HN user
Many years ago (early 2000s maybe), I lived on the road for work and stayed at a lot of hotels.
I would find random shares open on people's machines, then fill their entire hard drive with cat pictures. I usually left a few GB so they could save documents or whatever because I wasn't that much of an asshole.
In a previous life, I supported a local govt and I had a judge get a different variant of the cryptowall virus 6 times before I took his "work" PC away. His real work PC was controlled by the state and not me, hence the quotes.
That's the type of person who is a repeat offender. He could never tell me how he got the virus, but some recon between email and internet history showed otherwise. He loved clicking on EVERYTHING while "researching" cases. I get the research, but a lot of court cases probably aren't on page 20 of google on some shady half English sites either.
Lots of fun in local government.
/also I just restored from backups each time but they were ready to pay to have "all their data restored."
I have had some issues getting sent to collections before I get any bill, or not sending me the right bill and still sending me to collections after I try to figure out what I actually owe.
I learned to just pay like $10 a month regardless of what happens. Then if insurance decides to pay for it I get it refunded or it's put towards my deductible. The clinic sees me "trying" to pay for my bill and don't send me to collections now.
I doubt it would work everywhere, but it's beyond frustrating.
I've worked with a few police departments in a previous life. For the last few years I worked with the bigger dept they all wore cameras for their entire shift. They still let people go for small amounts of weed, or odd drinking violations (open intox usually) even though it's still illegal here.
They only review the videos if there's an incident or complaint. So it's not like there's someone watching 40 x 8 hour videos every day.
/this is a smaller rural area in the midwest US, so ymmv but these officers do use discretion and the higher ups don't care if it's nothing big. In the Chief's words, "we were all young and stupid at some point."
There was a site called something like: pleaserobmyhouse.com
It just scraped social media for posts about people going on vacation and when they'd be back.
I have had an amazon card for a few years now.
I can't say anything bad or good about it. I get 1% back (or points to spend at amazon) for any purchases, 2% points back for gas, and 3% points when I use it at amazon.
There's been more than several times where it looked like it never applied the points to my account though. I always paid it off in full every month, and sometimes it works sometimes not. When I lived on the road and used it for hotels, while getting reimbursed from them, I was able to rack up $1500 worth of points.
Other than that, it's been fine. Looking around for something a bit better though.
I wish. I used to work at an Apple repair shop years ago.
We never could figure out why they had so much in their manuals.
Yeah. The healthcare part made me lol.
I put in the "work," live in an awesome location, and I have to fight insurance damn near every time the Dr puts me through any procedures. That's not counting the awful healthcare I actually get. I guess I just need to drive 3-4 hours to get it instead of 1? Then I can't put in the "work" because I'm spending days traveling to get all this stuff done.
I guess the answer is to move. Well then that means i get to start over fighting insurance to get them to cover everything, again. I'm not doing that a third time.
This is exactly right.
I used to work at a hospital and some clinics in a previous life. The administration went forward with a new EMR system without actually getting the users to "test" it beyond a webinar.
I left before it started to be implemented. Not sure how it went, but it's been 4 years and they're still "working on it" according to some old co-workers still there.
If that's the same issue I had, it was a defective nvidia chip. I went through 2 logicboards and I know several of my friends who had 2012 MBPs went through a few too.
We used to be an Apple shop, and we had a lot come in due to that issue.
A few of my friends have spent some time in jail / prison due to smoking pot and the "three strikes" rule along with it. They were in there ranging from overnight to a few weeks to months.
One developed PTSD from it and has had major issues since he was released 15 years ago. The other one hasn't quite came back mentally either, will not talk about it and is so much worse off now than ever. After he was released, but before his court date where he knew he wasn't going to have to go back, he was contemplating suicide.
They all said they would rather die than ever go back for any significant time. I'm not sure what significant means in that respect, but dying seems to be the general theme they share now.
After working at a jail for a bit, I'm not sure I blame them at all. I like to think I'm mentally strong, but I don't know how long I could do it. I am sure I would have the same mentality they do now after spending time in jail / prison.
one of the weirder numbers I got a call from was 000000000000
it made my old phone kind of glitch out because the number was a bit too long.
