anonymouzz

Any chance someone could upload the VX Heavens dataset of viruses to the Internet Archive?

https://archive.org/details/malwaremuseum

Afaik it's a custom system with download-and-cache-on-demand.

Note that there's nothing forbidding you from writing a virtual git filesystem that fetches objects from some centralized repo as files are open()ed. Git on cloud steroids.

Yes but why not send a single email to the manufacturer before making it public? Does it really hurt so much?

From a "cyberpunk hacker" mentality this only gives you an opportunity to roast the manufacturer if they do nothing. Perhaps even bankrupt them, I don't care. Competition will take their places and hopefully be better.

It's not about the companies. I do not care much about them.

It's about people that may be hacked between someone's 0day disclosure and manufacturer's response. And if the manufacturer doesn't care to fix the bug - roast them about that. It's their fault.

It's not moral because people (not companies) may suffer. Your actions have consequences.

What bothers me is that they did not responsibly disclose the vulnerabilities to the manufacturers ahead of time. This is not moral, and I'm not sure what one gains by not doing that. I think that conference organizers should pressure presenters to do that before talks.

Either that or attendees should apply bottom up pressure and ask live questions like "what did you do to responsibly disclose this issue?". I think I'll do that on future security conferences I attend.

I'd be interested. The two still offending tools (spell and f77) sound super rarely used these days. I think it's fair to compare samples of commonly used tools in 1995 with samples of commonly used tools in 2018 even if those samples are widely different. This would be more related to the change in the probability that an average user sees a crash.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. There's research indicating links between gut bacteria and (among others) mental health:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4662178/

And of course one's gut bacteria culture heavily depends on what one eats.

Yup, climate change is real - it's evident from computing average temperatures. No point in debating that.

I completely agree that smog is terrible and essentially kills people. My point was the really bad consequences of warming (mass migrations from deserted areas and subsequent refugee crises, wars over farmable land, exodus from flooded areas) can be avoided via aerosols.

My point is that we can deploy more aerosols. See the first link

There are alternatives that can be deployed without reducing carbon emissions: https://edition-m.cnn.com/2018/11/23/health/sun-dimming-aero...

We'd already be over 2*C if not the aerosols that humans released: https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/img/figure/figure2_1.png

These took out much of the heat from greenhouse gasses. And in my opinion you either buy the climate change models (which are very aware of aerosols), or you don't. It doesn't make sense to believe that the planet will heat up more, that it is due to humans, but aerosols are not a part of the story.

We're not as screwed as many people think.

It's firmware. Very little firmware is. In information theoretic sense it's much more surprising if some firmware is open source.

Heh I was thinking that > 1TiB of data in an sqlite db is a bad idea :).

How do you process that? The restrictions I had in my mind come from that it's infeasible to concurrently process a large dataset in mapreduce/bigquery style.

I wish more people would publish data as SQLite databases (if the size permits, of course; usually it does). It's so much more reliable than CSVs, which have at least a few dimensions of significant differences (quoted/unquoted, comma vs semicolon vs tab vs space, headers/no headers, comments). Not to mention that initial data exploration can be done right in an SQLite explorer/browser tool.

Yup, see no reason why not. This is answered in the post:

Any application state that can be recorded in a pile-of-files can also be recorded in an SQLite database with a simple key/value schema like this:

   CREATE TABLE files(filename TEXT PRIMARY KEY, content BLOB);

Also look at the related post which suggests doing precisely that - storing images inside SQLite blobs: https://www.sqlite.org/affcase1.html

I don't understand these naysayers. I'm not trying to be mean here, but is there anything more to that than an old guy complaining about how it was awesome in his time and age, and how we get everything wrong nowadays? I'm genuinely asking - are astronauts talking about space programs similar to actors and celebrities taking about moral or political issues? I.e. just famous but not so smart people?

Also, Elon's take on this three years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P8UKBAOfGo

This is a good point, and I agree with you completely. Perhaps the Brave org will come up with a working solution. It's likely the largest problem with the Internet economy today.

Personally, for now, I'm paying monthly to those news sources that respect my attention and provide an honest representation of reality.

Off-topic, but you should want to pay for news. You should want to pay a lot.

Which kind of meal would you prefer?

1) Expensive, tasty and healthy.

2) Cheap and loaded with sugar (so you come back to get more) while ads flash all around your plate and on the tip of your fork.

Same goes with cars, cosmetics, education. For some reason paying more for those goods is universally accepted. Why wouldn't people want to pay to get high quality news? "No sir, just give me the lowest quality, most clickbait news you have. Yes, I strongly prefer that to paying $10 a month."

