Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.
I haven’t dug into the docs much. This really does return vectors? Because all of the OSM servers and services I have seen return tiles that are bitmaps, which for the type of data being displayed always seemed like a rather moronic way to do it.
As usual for the type of screeching and breathless hit piece that these types of things inevitably become, it seems that two very distinct things are being conflated here in a probably deliberate attempt to make them appear equivalent.
The headline image shows a bunch of nitrous oxide cartridges or “whippets” discarded on the ground, and there is one lonely mention of nitrous down at the very bottom of the article. The article puts a lot of scary words around “inhalants” but stops short of defining which ones they’re actually talking about, and I’m guessing (having not watched any of the TikTok videos nor do I intend to) that nitrous is not the actual, or at least only, concern here. Either that or they’re trying hard to imply that nitrous fries your brain as much as huffing, say, tetrafluoroethane.
Doing nitrous (or whippets, or hippie crack, or laughing gas, or whatever you want to call it this decade) is neither new, nor is it particularly harmful provided you can manage not to do it in such a moronic way that you asphyxiate yourself or pathologically huff the stuff at the edge of high precipices or while driving or something.
Inhaling propellant gasses from aerosol cans, meanwhile, i.e. the usual sort of “huffing,” is monumentally stupid and also a fast track to permanent brain damage.
Just make sure you’re packin’ the right kind of chrome, choom.
Texans’ right to carry firearms on land owned or leased by governmental entities.
Like the courthouse, police station, and state capitol building? Can I carry my gun there? No? Wow, I wonder why.
Agreed. We should come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who coerces anybody to enter into prostitution, and leave everyone else alone.
Like content recognition can’t recognize text, if that’s what it’s been configured to look for?
That would require us to deal with both Reagan and Nixon over and over again, though.
I guess their bullshit would be reverted when each loop resets. But still.
That particular strain of nonsense is actually specifically an Amazon thing, because you cannot sell “non branded” merchandise on Amazon, a policy that’s in place allegedly to combat generic whitebox goods from flooding the site. Your product has to be sold under a registered trademark, but the loophole is that said trademark does not actually have to make any sense whatsoever.
Now there are brokers who will assist anyone in registering a trademark that is literally just a random string of letters for this express purpose. All you have to do is concoct a combination that no one has used yet, and register it with the USPTO.
Therefore the entire scheme falls flat on its face, and manifestly fails to make any impact in the problem it purports to solve. But it does probably give Amazon a legal escape hatch to accusations of being a dumping ground for Chinese knockoff products, because they can point to all those trademark registrations and say, “No, see, everything sold here is all totally from a 100% legitimate brand!”
I turned one of my coworkers on to knockoff shit on Wish, and he is heavily into fishing and pretty much agrees with all of your sentiments listed here. He’s been buying knockoff lures like mad ever since.
I will further add that a lot of fishing gear is consumable. Not just line, but also hooks that can just plain break or wear out, and especially lures and so forth in that they are inherently prone to getting lost, irretrievably snagged in a tree, outright eaten by a fish and dragged to the depths never to be seen again, etc.
It is therefore bonkers to pay a premium for most of this stuff which is ultimately disposable.
“But that’s just an exaggeration taken out of context!!!”
…And it’s also literally the slogan on the license plates in our nations capital.
religious reasons
I’ve just remembered. We’re all Shakers.
I think there are a few critical steps in the middle that are missing, there. Fuckmunchery aside, how did this person expect that blacking out Baltimore would somehow magically trigger a race war?
You should probably have some safeguard to prevent jokers from uploading 14.2 gigabytes of absolute nonsense into your system’s password field just to see if they can make it crash. But I think limiting it to, like, 8 kB ought to be quite lenient for anything with a modern internet connection.
As others have noticed, various hashing functions have an upperbound input length limit anyway. But I don’t see any pressing reason to limit your field length to exactly that, even if only not to reveal anything about what you might be feeding that value into behind the scenes.
Ooh, ooh. And for implementing any Javascript or jQuery or whatever that pops up some kind of smarmy message when you right click: Believe it or not, straight to jail.
Plus, that kind of thing is not going to prevent anyone from scraping images from anywhere if they have the capability to lift a finger to press F12.
Characters are characters. The system I just wrote will accept anything, because the first thing I do with it is hash it. If you want to make your password:
░▒▓█ ʥ۞ݔݯݲݸݴݺ '; drop table users; 🤣💩ʩ █▓▒░
Then go for it. More power to you for typing that out or, more likely, letting your password manager remember it. Make your password as entropic as you can manage, I don’t care how you arrive there.
That works great until some dickhole implements the old, “New password cannot contain any sequence from your previous (5) passwords.”
This also of course necessitates storing (multiple successive!) passwords in plain text or with a reversible cipher, which is another stupid move. You’d think we’d have gotten all of this out of our collective system as a society by now, and yet I still see it all the time.
All of these schemes are just security theater, and actively make the system in question less secure while accomplishing nothing other than berating and frustrating its users.
That’s the “zero width space,” Alt + 200B for Windows users. Another favorite of mine is the nonbreaking space, Alt + 0160, which a staggering majority of web sites and other systems fail to account for.
Don’t bug users to change passwords periodically. Only do it if there’s evidence of compromise.
This is a big one. Especially in corporate environments where most of the users are, shall we say, not tech savvy. Forcing people to comply with byzantine incomprehensible password composition rules plus incessantly insisting that they change their password every 7/14/30 days to a new inscrutable string that looks like somebody sneezed in punctuation marks accomplishes nothing other than enticing everyone to just write their password down on a Post-It and stick it to their monitor or under their keyboard.
Remember: Users do not care about passwords. From the perspective of anyone who isn’t a programmer or a security expert, passwords are just yet another exasperating roadblock some nerd keeps putting in front of them that is preventing them from doing whatever it is they were actually trying to do.
Who cares? It’s going to be hashed anyway. If the same user can generate the same input, it will result in the same hash. If another user can’t generate the same input, well, that’s really rather the point. And I can’t think of a single backend, language, or framework that doesn’t treat a single Unicode character as one character. Byte length of the character is irrelevant as long as you’re not doing something ridiculous like intentionally parsing your input in binary and blithely assuming that every character must be 8 bits in length.
This is all relevant information, but I take exception to:
strongest storm to hit the US in over a year
No shit, Sherlock. That’s how it works. Hurricanes are seasonal.
I’d be a bit more concerned about “strongest storm to hit the US in a decade,” or “two/three/four of this strength so far this season.”
Neat.