skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My favorite was the satellite hacking scene back in the early 2000s. It started earlier than that, I know, but my exposure was around that time.

It's fairly well documented these days but there was a very fun game of cat-and-mouse between the satellite companies (DirecTV and Dish Network) and all the pirates. For DirecTV, at least, the outline of the whole thing went like this

Subscriber specific smart cards were insertted into the DirecTV set top boxes and they were, IIRC, essentially responsible for providing the decryption keys for the video stream. The cards did this using a custom onboard ASIC that I don't think was ever really reverse engineered. So the cards - at least for the "mainstream" DirecTV pirates - were always required.

People would manufacture and buy modified smart card readers which would tweak the power to the cards in such a way that after enough attempts they would enter some kind of debug mode and accept unsigned software updates.

People would disassemble the software on the card and write patches (all in assembly) to make the smart cards to authorize any request for channel access instead of them cross referencing the authorizations for your account (1).

You'd apply the update to your card using a modified reader and voila - all channels worked perfect.

But then, DirecTV got clever and instead of just using the ASIC to compute the channel decryption keys they started to use both the ASIC and a hash of parts of the card's onboard software! So now every week or so a update was released which would break the old patches since the new update would potentially need the hash of parts of the original code that the software had overwritten.

So then the people writing the patches would do things like add lookup tables for the known incarnations of the packets that initiated the decryption key generation...so they'd just have a table of Hash(DecryptionPacket) -> Hash(OriginalSoftware). But then new packets (usually released each week on Monday's I think) would require more updates.

There were more clever patches that would do more sophisticated things but the extent of which I don't really remember.

Note that this was all _after_ the infamous Black Sunday event when lots of cards were permanently disabled. That was the P2 generation of cards. The generation I'm referring to above (during my exposure to the scene) was almost entirely P3. They were running P2, P3 and P4 cards all at the same time, I think.

As far as I know this scene is entirely gone now. I don't think the P4 cards were ever exploited - not publicly, at least.

Lastly there were LOADs of forums for this kind of thing. vBulletin forums were all over the place. Lots of thriving communities.

My memory is pretty hazy on all this now and I was pretty young at the time so if anyone has more salient details on this I'd really like to hear them!

(1) - I don't remember exactly how the massive subscriber database was sent down in the stream in such a way that the boxes and cards could do this. Maybe some kind of tree? Maybe someone else can fill in that detail.
> contrary to what this shallow blog article posted with no substance.

We'll see. If I'm not mistaken the author has written books on Windows even. Why would he lie about something so stupid? ghacks is not a blog it's a tech news site and pretty well known. Perhaps you don't like it because of the sites critical view regarding Windows?

> Average Joe users who user their PC for entertainment and work

Don't bring up average Joe - we're talking about power-users, you were the one who brought up 'power-user stuff' and that's what I quoted you on. I wanted to share the perspective of someone who do not share your praise and excitement for W11. Many seem to not share your experience that is an ad free, lovely OS.
My local 2600 club puts on a conference (CarolinaCon) that's a fun dive into gray-hat security stuff.

E.g., one guy demonstrated how he forges the signature on a printer's USB firmware updates so he can deploy a his own stuff inside a company's network perimeter.

Or they always have "Lockpicking Village", where you can learn to escape handcuffs!

The 2600 magazine has always been a fun glimpse into this world, too.
It does seem like they've confused Hollywood with Wall Street. I mean, had the founders ever met a WS trader, for example? Okay, maybe not, plenty of people haven't. But there are magazines targeted to traders (I used to subscribe to one), someone could go read one of those. Not a lot of herbal bath bombs being advertised (or whatever the conservative fantasy would be of a "liberal" advertisement). Nope, fast cars, expensive liquor, and other items of the hedonistic lifestyle. I don't know which bucket "hedonism" falls into, but I doubt it's "woke".

Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree on what the founders were thinking, but I'm still stumped on how they consider Wall Street to be liberal, and why their offered alternative had better features because "not woke".
Lance Bass almost made it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Bass#:~:text=Bass%20was%....
One thing TFA did do was to describe very well the bad things about a cult: separating you from friends and family, controlling you with guilt, forbidding you from engaging honestly with differing belief systems.

I have not been pressured to cut off from friends or family, regardless of their belief systems; I am not controlled by guilt; and I genuinely try to engage the best I can with other belief systems. I'm pretty sure I could make a case for atheism at least as strongly as you could.
Space is inhospitable for humans, but not so bad for tech. With no need for a cushy room-temperature, you mostly need to think about increased radiation and temperature swings.

