There are options for persistent connections, with logs and detachment, etc. ZNC/PsyBNC/Quassel come to mind. ZNC, in particular, is extendable via Perl or Python (or TCL if you're a masochist). I hear good things about Quassel as well, but it's still early in development.
I get Android notifications if I'm detached from irssi in tmux and someone PMs, says my handle, or any number of custom triggers I set. All free & open source (other than the android phone).
I'd be interested to know what folks in your field think of the newly developed substance [1]'Vantablack'. Thin carbon tubes that apparently absorb 99.965% of visible light. Are there any cool applications for this stuff in practical effects?
I've been out of SFX for decades so can't speak for current practice; anything really black (classically velvet/black flock) is (was?) useful for hiding all sorts of things from the camera. So I'm just guessing here, but because cameras (more specifically the sensors) are much more limited than the human eye in terms of the range of brightness they can handle it's probably more useful in scientific/direct view applications.
THIS is a not-insignificant part of the problem. right here. You jumped straight out of the gate with calling the OP stupid. Not even a feigned attempt at some sort of discussion or debate.
You saw the word "conservative" and BOOM it's right into the Us vs. Them, Me vs. You, Good vs. Evil. I just don't see how that is healthy, at all, for anyone or anything including the country. It's childish. Social media and karma/upvotes/likes/karma/fake-internet-points, whatever you want to call it, has devolved us into kids on the schoolyard.
I mean, if you look throughout history, even at the last century, you see civil rights actions that were vehemently opposed by conservatives and traditionalists.
Votes for women, emancipation of slaves, equal rights for women, for blacks, for gays, for the transgendered, worker protections, abolition of child labour, mandatory paid leave, maternity leave, environmental protections etc.
The list could go on, and in each and every instance we have had conservatives and traditionalists fighting them tooth and nail, and losing the battle every single time.
While the comment the person you replied to is short and lacking in substance, I do think there is truth to it.
What's that old Buddhist maxim?
Change is the only constant in life or You cannot change the wind, but you can adjust your sails.
Change is a certainty, but conservatives and traditionalists have made it their life's work to resist it.
It is incredibly, incredibly dangerous to mix benzodiazepines (Xanax, Ativan, etc.) with Methadone. This is common knowledge amongst opiate addicts, at least everywhere I ever went in the US back in my wilder days. I have 3 close friends whom I grew up with that all died before age 30 from abusing that exact combination of narcotics, and know of countless more just in my home state alone.
Benzos are a respiratory depressant, and when combined with Methadone it amplifies it to the point where you stop breathing in your sleep and never wake up from respiratory failure, lack of oxygen to the brain, or your body freaks out and has a coronary episode, etc. it's really really risky -- no joke & no exaggeration. If alcohol is in the mix too then it's even worse.
And I'm not going to pretend like it's not enjoyable -- because it is. It's a great fuckin' buzz if downers are your thing. IMO it's better than heroin (no 'rush' to it, but the effects hit you like a ton of bricks and it lasts all night long. And it's a cheap buzz too), but it's also asking for your life to end.
methadone clinics know this and every one that I've ever seen, heard of, or been to personally Benzos are their one big 'no-no' [as in: if we find it in your Whiz Quiz we kick you out, some won't even give you a second chance and most clinics have mandatory urine screening twice a month, some every week]. You can test positive for damn near anything else -- and they expect you to test positive for opiates -- but if you have benzos in there then you kick rocks.
Do you have a source for this "common knowledge"? I've seen plenty of people on methadone do just fine with benzos, especially if they take prescribed doses. I'm not so sure this isn't some bullshit pushed by doctors without evidence so that they have an excuse to stop treating their patients and leave them without benzos in a state where they are forced to either go to the black market or potentially withdraw and die. I've seen a lot of this from doctors as regards to methadone patients, trying to take people who have been on benzos for years or decades off without proper tapering and without a proper reason. It's almost as if they think of methadone patients as less than human, creatures whose lives are not of value. Wait, not almost. Whatever happened to the hippocratic oath?
