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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Not really saying otherwise. What I am saying is that for your electronic devices to have “explosives” in them would require that a supplychain attack of a similar sort.

    It’s almost definitely not the case that any electronics manufacturers are systematically putting explosives in every smartphone or whatever that they manufacture and supplychain attacks are much more likely to be a targeted thing rather than “all Samsung phones” or whatever. If they weren’t targeted, it’s pretty certain that the presence of explosives in devices would be noticed even just by regular end-users with a bit of a tinkering proclivity within weeks. So if your devices are more than a couple of months old have been in reasonably normal use for most of that time and you haven’t been specifically targeted by any particular government or anyone who might have the ability to tamper with the supplychain, you’re almost certainly safe specifically from explosive-laced consumer electronics devices.

    Also, it seems unlikely that a state police agency (like the “sheriffs” you’re talking about) could leverage enough power to compel an electronics company to allow such a thing without the FBI or DHS involved. I’d imagine state police folks would more likely resort to more low-tech approaches like the Tulsa race massacre air firebombing.

    Again, I’m not saying it’s impossible that your phone contains explosives. And as I said in another comment, it might be possible to remotely get a device to cause its battery to catch fire. Maybe.

    Also, I am in the U.S., but what made you think that was the case?


  • Wow. Jeez. I’m sorry this is so close to you.

    can they do that to phones, without the phones being rigged?

    I’m not any kind of expert. But as others in this post have said, theoretically… possibly technically yes. If the firmware can be modified remotely to cause the phone to allow, for instance, overcharging the battery, then it’s possible the phone could be made to explode without physical access to the phone.

    How likely it is that you or your family specifically would be targeted, I couldn’t say. It seems unlikely…? And we don’t have specific knowledge that Isreal has tried any such attacks that didn’t involve direct physical access to the devices which later exploded. (And also no indication they’ve targeted any Samsung devices.)

    Again, I’m no expert, but if you wanted to take precautions, I’m thinking the precautions to take would be to put any mobile devices that contain rechargeable batteries and have wireless connectivity far away from your house and your family and stick to devices with no batteries (and preferably ones you’ve had for a “long time”) for a while.

    I’m sorry you’re in a situation where you’re having to weigh these risks. Again, it seems unlikely that you and your family could be in danger regarding ostensibly-stock Samsung phones that you’ve had for a while.

    Also, no condemnation is strong enough for this indiscriminate attack by Isreal on the people of Lebanon. Netanyahu must really be heartless to have authorized this. I hope this results in real pressure on Isreal to stop its indiscriminate terrorist acts.

    Good luck and stay safe.

    Edit: Hmm. Not sure why I’m getting downvoted so much. Maybe the downvoters think I’m making it sound more likely than is realistic that there’s a threat to Peepo specifically?


  • You should understand that what happened in Lebanon involved the government of Isreal physically modifying the pagers (and walkies) in question by adding explosives to them, turning them into remote-triggerable bombs.

    (The term “supplychain attack” has been used a lot to describe this attack. Isreal intercepted the order of pagers between when the order was placed and when the pagers were delivered. And either physically altered the pagers ordered or replaced them with altered/tampered-with pagers.)







  • No joke. I’m ashamed to say I have had to endure Weblogic in the past. God was that time a massive clusterfuck.

    The company I worked for decided to use two particular separate products (frameworks, specifically; ATG and Endeca, even more specifically) to use in tandem in a rewrite of the company’s main e-commerce application. Between when we signed on the dotted line and when we actually started implementing things, Oracle acquired the companies behind both products in question.

    The company should have cut their losses, run away screaming, and started evaluating other options. That’s not what happened. Instead, they doubed-down and also adopted several other Oracle products (Weblogic and Oracle Linux on (shudder) Exalogic servers) because that’s, of course, what Oracle recommended to use with the two products in question. The company also contracted with Oracle-licensed “service integration” companies that made everything somehow even worse.

    And the e-commerce site rewrite absolutely crashed and burned in the most gloriously painful way possible. They ended up throwing away tens of millions of dollars and multiple years on it.

    When the e-commerce site rewrite did happen, it was many years later and used basically only FOSS technologies. I guess at least they learned their lesson. Until the upper management turns over again.



  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@programming.devJava Was The Future
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    11 days ago

    I write Java for a paycheck, but I really hate it.

