palordrolap

the Russian alternative

You say that like it’s not simply swapping which one you have in your mouth.

Your company needs to charge Waymo a toll for usage of your premises.

Alternatively, get a button-operated rising-arm barrier. All a driver needs to do is push the button to get in or out. Unless they’re an AI that can’t get out of the car, anyway.

Edit: Sometimes I a word.

This was the in the UK over a decade ago, back in the bad old days of migration codes and everything being underpinned by BT Openreach who basically had their arm twisted to allow other ISPs to exist and use that infrastructure. And even then they guarded everything jealously (and sometimes incompetently, but that’s another story).

We didn’t sell telephone lines, so every DSL we sold was on an existing POTS line that each customer already had. Most of our customers wouldn’t have known about getting a separate POTSless line even if that was possible at the time. And the customer in question certainly didn’t.

They had it installed on their company’s one and only telecommunications line. Of all the hundreds of customers I dealt with over the years, it only ever happened the once… although we did have to warn at least one other customer off the idea when it happened to come up in conversation.

Once upon a time I worked for a company that provided DSL internet.

One day we got a call from a customer complaining that they had no connection.

We investigated and discovered that their line had been completely cancelled from under us and ask the customer what happened to their telephone line.

They said they had set up VoIP on their internet connection, and thus no longer had need of their telephone line and so they cancelled it.

The telephone line on which we had provisioned their DSL internet…

“No more hand-written code” sounds to me an awful lot like “we don’t need that telephone line any more”.

The real shame here is that the fall-out won’t be as sudden and the people who ought to be getting the brunt of it will manage to squirm out of any responsibility.

Are you a believer in the idea “They who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear”? Hint: You shouldn’t be.

And do you know for certain that your sandboxes and VMs don’t simply pass through the CPUID instruction? And if they don’t, do they rotate their fake CPUIDs? And how often does that happen?

What I’ve read just now is what I’d deliberately not gone looking for up to this point in case I found this out.

Linux and Windows happen to require that the executables that access that information be run with root privileges, but it looks like that’s merely an affectation.

It seems that any old piece of software, without root or other privileges, can independently run the CPUID instruction that obtains a processor’s serial number.

I do not like this one bit.

Either I knew and forgot, or misunderstood it as CPU family identification whenever I’ve come across it. Denial is also a possibility. We’ll see if I remember this in a month or two.

I would be very interested to know how they are able to identify a specific CPU. The article speculates but does not answer this question.

The fact that this is even possible is a security nightmare.

OK, I’ve done a bit more digging and pieced it together. Acknowledgement to @[email protected] for prompting me to try (again) to find a command that might do it among other things.

IMO, this sort of information shouldn’t be in processors in the first place, but apparently it is there and needs admin/root access to, well, access it.

… and the game in question requires kernel-level anti-cheat, so of course, it has the necessary access.

The command for Linux is sudo dmidecode -t processor, which dumps a lot of info including an ID field, which is supposedly the CPU’s specific identifier. It can be grepped for or otherwise filtered out.

My own Ryzen gives 8 hexadecimal pairs, so it’s a 64-bit value.

I would not know that that was unique to my specific individual processor if I had not been told, but I’ll assume that at least part of it is not unique between Ryzens of the same calibre. (I won’t be posting any of it for comparison, for obvious reasons.)

So the upshot is, if you don’t want to be identified right down to your CPU, don’t run programs as root if there’s any chance of them phoning home.

" ‘I was only following orders’ […] The refuge of scoundrels since the dawn of time. " - Patrick Ness

No, I’ve no idea who Patrick Ness is either, but it’s a quote from one of his works, and it happens to be true.

In an ideal world, she’d win every penny and the money would come out of the assets of each and every person involved in her arrest, including their immediate superiors so that lessons would be learned.

She lost her assets through no fault of her own. Seems only fair that they should lose theirs, if not worse, because they actually did something wrong.

There’s an old saying: “If it’s stupid but it works, it isn’t stupid.”

Tables still work and probably always will, whether they’re meant for layout or not.

CGI on the other hand, has pretty much gone the way of the dinosaur. If you need that, you’ll have to learn something new. Or find a very amenable host.