I mean I cannot link you to a direct source, it was just something everyone knew, ya know 'common knowledge'. This was on both coasts as well as the midwest.
And it was explained to me at 3 different clinics in 3 different areas of the country that it was really about #1) liability -- particularly at clinics that accepted insurance for payment but not exclusively, there were cash-only ones with the same rule: No Benzos full-stop. If you had a legit prescription for xanax or ativan then they would send a letter to the prescribing doctor and would not dose you until they got an affirmative, positive response -- and to a somewhat lesser extent #2) they know it has the real potential to be fatal, and they're not monsters they don't want to kill all the junkies. Despite what you might think, some of them actually do give a shit and got into substance abuse medicine trying to help. Sure, for some it's just a job, and if you own the clinic it's a gold-shitting goose, but there are a lot of them who are genuinely trying to do good.
Taking patients off benzos without properly tapering them off can lead to death. Some clinics are putting their own liability worries ahead of patients' well-being and risking patients lives in the process. It's not every place, but the places that do this clearly do not have the patients' best interests in mind. It's hard not to think that it's because they are dealing with addicts that they even consider such actions. The way addicts are treated at some clinics is simply unbelievable. They are lied to, disrespected, and ignored. That's bad enough but putting their lives in danger based on something that's allegedly common knowledge but hasn't even been studied is beyond preposterous. However as you say, they are raking in the dough so what do they care. It's not everywhere, but it's like that at a lot of clinics.
I don't have any sources, but I've lost two people close to me who mixed xanax and methadone. They were in rehab, fell off the wagon and that was it. Blood tests showed just those two drugs in their systems.
> It's almost as if they think of methadone patients as less than human, creatures whose lives are not of value.
This is 100% what one friend who's going through methadone treatment says. They don't even want to get them off of methadone either. He had to fight to even begin going down, and he was on it at 2 years at this point. He'll be in "rehab" for 5 years early next year, and the dose is about 1/3 what it was when he started.
I interpreted that as "completely anonymous to users". The owners/operators of Blind have the mapping between pseudonyms and email addresses. These will not be available to others until the inevitable data breach or exit (possibly to one of the organizations whose employees use the service).
One possible approach is to relax the gate-keeping guarantees, so that every "wait for email and click the link in it" exchange allows the user to create one new account which is not scoped to their work-email address but simply associated with the company-name. (Like almost all privacy, this requires some basic "we're not recording that" choices by the social-media site.)
During the creation process, the user gets the option to set a non-work email for password-recovery etc.
The main risk of this scheme is that a single jdoe@acme.corp could easily create a thousand sock-puppets or "give" new accounts to people who don't work at the same company.
This can be minimized by only allowing a corporate e-mail address to be used once, but that does mean keeping lists of which users in a given company happen to have accounts, even if a direct email-to-account link doesn't exist. (It seems pointless to hash the "already used" emails for privacy, since the search space is so small.)
One could probably use some crypto to not even require any "we're not recording that", e.g. let the user use a ring signature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature) which could have been produced by any of the people registering a work address.
You should probably put in some extra work to make sure that people really are anonymous, e.g. you could make the Blind server a Tor hidden service, forcing people to connect to it using Tor and therefore not revealing their IP address. Basically making sure that Blind is not even accidentally exposed to any personally identifiable information.
Neat, I hadn't heard of ring signatures before -- but unfortunately it sounds like it involves (A) a predefined and fixed set of users and (B) all of them already having public keys.
If so, then you can't really use a ring-per-company, because you'd first need an authoritative list of all current employees (whether they have an account or not) and their public keys, and you can't easily add (or drop) employees without creating a new ring.