(this is based on chats with guides in Auschwitz)

Apparently survival inside the camp for this long was only possible if you knew how to climb the hierarchy, and Pilecki did it well. For example - on the day he (and a few of his friends) fled they were assigned to a job in a bakery. A job in a bakery is one of the best jobs you could possibly get there, as you can steal enough food to not die of starvation.

At first nobody believed because there really was no concrete evidence. This was changed by Witold Pilecki:

During World War II, Pilecki volunteered for a Polish resistance operation that involved being imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp in order to gather intelligence and later escape. While in the camp, he organized a resistance movement and informed the Western Allies of Nazi Germany's Auschwitz atrocities as early as 1941. He escaped from the camp in 1943 after nearly 2½ years of imprisonment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki

By 1944 the evidence was massive, yet Arthur Koestler still needed to write this piece.

Depends on the company. I had a friend who spent most of his time at work not doing any work, but for example browsing catalogs and fixing his new apartment (while financing that with his salary). Although after a year or two he started to hate it and quit, changed to something that actually requires his attention, as I think he was afraid he's losing skill this way.

I'd say anything between ~30% and ~70% "time-weighted attention" required within those 8 hours a day doesn't surprise me. And when I say "required" I mean if you put in less you'll be eventually fired.

Edit: this is not to say that working hard doesn't pay off, it certainly does if the company is set up properly (and many are). I'm taking about bare minimums here.

Are you up for working 8 hours a day? My experience is that many jobs (even in the top companies) allow you to stay relatively unmotivated after a certain point which is fairly easy to reach (1 to 2 years). You still have to do something, though, but not nearly as much as one might think.

I think the Internet is different. You see the absolute tops, be it real or slightly "boosted", of everyone's highs and project all of that onto a single imaginary awesome person to which you compare yourself.

I think most of us would agree that we see tons of new and fascinating stuff here almost every day. If for no other reason then via the process of selecting where to direct your attention - you wouldn't be here if it was all easy and obvious for you.

I'd see which newspaper had a reaction to the Khashoggi's death and try to directly contact the journalists writing the articles. They're people and they may be quite happy for the ammunition provided. For example:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/17/silicon-valley-hoped-the-k...

Don't let scumbags have their way, if you can tip the scale in the other direction. But again, don't want to take the moral high ground and tell people what to do.

Pretty sure that's generally the case at Google too:

Under normal company protocol, analysis of people’s search queries is subject to tight constraints and should be reviewed by the company’s privacy staff, whose job is to safeguard user rights. But the privacy team only found out about the 265.com data access after The Intercept revealed it, and were “really pissed,” according to one Google source.

Perhaps I'm taking the moral high ground here, but you should contact the media or human rights organizations, spill the beans to help them investigate. Anonymously if necessary.

Yeah I get that fear, but the truth is we'd already be over 2*C if not the aerosols that humans released: https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/img/figure/figure2_1.png

These took out much of the heat from greenhouse gasses. And in my opinion you either buy the climate change models (which are very aware of aerosols), or you don't. It doesn't make sense to believe that the planet will heat up more, that it is due to humans, but aerosols are not a part of the story.

Why is no one talking about alternative means to cooling the planet, like aerosols?

https://edition-m.cnn.com/2018/11/23/health/sun-dimming-aero...

This would be a great opportunity for stalling (or even reverting) part of the problem till batteries and other clean products get crazy cheap.

Edit: I think this is important because it's much more doable. It is a much easier sell - fits the general story of economic growth, that almost everyone believes that economies (especially their economy) should expand. This would be a cross-national collaboration in which many people would take pride (we own the planet, and we're handling it well) and could have technological side effects like the flight to the moon. The current ideas which find it hard to get themselves divorced from slowing down economies are simply much less palatable.

My view on this is that wealth is something real that actually impacts people's lives. At the same time money is not, it's the story told around wealth so that we can all agree on how one "wealth" compares to another. The goal is to not let this story go wild (e.g. into super-inflation) so that people don't lose trust in money.

Keeping those two in check is the main goal of any central bank, ever since the gold standard was generally abandoned and money became entirely abstract. In my opinion no one really knows how to do it (although it's been okay-ish so far), the FED for example often uses national unemployment rate to decide how much dollars should be thrown at the system.

This is how the system works. There's a limit to that practice (the money multiplier), which is one of the reasons why banks need to rotate money as you said (another being cross-bank transfers). See this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation#Credit_theory_o...

It's a very counter intuitive concept that underpins the entire economic system. It was even a subject of a (failed) Swiss referendum recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Swiss_sovereign-money_ini...

Shortest possible answer: debt is money.

Or you could say it's dual to money - creating debt creates money, paying debt destroys money. There's literally less money in the world when you make your mortgage payment (bank just sends much of your payment to /dev/null), and there's literally more money in the world when you take a mortgage (bank pulls it out of thin air).

If all debt would be repaid then almost all of the money as we know it today would disappear.