This isn’t really about safety, it’s about gun manufacturer profits.

Yeah, if they are able to intercept traffic or access the logs, they probably already have other access to the account without needing the password. If you don’t reuse passwords, then your other accounts will be safe from that.

Yeah no worries and agreed. I hate seeing commercial sites using worse password sanitization practices than I used for my first development website that wasn’t even really intended for anyone else to log in to and any max length suggests the password is either stored or processed in plaintext.

IMO it should even be hashed on the client side before being sent so that it doesn’t show up as plaintext in any http requests or logs. Then salted and hashed again server side before being stored (or checked for login).

Correct, hence the sentence after the one you quoted :)

If any service can recover your password and send it back to you rather than just resetting it for you to set a new one, don’t rely on that service for anything you want to keep secure. And certainly don’t reuse a password there, though you shouldn’t be reusing passwords anyways because who knows what they are and aren’t storing, even if they don’t offer password recovery.

Once upon a time, battle.net passwords weren’t case sensitive. I used upper and lower case letters in my password then one day realized I didn’t hit shift for one of the caps as I hit enter out of habit, but then it still let me in instead of asking for the password again.

It was disappointing because it takes more work to remove case-sensitivity than to leave it. I can’t think of any good reason to remove it. At least the character limit had a technical reason behind it: having a set size for fields means your database can be more efficient. Better to use the size of a hash and not store the password in plaintext, so it’s not a good reason, but at least it’s a reason.

Someone set up a script to automatically create daily backups to tape. Unfortunately, it’s still the first tape that was put in there 3.5 years ago, every backup since that one filled up failed. It might as well have failed silently because everyone who received the email with the error message filtered them to a folder they generally ignored.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie should be required reading for everyone. It’s full of things that are so obvious in hindsight but go against our natural instincts so we blunder through attempts to persuade not realizing that we might be increasing resistance rather than decreasing it.

Like the whole, “you might be right but you’re still an asshole” thing. Being correct just isn’t enough. In some cases you get crucified and then after some time has passed, the point you were trying to convince others of becomes the popular accepted fact. And they might even still hate you after coming around on the point you were trying to make.

That book won’t turn you into a persuasive guru, but it will help avoid many of the pitfalls that make debates turn ugly or individuals stubborn.

Or, on the flip side, you can use the inverse of the lessons to become a more effective troll and learn how to act like you’re arguing one thing while really trying to rile people up or convince them of the opposite. I say this not so much to suggest it but because knowing about this can make you less susceptible to it (and it’s already a part of the Russian troll farm MO).

Catholic masses are extremely cult-like. There’s a choreographed stand/sit/kneel dance, “everybody please give us money” phase, plus a part where everyone lines up to eat their unappetizing snack.

And they speed kids through the initiation process so that they are “committed” before high school, when they might start thinking for themselves.

I don’t understand how anyone can look at that religion and not immediately see that it’s mostly a power grab dressed up as a salvation from inherited sins that were made up in the first place. And then later, it’s, “Hey yeah, you’ll get into heaven, just tell us all the dirt on you!”

A glass of milk. Might get that 3 months down to 2 months and 29 days.

Watch out for falling Mankinds and Undertakers, especially if you are or are near to an announcer’s table.

It’s not easy to make shit that doesn’t work if you care about what you’re doing. I bet there’s angry debates between engineers and business majors behind many of these enshitifications.

Though, for these Intel ones, they might have been less angry and more “are you sure these risks are worth taking?” because they probably felt like they had to push them to the extreme to compete. The angry conversations probably happened 5-10 years ago before AMD brought the pressure when Intel was happy to assume they had no competition and didn’t have to improve things that much to keep making a killing. At this point, it’s just a scramble to make up for those decisions and catch up. Which their recent massive layoffs won’t help with.

McDonald’s doesn’t offer quality like mid burgers.

Personally, I see incompatibility with kernel-level anti-cheat as a feature rather than a limitation.

People can still cheat without involving any software on their PC because the game needs to display something to the user (which can be analyzed by another device, either intercepting the stream before sending it along to the monitor or even by using a camera to grab the pixels from the monitor, if there’s encryption used on the signal to prevent mitm). And it needs to accept input from the user, which another device connected to the device analysing the display can adjust to improve aim, prevent friendly fire, or just auto shoot when you’re pointed at a target. You could even write a full bot using that.

On the other hand, kernel level anti-cheat can be an attack vector to get into your machine in a way that existing malware detection will have a hard time detecting. Kernel modification is the level rootkits work at and an arbitrary code execution flaw could mean your hardware is forever compromised, or at least anything with flashable firmware storage (especially if that firmware also implements the flash capabilities, since it could then add its own code to any new firmware you try to flash).

I just don’t play many multiplayer games these days to avoid the cheating. And if I do get back into multiplayer games, I’ll either do it on a console where I don’t care as much about the kernel getting exploited or I’ll play a game where the servers are managed in a way that cheaters will get banned because an admin can see what they are doing.

It’s interesting to me that they used the English alphabet for the Toyota symbol instead of Japanese. Or is that symbol localised?

Fun fact: Dionysus, Greek god of wine and festivity, and Zagreus, Greek god of blood and rebirth, are the same being!

They should only be able to choose one of “lock device down against any low level changes” and “stop supporting device”. If they want to end support (which was frankly not so great in the first place), they should be forced to open up the device.

I wish I knew how I went from having extremely painful hemroids in my early 20s to having painless hemroids ever since. But I highly recommend it, whatever it was.

Police immunity is another interesting angle I hadn’t thought of. I was thinking about whether it was relevant to the recent supreme Court ruling, maybe even some ammo for impeachment if they directly contradicted a law with their ruling.

Hmm out of curiosity, what’s the current status of that law?

2024 election results: Harris sweeps the nation after MAGA vote split due to rumours they could vote in actual Hitler instead of his imitator who couldn’t even properly burn down his own capital building.