I can't find details on NASA's designs, but I suspect you'd mostly need a new casing. Something radiation-tolerant (most plastic degrades quickly) and maybe radiation-shielding if it messes with the electronics too much. For temperature you could just run it through a few cycles on Earth and see what breaks. Probably nothing, given the GoPro's lack of moving parts and general ruggedness.

The rugged, icy, salt-water environments the GoPro is designed for are, in many ways, a lot more demanding than space.
I agree that closed circuit is the best answer.

In my opinion, the coordination is not an issue. Most of the accidents and near accidents I've seen are due to poor decisions, inattention (which is usually a poor decision), and not understanding vehicle dynamics.
Climbing is a great way to learn knots in an applied way.
Programming languages here as well. I am working on 2 at the same time currently (and I made many before); one of them I am trying to have done befor 1 dec to do AoC22 with. I believe I can make that.
That's how you're supposed to use a traditional Japanese toilet, facing the flush.

Now granted, traditional Japanese toilets are getting rare in Japan, it's mostly western style toilets now.
It was my first computer game back in the early 90s! I wish I knew there were competitions around it.
I'm in! I run a small Discord server for 3D printer enthusiasts (I'm building a a closed-loop monitoring system for 3D printers). A section for offline systems in general would be easy for me to add. Invite link: https://discord.gg/sf23bk2hPr

I'm open to wherever people naturally gather though. IRC, maybe?

Another community you might like: https://www.tinyml.org/
And most of those aren't even real sticks (auto rev matching, no lift shift, etc).
Consulting and Clojure: It's a Living
Corporate virtue signalling
Let's go Jackie!!!
I played Doom, Doom 2 and Final Doom all the way through about 20 years ago - I can’t recall a single instance of this kind of level design. Doors stayed open once opened. Maybe it was done with corners/sight lines instead? To be honest I remember some vast areas rendered, especially when accessing secrets.
> Mastodon doesn't fix that, because Alice@instance1.com doesn't necessarily mean you're talking to Alice. It could be a malicious Alice. Maybe the "real" Alice is Alice@instanceAlpha.com.

Okay, I'll bite; how do you know that the Tumblr user actualice12345 is the real Alice?
The browser updates will refresh the cert store. To see yours and the overrides file use

find ~/.mozilla -type f -name "cert*"

cert9.db is a sqlite database file and cert_override.txt is a text file with dns names and certificate fingerprints. There are probably scripts to drive this tool [1] for automating removal of certs assuming FF is not running but I have not looked for any. Here [2] is someone making it work n Windows.

I suppose one could set the file immutable once it in the desired state but I have no idea how well Firefox will deal with not being able to update it. I would hope it just throws some stderr noise. The risk of course is that new CA's would not get added unless your script deals with comparing the updated cert9.db and your custom file and alerts you when new CA's show up. It's probably best to make use of the overrides file rather than removing certs from their cert9.db file.

[Edit] I totally missed that a comment further down in the linked article actually explains how to use the certutil tool to manage overrides by Rowena

[1] - https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/security/nss/legacy/...

[2] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58550397/can-t-use-mozil...
That's awesome! I preordered. I've written one tiny browser extension once, which was really just for my own use, and I was a bit surprised at how hard it was to find anything that taught how to do it from beginning to end. The APIs were all well-documented, and there was a tutorial extension I could clone, but after that I was really left to searching through random blog posts and StackOverflow for help, since even with good documentation "what is possible in the first place" is hard to figure out. It took me a full day to write an extension to mute all tabs whose name matched a regex pattern. That's it, that's the entire extension, and I wasn't even interested in making it cross-browser. (The use case is that you pair its hotkey with an autohotkey script and then it's actually quite useful.)

Since then, I've on occasion had interest in making some other browser extensions, but I always look back to that experience & the lack of resources and just think ehhhhhh do I really want to? I'm sure I could but just how much do I care about this, and the answer has never been enough.
Tumblr is adding activitypub integration which means you will be able to follow and interact with Tumblr users from Mastodon and vice-versa.
For what it is worth, I also care about building this with zig. https://github.com/sagemathinc/cowasm/blob/main/packages/sql...
Or let's say you take a job writing Go and they switch to Erlang? I'm curious how you would react?
First, people should separate the technology of cryptocurrency from speculation on centralized exchanges and other bank-like behavior that actually takes money off-chain. Almost everything that people are talking about when they say "crypto" is explicitly NOT using cryptocurrency but rather collecting money with cryptocurrency to help with marketing and onboarding but then speculating with it off chain in the traditional system.

