Andrew Drake

@glyph@mastodon.social I've long wanted an OS-level option to, when an app asks for contact access, to give them a phonebook of plausible fake data where every email is a spam trap.

@glyph the copilot terms of service literally say it's for entertainment purposes only https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot/for-individuals/termsofuse "Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk." Which is more honest than "informational purposes only" but just makes the fact that people trust it even more depressing

@theeclecticdyslexic@mstdn.social @colinmford@typo.social It only takes one rogue token to mess up a reply, so there's some interesting potential for adversarial strategies where you wait for some other bidder to start emitting their ad (having already sunk some money into it) and then you outbid them on any random token and emit gibberish (or ideally something damaging to their brand). Or you could run that against Google directly and buy cheap tokens in the middle of answers that aren't attractive to other bidders, again emitting gibberish. Bonus, once the answer is messed up, it's probably cheap to keep emitting more gibberish, making the failure even more apparent to the user.

@mhoye we had a vendor that our data team was using for replicating our databases. Super expensive, and with a pricing model clearly (to me) unrelated to their actual costs. This came to my attention about a month before we were supposed to renew our annual contract. In that month I replaced them with some Rust that was an exact drop-in, but faster, with a couple of new features we had long wanted, and literally *two orders of magnitude* less cost. Hundreds of thousands a year to less than two thousand. The compute now easily fits on a laptop, but it does benefit from a local network connection to the database 😉 Their CEO was pissed we were leaving (because they had already given us a big discount) and absolutely certain there was no way we could possibly do it cheaper, and that we'd come crawling back. Given the obvious insanity of that position, my only explanation is he was drinking his own SaaS pricing Kool-aid.

@theeclecticdyslexic@mstdn.social @colinmford@typo.social probably doable if they're using an open-weight model! Though doing it in real-time does up the challenge.

@mast0d0nphan@beige.party @ana@starlite.rodeo there's nothing worth reusing in a mall. Data centers have racks of heavy equipment inside and generally heavy cooling setups on the roof, too. Mall construction isn't rated for that. Cheaper and less risk to demolish and build to spec than to retrofit. Nobody wants to fry millions of dollars in server hardware because the retrofitted mall roof leaked. The site is flat, but unless you get lucky it probably has none of the other things you'd want (like proximity to big power lines or network backbones).

@jrconlin @futurebird I thought hummingbirds were pollinators, too, though?

@alci@pouet.chapril.org @glyph@mastodon.social that is a neat feature but doesn't really have the same effect. The point is to poison the data source, to make the entire concept of using harvested contacts unappealing. This requires that the poisoned data actually be harmful, and that the rate of using such an option must be high enough that ingesting poison is a virtual certainty. To be harmful, the spam trap needs to negatively affect their email reputation. That's not something that you can really do as an individual. Normally this is larger mail operators, but a project like Graphene might be able to partner with one of those to make it happen. For the rate of use to be high enough to matter, I'm not sure even a rate of 100% among Graphene users would be enough. But it would be a good start!

@DrHyde@fosstodon.org @SecureOwl@infosec.exchange just carefully rearrange the wires going into the instruction decoder so all the instruction encodings have a few bits swapped. It's a darn shame silicon fab is so expensive, I'd love to see how long it would take someone to figure that out given a chip with a working firmware image on it 😁

@alci@pouet.chapril.org @glyph@mastodon.social from the docs, it looks like it does the lying about having permission thing, but returns an empty contact list instead of poisoned fake data. Is there an option for the latter somewhere?

@cwebber@social.coop I'm so excited for the first compromise where people are like "darn, that's what we get for updating immediately after the standard 7 day cooldown"

@aburka I've done one of those once! I lay down for a quick nap, 12 hours later I woke up having missed an exam and feeling *fantastic* (at least until I realized what happened).

@ifixcoinops boost button but you can specify the entire emotional valence as a vector with uncertainty intervals

@byakushin@mementomori.social @futurebird@sauropods.win this was taken freehand with my cell phone camera through one of the eyepieces of my stereo microscope, the subject is an Argentine ant about 3mm long. A little finicky but I got plenty of good shots. It is a bit washed out because the subject was captured inside a Ziploc bag, which was somewhat matte.

@nini @glyph indeed. Though you'd think the mandatory arbitration clause would be effective enough at that!

@dpflug @jrconlin @futurebird you know, I know that's the meme, but in all my years going to Waffle House growing up, I never saw any fighting or even any heated arguments! Admittedly relatively few of those were late-night, but I imagine the hummingbirds aren't out then, either 😛

@jrconlin @futurebird oh gosh yes, re anger for each other. Any other hummingbird and the male Anna's that claims our yard as territory is dive-bombing them within seconds, and escorting them off the property at high speed. Very impressive to watch! The male likes to dive-bomb me when I'm out there, usually waiting until I'm hunched over and not expecting it. Then he hovers there at eye level, as if to laugh at making me jump! Clearly doesn't see me as an actual threat, though, because right after he goes back to feeding in the lemon tree, often quite close to me (I'll often watch for a while since it's a nice treat to see them so close).

@jrconlin @futurebird interesting! We've got a lemon tree and there're constantly honeybees, bumblebees (yellow-faced), and an Anna's feeding in it. Never seen the bees give the hummer any trouble. Often some other small birds gleaning insects off the leaves, too.

