Several years ago, we were talking about Gracenote's metadata, it came up that your musical tastes are a shockingly accurate predictor of your political leanings.

So consider that this metadata just helped all those "partners" build an even more accurate profile of you.

That article was so horrendous, I'm going to attempt to rewrite it with more context:

Malware authors want to slip their malware into a victim's PC undetected, which means they need to know, ahead of time, whether it will be detected by antivirus tools. So they scan it with antivirus tools. However, there are so many such tools (and it's difficult to know which one a victim might have), it's time-efficient to centralize the scanning. This is done with a "multiscanner", which is a website that runs a bunch of antivirus tools to inspect any file that a user uploads. The results from the (dozens of) scanning tools are presented to the user in a webpage.

There are two kinds of multiscanners, however: Those run by/for the "good guys", where Jane Doe can go and upload a fishy file to see what the scan result looks like (as part of deciding whether she wants to run/install/trust it). These scanners send copies of uploaded files (at least, those which smell suspicious to a first-pass heuristic) to antivirus companies so they can be hand-evaluated, and folded into future detection signatures. If a malware author uploads their newest creation to check that it slips through undetected, chances are that a few hours later, that result will change!

Aaaaand, those run by/for the "bad guys", which work just the same way, except they don't send copies of the fishy files back to AV companies. This is most useful to malware authors who want to make sure their payloads are still stealthy, without tipping their hand to the AV companies. Just like the other multiscanners, this type presents the results to a user in a web page.

In either case, the link to the results page contains the checksum of the submitted file; it's just an easy way for such things to work.

The article's central point is that this latter class of multiscanner is very popular. Sometimes, malware authors will share a link to their results page as a way of asserting that their payload is undetected by any scanners. By skulking around the seedier parts of the internet, looking at malware advertisements, researchers collected a lot of these links, and then looked for the checksums on other multiscanner sites. Only about 25% of them showed up in a timely fashion.

[Ed. note: This can be improved by you, the reader, by uploading suspicious files to sites like Virustotal.]

Thank you! Yeah, I remember this back in the BBS days. Some boards would unzip uploaded archives to scan them for viruses or duplicate files, and so they were vulnerable to zip-bombs.

Various strategies could render the attacks moot; I think the common one was to initially run pkunzip to only list the contents of the zip without actually unzipping anything. If none of the known attacks seemed to be present, the file could then be unzipped and its contents scanned as usual. There were other mitigations, like unzipping to a ramdrive, which worked well if the system had enough memory, or to a separate partition on the hard drive, since traversal attacks seemed limited to a single filesystem.

And the degree-toting engineers coming out of those institutions are so clueless -- most of them never built anything more involved than LEGO -- most of them can't design a moderately complex part that's both manufacturable and assemblable. They've had no lab time, no shop time. It takes a ton of on-the-job experience to get them the basics that previous generations started college with, because previous generations built things and fixed things and generally saw building and fixing things as worthwhile pursuits and worthwhile skills.

It seems a week doesn't go by without some story of trouble decoding data from a distant space probe or other legacy system, or refurbishing old rocket engines because we've forgotten the basic research needed to design new ones, et cetera. I think the hyperspecialization and abandonment of skilled trades is leading America into a future where we literally can't make things because we don't know how -- I'm calling this the white-collar dark ages. We're reduced to being the customers of nations where this knowledge is still valued and where things are still produced.

So much of my early internet was Slashdot, and so much of Slashdot in that era was Roblimo. I owe a debt of gratitude to everyone involved.

I bought a $200 color laser almost a decade ago. Most of what I do is black-and-white, shipping labels and such (bonus: toner doesn't smear when it gets damp), but it's also great for occasional flyers, reference charts, and other items that benefit from color. I've replaced the black cartridge once, I'm on the original CMY cartridges, and it's just a quiet little box that sits in the corner, unplugged until I need it to reduce standby power consumption.

The drivers situation is a little stupid, given that it's a Samsung instead of an HP, but now Samsung has sold their printer business to HP so who knows what the next update may bring.

Here's my implementation, which uses a bit of circuitry to work around the NIC's behavior.

Here's some prior work that I found out about after I'd made mine, which is much simpler because their NIC apparently deasserts the wake output after some time.

Yes and no. WOL can wake a sleeping computer, but not reboot it if it hangs, nor provide any other sort of remote administration beyond what the OS gives you once it comes up. And if it doesn't come up, WOL just left you in the lurch. You need remote-hands to recover.

I've gone so far as to repurpose a WOL-capable network card as a reset-on-lan device, because my always-on machine doesn't need waking, but inevitably if I'm on the other side of the country, it somehow manages to need rebooting.

IME sounds like it could serve this purpose and more, perhaps providing a useful subset of iLO/DRAC functionality, but not just for server boards.

And then BO2K was horribly bloated with all the plugins that seldom played nice with one another and, at least according to this humble scribe, failed to deliver on most of its promises because it was overly ambitious and took too many steps forward all at once.

But the release party for it was quite an affair..

Meanwhile, archive.org is scanning a thousand new books every day and nobody's writing news stories about it...

Most of the early boards I called were Renegade, one was WWIV, one was Telegard.

Then I discovered a board running Excelsior! and the rest quickly faded. Inherently multi-line, and supported inter-system links, so I was calling one Excelsior! BBS with 6 lines, and one of them was a dedicated linking line to another board the next city over (still a local call, but itself was local to different folks) with 12 lines, and that was linked to yet another with 8, and everyone could communicate. It was... phenomenally addictive. My grades reflected that.

> both sides of the disk were coated with media.

Yup. Some single-sided drives used only the top surface, and some used only the bottom, but the "single-sided" disks didn't specify which systems they were intended for, ergo both sides must've been usable!

I have a box full of those notch punches in the basement. One of these days I'm gonna go to VCFMW and hand 'em out like candy. :)

Actually in CDMA, they do, to get the timing-advance that allows soft-handoff to work. It's down to tens of nanoseconds to make the chips line up when they're received at your location, and that means the trilateration accuracy is down to tens of feet.

Also, all modern standards are based on CDMA for the air-interface portion, because it's so efficient.

Look up any of the hyphenated terms if you care to learn more.

And Ma Bell has been doing it for a century. Cable rack in the central offices gets crowded after just a few decades, otherwise.

There's precedent, there are specialized tools and procedures for error reduction, and worldwide there are at least dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people with lots of experience in this very specific field.

You can feel the weight balance to tell how much of the tape is on one reel versus the other. You can rewind and fastforward by gut-feeling, with no display. Every operation of the player is tactile, and there are no hidden options menus, touchscreens, or any of that crap.