There are three fundamental advances that cryptocurrency brings to digital money: digital signatures which allow transactions without disclosing account secrets, mathematically verifiable public ledgers which prevent cheating, stealing and irresponsible behavior (such as with FTX), and smart contracts that enforce agreements for structured transactions.

Actually problems with FTX and doubts about Tether should make the advantages of cryptocurrency _more_ obvious for those who understand it. Because fundamentally the issue is the secret unverifiable nature of the ledgers, and manual "legal"-(non)enforcement of agreements (as opposed to automated contracts), in the traditional system.
Another interesting wrinkle in this whole conversation is that research tools that are useful for normal people tend to eagerly escape the lab. This happened with (off the top of my head only): SQL/RDBMS, the Internet, Email, garbage collected languages, object-orientation/actor model, research UNIX, and the WWW. The list is endless.

When this happens, the researchers (who were the initial user base) basically lose control of the technology. This process can benefit the researchers or not, but is basically indifferent to their needs.
Pretty much all input is untrusted unless it originated (exclusively!) from something with more permissions that is trustworthy.

The kernel is written in C.

So that pretty much means all parsers written in C and every other language should consider all input untrustworthy, no?
Yeah why don't we just place an order at the first available orbital facto...oh no such thing exists. Well we can order some aluminum from an asteroid mining smelt...oh that doesn't exist. Well I'm sure the useful payload entirely built in orbit is...oh.

There's no infrastructure in space to do anything. Even if you built a rocket in orbit that doesn't do you any good if the payload in sitting on a pad on the ground.
I was responding specifically the implicit assumption that the timeframes can be directly compared — since things happened on different scales, that doesn't make sense especially when you're comparing different things. The number of people using the internet changed as a function of reasonable speed/price connectivity becoming available where they lived so the process was a lot slower than shipping an update to a blockchain network because it involved things like getting permits and deploying crews to install cables.

That said, even if you want to ignore Bitcoin, things like Ethereum still are lagging far behind — if that network shut off tomorrow, nobody not involved in selling tokens would notice. The same would not have been true of the web 7 years, or even 2 years, after it launched because tons of people were using it for things unrelated to selling web services.

It's certainly possible that at some point some level of functionality will make it more attractive but I suspect that this will involve rolling back parts of the current sales pitch and that will unfavorably affect the cost relative to other models like distributed ledgers or standard APIs.
Alabama is pausing executions after a 3rd failed lethal injection
Why you keep quitting online courses (and then buy more) [video]
As a sibling poster says, why don't you ask them? I converted to Catholicism after weighing it up against pantheism, atheism, and other forms of Christianity. I think I have very good reasons for believing in God's existence with a very high degree of confidence (not just "look what I experienced" reasons, but philosophical arguments that appear sound to me). And I teach my kids about it because if I let them "make up their own mind", they'll fall for whatever persuasive argument they first encounter. Of course I want them not to believe anything "blindly", and to make sure they test the reasons they're given for things, and to think through the arguments logically, etc.
Yes! I had no idea Meta actually invested in innovation/engineering like this. I always assumed most of their work was just in ad tech & "metaverse".
They got the article from the OP article -- it goes on a diversion into the circle-squaring thing at the end.
Why don't they use a painless method, like nitrogen or helium gas?
I really hope that you also do cool things like this one [1] with your Christmas lights

1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TvlpIojusBE
Even for modern games that don't care about depth ordering, they still tend to render first-person weapons or third-person characters first, and the sky last, just because it's an easy way to skip a bunch of overdraw, so why not?
I like webscraping and made a lot of money making farms 15 or so years ago; I started disliking it somehow when Python kind of took over. What are you using? I am also interested in doing it as cheap as I can which is a lot of fun for tech reasons.
> the company can retroactively create a conflicting chain of backdated signatures and purport it to be the canonical one
> Mastodon doesn't fix that, because Alice@instance1.com doesn't necessarily mean you're talking to Alice. It could be a malicious Alice.

Interestingly, email seems to not have that problem at all.
I do advocate for the importance of backward engineering - with its companion, competence and awareness over the lower-level.
And then do what with it? Throw it away?

If it hands it to a C program, that C program needs to parse (in some form!) those values!

How is a C program expected to ever do anything if it can’t safely handle input?
https://mynoise.net/ ?
The issue in many of these cases is there appears to be no canonical safe way to know the length of the input in C, and people apparently screw up keeping track of the lengths of the buffers all the time.
Thanks, didn’t know the latter.
Did the companies which refused to do business with apartheid South Africa have an ideological bent?