@Sadsquatch I would *absolutely* go on that!

@pathunstrom Good rule! I'm enjoying seeing all the replies to posts I can't see from accounts I've already muted for other reasons, confirming the efficacy 😁

@admin @mhoye pretty sure the CPU on an Eye-Fi (WiFi SD card) could handle a database with a few million records.

@ifixcoinops @drahardja on the hardware side, some locally-visible indication that the device is being controlled remotely (e.g. blinking for a few seconds after a command) + some way to easily disable that remote control + local controls so you still have the basic non-smart functionality? Though it's cheaper not to add all that stuff so the cheapest option at the big box hardware store will probably also be the most abuser-friendly :/

@ifixcoinops I'm definitely prone to that line of thinking. My instinctive reaction was "what's the point of adding safeguards when the abuser can just comment them out". But I've been programming for nearly as long as I have memories, and it's been nearly 20 years since the last time I saw a piece of open-source software as something I couldn't just change to do what I wanted. It takes some conscious effort to remember that isn't how it is for everyone!

@troed@swecyb.com @geospacedman@mastodon.social for any given image, some portion of the audience might notice, and some portion of those that notice will now have some form of negative reaction to it. Maybe they're reminded of the environmental impact of AI, or the impact of AI art broadly on artist jobs, or they just find the aesthetic really grating. Either way, there's a negative emotional response that distracts from what you're saying. It's a bit like cracking a joke about a charged topic. The joke might land with most of the audience and add to the presentation, but it might also alienate a different part. That's the sense in which I meant it's "bad" - it might have an impact other than the one you're going for.

@alameth fun fact! Cabbage and relatives are sometimes called "cruciferous vegetables", in reference to the cross shape of those four-petaled flowers.

@dportalesr @aburka definitely less likely to make it worse than a longer nap where you get into deeper sleep, but I think the best case for me on those has been "a tiny bit less tired."

@futurebird@sauropods.win maybe this is Wikipedia misrepresenting the idea, but it sounds like this puts a lot of additional burden on the victim? Like there's all these meetings with the victim and offender, on top of the trial that established the guilt of the offender in the first place. I had my wallet stolen once, and the majority of the harm to me was the time and stress it took to replace the IDs and cards. If on top of that I had to go to a bunch of meetings with the guy who stole it, that would be dramatically more time and stress for me? I would feel pressured to just say yes to whatever to get out of the meetings as soon as possible, effectively forfeiting justice at all. For violent crime, why should a victim be forced to spend more time and trauma interacting with the offender? This seems like it amplifies the harm to them in much the same way. If it's something the victim wants I guess that's another thing, but it seems kind of awful if it's your only option.

@troed@swecyb.com @geospacedman@mastodon.social why not just ... not use an image, then? A good image can add to a presentation, but a bad image detracts from it. If you don't want to go to the effort for the former, that's understandable, but it seems like "no image" should fall in the middle and is even less effort.

@troed@swecyb.com not really seeing the link between "managers should say no to work that their team doesn't have the bandwidth to take on" and "you shouldn't make any effort to make your presentation more appealing to your audience".

@peterkos@iosdev.space @phire@phire.place that's basically the point of outsourcing this sort of thing to contractors. You want an army of people doing undesirable work for cheap, but you don't want to get your hands dirty. So you contract it out to someone who has no moral qualms about that sort of thing and tell them you want the job done and don't want to hear anything from them but results. They predictably run their shop like this, and if it ever does come back to you in a way that matters, you pretend to be outraged, terminate your contract with them, and contract with a new company that of course turns around and does the exact same thing.

@troed@swecyb.com @geospacedman@mastodon.social well, as you said, you can't please everyone. You've lost me at "and you should never try to", though. To paraphrase, given the choice to put in a little more work to make the presentation appealing to your entire audience, vs. only 90% of it, that you *shouldn't* put in that little bit of extra work? I can understand putting a limit on the amount of effort, but to "never try"?

@spirit532@mastodon.social this is unbelievably cool! I would never have guessed it would be that simple. If I'm reading correctly, it sounds like the kinematics from a modest CNC metalworking mill would easily handle the needed forces, just need to swap out the tool for a big ultrasonic transducer and tip/wire-feeding system? Not as cheap as FDM but that feels pretty achievable for a hobbyist already! I'd be very curious to see how the parts respond to heat treatment. As-is it seems like the parts are basically annealed during the process (and have properties comparable to the annealed input), would whole-part annealing get them closer? Does the gap widen with tempering or do they temper like the bulk material? I hope they keep working on this :)

@arthfach @nitinkhanna @adrienne fwiw, keeping a computer powered while seizing it is a standard tactic, and tools to do it are commercially available and not particularly expensive, e.g. https://cdsg.com/products/hotplug-field-kit?image=0 No surgery needed most of the time, unless you are connected directly to the wall (no power strip), and your power connector doesn't expose anything hot while slightly removed from the wall.

@JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange I've seriously considered setting up monitoring on ICMP ping packets for a similar reason. Sadly harder to do these days (and ping is less useful as a diagnostic in general) now that it's the norm to have a CDN in front of everything.