DigiCert recently was forced to invalidate something like 50,000 of their DNS-challenge based certs because of a bug in their system, and they gave companies like mine only 24 hours to renew them before invalidating the old ones…

My employer had an EV cert for years on our primary domain. The C-suites, etc. thought it was important. Then one of our engineers who focuses on SEO demonstrated how the EV cert slowed down page loads enough that search engines like Google might take notice. Apparently EV certs trigger an additional lookup by the browser to confirm the extended validity.

Once the powers-that-be understood that the EV cert wasn’t offering any additional usefulness, and might be impacting our SEO performance (however small) they had us get rid of it and use a good old OV cert instead.

Back in the 90’s before the days of Windows 3.0 I had to debug a memory manager written by a brilliant but somewhat odd guy. Among other thing I stumbled across:

• A temporary variable called “handy” because it was useful in a number of situations.
• Another one called son_of_handy, used in conjunction with handy.
• Blocks of memory were referred to as cookies.
• Cookies had a flag called shit_cookie_corrupt that would get set if the block of memory was suspected of being corrupt.
• Each time a cookie was found to be corrupt then the function OhShit() was called.
• If too many cookies were corrupt then the function OhShitOhShitOhShit() was called, which would terminate everything.

If you have ssh open to the world then it’s better to disable root logins entirely and also disable passwords, relying on ssh keys instead.

Port 22 is the default SSH port and it receives a TON of malicious traffic any time it’s open to the whole internet. 20 years ago I saw a newly installed server with a weak root password get infected by an IP address in China less than an hour after being connected to the open internet.

With all the bots out there these days it would probably take a lot less time if we ran the same experiment again.

No, see, piracy is just you downloading movies for yourself. To be like OpenAI you need to download it, put it in a pretty package with a bow, then sell it over and over again. Only when it’s piracy for profit do you get to beg and plead for a pass.

How about a Hunger Games variant where the worlds top 20 billionaires are pitted against each other?

My employer goes so far as to lock down what devices can connect to our network & VPN, and also locks down laptops so that removable media like USB thumb drives won’t work.

No way in hell I’d let them do things like that to my personal laptop.

I’m willing to bet the vast majority of that money is changing hands among tech companies like Intel, AMD, nVidia, AWS, etc. Only a small percentage would go to salaries, etc. and I doubt those rates have changed much…

I doubt it. The liability would be far too great. Ambulance chasing lawyers would salivate at the chance to represent the families of pedestrians struck and killed by buggy self driving cars. Those capitalists don’t want endless years of class action cases tying up their profits.

Not until a self driving car can safely handle all manner of edge cases thrown at it, and I don’t see that happening any time soon. The cars would need to be able to recognize situations that may not be explicitly programmed into it, and figure out a safe way to deal with it.

My wife and I just streamed a movie a few days ago. It had a ton of bloopers intermixed with the end credits.

My wife used to drive an electric Smart Car for her work. It had a range of 60 miles (less in the winter), and she called it a glorified golf cart. But it was perfect for the 20 or so miles she’d drive each day.

Back in the late 90’s I worked for an internet search company, long before Google was a thing. We would regularly physically drive a dozen SCSI drives from a RAID array between two datacenters about 20 miles apart.

It’s 126 miles to Chicago 13.6 kilometers to Alpha Centauri, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack off cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.

Bought my first one probably 20+ years ago at this point.

Bought my second one probably 10+ years ago when traveling abroad and it was more reliable and cheaper to have offline maps of the countries I was going to.

We like to travel to places that often have spotty cellular coverage, if at all.

My first GPS came with a cigarette lighter plug.

My next one came with a USB cable along with a cigarette lighter to USB adapter.

I think most these days now come with a USB cable but no adapter.

I’m now starting to see some devices come with USB-C cables.

Hell, I’d be happy with the manufacturers ensuring buggy ECU software is kept properly up-to-date. Long story short I spent months dealing with dying batteries in a pre-owned Honda CR/V that I bought from a dealer. After multiple dealer visits, jumpstarts from AAA, etc. I finally found references to two recall notices on my own that described my symptoms perfectly. The only problem was that my cars VIN wasn’t in the list of those affected by the recalls.

I took printouts of the recall notices to the dealer, and they agreed it sounded like issue I was having. They updated the ECU software and I never had battery issues any more as long as I had that car.

Asking for a friend…

What would it take to create a domain that just acts as a proxy to Reddit but serves up its own robots.txt that allows all bots?

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.