All true! And if you want the service to be up 99.99% of the time, you can’t rely on waking someone up to fix it.

Aww, thanks.

Diet is what you eat, not what you buy or what recipes you read on the web.

Remember print magazines and newspapers? Ads pay a large portion of the costs of producing them, but no reader is obliged to look at any ads at all. Advertisers pay for a chance to be seen, not for an obligation for anyone to look at them. Since nobody has any obligation to read the ads, avoiding them cannot be a violation. You pays your money and you takes your chances.

The Tesla Rusty Triangle, the vehicle for your high-iron, low-poly lifestyle.

In today’s example of a garden path sentence …

https://sign.dropbox.com/blog/a-recent-security-incident-involving-dropbox-sign

Here’s the actual security advisory, which contains much more information than the fluff article about it.

Everything is glowing all the time. At human body temperature, you’re glowing mostly in the infrared.

They learned from the poets about metrical feet!

When I was in middle school around 1990, my family lived in military base housing, and there was a “teen center”. It had a TV, stereo system, some arcade games¹, and a snack bar. It hosted dances on weekends; with one night designated for the middle-school crowd and one for the high-school crowd.

¹ “Red wizard shot the food!”

People pay for this?

Cutting someone’s brake lines has been a means of assassination for a while. What’s new here is that it could potentially be done remotely, e.g. an attacker in Bucharest targeting a victim in Seattle on behalf of a payer in Moscow.

On the other hand, they could be yelling, “Yes! Keep going! You’re the best!” and you’re thinking of just quitting?

Other way around. Unsupervised OTA updates are dangerous.

First: A car is a piece of safety-critical equipment. It has a skilled operator who has familiarized themselves with its operation. Any change to its operation, without the operator being aware that a change was made, puts the operator and other people at risk. If the operator takes the car into the shop for a documented recall, they know that something is being changed. An unsupervised OTA update can (and will) alter the behavior of safety-critical equipment without the operator’s knowledge.

Second: Any facility for OTA updates is an attack vector. If a car can receive OTA updates from the manufacturer, then it can receive harmful OTA updates from an attacker who has compromised the car’s update mechanism or the manufacturer. Because the car is safety-critical equipment — unlike your phone, it can kill people — it is unreasonable to expose it to these attacks.

Driving is literally the most deadly thing that most people do every day. It is unreasonable to make driving even more dangerous by allowing car manufacturers — or attackers — to change the behavior of cars without the operator being fully aware that a change is being made.

This is not a matter of “it’s my property, you need my consent” that can be whitewashed with a contract provision. This is a matter of life safety.

Personally, I blame the people telling the lies; e.g. the antivax campaigners, the tobacco companies, etc.

If your input is limited to ASCII, sure.

But ASCII is only a 7-bit standard, and only supports those characters needed by American English computer users in the 1960s. Lots of characters you might see in “plain text” are not part of ASCII; including all accented characters, all non-Latin alphabets, and many common symbols and punctuation marks including these: £€¢©™°

(Yes, you could get accented characters in the pre-Unicode days using 8-bit “extended ASCII”, e.g. IBM/Windows code pages. However, those are not really ASCII and they will break if the text is interpreted as the wrong code page.)

Unicode collation is the Right Thing today.

If you allow comments at all, you are gonna get spam. That spam will range from “please buy good vitamins from my holy web site” to horribly illegal eye-destroying things.

However, another meaning is “fart”.

I’m sure you would have done great in the Roman Empire!

Recognize that a lot of what you’re suffering from is, well, suffering; that it’s part of the human condition and not really specific to one historical epoch, country, or economic system. Sickness, poverty, cruelty, envy, selfishness, domination, and other woes have been with us for much longer than economic or political modernity.

People have been investigating how to alleviate suffering — in the general sense — for a very long time. There are whole philosophical and social movements about it, which have proposed strategies such as —

• “Love your neighbor; forgive those who have hurt you. Feed the hungry, heal the sick, comfort the afflicted.” (Christianity)
• “Avoid killing, stealing, lying, raping, and getting drunk. Seek out wholesome companions. Maybe do some meditation.” (Buddhism)
• “Pursue a simple life. Try to avoid pain rather than seeking out pleasure. Don’t worry about gods or politics.” (Epicureanism)