I was thinking, each time you register a company email you would get a reply with a list of all the public keys from people who registered with the same email domain. It would mean that the first few people to sign up would have a small anonymity set---but they could wait a bit, and then send another email and get an updated list of the public keys of people who have registered since then. As long as you wait until (say) 100 people have signed up, you'd still have some cover.
Maybe it'd be OK if they had a way to authenticate without retaining any record of the mapping. And could prove it, somehow. But otherwise it's bullshit.
I mean, the Tor Project is very careful not to claim that Tor is "completely anonymous".
Couldn't they issue some blindable certificates (it's in the name!) that attest that someone belongs to an org without being able to trace it back to a specific email?
Not just that, it has the same issues that Secret had, at least for smaller companies - you can just create a bunch of fake accounts and invite a single person you know, then have the fake accounts post some stuff to make it look like there are a lot of users, then hear what the individual says.
In addition there are two other pretty big holes. The first is the LinkedIn versification (where anyone can claim to be part of any org) and the second involves ways of receiving mail sent from the domain that is sent to non-employees (e.g. via a helpdesk ticket - a common attack against slack and other services that use domain name as a security identifier).
Here in India we have an app Hush[0] (not sure if it's widely used outside India).
They claimed they used to decide what company you worked for based on your "office network information". Anyway the quality of conversation was as bad as it gets even from a trolling and gossip forum standards. Now they have moved to collecting professional email address to verify and they still say it's "anonymous". The quality of conversation hasn't changed, definitely not for better. This kind of anonymity is one hack, or acquisition, or legal request away from going for a toss.
homeless citizens and needles I understand, but 'human excrement' -- what? Is people shitting in the streets as common and as noticeable as homelessness? WTF is that about, I thought SF was, by and large, wealthy? Why isn't it clean?
We hear about these mis-configurations leading to publicly-viewable things that shouldn't be publicly viewable all the time. This makes me wonder what is the default security setting? It seems like -- and this is from the outside looking in, I have little experience with AWS -- whatever the default is, it's not nearly strict enough. Shouldn't the default config be pretty restrictive for security's sake? Or is this a case of trying to dumb it down in the name of "usability" or "streamlining the UI" or some other marketing fluff crap (aka "for people who don't/won't/can't RTFM")?
The default is private to the owning AWS account. You’re meant to generate short-term tokens in your backend code to authorize specific requests, embedding them in the URLs you pass to others. People who are abusing S3 as a substitute for Dropbox or Google Drive (or using it from any context other than custom server-side software) won’t do that, so they set resources as public to make things work.
I just checked, and the default for creating a new S3 bucket through the console is not public readable. However, getting the right permissions in place for real-world work is not trivial if you haven't put some time in the docs so I suspect people end up shoving wild cards and the like in their access policies.
I'd take it even one step further and say people shouldn't even have an Alexa (or Google Home, et. al.) in their home at all. There are so many downsides, and after you get past the "cool new technology" factor there are relatively little upsides.
It would be better, more worthwhile, and a hell of a lot more interesting to research and figure out how to create your own "voice assistant" type of device that's hosted locally and doesn't transmit everything that's said in your home back to some company's servers. [and don't give me any of that 'they're not listening to everything' crap -- that's bullshit. if things can be abused they will be]
First world problems, but “Alexa, broadcast ‘dinner is ready’” is just amazing. Or, “Alexa, drop in on [child’s] room” to remind them about X.
Also timers, light switches, and playing music to the surround sound from a Bluetooth connection to the receiver...
We didn’t own one when we lived in Brooklyn, but they are all over my house in the suburbs. I don’t apologize for my love fest. But I won’t use it to order anything. Add something to lists? Definitely. Make a purchase decision? Ha!
Alexa is worth it just to turn off/on light switches, get the time and weather occasionally.....really turning on and off the lamps in various rooms is very convenient though.
With three kids, a two story house plus basement? Yes.
