Reminds me of one of the characters from Extraordinary who could 3D print anything from his ass given enough time.

As soon as the dealer quoted $1600 to fix I’d whip out my phone right there and call the state Attorney Generals office and file a consumer affairs complaint against both Volkswagen and the dealer.

I worked in IT at a university about 15 years ago. As part of a research project I helped set up a Tor exit node. Within a few hours of it taking on traffic I was contacted by the universities IT security team. They were seeing all sorts of malicious traffic originating from that system and wanted to know what was going on. They had the system shut down immediately.

Soylent Green is people!

Haven’t you heard the price of memory is skyrocketing?

I have a few decades programming experience, as a professional software engineer, an open source developer, and a DevOps engineer. There is no way in hell I would do a code review where 15k lines were added and a similar amount of lines removed without having a long discussion with the person who made those changes. I’d want to ask a lot of detailed questions about the changes, questions that an LLM isn’t likely to answer, and most definitely not questions I’d be inclined to try to type into an LLM to try to get an answer.

Over the years I’ve dealt with all manner of bugs, from overflows & underflows, to bad assumptions about logic flow, and much much more. The whole purpose of pointed questioning of the author is to be comfortable with decisions made in the code and to minimize the chances of all sorts of potential bugs.

I use an older version of Calibre that has a fairly robust plug-in to remove DRM. I use it to remove DRM from all my ebook purchases. That plug-in isn’t supported in newer versions of Calibre so I don’t upgrade.

Not to mention that it’s trivial to change your IP on most cloud providers. So if a VPN provider is using a cloud service for some of its gateways then it can quickly remember them if necessary.

Companies like Akamai already do this to an extent. My employer is an Akamai customer, and they’ve offered this service to us in the past when we saw a lot of malicious traffic originating from commercial VPN providers.

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How do you decide which open source projects are worthy of taxpayer money, and how much does a given project get?

I have a couple projects I’ve put up in GitHub as open source. Would they qualify? Or are you just talking about well known open source projects like Linux?

I’ve hardly scratched the surface with them, but I did create on/off sensors for my ancient washer & dryer with them. I’m sure I’ll come up with more ideas soon enough.

New costume idea: Racist zombie hulking maniac

The issue with cloud providers like AWS is that they charge for virtually everything, and that makes it easy to rack up charges if you forget about something you spun up as a test last week and forgot to terminate it. For larger companies it can be a significant issue. So there are other companies out there that you can use to scan your entire AWS account, summarize what you’re using, and highlight things you may not need any more. They’ll also recommend cost savings measures like paying for a year of server time up front instead of paying as you go. If you know you’ll need a server for a year then paying annually is a lot less expensive.

On the plus side, you don’t need to deal with things like hardware failures. We have a large AWS environment where I work, and we’ll occasionally get an email informing us that an instance is “running on degraded hardware”. A simple reboot (power cycle) will move the instance to new hardware. And if you decide you need more RAM, more CPUs etc. then it’s also as simple as rebooting.

You mention it’s listening on port 53, but have you actually tried DNS queries to see how it responds? Will it resolve www.google.com or <reverse_ip>.in-address.arpa?

So glad to hear this. Had Insteon in my old house and moved when they shut down, so I’m mostly using eave now in the new house. I loved Insteon, and kept my hub & plug in modules when we moved. I’ll definitely consider using them again going forward.

Cost of living is way too high since everything other than pineapples & coffee has to be imported…

Yuck. Makes me glad ours are in our relatively dry basement. But with them down there we used to forget about loads we started until I set up the notifications.

Same. Ours also uses a timer to re-check in 15 minutes if nobody is home. That way one of us gets alerted when we’re actually home and can do something about it.

It also doesn’t alert us between 11pm and 8am so we don’t get woken up if we start a late night load.

Wow, are you really that clueless about crypto stealing malware, Fraud by crypto exchanges, Authentication attacks, etc?

None of those sorts of attacks would be prevented by the use any sort of escrow service because you’re not actively performing a transaction.

An Analysis of the first half of this year also shows a significant uptick in attacks on personal crypto wallets, and over $2 billion stolen so far in 2025.