Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
>The company behind Qtap (Qpoint.io) provides full inventory and alerting for this sort of scenario.

Could you expand on this? I haven't seen anything on your company website that suggests detection of this kind of stuff. Also, could you explain how this could be detected? Through another eBPF program?

Comment · 1 year ago
I'm not a meteorologist, but modern meteorology is a lot of physics and math and supercomputers.
Comment · 1 year ago
Yeah, that's a valid argument.
Comment · 1 year ago
Sure I would.
Comment · 1 year ago
Regardless of whether you prefer Trump or Biden, I don't get this trend of making last-minute US policy changes before Trump sits in. Can't he undo all that once he becomes President? If so, what difference does it make?
Comment · 1 year ago
>Tinder, Spotify, Citymapper, Mumsnet and Sky News were among hundreds of companies named in a sample list of apps linked to the breach.

>Hackers appear to have targeted a US location tracking firm Gravy Analytics. It collects information through smartphones, including peoples' precise movements, and then provides it to other companies or governments.

So... those companies sold their customers' data to Gravy Analytics? You know, Cambridge Analytica style? And these hackers just siphooned data from this tracking company?

>He also told Sky News the apps named in the leak weren't necessarily working with Gravy Analytics.

>Instead, he said, software development kits used in the apps appeared to be sending off users' location data.

So... those companies used SDKs from Gravy Analytics which secretly phoned home users' data to this tracking company?

Not sure what's worse, but if this is really the case, it highlights deep flaws in the way major companies evaluate their "software supply chain".

Also, from a more technical standpoint, single API calls following an established specification (assuming that's what those SDK actually do) should be favored over SDKs. If you send a POST containing certain data, there's no way the destination gets other data from you, unless your HTTP client is vulnerable and can somehow be attacked by the company who owns those APIs.

Comment · 1 year ago
>I expect a Taiwan incident of some sort to happen, although I hope it will be a minor one.

>Either that incident or the continuing hostilities in Ukraine (which are likely to last another year at least) will cause the economy to tank again, screwing up the markets to a fair degree.

I'm not an economist or a diplomat, but I would argue that a serious Taiwan incident may be worse than continuing hostilities in Ukraine from an economic standpoint.

First, because the surprise effect is probably relevant. We have been dealing with the situation in Ukraine for a while. We know trades with Russia are very limited, European countries know they can't get reliable gas supply from Ukraine, and so on. Yes, things may get worse, and Western countries might send more (or less) money and aid to Ukraine, but at least we have already covered our bases. When it comes to Taiwan, if something significant happens, it will probably affect the semiconductor business, which goes from CPUs and GPUs to photovoltaics, all things that are highly relevant to our economy.

Also, China itself is much richer than Russia, so a prolonged China-Taiwan conflict may last for a really long time.

Comment · 1 year ago
>As The American Practical Navigator (aka “Bowditch”) states, “No navigator should ever become completely dependent on electronic methods. The navigator who regularly navigates by blindly pushing buttons and reading the coordinates from ‘black boxes’ will not be prepared to use basic principles to improvise solutions in an emergency.”

I wonder if this mindset is also applied, for example, to the rest of the military. Does the Army regularly practice land navigation? I know they get at least one landnav class, but it is a perishable skill. If you don't practice, you'll soon forget about it.

I guess this could also be useful to civilians. Being able to do stuff without relying too much on electronics.

Comment · 1 year ago
what do you mean?
Comment · 1 year ago
I'm from another European country.

We do tip, but occasionally, only if we believe something about that meal was really great, and there's no set percentage.

Also, there are no tip jars. What happens is the server brings the check to you, and you can tip the server by giving money directly to them. Of course, this doesn't mean the owner cannot pocket the tips, but it does give a feeling that the tip is more likely to reach the servers only.

Comment · 1 year ago
Let's say your application talks to a database.

You reuse connections with a connection pool, but you accidentally reuse connections with different privileges and scopes. As a result, sometimes you get to read some data you shouldn't read and sometimes you don't.

Or, concurrency bugs.

You don't properly serialize transactions and sometimes two transactions overlap in time leading to conflicts.

Comment · 1 year ago
Cool, but you could add units of measure at least to the y-axis?

We get the general trend, but we don't know if that peak is 10%, 20%, 100% or something else.

Comment · 1 year ago
The point of tipping is that it's _supposed to_ go straight to the servers, while normal charges go the owners who then share them with their employees as they see fit.

Assuming this is true, and tips are not actually taken by the owners, there are two interpretations of this:

1) customer pays more than what their lunch or dinner actually costs, to intentionally signal that there was something special about it (good service,...), or

2) customer pays more than what their lunch or dinner actually costs, because they know employees are underpaid and they want to compensate for that. It's essentially a form of charity.

While I have nothing against charity, charity that is "institutionalized" (big word, I know) by the employees (a tip jar) and very strongly encouraged does seem like a nice way for employers to justify a lower pay. And even if that is not the actual reason why tips exist, an employer who knows most of its customers tip can use this to pay less its employees.

Comment · 2 years ago
Interesting, thanks!
Comment · 2 years ago
Interesting, thanks!

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