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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Part of the problem is how insanely complex modern cars are. Modern cars can have 30+ different ECUs, and knowing which ECU does what can be difficult to figure out. Programming ECUs is also a bit of a dark art, and a model line of cars can go through a number of ECU versions over time.

    I used to own a car that the battery regularly died on. Eventually, after multiple dealer visits, a couple replaced batteries, and hours of internet research, I found two service recalls that described my cars symptoms perfectly. The problem for me was my cars VIN fell outside both recall notices. But I took printouts of both recall notices to a dealer and they agreed to look into it. They confirmed my car had buggy firmware, annd ended up installing updated firmware on two different ECUs. I never had a battery problem again after that. I’ve worked in tech for 30+ years and I wouldn’t have wanted to tackle that on my own…







  • I hate to break it to you but not only does Cloudflare do this sort of thing, but so does Akamai, AWS, and virtually every other CDN provider out there. And far from being awful, it’s actually protecting the web.

    We use Akamai where I work, and they inform us in real time when a request comes from a bot, and they further classify it as one of a dozen or so bots (search engine crawlers, analytics bots, advertising bots, social networks, AI bots, etc). It also informs us if it’s somebody impersonating a well known bot like Google, etc. So we can easily allow search engines to crawl our site while blocking AI bots, bots impersonating Google, and so on.







  • Politicians routinely use the press in this manner to send messages to adversaries.

    A nephew of mine was serving on board the USS Hartford back in 2020 when they took a CNN camera crew under the Arctic circle and surfaced through the ice. You can find lots of similar news clips involving most/all military branches with just a little bit of effort.

    And back in the 60’s my dad worked at MITRE where he held a top secret clearance. He worked on a missile defense program that was so highly classified at the time that he said only about six people knew the full scope of it. A few months after a successful test, President Kennedy announced it during a state of the union address. My dad is convinced he was sending a public warning to the USSR about our capabilities.