Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • This wasn’t nearly as interesting as the headline made it sound.

    It’s a physical box you purchase to effectively break the law, so some of the architecture is going to be shady because it has to be.

    • it polls multiple domain servers to get around blocks (and probably updates that list regularly)
    • it obfuscates the endpoints it hits because they’re trying to secure a box they’re handing to someone else from tinkering that would allow people to access their (pirate) services without buying a box.
    • it obfuscates its user agent when connecting to a weather service to avoid being blocked.

    There’s nothing special or nefarious here. Indeed I’ve worked on projects that had to take the same considerations into account.

    The “someone else’s Hulu account” claim sounds like bullshit to me because it doesn’t make sense from a business perspective. They’d want to control the accounts in question and rotate the passwords regularly, again to avoid freeloaders. More likely they’ve paid for 25ish Hulu subscriptions in every region (hence the initial call for IP geolocation) and are then relaying credentials to a box based on this info.

    The only really sketchy thing in this whole video was the disabling of TLS checking, which was likely done to get around sketchy pirate websites with bad or nonexistent certs. It wasn’t clear though which part of the OS this applied to. If it’s only doing this for the pirate streaming, that’s sort of a bullet you have to take if you want the service. So long as the only data being sourced unencrypted/unverified is some audio and video, you’re fine (assuming you’ve already accounted for streaming such data in your jurisdiction, ie. you’ve got a VPN). If you’re pulling down software updates though, you’re gonna have a bad time.


  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.catoComic Strips@lemmy.worldLeaving
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    4 days ago

    The term for this “vampire load” the power being consumed across a given network that’s doing literally nothing.

    Those little LEDs are a tiny amount, but when they number in the millions, that shit adds up. People have calculated the cost in terms of tonnes of CO2.


  • At my first-ever tech job back in 2000, I was given a little Celeron desktop computer to do my work: mostly writing some ColdFusion and cutting up images in Photoshop. For the most part, the machine worked fine, except whenever I scrolled down on a webpage in Netscape, the box’s PC speaker would start screaming. I tried to ignore it, but I was in a small room with two other nerds and it was getting really annoying.

    One day, my frustrated colleague decided it was time to investigate. As part of the process, he noticed that there was very little air coming out of the power supply fan port. “Must be a busted fan and that’s causing an overheating alarm” he declared. We unplugged the box, popped it onto my desk, and opened it up. The internals were pristine. No dust, nothing. The computer was practically brand new after all.

    We were just about to crack open the power supply (not recommended, but we were getting desperate) when my colleague noticed that something was wedged inside the fan… it was the biggest (dead, thankfully) cockroach I have ever seen, at least 10cm long. For context, this was in Vancouver, Canada. Those just don’t exist there.

    My colleague jammed his screwdriver in there to grind up the cockroach carcass, then plugged the box back in. After a shittone of dessicated cockroach guts spewed out the back, my little computer was operating normally.

    As best we could guess, the monster crawled into the fan in Malaysia when as was assembled and somehow got pinned in there, died of starvation, and then stowed away to Canada.



  • The right time to look elsewhere was when Microsoft bought it.

    The next best time was when viable alternatives like GitLab and later, Codeberg appeared.

    The next best time was when it became clear that they were stealing your code to feed into their sparkly autocomplete and were going to sell it back to you.

    The next best time was when they dumped a bunch of vibecoded garbage into the codebase and killed the uptime.

    The next best time is now.

    You don’t even have to migrate all your stuff. Just start all your new projects on Codeberg, or GitLab, or something self-hosted. Once you get used to the new place, you can migrate your old stuff when you’re ready.







  • You sound like a reasonable person who’s given up, and I get that. Given everything we see, it may even be the rational choice, but it’s not the moral one. It’s fine if you want to check out, but that doesn’t explain the cheerleading for policy that will make everything worse. It turns you from a bystander to an antagonist.

    If this planet is going to end in fire, I have to believe that Good people are going to fight for it, even if we know we can’t win because “if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do”.


  • So this is what we’ve come to.

    First it was “global warming isn’t real”, then it was “it is, but it’s not our fault”, then “it’s our fault, but there’s nothing we can do about it”, and now you’re taking the position of “it’s all gonna burn anyway, so I might as well get mine.”

    Putting the emotional argument aside for a moment, this is a blisteringly naive position to take. In a world on fire, and with Canada’s terrain the way it is, what could possibly make you think that your home isn’t going to be burning next year? A “full stomach”? In a world on fire? Where do you think the food is going to come from? What in your head tells you that you’re going to be able to afford to feed yourself or your family in a world where crop yields are cratering everywhere? The people with the money, who stand to profit further from policies like the one you’re supporting here will gleefully let you die and not even notice.

    For every litre of oil & gas Canada leaves in the ground, the cost of accessing those fossils elsewhere increases. Driving up the price drives divestment and innovation everywhere, and that means fewer burning forests and a better chance of survival.

    While it’s true that resource extraction can drive an economy, extracting resources that literally burn the future is at-best shortsighted… extractive if you will. We could be pushing money into electrification, transport, and education, fields in desperate need of support that objectively lead to a stronger economy nation-wide. With the US cratering, we could position ourselves as a cultural hub, or a manufacturing bridge between Asia and Europe… but instead Carney is choosing short-term profits for private companies (protected by public funds!) and increasing our already sizeable contribution to burning the world.

    But I guess it’s ok if a few people have some jobs for a few years. You best hope your home isn’t next on the to-burn list.



  • It was surprisingly common, though due to the cost of buying tapes, it wasnt as common as it is now.

    VHS tapes have this nifty feature where you could store video on it in 3 different formats. While the tape from the rental place was stored in the format that fit roughly 2hrs on a tape, you could record three 2hr movies to a tape if you used the lower quality EP format (I think that was the acronym).

    This lead to people like my friend’s dad keeping shelves of tapes with hastily scrawled labels on them for 3 different movies or 6 different episodes.

    All you needed for any of this was 2 VCRs, which from the early 90s were pretty affordable.