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Comment Re:FBI SURVEILANCE VAN (Score 1) 142

Same, I had that for a while.

The wifi names were "Surveillance Van 5" and "Surveillance Van 24" for 5Ghz and 2.4GHz channel. I set the family's cell phones network device names "Surveillance Operator 1", "Surveillance Operator 2", "Surveillance Operator 3", and "Surveillance Operator 4". For house guests sometimes it got a chuckle, "connect to surveillance van 24". I know when I went to friends who took their networks seriously, I had someone ask about it.

Comment Re:Everybody Hates Documentation (Score 2) 85

I am reminded of some source code for a company-specific program that I saw in the late 1990s. I don't remember why I was perusing it, as I was in IT and absolutely not a developer. But I remember being tickled at one of the comments before a block of code. It was something like, "I have no idea why or how the following code works. But every time someone tries to change it, everything breaks, so please don't touch it."

Submission + - Wi-Fi Routers Can Scan Your Body to Identify Exactly Who You Are (futurism.com) 1

JoeyRox writes: New research out of Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology found that the types of Wi-Fi routers we all have in our homes come with a major privacy vulnerability that can be used to identify any human body that comes within their range.

The study, flagged by Gizmodo, used machine learning systems to identify individuals with an accuracy rate of 99.5 percent. To do so, the researchers exploited a vulnerability in a process known as beamforming feedback information (BFI), which was introduced to allow routers to focus Wi-Fi signals on connected devices, as opposed to the older approach, which is to blanket an entire area in coverage.

While BFI is great for network connectivity, it has a major downsides for privacy. For starters, devices connected to a router using beamforming need to send constant feedback in order to be found. As routers send out and receive network feedback, the signal is inevitably impacted by real world factors like pets, walls, and people.

Making matters worse is the fact that this data is basically wide open for anyone to grab — not only is that feedback data unencrypted, it can also be accessed without ever connecting directly to the router.

Comment States should use settlements to teach ad-blocking (Score 1) 70

Each state that gets money in a judgement or settlement, should use that money to make sure their public education system teaches kids how to block ads.

By 2030, I don't think anyone should be able to graduate high school in America, unless they've learned how to be ad-free (on screens under their control; obviously they won't gain superpowers to blank out billboards or the sides of buses).

Space

Blue Origin Rocket Exploded Thursday Night During Hot-Fire Test (cbsnews.com) 73

Spaceflight Now shared their video of the explosion, which the Orlando Sentinel describes as showing Blue Origin's rocket "become engulfed in flames. The fireball expands out and covers the entire launch pad as the fuselage of the rocket can be seen crumbling into the flames."

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos said on X.com "It's too early to know the root cause but we're already working to find it. Very rough day, but we'll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It's worth it." (SpaceX founder Elon Musk posted "Sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly.")

It's unclear how this will impact future launches. "The rocket was destroyed," reports CBS News, "and as the smoke cleared, there was no sign of the erector-gantry used to move the New Glenn from its hangar to the pad and to raise it from horizontal to vertical. Likewise, one of two tall lightning towers was no longer visible." It was the first such on-pad explosion at the Cape since a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up on nearby pad 40 on Sept. 1, 2016... Blue Origin only has one New Glenn pad, the one that was damaged in the Thursday test. The New Glenn, which has launched three times, is a heavy lift rocket designed to compete head-to-head with SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. During New Glenn's most recent flight in April, an upper stage malfunction prevented a commercial internet satellite from reaching its planned orbit...

The New Glenn destroyed Thursday was to send 48 Leo internet satellites owned by Amazon into space [which were not on board for the hot-fire test]

Blue Origin posted on X.com that "Debris from our recent hotfire anomaly may wash ashore in the coming days/weeks. If you encounter any debris, do not touch or approach it for your safety."

"Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult..." NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman posted on X.com. "âWe will provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader symbolset for sharing the news.

Comment Re:Maybe now we can finally get rid of COBOL? (Score 1) 28

It's certainly possible to translate COBOL source into another computer language of your choice, although I'm not sure LLMs are the best tool for that job. An LLM might be able to give you more readable post-translation source code, but traditional machine translation would give you post-translation source code that works correctly, which is probably more important.

Submission + - I found a second vote.gov -- and it's registered to the White House

As_I_Please writes: The Drey Dossier reports that the National Design Studio, an office created by executive order and which reports only to the White House, has been building copies of federal agency websites like vote.gov, passports.gov, login.gov and others.

