Great Moments in Computer Programming

[The Happiness Engine]

We've all been worried about how mobile phones are stuffed with sensors that can watch what we watch, hear what we hear, track where we go and note what we do. The evolving world of personal data privacy is based around these not being stored in the vast vaults of big data, keeping them from being grist to the mill of manipulating our digital personas.

But what happens if the phone itself grinds that corn? It may never share a single photograph without your permission, but what if it can look at that photograph and generate precise metadata about what, who, how, when, and where it depicts?

This is an aspect of edge computing that is ahead of the regulators, even those of the EU who want to heavily control things like facial recognition. By the time any such regulation is produced, countless millions of devices will be using it to ostensibly provide safe, private, friendly on-device services that make taking and keeping photographs so much more convenient and fun.

It's going to be very hard to turn that off, and very easy to argue for exemptions that weaken the regs to the point of pointlessness. Especially if the police and security services lobby hard as well, which they will as soon as they realise that this defeats end-to-end encryption without even touching end-to-end encryption.

So yes, Apple's anti-CSAM model is capable of being used without impacting the privacy of the innocent, if it is run exactly as version 1.0 is described. It is also capable of working with the advances elsewhere in technology to break that privacy utterly, without setting off the tripwires of personal protection we're putting in place right now.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

If Steve Jobs were alive, I bet he would be interested in phones telling him which employees were trying to get raises and employment at other tech companies and he wouldn't give a shit about the abuse of kids. We should have listened. :(

[AArdvark]

How did child abuse happen before the internet? The mails, I suppose. The pervolinos will just go back to that.

Or just some kind of dark web stuff that will enctypt a nasty picture inside some other, inoffensive photo. And they wont catch everyone and we'll all suffer privacy loss for it.

THE
NO CHOICES
AARDVARK

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Did you guys know that Google Protects Every Search With Encryption? They've only put a toast up every time I have brought forth their stupid page for the last three days to say so!

[The Happiness Engine]

Today I was looking at a linux box and noticed a rather peculiar process backgrounded:
`tail -f /dev/null`

I am not sure what this dev team thought was going to happen but now I know someone typed that in, so now do you.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Trust no-one!

[Casual Observer]

Trust no-one!

You're right, zero trust is the holy grail of cybersecurity.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

It's important to me that you know I was just making a joke about being so paranoid that a person tails dev/null to make sure they aren't against them too.

[AArdvark]

What does that dev null mean?

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Putting anything into the file /dev/null means it just disappears. So if you tried to tail (or: get a running list of stuff in there) you'd never see anything. It be gone.

(You know what? That's my UNRESEARCHED MEMORY; the older I get the less I find I actually know about anything, haha. It would not surprise me if there was a "Well actually" regarding it.)

[The Happiness Engine]

ICJ is correct, but a little context:

In Linux, Everything Is A File. Your speaker? A file. The hard disk? A file. An actual file? No psyche, its also a file. The resources being used by a program? All files. It is weird and wonderful.
So under the category of special files is /dev/null. Its contents are Literal Nothing. It's not zero, because that's a different file, /dev/zero, which is just a zero. Nothing can ever be in /dev/null, nothing can ever come out of /dev/null, so looking at it is kind of like staring into a black hole.

P.S. to linux nerds: have a too-large log file but can't restart the process writing to it? `echo < /dev/null > /path/to/large.log` saves the day! I have JUST learned this and need to know why it's not literally printed on the front cover of "Intro to Linux"

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Aardvark and I have talked about how word processors and the like get "finished" but they have a team there and they have to give them something to do.

When they changed pasting in Sheets to CONTAIN formatting by default, I knew they would break "Paste without Formatting" and they have. Many times.

Maybe it's Brave, but I doubt it. Paste without Formatting is once again broken in Sheets. Every spreadsheet seems to eventually default to including the formatting, which is maddening. IT IS A SPREADSHEET. It probably has its own font and size. You could make it a toggle or you could make pasting with formatting the thing with the weird key combo.

[pinback]

P.S. to linux nerds: have a too-large log file but can't restart the process writing to it? `echo < /dev/null > /path/to/large.log` saves the day! I have JUST learned this and need to know why it's not literally printed on the front cover of "Intro to Linux"

I've done this, but just...

echo "" > largefile.log

Didn't occur to me to use /dev/null.

[The Happiness Engine]

Less typing, that's better.

[pinback]

Not as cool though.

"I just echoed an empty string to it."
"I just echoed the fuckin' opposite of existence to it, motherfucker."

Stackoverflow would prefer your method.

[RealNC]

I've done this, but just...

echo "" > largefile.log

Cool kids use:

Code: Select all

truncate -s0 largefile.log

[Tdarcos]

Not as cool though.

"I just echoed an empty string to it."
"I just echoed the fuckin' opposite of existence to it, motherfucker."

Stackoverflow would prefer your method.

Programmers prefer precise solutions to hacks. While the other way might work, it depends on quirks in the shell (by 'quirks' I mean the general features and behavior) which if someone develops an 'improved' shell that changes that behavior - and programmers love to change things, they're like engineers in Star Trek - the /dev/null method will work and the other might not.

[The Happiness Engine]

chars=( 4C 4F 4C ); for c in ${chars[@]}; do printf "%b" "\x${c}"; done; printf "\n"

I did.

Also there is no possible change to any shell that has ever existed that would break any of these methods.

[Tdarcos]

Did you guys know that Google Protects Every Search With Encryption? They've only put a toast up every time I have brought forth their stupid page for the last three days to say so!

Whoop tee do! Ever since that company (Let's Crypt?) that got its issuer certificate into the chain recognized by all major browsers, and offered sites free SSL certificates, everyone can offer encrypted connections. Even Jolt Country does! Notice this page's web address starts with HTTPS://

"Jolt Country: where your pointless blatherings are fully protected by 256-bit encryption!"

[Casual Observer]

OK, I'm just about at my wits end with Google Chrome and am thinking about uninstalling. The only thing holding me back are all the damn passwords it's stored for me that I will have to go back and recover. That and my integrations to salesforce, apollo.io, zoominfo, seamless.ai, and getemail.io, etc.

Chrome has always been a resource hog, we all have known this for years. Now, on my machine, Chrome is doing something I didn't know was even possible. It's periodically freezing, not just itself but certain functions for the whole computer. Magically, with no warning, Chrome tabs just stop working, period. At the same time, some functions on the current webpage work while others do not. Ok, that's one thing. A whole other thing is it stops me from changing applications. I can't go to word, I can't open powerpoint, all I can do is some of whatever is facing me in my browser right now. The only solution is the old three finger salute, restart Chrome and then recover pages. This is happening 3 - 4 times per day now.

Has anyone ever heard of this?
Is this a Virus?
Do I re-install Chrome or say fuck you google. If so, what's the best browser to use nowadays? I assume Edge isn't it. I hear Firefox has been chugging along all this time, is that any good now?