Yeah, I use it for some programming tasks as well. I’m sick and tired of telling it that it did something wrong or simply omitted something, only to have it apologize and offer to fix its own mistakes.

So nice to see the growing number of reports of seized shadow fleet ships.

This kind of reminds me of the Hunger Games books/movies. The capitol tries to pretend nothing is going on while all the other districts burn.

Wouldn’t you be if you had front row seats on the sidelines for the past 3 years?

“Legally”?

Has there been a single recorded case where somebody tried to unsubscribe from text spam like this, kept receiving it, and successfully had the sender prosecuted?

Ukraine should leave it alone as long as the vast majority of traffic on it is leaving. The moment any significant inbound traffic is seen then blow it to hell.

Back in the early 2000’s I worked at Akamai for a while. Their worldwide CDN is built on clusters of servers physically located at thousands of datacenters around the world. They rely on the local staff to physically install it and do any on-site maintenance like replacing failed hard drives, etc. So Akamais remote management capabilities are quite sophisticated.

During my training one day I started poking around old tickets and found one that was a few years old and still open, but appeared to be abandoned. It started out with an automated alert that the systems at a small Midwest ISP had stopped responding, followed by a few updates from techs who tried to remotely access them with no luck. That was followed by comments that calls had been made to the ISP and voicemails left. The final note in the ticket stated that the entire datacenter had been destroyed by a tornado.

Paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/pxpUG

I worked in IT at a university about 15 years ago. As part of a research project I helped set up a Tor exit node. Within a few hours of it taking on traffic I was contacted by the universities IT security team. They were seeing all sorts of malicious traffic originating from that system and wanted to know what was going on. They had the system shut down immediately.

A few years ago I was given a technical deep dive into Akamai’s bot detection systems. One area they were quite focused on were bots impersonating mobile devices, and in particular mobile apps. It’s commonplace for attackers to try to mimic the behavior of mobile apps because it often provides more direct access to the data they’re looking for than trying to scrape websites.

To counter this threat Akamai developed a library for their customers to incorporate into their apps. This library collects a bunch of haptic data from the mobile device, such as the tilt sensors, accelerometers, finger taps/swipes on the screen, and other available data. It then encrypts it and sends it along to Akamai along with the data the app sends. Akamai then analyzes that haptic data and uses it as part of their bot detection analysis.

It is VERY difficult for a computer to mimic the truly random way a mobile device moves in space, or the way your fingers tap/swipe on a screen. If you were asked to draw a straight line from the upper left corner to the bottom right corner of your smartphone, not only would it not be perfectly straight but it would be quite fluid in its randomness. Writing a computer program to simulate that would be very tough. You’re far more likely to get lots of short straight lines with jagged angles than something that looks like a human drew it. And computer algorithms can quickly analyze this sort of data and return a confidence score indicating if it appears to have been created artificially or not.

So my guess is that when that QR code is scanned it will launch a Google app that will collect some similar haptic data and send it off to Google along with a unique id for that captcha. Google will then quickly analyze that haptic data to determine if you’re a bot or not.

I used to work across the street from Boston Dynamics and would regularly see them testing robots in their parking lot & surrounding grassy/hilly areas. At one point they actually gave a bunch of folks in my company a tour of their labs. I still keep tabs on them from time to time because I find what they do absolutely amazing.

From what I’ve seen of the past 15 years or so of watching them I believe that Boston Dynamics is well in front of Tesla when it comes to robotics. Especially when you see gaffes by Tesla like that video that seems to show their robot was actually being controlled by a person wearing a VR headset.

Soylent Green is people!

Could have been something similar to Operation Spiderweb where drones were smuggled into Russia and transported across part of Russia before being launched. This seems to be a likely tactic Ukraine has used multiple times.

Strap a Go-Pro to the dogs for a great FPV of them at work.

My employer has been pushing AI as well so I’ve been using Claude to help me when it makes sense. I’ve had it write python scripts to interact with various API’s, had it analyze log files, etc. I might use it two or three times every other day for between 10 to 30 minutes at a time. So while I’m not using it excessively, I’m still using it what I consider to be a reasonable amount.

I checked my Claude account the other day and it said I have used a whopping 1% of my quota for the past month. That really makes me wonder how all these companies are burning through their usage the way they are reporting. Do they have teams of employees now that are doing nothing but interacting with AIs for 8 hours a day? It seems like that would be the only way for me to put a dent in my monthly quota with Claude…

Our solar panels are probably the best investment we ever made. Year to year our electric bill averages out to zero, even with charging our EV. Over the summer our batteries participate in our electric utilities virtual power plant program, which pays us around $2000 each year for the excess electricity we provide. And our state has a renewable energy program that pays us for every megawatt our panels generate, no matter what it’s used for.

This has been the norm for high ranking US politicians for decades. About 10 years ago I attended a talk by former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. She described how, as PM, she would regularly take walks along a river in Perth and talk with the folks she would encounter. She had a couple personal security guards who would be with her, but it was all very informal.

When Hillary Clinton visited as US Secretary of State she came with an escort of a dozen or so Secret Service in her entourage. On a whim Gillard suggested going for a walk like she usually did. The Secret Service freaked out that this hadn’t been planned weeks in advance, that the walking route hadn’t been scouted out ahead of time, that they didn’t have agents pre-positioned along the route, etc.

I recall that Gillard said they actually did go on a short walk, but the entire Secret Service entourage was very nervous the entire time.

I bet Iran will only honor ship insurance sold by Iran.

That’s what usually happens when a fire breaks out and all your firefighting resources are tied up down the street battling fires at the oil refinery…

🖕