Got a mail not meant for me, sent by a girl to some girl friend of hers -- I'm a guy. Replied concisely and professionally. Got a laughing excuse in reply. Replied in the same vein, with reference to how the original mail tied in to my personal context. Exchanges continued for a few days, covering the fact that we lived several time zones apart, and culminating in "I really like talking with you, I have to ask, are you married?"

I have noticed that when I use a certain (shady) cable to charge my iPhone, it charges much faster, but then it doesn't hold the charge. When I use the normal cable, getting to 100% takes much longer, but the device lasts twice as long. Is that known/expected behavior?

Except that Musicoin doesn't seem to to take on, and that Audius will profit to other people, of course.

For all those who say that 120 days off in a year is insane... just count the weekends!

I'm at about 55 days off per year (30 vacation days instead of the legal minimum of 25, 35 hours a week, spread out into roughly eight-hour days with one day off every fortnight) plus the weekends and national holidays, so that's easily 160 days of out of 365. And job security that most Americans can only dream of. Pay... well. I upgrade my vacations with a second job, which I wouldn't be able to do if my 35-hour week was five 7-hour days. That hour's difference per day works out to some 25 days off in the year, not too shabby.

I have read through the documents (for work). Once stripped of the hype, I would not be surprised if these "vulnerabilities" are literally correct as described. There is a whole lot of hedging going on down in the details, which gut the document of any really critical vulnerabilities. It would have been so easy to leave out a sentence to make any one of those bugs earth-shaking, but no. This makes me think that the document is carefully written to be as alarming, as scare-mongering, as possible, while not actually giving in to blatant lies that could land someone in prison.

*If* the vulnerabilities are as described, then the real-world impact is that you will no longer be able to really trust a pre-owned computer. Governments and security-conscious companies will no longer be able to take any computer (new or pre-owned), format or replace the disks, and declare the computer secure. Those "bugs" will need to be taken into account. Same thing for computer forensics.

Of course, this was already somewhat the case. You should already reflash the BIOS, and some hard disks and ethernet cards have flashable firmware, but it would seem that the impact of these bugs are that the manufacturer's manual for cleaning the system, more or less unchanged for decades, now has a few holes in it.

To sum it up, I suspect we paranoid people will need a much more hard-core procedure to sanitize hardware. A format/reinstall isn't going to cut it any more.

It seems as if it's a logic bug when upgrading the password store. The store is upgraded with the password entered. I think the reasoning behind the code may have stemmed from the fact that to upgrade a password hash to a more secure hash, you wait for the user to enter their password so that you can hash it with the new hash function... but that's not a reason to enable accounts that are disabled, or to update the hash if the provided one doesn't match. See https://objective-see.com/blog...

List all William Gibson books and let people vote!

Does that matter exist between stars and not only between galaxies? Can it be used as fuel for spaceships? Inquiring minds want to know.

Will they be able to use this to track down the authors of the DAO hack that prompted the split of Ether into Classic/Not Classic, or of any of the other recent mediatized multi-million dollar thefts?

Last year the fact that the FBI had closed the case made headlines, and now there are 40 people working on it?

https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us...

OK, looking at the press release, the "redirected" "resources", I suppose the FBI only officially closes a case when the perp is caught...

Once I was nasty. I got a mail from the person's boss saying that I was a bad person for traumatizing their employee.

Once I was nice. I got a nice excuse and a follow-up question. After four or five exchanges, she apologized for being forward and asking a personal question, but was I married, 'cause she really liked talking to me?

After having proved to myself in this way that I really could take over the world if I wished, I now mostly ignore mis-addressed mails.

Well, without the web, I would definitely want inn and trn.

Brocade, dammit, no editing your posts on Slashdot, and you probably won't believe me now... umm, let's just say that I have a psychological block against the name Broadcom^WBroadwaaaay^WBrocade^D

I hope they fire a particular person from their marketing... but it's probably already done.

I was waiting for a super important call (read: production is down, four levels of management in my office, SevMax ticket open with support that costs USD 500k+/year that is going to call you back immediately promise promise), and I get this gal peddling Broadcom. I tell her sorry-I-don't-have-time-and-I'm-not-the-right-contact-for-network-equipment-in-any-case-goodbye. Thirty seconds later the phone rings again and a different girl wants to know if I am Lorens (duh) and then says Well you hung up on my colleague, that's not nice, we can hang up too - click.

Several years later that's all I can think of when I hear the name Broadcom.

At least the four levels of management in my office got some comic relief from the speakerphone, and one of them was the boss-boss of the guy who would have been the right contact for peddling network equipment (of which he probably bought maybe $1M/year)... we never did buy any Broadcom.

I saw an underage guy get blocked from a bar based on not knowing his zodiac sign. He'd borrowed the ID of a slightly older friend who looked a bit like him (but not enough). He'd learned by heart everything on the ID card, but the bouncer got suspicious and then asked him for his zodiac sign.

Maybe a generational thing indeed, this was some twenty years ago.