nyan

The one time anyone implemented the original “Packet Transmission over Avian Carriers” RFC, 45% of the packets (= 45% of the pigeons) were lost.

Sounds about right.

Pretty sure we’ve known that for a while now, although I assume the article is about a new and different exploit rather than one of the ones already documented.

In which country?

I keep on remembering a line from an old anime: “An unjust peace is better than a just war.” It keeps on floating through my head because it’s true for most people most of the time. Things have to get really bad—really bad—or at least you have to persuade people that they are, before you start seeing organized, armed insurrection on a large scale.

So what does it take? Lots of people being killed, maimed, or raped, at random and without any recourse, usually. Stealing enough children might also do it. Or a faction deliberately whipping the less-intelligent part of the population into a frenzy. Or really poor quality of life over the course of decades that makes people think they have nothing to lose. And even then it takes time if everything was peaceful for a generation or more before that, because at first people will hunker down and claim they’re dealing with “isolated incidents”, and that it can’t happen to them.

On the government side, what most governments want is to keep the economy running, because these days GDP is the measure of national success. For that, they need live workers and functioning civilian production equipment. That makes tear gas, handcuffs, and rubber bullets their weapons of choice and first resort.

For the government to haul out the big guns, one of two things has to happen. The first possibility is that it thinks it’s losing control to a point where it no longer has enough jack-booted thugs to keep its interests protected, and starts killing people and destroying material assets to make sure that at least no one else can have them.

The other possibility is that the upper echelons go completely Nazi Germany/Khmer Rouge level batshit, and enact bizarre murderous policies founded in deranged idealism. At that point, they often cease caring how they kill. (This includes governments that define some group of the people living in their country as subhuman.)

Are we going to see heavier munitions deployed in Canada over civil insurrection in the near future? I doubt it (and if it does happen, it’ll be in Alberta, not over the judiciary mistake from the original post). Is it going to happen anywhere in the world in the next decade? Possibly, because there are countries out there where people really do have nothing to lose and no way out, and governments whose grasp on power is shaky.

I decided that a game controller and antimicrox were acceptable as a supplement for the remote, and installed a full desktop OS (Gentoo/TDE, like my main system, on a Dell Optiplex box I bought off ebay last year). Works fine for my unconventional needs, although I admit I do updates, etc. over ssh because it’s faster than entering one character at a time on the on-screen keyboard.

And even when you get past that, it takes some scrolling (or page-mangling with browser add-ons) to get past the sponsored garbage. They insert some of that in the actual results without telling you, too, I discovered today while doing another junk cleanup pass. I now have over thirty “kill anything matching this xpath” and two or three “set the height of this to zero pixels” directives for Amazon, making it one of the worst sites I can still be arsed to deal with at all.

The largest fully independent generalist search engines are Yandex (which is no better than Google/Bing, unless you want something that doesn’t deprioritize sites for DMCA reasons) and Mojeek. You may want to read A look at search engines with their own indexes, although it’s about a year out of date now.

I suggest moving to any other search engine, if anyone hasn’t already. If duckduckgo isn’t to your taste, startpage.com uses Google’s database without pushing any of this nonsense.

They’d like to believe they have jurisdiction over the entire planet, and often pretend that they do.

The “1000W/kg” figure appears to be from Wikipedia, which claims https://www.idtechex.com/en/research-article/sodium-ion-batteries-will-diversify-the-energy-storage-industry/30405 as a source. Wikipedia has the information in a table flagged as “Needs update”.

Anyway, most of the lithium-ion chemistry variations drop off relatively fast in capacity over repeated charge cycles (the exception being LiFePo4). If the sodium-ion chemistry is better that way, and drops off less in the cold, it’s still worth exploring for vehicle use even if the energy density is a little lower.

You can’t stop the state from committing violence with a handgun, for crying out loud. Or even with a million handguns. The state will always have better equipment than you, most of which doesn’t require anyone to get within handgun range if they don’t want to. Granted, big missiles make a tremendous mess and they’d rather not use them, but the possibility is always there.

Expecting citizen violence to overthrow a modern government that’s dead set on preventing it is, to put it politely, unrealistic. Unless you can convince the military to take your side or at least bow out, removing the government’s ability to exert force, but you aren’t going to accomplish that by directing violence at the military.

1. Wrong country. We don’t do that up here. Overall, we find this results in fewer unnecessarily dead people.

2. Let’s say he’d had a gun, and used it against the police. He would just have gotten hit with an additional charge that could have been anything from resisting arrest to first-degree murder, depending on how good a shot he was. So he’d still be in prison even after being proven innocent of the original charge. Real smart.

