joel cretan

@lcamtuf@infosec.exchange even though the giveaway is over, I’ll chime in. At a previous job, I was researching a $2000 commercial 5G base station. We were putting modified firmware on it and I had to do frequent builds. For some reason, it used an “eUSB” drive as its main storage, a flash chip on a tiny board with a USB controller. Taking it out to write to it was a pain, so I made a USB switch with some relays and a hacked up cable that could change the connection from a laptop to the device, controlled by a Raspberry Pi. It worked, was awesome, until after maybe 50 uses the device got stuck in the BIOS and could no longer recognize USB drives. Had my colleagues look at it, no one could figure out why, maybe my cable had a random short briefly? Started over with another device, trying to be extra careful with everything. Again, worked great, then the same thing happened. $4000 later, I just relied on unplugging the drive from then on with the remaining functional device. No one ever could figure out what it was doing to the thing. Also at that job I had an intern who was working on a fault protection relay for the power grid that was for some reason missing a power cable for itself. We checked the other device like it that we had, it just used 120V or 240V AC from the wall. He said the device with missing cable said it could use the same voltage range. I checked his connections but didn’t read the thing myself. Luckily he was the one under the desk plugging it in because if the small explosion had been larger I would have felt really bad putting him in harm’s way. I knew better to be more careful with wall power. Turns out the second device wanted 120V DC, not AC. Lots of wild stuff at that job.

@Colin @jeder @vozercozer they route it through a referral link to get a cut of the ads. Browser hijackers are pretty common believe it or not

@lockelyfox I’ve only just now learned it exists, and I’m sorry, but you should know that I’m jealous you ever had it

@futurebird is this a show about ants? Or just show and tell with some ants in person? I’m in dire need of long-form video just showing ants in their colony doing their thing for hours at a time. My cat demands this and I can’t find much of it.

@galacticstone@mastodon.social @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social sources say probably AI generated. But still…I’m not that mad…

@futurebird I see…well….how about going into the ant content business? My cat would be a very loyal customer

@igorkulman where do they still teach Pascal as a first language? I wasn’t aware it was being used hardly at all outside of Delphi, since at least the 1990s

@mattblaze@federate.social neither, apparently, have the entire staff of US attorneys of the SDNY https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/22/epstein-files-release-review-00739987

@osmosisch@idlethumbs.social @jwz@mastodon.social this one is so funny to me, but not because of the content of the joke. I can't believe we're sitting here thousands of years later trying to understand it. This could be their best joke, or their worst one, or not even a joke at all, and we have no way of knowing, so our top scientists are debating why it's supposed to be funny, or if it even is. The person who wrote it down would probably think that was so strange. I hope someone prints out this post and an archaeologist finds it 4000 years from now and cannot figure out what we're talking about.

@sigkill@mastodon.social @b0rk@social.jvns.ca @ripienaar@devco.social yeah, easy to verify and/or low stakes are the cases where I’m finding it works to apply it, which I’m unfortunately being required to do as well. That’s sort of where I’m expecting we’ll settle out in 5 years once the hype drops off. It’ll be useful for some things, not others, we’ll figure it out. In the mean time, if you still want to search for web pages like a normal person, Kagi is great, cannot recommend enough

@infobeautiful@vis.social my cat absolutely loves my laser printer. She demands that I print more. So I only have half of these problems.