Would you have detested them?

What about the companies which continued to do business with apartheid South Africa? Did they have an ideological bent too?

> why not just be a bank serving all types of customers

If there's an under-served market then a business which focuses on that market's specific needs can be more profitable than one with multiple focuses.

In the link you can see some examples: "debit cards with customers’ chosen names, which aren’t always the same as what’s on their ID", "guided goals for gender-affirming procedures like top surgery and facial feminization", and family planning which doesn't assume heteronormativity.

As a different example of a bank started for an under-served population, USAA is focused on people who serve or served in the military, and their families. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAA :

> USAA was founded in 1922 in San Antonio by a group of 25 U.S. Army officers as a mechanism for mutual self-insurance when they were unable to secure auto insurance because of the perception that they, as military officers, were a high-risk group.
Elon Musk Is Addressing Issue of Child Sexual Exploitation Content on Twitter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35DSdw7dHjs is as relevant as ever

> Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state? Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.
My scene is hobby operating system development, where you build an operating system usually for x86 / x86-64 PCs from scratch booting either from the BIOS, or UEFI, and then going from there. Common languages to use are C, C++ or (recently and my personal favourite) Rust.

Personally I'm currently working on an AHCI storage driver (i.e, for talking to SATA drives) for my operating system.

There's a lot of information out there, especially at https://wiki.osdev.org/ about how to get code booting, and about lots of the basic hardware works. There's also places like https://www.reddit.com/r/osdev/ for asking people for help.
I think for me there's 2 levels of eye contact. When you look at the eyes, and then when your pupils look straight into the other pupils. When I look straight into the pupils, it's like I put a fix on them and I get some sort of tunnel vision. Now that I think of it maybe my brain thinks of the reverse, that I'm somehow put on the spot by the other person, and I become anxious. Doesn't happen all the time, but when it happens, it becomes weird.
Well what is your rebuttal?
Not. Water is a chemical byproduct of the Photosynthesis. Each time a plant cell uses the sun is making 3 molecules of water by cycle.

Is a well known fact that forests build rivers

Even better, they turn CO2 into water. Many of our problems would be solved having much more plants and algae around, but strictly protecting more lands as forests is the simple solution that nobody wants to try (and making the laws much harder against arsonists that are releasing CO2 in massive amounts just for fun and profit would be a big step in the right direction).
Or maybe just don't run your company around unrelated political goals, unless you're a PAC.
They still do. There are algorithms to fetch whatever will be shown on your feed. They may be as straightforward as fetching a user's follow list and displaying their posts chronologically in reverse. That's still an algorithm.

I'm sure Gaiman means specifically the kind of "smart" feed algorithm like FB etc employ. That said, I really dislike this trend of equating "algorithms" to something wicked. I write them for a living, and I'd rather we kept writing and employing them.
I wouldn’t say I’m part of the community, but I’m certainly a fan of ZZT. A text-based game engine developed in 1991 by Tim Sweeney which still has a community going and new games being released to this day. I was able to make my way around it a 14 year old kid, which says a lot about its accessibility.

https://zzt.org / https://museumofzzt.com
At the risk of going too far off topic, there is a distinction between Biblical inerrancy and Biblical literalism.

For example, Jesus says: 'You are the salt of the earth.' He doesn't literally mean his followers are Sodium Chloride molecules.

Diving deeper in one specific interpretive case, the Roman Catholic Church teaches that the Bible is Inerrant but the 'literal' interpretation is not always to be prefered.

This should be obvious because the Bible is not a book it's a library, and how you read it depends on which section of the library you are in.
One thing confuses me about this: does it require a separate tree per-axis?
I’m in the SaaS Founders community on IndieHackers, Crunchbase, and Kernal.
Can I run programs built in this SDK on an original PS1? Like the one I have from when I was a kid? I'm interested, I'm gonna check it out.
Why the ... I need to buy a pixel and install a niche operating system like GrapheneOS or CalyxOS to be at least a little safe with my privacy :/

btw. GrapheneOS is great!
So in a nutshell I can grab the toroidal aerospike model from KSP, print it 1 cm larger and I now have the world's largest 3D printed aerospike.
Laserdiscs had extra audio tracks with commentary on some discs as I recall. (But the stack of LDs I have is in the garage and it's too cold to check :-)) An audio track shouldn't take much room. But not sure about actual numbers.