Uhhhh this seems to imply that the fuselages aren’t normally checked for cracks.

They are checked. On a schedule. Sometimes it’s discovered that the original maintenance schedule was too spaced out, and the aircraft should be checked more frequently. This means that any that have exceeded the new length of time between checks have to be checked right away or be grounded until they are, which may be what happened here.

That doesn’t mean that even the new schedule for this particular aircraft is frequent enough, just that in general, someone does examine aircraft for structural damage and metal fatigue from time to time.

Boeing doesn’t actually want the aircraft to come apart in the air. That’s the kind of thing that makes airlines buy Airbuses instead. Their goal is to try to figure out what the cheapest, least-frequent maintenance schedule is that will still keep the planes from catastrophically self-destructing. Too bad they suck at it.

The thing is, a lot of websites don’t need to be interactive, or only need to present interactivity to a minority of visitors. Consider Wikipedia, for example. Only a small percentage of people visiting the site are interested in editing anything. The rest shouldn’t be burdened with massive quantities of extra downloads for a feature they don’t need, want, or use.

Furthermore, you don’t need a “modern web framework” to have an interactive site, and most of them seem to be pretty bloated.

The level of technology a site displays should be appropriate to what the site is trying to do. If your site is about services that you need an appointment for, then yes, there should be a booking setup on the site. If you’re running a store, you should have a shopping cart. Add as much of an interactive layer as is necessary to do these things, and do them well, but no more than that.

Most of us just want pages to render quickly, stop tracking us unnecessarily, and stop choking our connections and stealing our electricity for stuff that isn’t useful to us (or to anyone except depraved corporations).

sure, but is that implying that 5% of this traffic is bad faith or rogue agents?

Given the volume of requests that have been semi-DDOS’ing a lot of servers? 5% is probably an underestimate.

the tools built into Claude Code and Codex surely have their own user-agent settings.

“Surely” is like “assume”—it says more about the speaker than the entity being discussed. They almost certainly don’t use completely distinct strings (no one does—they all start with “Mozilla/5.0”); at most they might have tacked an additional bit on at the tail. And that’s if they’re being aboveboard.

and why would they spoof Linux instead of Windows?

Why not? But actually, this may be due to an incorrect assumption on the part of the stats collectors. Typical strings for bots that admit to being bots don’t specify an OS: “Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot” as opposed to, say “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/134.0.0.0” or “Mozilla/5.0 (Android 15; Mobile; SM-G556B/DS; rv:130.0) Gecko/130.0 Firefox/130.0”. If they’re dumping anything without OS markers into the “Linux” bucket, that might do it.

Crawlers—even the honest ones—have been spoofing browser User-Agent strings (partially or completely) since the beginning of the commercial Internet. Why would they do this? To dodge bad browser-sniffing scripts, which I still run into from time to time.

Thing is, “Cloudflare identified this as a normal browser used by a human” doesn’t mean it actually is a normal browser with a human in the driver’s seat. There are going to be both false positives and false negatives (a browser puppeted by Selenium is still a human-usable browser, after all, and could even be taken over by a human in mid-session; by contrast, a browser whose settings have been chosen by a privacy advocate may make some expected indicators unavailable). So it’s hard to make any useful inferences.

You’re pretty much only at risk on this one if you’re doing Javascript development or running a server. The popular Javascript and Python library repos seem to get successfully attacked a couple of times a year each.

Linux main distro repos haven’t been reporting any significant breaches. You should be okay to update your system (but if you’re on Arch or one of its downstreams, maybe steer clear of AUR packages for now).

Not quite the same thing, because back then, each wire had to be listened to by a human being in order to see if there was anything actionable passing along it, making surveillance a scarce resource that had to be deployed selectively. Now we have machines listening for keywords on all communications passing through a system, and the resource is no longer scarce: they can listen to everyone, and do.

Unfortunately, people’s expectations are still stuck in the phone-tap era.

Only if the Marx they’re talking about is Groucho.

A hobby, apparently, and one she isn’t very serious about, since one local used book store is quite happy to put together 6-8 banker’s boxes of books for my family a couple of times a year and then hold them for pickup. (Needless to say, we don’t destroy them to feed to AI.) Even if you don’t keep an electronic invertory, finding the books should be as simple as following the authors’ names in alphabetical order along the appropriate genre shelf. Putting them in boxes isn’t difficult.