I'm in a bit of insurance hell at the moment.
Depending on when I call them during the month, I might owe money or I might not....
Before the colonoscopy, they said I would owe $500 for my deductible, which is correct.
Then I got there, they said I didn't need to pay anything, and I just got a bill yesterday for $2700. The insurance line items say they covered about $1300 of it. Now I get to fight insurance again because I shouldn't be paying anything over $500. I have 30 days before collections too.
I love paying for the privilege of fighting for insurance coverage.
> My daughter didn’t ask to have a writer for a mother, but that’s who I am. Amputating parts of my experience feels as abusive to our relationship as writing about her without any consideration for her feelings and privacy.
This part got me. To me that article definitely makes it sound like she's a writer first, and mother second. I just hope her child grows up to be a better person than that, or I hope I'm misunderstanding that article.
> I'm sure they'd love to pursue perfection if they were paid decent wage and not pressured to be as fast / cheap as possible.
That and depending where you live, there's next to no money for road work.
At the local county govt I worked at, the first department that would get gutted was the highway department. It can easily cost millions to redo a few miles of road, and you need to fix a bridge that doesn't get used much (but it is becoming a hazard because it's been neglected for so long), magically most of the road budget is already gone for that year. Now add in the unknowns like salt prices, the equipment to do anything, maintenance, and everything else that comes with it.
Things here become "just good enough" because no one wants an increase in taxes to pay for it.
I want to believe that isn't the case for every local govt, but it is for the few smaller ones I've worked with around here.
/incoming rant but related to your story
It sucks so bad. My brother and I got parasites from water at some restaurant in GA.
Down there they were able to help him, but up in the north, the Drs have no clue on how to deal with parasites. The most help I got was the Dr calling the pharmacy for me.
So my brother got meds from his Dr, sent them up here to get rid of the parasites. Now I'm dealing with some bacterial infections that no one can figure out.
I asked to have the same test done that my brother had that found all his issues relating to this. They replied with "Yes, we can do that test." Then they sent me to CT and for a colonoscopy which took 2 months before I could get in... all the while they couldn't "give advice" because they "don't know what my system is like."
I'm seeing the 4th opinion next week. It's been 4 1/2 months now, so maybe this one will care.
This is with the "good insurance" I keep hearing about.
Trust me, I know they can be serious, but
> jurisdiction that doesn't take DUI seriously
That describes where this was at perfectly. Which is why I had put
> It was his first offense and this state is very lenient on DUIs.
I probably should have used a different word than lenient, but it is what it is.
/might be related
I've seen something similar in regards to a normal DUI case. The defense lawyer talking about 1970's RADAR tech in airplanes, NTFS filesystems, Windows Server, "md5 hashing protocols" and other items "related" to the case.
The judge was all sorts of confused and "phoned a trustworthy friend who worked in a fortune 500 company" for clarity.
That guy got out of a DUI after 5 x 2-3 hour sessions in court. 10+ hours of court to get out of a couple hundred dollar ticket, if that.
I really wonder what the lawyer fees were though. No way was he doing that for free or cheap. It was his first offense and this state is very lenient on DUIs.
Showed me exactly why I never want to be in court, on either side.
/leaving a lot of details out, but man, was it depressing to watch.
I barely noticed it back in the day too. I had a friend who was into piracy quite a bit more who complained about getting the wrong movie or getting the wrong mp3s.
I don't know if I ran into that issue, but I wasn't really downloading a lot of mainstream stuff compared to him either.
I'm also interested if OP will post their medical history, since they don't mind it being public. But I doubt anyone making that argument would actually do that.
Kind of a rough argument, but maybe it's just because they have never been beaten or harassed over something about their medical history. Which is good for them, but not the world most of us live in.
I've worked with a few small town USA type law enforcement agencies. No big city ones, so think towns around a few thousand people total, or a county with 15k people total. This won't reflect the majority of the US, but it does seem to reflect the majority of arrests in this location.
