Is it worth it anyway? The purpose of Epic Store is to check what games they're giving away every Thursday, collect your copy and never bother to play it. Your don't even need a client for this.

Well, if you can save $100 off a game, why not? If you can get the new Epic Games Store launcher to give you GTA 6 for free, rather than paying what, $100 for it off Steam, wouldn't you use the EGS version?

By the same measure, if you can get Vbucks for free it would be well worth it for people as well.

404 media had been showing how weird the glitches are. Good job. And like everyone already said, who even cares how fast it starts. Are we even talking about feature parity? Does it have a smaller memory footprint? Does it tax the system less when games are running?

But is it glitchy enough to be useful? I mean, how long until we can use this launcher to get free games? That's what people really want to know - how long until a glitch makes everything in the store is free so you can buy every game for $0?

Or for some people, to get vbucks for free.

Surely there's plenty of vulnerabilities we can use to exploit this.

I've already run up the Jolly Roger again, sigh, streaming was good whilst it lasted but sadly it was never going to last that long.

I don't even bother with that. There's just so much content out there that there's no need. Streaming only content? Doesn't exist in my world - and there's still way too much content available legally for me to ever watch.

There's just so much competition for your attention that there's always something I can do, between books I haven't read, TV shows I haven't watched (OTA, anyone?), games I haven't played (both video and board), etc. A whole class of content not being available to me is just a relief that I'm not burdened with having to devote hours to. Hell, my YouTube Watch Later playlist could use some trimming as well.

(And content like Star Trek? Well, CBS puts them out on physical media which I prefer, so I do legitimately acquire those). Sure I do want to watch a ton of content available on say, AppleTV like Silo and Severance and such, but I don't think about it too much because there's just so much other content around for me to consume it doesn't bother me that I'm not seeing it.

yeah the Space Age technology of some screws and an O-ring were lost technology to the wearables space for the past 15 years... along with replaceable batteries that that allowed.

Just because it has a replaceable battery doesn't mean it's user replaceable.

Watches and such you often had to take to a watch repair shop to change the battery because they could make sure the O-ring didn't degrade as well as ensure it still retained waterproofness by making sure it stayed clean and likely lubricated. Heck, if you read the warranty they often voided the waterproofness guarantee once you pop open the lid and it was the company that replaced the battery who provided the guarantee if it stops working.

Sure, it's easy to do, but often you automatically lose the IPxx protections once you open the lid. Everyone accepted that because that's why you paid the watch repair company to replace the battery for you.

From the article: "Supermarket cold aisles are typically run by control panels that manage an entire store's fridges and freezers and can be accessed over the internet, which lets maintenance companies adjust them from anywhere."

Well, there's your problem. Stop doing stupid things like that.

But then if something goes wrong, you realize there's no one in the store who can fix it, right? The store manager would have no idea what the panel does. They're going to have to get a technician over to fix whatever it is.

Maybe you haven't done the whole "drive two hours to flip a power switch" thing, but you'll find the vast majority of issues people have are trivially easy to fix things like that. People don't interact with the panels, other than maybe accidentally by bumping into it or something and then changing a setting. You don't want someone who doesn't know what they're doing (i.e. a teenager who bumped the control panel while bringing in more pop tarts from the back) to fix it. But you also don't want to call in a $200/hr technician to push the button to turn it back on as well.

Those things pretty much have to be remotely monitored and often adjusted remotely because there will not be anyone in the store who knows anything more than "The panel has a beeping red light on it".

Granted, the security should be better - VPNs and such aren't terribly expensive things, and any reasonable supermarket with a backend inventory system already has a VPN to corporate so the HVAC techsn can access every panel through the VPN that already exist.

(One should also note this happened in France, and shopping habits in Europe are quite different from the US - namely in that many people shop daily - they pop into a really tiny supermarket for a few bits of produce and such and 5 minutes later they're back out with dinner ingredients. The weekly "big shop" you do in the US isn't really a thing.