    It feels like everything is layers and layers of overengineered cruft, each added to the precarious tower for something extremely minor. But every subsequent card in the house of cards makes it more precarious. “But look, I don’t have to write accessors.” “But look, I eliminated the need for the web.xml file.” “But look, I don’t have to understand SQL now.” But look, the codebase depends on a shit-ton of completely opaque Automagic™ that you have no hope of understanding the moment something goes wrong – which it will if you even think of changing your Java version. And since it’s practically impossible to understand what’s going on under-the-hood of whichever dependency is fubar’d this week, you have to resort to a mixture of trial-and-error and copy-pasting shit (that you also don’t understand) from StackOverflow and praying to Cthulhu something works – which is also trial-and-error because Java questions in particular have tons of just straight up wrong answers.

    To be fair, I’m the guy on my team who people come to when they run into those sorts of “I bumped up one subminor version of Mockito to fix a bug that was preventing my unit test from working but now literally half of our unit tests won’t build” or “I added the war plugin to the build.gradle and now SwaggerUI is broken.” So maybe I see more than my fair share of “well shit, I guess I’ll just spend the next three hours hunting down which magical combination of Jar version numbers will fix things” kind of problems. But damn. This shit didn’t ever happen back when I was doing Python for a paycheck.

    I don’t use Java if I don’t have to. If I have to use Java, I prefer to just use Servlets (mostly I do web development) and absolutely as few dependencies as I can possibly get away with. Fewer moving parts mean less that can break.


  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldtoOpenSourceGames@lemmy.mlThrive 0.7.0
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    18 days ago

    Without confirming on the site/devlog, I think what heartbreaker was saying was that the multicellular phase features are still in early-ish development. So, technically yes, you can do multicellular (though maybe only in nightly builds or something? not sure) but there’s not very much to do in the multicellular phase just yet.



  • Sugar. Ok, that’s a slight exaggeration. I don’t eat anything with added sweeteners. (Like, if it has sugar, honey, HFCS, corn syrup solids, cane juice, apertame, sucralose, agave nector, dates, maple syrup, etc, that’s just a deal breaker for me.) And I don’t eat anything that has natural sugar any sweeter than a tomato, red bell pepper, or carrot.

    I’ve been doing that for the last 15 years at least and made very very infrequent exceptions. (Like, I can literally count the times I remember making exceptions to this rule in the last 15 years on one hand.)

    …because any time I do make an exception, I have severe gastrointestinal symptoms.




  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@programming.devA QA engineer walks into a bar
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    1 month ago

    To be fair, the team at the time was all business majors. (Is “Computer Information Systems” what they call that degree most places or just at my alma mater?) I think I was the only computer science major there.

    They’d done a surprisingly admirable job of cobbling together a working e-commerce, loss prevention, customer sercvice portal, orderfulfillment, and CMS suite. And their schooling was in, like, finance, MS Office, and maybe one semester on actual programming.

    None of them had ever learned how to count in binary. Let alone been exposed to 2’s compliment. And there were no QA engineers.

    Oh, there was the sysadmin. He had a temper and was a cowboy. If you asked him to do something, it’d be fuckin’ done, man. But you did not want to know how he made sausage. The boss asked him to set up a way for us to do code reviews and he installed Atlassian Fisheye/Crucible on a laptop under his desk. We used that for years. And a lot of the business logic of the customer-facing e-commerce site lived in the rewrite rules in the Apache config that only he had access to and no one else could decipher if they did have access.

    Those were good times. Good times.


  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@programming.devA QA engineer walks into a bar
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    1 month ago

    Back when I was the “new guy” code monkey at a fairly sizeable brick-and-mortor-and-e-retailer, I let the intrusive thoughts win and did some impromptu QA on the e-commerce site. (In the test environment. Don’t worry.)

    It handled things like trying to put “0” or “-1” or “9999999999999” or “argyle” quantity of an item in the cart just fine.

    But I know my 2’s-compliment signed integers. So I tried putting “0xFFFFFFFF” quantity of an item in my cart. Lo and behold, there was now -1 quantity of that item in my cart and my subtotal was also negative. I could also do things like put a $100.00 thing in the cart and then -1 quantity of something that cost $99.00 in the cart and have a $1.00 subtotal.

    (IIRC, there was some issue with McDonalds ordering kiosks at one time where you could compose an order with negative quantities of things to get an arbitrarily large unauthorized discount.)

    The rest of my team thought I was a fucking genius from that moment on. I highly recommend if you’re ever the “new guy” dev on a team and want to appear indispensible, find a bug that it would never occur to a QA engineer who doesn’t have a computer science degree to even test for.