She talks about it in this video.

I loved the bit where he spent a small pile of that money on an Inverted Jenny postage stamp then used it to send a postcard.

I’ve heard of all sorts of issues with my fiber ISP (Verizon Fios) rolling out IPv6. It’s been years that they’ve been slowly rolling it out for testing in a few places. There’s virtually no useful documentation on their website about it. And it’s still not available where I am.

My employer has a pretty large presence in AWS. We finished migrating to Amazon’s Corretto (based on openjdk) months ago. It was pretty painless given we already use Amazon’s Linux distros.

Quick! Change all the textbooks to “clay tablet theorem”!

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Decades ago I had to debug a random crash. It only happened on Wednesdays. On Wednesdays in September. On Wednesdays in September after the 10th…

I’m a 50+ year old IT guy who started out as a c/c++ programmer in the 90’s and I’m not that worried.

The thing is, all this talk about AI isn’t very accurate. There is a huge difference in the LLM stuff that ChatGPT etc. are built on and true AI. These LLM’s are only as good as the data fed into them. The adage “garbage in, garbage out” comes to mind. Anybody that blindly relies on them is a fool. Just ask the lawyer that used ChatGPT to write a legal brief. The “AI” made up references to non-existent cases that looked and sounded legitimate, and the lawyer didn’t bother to check for accuracy. He filed the brief and it was the judge that discovered the brief was a work of fiction.

Now I know there’s a huge difference between programming and the law, but there are still a lot of similarities here. An AI generated program is only going to be as good as the samples provided to it, and you’re probably want a human to review that code to ensure it’s truly doing what you want, at the very least.

I also have concern that programming LLMs could be targeted by scammers and the like. Train the LLM to harvest sensitive information and obfuscate the code that does it so that it’s difficult for a human to spot the malicious code without a highly detailed analysis of the generated code. That’s another reason to want to know exactly what the LLM is trained on.

Yeah, I don’t think too many people click on those “educational” phishing emails but it does happen once in a while. We have a slack channel where people can contact the security team and I do regularly see people asking about suspicious emails. They never admit if they’re test emails but always thank folks for reporting them.

I remember reading an article by a penetration tester years ago at this point. His company is hired by all sorts of companies to test their network security etc. He described one client that thought it had the best network security money could buy. The pen tester took a novel approach (at that time) and put a benign Trojan on a bunch of random usb sticks then scattered them around the employee parking lot, outdoor smoking areas, etc. sure enough some of them started “phoning home” from inside the clients network fairly quickly.

My own employer has been the target of phishing and other attacks over the years. Our security team now contracts with a company that randomly sends out well crafted phishing emails to employees to see if they can detect it or if they click on a questionable link in the message. If an employee clicks on one of these then they are immediately told that they failed a test and are automatically signed up for a training session on spotting phishing and other scams.

Since we’re an iPhone family I use iCloud3 in HomeAssistant to track our devices. After setting that up and associating the phones with people in HA it was just a matter of creating triggers based on us entering the home zone:

alias: Somebody Arrives Home
trigger:
  - platform: zone
    entity_id: person.jack
    zone: zone.home
    event: enter
  - platform: zone
    entity_id: person.jill
    zone: zone.home
    event: enter

We live at the end of a dead-end, so I set up the home zone to extend down the road a bit. That gives iCloud3 enough time to figure out we’re home and trigger the automation in HA while we’re still approaching. I combine the above with a check to see if it’s roughly sunset to sunrise, and if it is then turn on the outdoor lights.

For doing things like turning off the lights when nobody is home, I have a similar trigger for everybody leaving the home zone, followed by a conditional that verifies everybody is away:

condition:
  - condition: or
    conditions:
      - condition: template
        value_template: >-
          {{ states('person.jack') != 'home' and states('person.jill') !=  'home'  }}

I came up with these myself over time, they started 10+ years ago using a Mac platform called Indigo, but since moving into our new house a year ago I’ve switched over to Home Assistant as well. I have a background that includes 10 years of software development & another 15 of IT, so these sorts of things come fairly easily to me when I think about it a bit.

My wife and I use iPhones and I found iCloud3, which is a great add-on that tracks locations based on those devices. I started out with the washer/dryer notification with the simple realization that we regularly forgot about laundry in our washer in the basement since we’d forget that we had started a load. So I figured out how to have HA send us alerts when the washer or dryer finished. But I quickly realized that wasn’t all that useful if one or both of us was at work, shopping, etc. I then realized I could set up a trigger based on a time schedule that checks if we’re home or not, and only sends the alert if we are. So I have a HA automation that is triggered every 10 minutes by a timer, but the timer is disabled by default. That automation uses iCloud3 to check if either of us are home. If we are then the automation calls a script to notify us. If we’re not home then the automation resets the timer for 10 minutes. When the washer completes it triggers an automation that just starts that timer running. That gives us a little time to park the car, bring in any groceries, etc. before being reminded that we have laundry waiting.

My home automation setup includes:

• Texting me and/or my wife whenever the washer or dryer in the basement finishes a load of laundry, but only if we’re home. If neither is home then it waits until one of us is and only texts that person.

• Turns on exterior / driveway lights when one of us arrives home after dark.

• Turns off exterior / driveway lights when we have both left home.

• Sets our Ecobee thermostats to “away” when we have both left home, and to “home” when somebody arrives home.

I also have a “bedtime” button that ensures all lights are off, thermostats are set to their “sleep” profile, and doors are locked.

Those are the nicer things we use pretty much daily. We have others as well.

I recall a TV show years ago that covered this sort of thing. One part I still clearly recall was video of a white light “dancing” in the sky a few miles away for a minute or two before quickly dropping out of sight (behind a mountain range I think). The typical claims of alien crafts were made along with “no man made aircraft could do this” etc.

A researcher was able to quickly debunk if all by pointing out that the people who made the video were in a straight line with an airport runway on the other side of the mountain. They were seeing the headlights of airplanes as they turned onto final landing approach. From directly lined up in front of the runway you would see the headlight appear almost motionless, with a little wobbling, as the aircraft lines up and approaches the runway. Then the light would quickly drop as the airplane descended to land. “No man made aircraft could do this” indeed… Most people just never watch them from that angle.

They terminate the TLS sessions at their servers and reencrypt to forward to the backend. This allows them to analyze the data to spot spam, optimize compression and such

And any organization that utilizes a CDN/security provider, like Akamai, AWS, Fastly, etc. knows that they all do this. They need access to the unencrypted content in order for services like CDN and WAF to work properly.

The company I work for is mainly an internet presence with a valuation in excess of $100 million. The number of emails we get offering somewhere around $5000 for our domain name is absurd…

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So successfully redeployed to a resource reallocation facility?

The article indicated this tunnel was entirely inside Gaza and was likely used by militants for storage, staging, etc. Israel focuses on locating tunnels that cross the border, not ones that are nearly half a kilometer behind it.

My understanding is that the beams were sprayed with a fire retardant foam that is designed to protect it in the event of a typical building fire. But the violent impact of the jets would have stripped most of it off, and the jet fuel did indeed weaken the beams. They wouldn’t have melted outright, but softening them after already being damaged by the impact was more than it could handle.