A lot of criminals (again, around here at least) are that stupid. The detectives have solved many cases just by searching for the suspects name on Facebook. Some examples were: seeing the stolen items right in their profile pic, drugs with the suspect standing there while holding a gun, a video of a friend recording someone breaking into a car, hell, they had to get CPS involved because a parent had a video of them hitting (it was hitting, not disciplining) their own child. All of that just on Facebook. The hardest they had to work to get those pictures was add them as a friend under a fake profile.
Now career criminals are a completely different beast. The law enforcement here (luckily) doesn't have many or any "advanced" criminals around here. There are definitely plenty of low hanging fruit here to keep law enforcement busy, and being in small town USA, once they know who you are, they KNOW who you are and who you hang out with.
The detectives always said that if most of these people left their phone at home, didn't take any pictures, and didn't tell their friends about what they did, that crime may not get much priority (or any) depending on what the crime was.
I don't have raw data to back that up, but it does happen here. I do agree with you about the career criminals though, but there are still A LOT of stupid people out there or maybe it's something in the water here.
I've been toying with the idea of getting into ham radio type stuff, so it's always been interesting to me.
After working with the local detectives / police, it isn't "very" difficult to find where a jammer is. /I never got the chance to work directly with them on that issue though, but they said it's happened once before.
Anyway, it took them one call to Verizon and less than a day later they found who was jamming one area. Did the police thing, and no more jamming. They had the pull because no one could call 911 with a cell phone in that area, and when the squads were out, they'd lose reception around that area too. Both big no nos if you want to stay hidden.
I can imagine if it's a country with adequate resources, it would not be much of an issue.
I've seen this happen in the midwest US too.
Given the choice between jail, being outside, or maybe a shelter if you live around a bigger city, I know what i would pick for the winter.
Reading the transcripts from the board meetings is a pretty bad time, but it reminds me of the board meetings in my neck of the woods. It sucks.
I don't have much to add, other than I have had some good results with using the application "4k video downloader" to grab playlists on youtube. I'm not a fan of the generic name, but it does what it sets out to do and is fairly cheap. I'm sure everything can be done with youtube-dl, but I don't have a ton of experience with that.
I am able to get most of the videos downloaded and converted using that application. Sometimes I have to go and manually get a couple of videos that failed to download, but the app has served me well.
I worked for an Apple repair shop from 2008ish to 2014ish.
The mid 2012 laptop I bought new went through two separate optical drives before I stopped using the drive altogether and put in another hard drive. The laptop also had two bad logicboards from NVidias recall iirc. One board died a month after getting it new, and the other died almost 3 years later.
To this day it is still going strong. I am starting to run into some video ram type issues (I think). I get random lines on any screen (external / internal) and a full reboot "fixes" it. I don't want to replace it, but after all the Apple changes (iOS devices vs "Pro" devices mainly), I just don't think any of their laptops fit my needs for a device anymore.
Like you said though, Apple has always had some hardware type issues like this. I remember HP, Dell and Lenovo all having big issues like that too when I was on the bench.
I found a Windows 2003 server (back in the day) with RDP open directly to it. It wasn't behind much (if any) external firewall. It also wasn't patched, and I got in using some exploit I found within a few mins of googlin.
Here it was a citys (pop 2mil+) water system. I didn't need a name or password to it once I got into the server itself.
I screenshotted the login, the exploit, their water system (it reminded me of MS Paint, which a lot of those system seem to look like), then created a fresh e-mail using Tor, sent a few e-mails to several e-mail addresses I could find for contacting them, and within a few days it was no longer accessible.
For a longer time than I should have, I felt bad for doing it, but at the same time, I doubt they would have done much if I just e-mailed them without showing proof.
I never received anything, threats or thanks, in that e-mail account. So hopefully someone appreciated it.
The last thing I gave my Grandpa was a Get Well Soon card, at his funeral.
/everyone had a good laugh, he would have loved it.
On iOS they have Shortcuts that can do something like that too.
It's real limited in what it does, but it can turn wifi / bluetooth / other stuff on depending on time, location, the usual stuff.
I would love to have a real "Tasker" type app for iOS, but I doubt that will happen anytime soon.
If OP can show what they use to packet sniff those boxes, then life will be good and we can put the conspiracy theories to bed.
If they can't see all of the traffic, but just know where the traffic is going, then I don't think they did their homework.