The two that fired the shots have been named.

Thankfully Costco stations don’t do that. I’ve not seen an ad at a pump in years.

I switched to Smart Launcher because it was the only one I found that mentioned being able to import my Nova backup. The transfer wasn’t perfect, but extremely good.

That somehow doesn’t surprise me

That’s true, and I should have been less absolute in my language. However all of those activities were niche and actively scary sounding to the ‘normies’ (and to a lesser extent still are)

I actually did find “warez” on BBSs before I had Internet access. But I really think even finding BBS numbers in the back of a magazine and trying them out put me outside most computer users of the time.

Well. That explains why it was very suddenly and forcefully uninstalled and blocked at work.

I hope this means it can be unblocked now, but I’d assume not anytime soon if ever.

Ah, that makes sense

Security by obscurity would have made a lot more sense before global communications allowed people to share the results of poking around like this.

Even after the Internet was invented probably 99% or more of users would have no clue about digging into the systems.

I’ve mentioned this before, but on one of my early contracts I found an ‘encryption’ function with a keyspace of 32… values. I don’t mean 32-bit. The key was prepended as the first byte to the stream, and the decryption function could accept the full 8-bit range.

Fortunately that was replaced by real encryption some time before I left. But I’m pretty sure nobody actually cracked it before then, because I think nobody thought to try it.

What about a maze that adds a few hundred ms to the response time with each request, so the load gets less the longer it’s trapped?

Maurice Ravel - Bolero

Although ‘enjoy’ is rather a strong word. More like “fail to dislike”. Barely.

I’ve never skydived so I don’t know, but that does genuinely sound like something that may be helpful or even necessary.

They asked if the numbers were from servers. No, the numbers are fake. The calls may be backed by SIMs, and that is an interesting implementation detail, but doesn’t change how to treat them (which is don’t try to retaliate)

Now I’m curious what the original was about.

Most famous depends on criteria, but the top selling single of all time is apparently White Christmas by Bing Crosby, and that’s a song I like.

Least famous is more difficult. Probably something by Auralnauts or Niel Cicierega or Acapella Science, etc.

Usually they are just spoofed, and the real owner of the number is innocent.

Is it a PCI Express bus?

It’s frustrating that they are spending money and bandwidth on ‘AI’ at all, but it’s not all bad news:

"Also, launch “AI controls” into Firefox, giving people a clear way to turn AI off entirely - current and future AI features. . "

Hey now!

You sure about that? Just by reading the title I know it’s composed by Hans Zimmer.