When you take the time to understand the AI-written code ( often using the AI to explain its own code ), there is no problem and you can proceed significantly faster than without AI.

The problem is that that work to gain understanding is boring.
While I often had to do it in the days before AI, I did not become a programmer to spend all my time understanding code I did not write myself.

True, however I have used AI to help me fix bugs in code I didn't understand. But I didn't let it make blind PRs for me. I had it make the changes, then I reviewed all the lines that it modified and asked it to fix lines that looked wrong to me. It produced working code, but I didn't like the way it initialized a structure that was central to the process. I had to ask it to fix that by using what already exists because it created a maintainability nightmare.

But I knew that not from understanding the code at a deep level, I knew it from my years of experience that code that looks like that would lead to problems years down the line.

Now, since I was unfamiliar with the details of the code, I did have it produce documentation about what it did, as well as how it worked and other things.

If I did it myself, it would probably take over a month. But with AI, the task itself was complete in about 3 days, but it took me another week to figure out what it did and carefully review the code it changed and how to fix its issues. By the time I was ready to submit it for QA testing, it was a full two weeks.

I don't mind using AI, but I'm not the kind of person to use AI blindly. My coworkers have asked why I do stuff manually - and it's because it's faster for me to do it manually than for me to figure out how to tell AI how to do it, let it do it, then understand what it did so I can submit it. AI just becomes another tool in my toolbox. Heck, I still coded up a few things from scratch - it did not occur to me to ask AI to code up a trivial tool I needed.

What it really shows is just how young and unknowing new developers have become to choose a name that has an obvious history.

Or those who fail to learn from the past. I mean, people seem to keep reinventing the wheel over and over again, and with AI, they're doing it faster than ever.

It's like "I invented something new!" makes big news, when in reality you just reimplemented something old.

This is especially true in the retrocomputing arena, where people would reinvent the technology we had over again because they didn't realize we had a solution back then.

It's only a matter of time when people playing with a 386 or something reinvent HIMEM.SYS or EMM386.EXE and think they're the smartest in the world.

Especially because AI makes people dumb in that way.

You have no idea (and it is designed that way) how many of these systems exist or where they are located. Flock cameras are made to be easily seen. Others are designed to be hidden from public view.

They've been around for decades. The land borders have ALPRs that read the license plate for everyone entering the US. They're also used on toll roads - the ALPR is on the gantry you pass that reads your transponder. If you don't have a transponder it snaps a photo so they can bill you.

If you ever parked your car there are mobile ALPRs that check to make sure you don't park too long (since chalking tires is a 4th Amendment violation). This applies whether you're parking on the street, or in a parking lot - the city has mobile ALPRs as do the companies that are in charge of parking lots making sure you paid and your parking is still valid.

Flock is more than a decade old - they provided a service for private businesses to have ALPRs monitoring the parking lot of HOA streets.

The main problem is Flock is treating it as a network - little isolated silos of ALPRs is not a bad thing - and for decades that was the norm and no one really cared or minded.

But Flock treats it as a network - the bigger they grow, the more monitoring they can do. And then it becomes their advantage that they can search any vehicle from anywhere. But that goes way beyond what the cameras were initially installed for.

ALPRs that are isolated aren't the problem. It's when you start linking them together that things become problematic. Just like how individual government databases are fine in isolation, but things get scary when you start linking them together. You give the IRS lots of personal information, with the expectation that they will block access to that information from other departments.; Ditto the census and other agencies. While it seems utterly repetitive to keep providing the same information to each department, by keeping each database separate and isolated, it provides a lot of privacy.

But when databases are linked, things get scary and you end up with surveillance. It's why data brokers are a concern because they are buying up data from everything and then linking them together.