And I imagine you probably carry a listening device with built-in locator that surveillance states can use to track your every move any way. All for the convenience of being able to make phone calls (or, more ironically, check Facebook).
At this point in the game, privacy is an illusion. So I might as well enjoy telling Alexa to “turn off the basement lights” on my way to bed every night.
The answer to stopping ubiquitous pervasive surveillance probably isn't installing more ubiquitous pervasive surveillance.
It's clear many people feel there are benefits to owning one of these devices, but it does seem all of the benefits you are listing can be achieved without making such a sacrifice to a giant multinational conglomerate with a poor history of user rights and privacy.
With your comment “Alexa, drop in on [child’s] room”, the point that immediately came to mind is that Alexa doesn't drop in. Alexa is always there. I guess a lot of it will come down to whether you believe that:
a) Amazon will honour whatever promise they have with the consumer not to monitor them/keep records of your communications safe
b) That normalising such devices will not lead to their expanding use in direction you do NOT agree with in the future
c) That the device, system and amazon servers your and your families information is stored in is secure from being taken control over by third parties.
Personally, I think b is the biggest concern, as I believe arguments similar to yours (you already carry a smartphone) will be replaced in the future with (you are already recorded by alexa) to justify further things I would consider to be beyond reasonable in a free democratic society (whats wrong with a little facial recognition, etc).
No, I don't realize. And neither should you, because you honestly cannot. It runs closed-source software and communicates with servers out of your control. Unless you are an engineer who works for Amazon directly in the smart-gadget department there is no way you could positively know with certainty.
Amazon isn't providing these devices out of the kindness of their hearts. They are a for-profit enterprise, they do not care about making your life "easier" -- they want your money. They do not give a damn about anything else, and I do not believe that it's overly-paranoid to say that if you think otherwise then you're fooling yourself. It has been proven time and time again that if a thing can be abused by others for their own gain then they will be, almost without fail. Be it the government, a company, an individual, whatever.
Amazon has already done the hard work by getting the device into your home (which you paid them to do. and walked it into your own front door yourself). It's a marketers wet dream, and we all know -- or, at least we should know by now -- how sleazy marketing is. Do you really trust them to not use that always-on microphone? Do you actually trust that they are deleting any "non-relevant" data, or even keeping the 'relevant" data safe and out of the hands of others? I do not. You shouldn't either.
It has always baffled me the things people are willing to be duped out of under such a simple guise as "convenience". I've never been able to wrap my head around it. And I refuse to buy into the defeatist attitude of "privacy is an illusion" -- that's a load of crap.
> They are a for-profit enterprise, they do not care about making your life "easier" -- they want your money.
Interestingly, one way they can get my money is by making my life easier. And I'm not the only one who is happy to pay for that. In which case it makes perfect sense for them to care very much about making my life easier, as it is essential to their profits...
> "voice assistant" type of device that's hosted locally and doesn't transmit everything that's said in your home back to some company's servers.
Apple will sell you exactly this and it even comes with much better speakers than the other "intelligent speaker" products. But it's Apple, so every "tech person" on the internet must hate it.
Wow, really? Am i reading that right, that without an active WAN connection, the internal LAN connections don't work on Google WiFi hardware? That sounds more like an "Internet appliance" than it does a router.
Digi-Key has what has to be a top contender for fastest order processing & shipment of any company that does e-commerce ever. No exaggeration, it's almost inconceivable how quickly they will pack up and ship out your order. Especially when considering most orders likely contain many different, intricately small parts each of varying quantities. For example, I've seen YouTube videos from AvE who lives in Canada, where he ordered a few ICs late-ish the previous night and UPS dropped them off at his door the next afternoon. And this isn't a one-off occasion, it's consistent.
McMaster-Carr might be comparable, though. At Georgia Tech, a MC order at like 9AM could realistically be received at like 1PM with the cheapest shipping option. Usually the slow link was GT Post Office.
But that's because MC has a warehouse really close to Atlanta.
