-off that they will actively vote for Biden when the time comes, and not just sit it out or cast a third party protest vote?