Our problem is we have several systems that use SSL for internal network authentication, but there is no way to automate them. We have phone system hardware that requires an SSL cert to communicate with the handsets around the office, but we have to go into a web interface on it to copy and paste the cert each year. We have the same thing for an internal camera/security system, same thing for a badge system. All of these things are local, not on the internet, yet require SSL certs for internal authentication with clients, and no way to automate these as they are just stand alone devices. As it is itâ(TM)s a pain in the ass to update them, but if we have to do this on a monthly basis itâ(TM)s just absurd.

What do you mean there's no way to automate them? None of the systems you described need someone to be physically there - they just rely on someone going to some web page and doing something.

And that's purely an HTTP thing, maybe with a little SSL thrown in. I mean, other than selecting the file to upload, it's just code (your web browser), interacting with other code (the TCP/IP stack in the computer) interacting with network stuff, then interacting with other code.

As far as the other end is concerned, someone needs to upload a certificate file every so often to it using the HTTP interface it provides. A web browser uses HTTP to get data and display and interact with it. It's just code.

And code that emulates a web browser is some of the most common code out there - for some reason HTTP(S) seems to be one of the most popular protocols to do stuff with.

To the point your situation could be handled in many ways. Maybe you could creatively use curl to log into the web interface and do the file upload - you get back a cookie or authentication token from the login and that needs to be passed back when doing the file upload (something curl can do as well).

Or you can pick your favorite scripting language and use it's HTTP classes to pretend to be a web browser to do the same thing.

Or you can write something using libcurl to do the same thing.

And for those who want to poke around, a program called "postman" can help with forming HTTP requests from basic HTTP(S) interactions to more elaborate ones involving JSON RPC, SOAP, or other API mechanisms. Just remember to document thorougly what your code does in case it breaks and you need to do it manually.

Sounds like theres a need for an easy automation solution.

The problem isn't the automation, it's when the automation fails. Do you remember how to fix the certificate manually? Or do you rely on the automated tool to never fail, and it just did?

It's easy if it's regularly practiced or someone documented the steps, but it's rarely going to be practiced (likely forgotten if the automation works for years) and documentation gets lost. It might be in a great spot in the IT wiki and IT documentation, but that gets forgotten about as platforms migrate. People also leave.

Suddenly, the automation fails. Maybe it got a bad certificate from the CA. Or maybe a parameter changed that triggered some unforseen bug in the automation. or an update was run that had a bug when used in the environment. Now it fails. And you're screwed, because no one knows how to fix it.

Automation works, until it doesn't. Then things that were relying on it break. Maybe you're lucky and you catch things breaking early to realize what is happening. But chances are, one day you'll try to log in, and you'll get a big "Certificate Expired" screen on the browser and suddenly your VM clusters are inaccessible because they don't have valid certs (seen this happen with openvirt) and the company is at a standstill becauze nothing works.

The danger of automation isn't when it works. It's when it doesn't and no human has touched the system in years because of it and tribal knowledge has dissipated in the winds, documentation is lost, and no one remembers how the system worked.

They renewed ST: Academy?! I'm sure the fans will be pleased.

They didn't renew it. They had announced season 2 when season 1 was underway and doing relatively well.

They were so confident in it, the season 2 showrunners ended season 2 on a cliffhanger. Of course, it was cancelled, likely as part of various lawsuits around CBS and 60 minutes and other things.

How are colleges and municipalities finding themselves in situations where they've signed contracts for someone else's equipment to be installed on their property, sometimes literally on a piece of infrastructure they they own/control and legally unable to physically remove the equipment? I woud consider signing that contract to be gross incompetence and negligence if I were a resident of a municipality like that, and it should be a fireable offense for whoever is responsible at that college.

Easy - they wanted monitoring for say, a car park. Flock offers them a contract for free cameras and installation on their property and a discount rate for the service (say, $1000/year. Yes, Flock service can be that cheap per year).

Flock then goes and installs cameras everywhere beyond the car park, offers access to the car park cameras and there you go. The contract says Flock is to deploy, install and maintain cameras on the entire property (the entire college, not just the car park).