What [the National Design Studio] is doing is taking the parts of the federal government that touch you directly, your prescription, your voter registration, your passport, your federal login, out of the agencies that legally own them and rebuilding them on White House infrastructure. Vote.gov belongs to the Election Assistance Commission, and the studio built a copy. Passports belong to the State Department, and the studio is building a replacement this week. Login.gov belonged to GSA, and the studio’s guy runs it now.

Trump has said publicly that this infrastructure is for other presidents, and he is right about that. It is the one thing in this story I take him at his word on. The infrastructure outlasts him. Whoever wins in 2028 inherits the websites, the vendors, the data, and the hardware, sealed and waiting.

NDS Infrastructure Map — my live working github map of every National Design Studio subdomain I have found, filterable by status, registrant, and parent domain. If you want to retrace this investigation or watch new subdomains appear in real time, start here.

Comment Re:I don't currently use Rust (Score 1) 161

This is why C code is bad, because C programmers never ask themselves, "How do I not leak memory?"

Another way to phrase that would be, "This is why C code is bad, because C programmers are expected to understand the rules about how to not leak memory, but there is no mechanism to enforce that requirement".

... and to their credit, eventually some of them do figure it out, and after that they (mostly) write good C code that doesn't leak. However, that doesn't change the fact that at any given moment there are millions of unseasoned C programmers out there who haven't reached that point yet, and who are nevertheless writing leaky code which gets put into production and causes trouble; and new C programmers appear every day. It's the Eternal September problem, applied to memory management.

So either (a) we ban C programmers from pushing to production until they've had at least 5 years of experience, or (b) we find some means to flag their errors at build-time, or (c) we live with the status quo messiness indefinitely. Linux is going with Rust as their mechanism for implementing plan (b).

Comment Re:What's the benefit of Rust here though? (Score 1) 161

If you have access to a God-tier LLM that you can rely on to find every bug, I think that could work.

However, I don't think anyone in the Linux community is ready to trust LLMs to that extent just yet. Not only are they quite fallible, they are also non-deterministic -- so if you ask your favorite LLM to find the bugs in the code, and it doesn't find any, and then you feed it the exact same prompt again, it might find some on its second attempt. So how do you know when to stop re-asking?

LLMs are currently constituted are very useful for finding bugs, but not so useful for guaranteeing that no bugs remain.

Comment Re:Thanks to Trump (Score 1) 181

That's not the reason that both bombs were dropped. They were dropped because the military saw them as just another tool in the toolbox, just like the bombs dropped on all the other cities that continued to be dropped on other cities until the surrender. Truman ended the military's control of atomic bombs after Nagasaki, when the USAAF was preparing to use a third bomb, establishing civilian control of atomic weapons. Firebombing continued, though, right up to Kumagaya, Akita, and Osaka getting hit in the 24 hours prior to Hirohito taking to the airwaves.

Comment Re:Thanks to Trump (Score 2) 181

The agreement expired in 2030. It did not authorize Iran to pursue nuclear weapons at that time. There's a difference.

The agreement was the best available at the time. Diplomacy sometimes requires taking a temporary win, and it usually means that neither side gets everything they want. The hope was that Iran would find that they would not want or need to develop nuclear weapons. If they did go down that path, there were penalties for doing so. Future negotiations were planned to modify or extend the agreement as it got closer to the expiration date.

That's how such agreements work. Every arms treaty signed between the US and USSR had an expiration date. The expiration date was not an agreement that at the end, both sides would immediately rearm. They were meant to establish a new normal and a baseline for future negotiations, and that's what happened. Over time, the arsenals were negotiated down from tens of thousands per side to a few thousand per side, with only a fraction of them deployed or even deployable. The last one expired a few months ago, but neither side is racing to add to their deployed warhead count.

There is no way to outright prevent Iran from developing a nuclear warhead without occupying the country and removing its entire current government. That is hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives, and an even worse look for the US than it has right now. Negotiating a deal like the JCPOA is the best option available. But every time Trump starts to talk about a deal and details start to leak out, they look a lot worse than the JCPOA. Trump is incompetent, he started a war that even Republicans are turning against, and he's arguably left Iran in a better place than it was before. Iran now knows that they can cut off the Strait of Hormuz, and no one can or will do anything about it. Worse, Trump has stated that he would be OK with Iran charging transit fees. If that starts, everyone else who controls a waterway that is otherwise internationally accessible is going to charge them, too. Indonesia and Malaysia would be the top two who could affect global trade, and while both have said that they would not, it's hard to say what future governments would do if they came under budget stress and had a precedent to point to.

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