That's usually how it goes.

Meanwhile, if you try to get ALPRs from Axon/Taser, Motorola, etc., you'll probably be charged $10,000 per camera and $1000/month for service. Flock can deeply subsidize it in order to keep their network alive, while the others need to recoup the cost from the sale because it isn't subsidized.

Specifically almost all operational areas have an up time KPI. Changes especially frequent changes present a risk to up time. Most if not all operational managers are have a pay component tied to uptime/availability.

You say this like it's a bad thing. For many things, operational uptime is related to production capacity - if a server goes down, production can go down. It's where the "we lose a million dollars a minute" stuff comes from. Operations goal is to keep the service running so that doesn't happen.

It's where redundancy, staged rollouts and other things are done which limit downtime due to hardware failure, software bugs, etc.

(It's also a HUGE PITA to do because during a staged rollout, you have to deal with both old and new schemas of data because not all the data is upgraded at the same time. In fact, in most rollouts, you update the code to handle the new data schema first, then code to switch between schemas, code to write data in both schemas, then your new code that required the new schema, then retire the old schema and handling everything with the new).

And yes, it makes PaaS/SaaS much harder to deal with because you need to do a staged rollout, but SaaS/PaaS don't like that because having to deal with old/new data schemas is a lot of work over just switching everything over at once.

But the goal is there because downtime can cost a lot of money very quickly and it's operations job to figure out all the possible risks that lead to downtime, their costs to the business if it happens, the chance of occurance and then mitigations. Some mitigations are ignored - if it only happens once every 10 years and costs a billion dollars to mitigate, it might be something you recognize and do your best to work around - if you can get things running back in under 1000 minutes (at a million dollars a minute), That's 16 hours 40 minutes, then it's cheaper to not mitigate it and just do what you can to recover from it.

Some operations are also such that there can be ripple effects in the economy. Say, if Visa or MasterCard went down for even an hour how much chaos will be caused. (And yes, they do go down, but there are mitigation that let it be unseen for operations).

This is why releasing on bittorrent is important, you can still get the images even if the site is down.

Or bookmark a mirror. Many universities host such mirrors still and are great choices for those with fast connections. I know the local university hosts a huge mirror of open-source stuff, and since their internet connection is basically unlimited you can really saturate your connection downloading the ISO in a few seconds.

Since the Republican majority in the House and Senate allowed it to, acquiescing to Trump's every whim out of fear from him and his dwindling base of Red Hats, who he's now also screwing over by breaking every campaign promise he made - except for the racists ones being driven by Stephen Miller and other like-minded people in his Administration. Hopefully things will change - for the betterment of us all - after the mid-term elections.

Depends. Lots of those (R)s are distancing themselves from Trump as of late in a last-ditch effort to show the people "they've changed" when they voted in lock-step with Trump until it started to affect their odds of re-election.

The problem is, lots of people are falling for it. And those who resisted, well, they didn't make it through the primaries. So every tear you see being shed that they're against whatever Trump represents is fake simply because they stayed in line the whole time until their ass was on the line.

Though unless there's a supermajority, even the midterms can't do much other than block everything Trump does (which is why it's often called the "lame duck" period). They can't do anything legislative as they can't override a Trump veto, but they can block future things from happening. And they can neuter executive orders since they aren't orders, but guidance towards Congress on what should be priorities.

The only thing the midterms can do is basically make sure no more damage can get done. Trump will veto everything Congress tries to pass, and Congress will block everything Trump tries to pass. Of course, having a government deadlocked might be the best of a bad situation where nothing else can be done.

The only real power Congress would have is over the budget as that is the constitutional purpose so they could do a lot of things simply by say, starving ICE of money and controlling procurement. Things like the BBB are really just "reconciliation" bills that reallocate money around by amending the budget, but a new budget can always invalidate the BBB.