Article note: That's clever. The assumption of all these systems is that people _want_ to get in, so they lock out on repeated login failiure, and it gives an attacker information to tell when that happens... so when there is a benefit to locking an account, there really isn't much defense.
This Twitter thread is wild. Read the text below, or, tl;dr for spoilers —
The 8-year-old figured out how to temporarily lock the account by entering enough wrong passwords, and did that every time she got bored in class. It took them 3 weeks to figure it out. — Read the rest
My feed plumbing keeps eating my notes on this one?
So:
Cheating? Oh yeah, we're worried because we keep seeing it. I've had several little shits screen-share me for help/to get signed off for something with the Chegg tabs where they copied from visible.
Remote labs: I've been involved in a bunch of variations over the last couple semesters. Most successful have been the in-person modded for individual labs (Now that we've done the experiment, we're probably never going back to lab partners because the more/richer labs aren't worth the parasitism) for a logic lab (~Half breadboarding/~Half Verilog on a dev board), and having students buy a dev board then holding online lab times where we can advise, help, and sign off via MS Teams (other tools have not been as successful) for embedded systems. We did lose some hardware practice in the Embedded class that we'll eventually transition back to primarily in-person to regain. I believe a 2nd semester programming and 2nd semester analog circuits lab are both trying our Teams setup this semester because it worked unusually well.
"Don't know how to find online resources…" - If you're getting your online learning resources in a package from a publisher, you're ripping your students off. Add more value than being able to rubber-stamp what they taught themselves from internet resources, or also bought the answers to from the internet.
Article note: This is what happens when you outsource things to "The Cloud."
If your CCTV system is connected to the Internet, it is, by definition, not Closed.
Hackers say they broke into the network of Silicon Valley startup Verkada and gained access to live video feeds from more than 150,000 surveillance cameras the company manages for Cloudflare, Tesla, and a host of other organizations.
The group published videos and images they said were taken from offices, warehouses, and factories of those companies as well as from jail cells, psychiatric wards, banks, and schools. Bloomberg News, which first reported the breach, said footage viewed by a reporter showed staffers at Florida hospital Halifax Health tackling a man and pinning him to a bed. Another video showed a handcuffed man in a police station in Stoughton, Massachusetts, being questioned by officers.
“I don’t think the claim ‘we hacked the internet’ has ever been as accurate as now,” Tillie Kottmann, a member of a hacker collective calling itself APT 69420 Arson Cats, wrote on Twitter.
Article note: Interesting, looks like the core MIPS IP is being folded into the non-profit that handles the core RISC-V IP (...because it's basically worthless at this point) which will at least assure people building legacy MIPS stuff a firmer footing during the (now, at least) managed slide into obsolescence and irrelevance, and clearly indicating a path forward onto RISC-V.
People who are fully vaccinated can safely have private visits with unvaccinated people who have a low risk for severe COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced today in highly anticipated guidance for vaccinated people.
In the guidance, the CDC considers people fully vaccinated once they have waited two weeks after their second dose of either the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine or the Moderna vaccine, or two weeks after a single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Though it may still be possible for fully vaccinated people to contract the pandemic coronavirus, have an asymptomatic or mild infection, and possibly spread the virus, the risk is considered low.
As such, once people are fully vaccinated, they can meet in private indoor settings—such as a home—with other fully vaccinated people without masks and without physical distancing.
Article note: This one has slowly crept from "yet another Exchange vuln" to "major international incident" over the course of a few months.
Now we're talking about 60,000 organizations compromised including things like bank regulators, with both data infiltration and dropping other payloads for later, the bulk of it by _probably_ a Chinese government affiliated entity.
Hurray for mono-culture on complicated proprietary packages!
Article note: Neat, someone built a package manager for FreeDOS.
Long-time Slashdot reader sproketboy shared a link to SvarDOS, "an open-source project that is meant to integrate the best out of the currently available DOS tools, drivers and games." From their site:
DOS development has been abandoned by commercial players a very long time ago, mostly during early nineties. Nowadays, it survives solely through the efforts of hobbyists and retro-enthusiasts, but this is a highly sparse and unorganized ecosystem. SvarDOS aims to collect available DOS software, package it and make it easy to find and install applications using a network-enabled package manager (like apt-get, but for DOS and able to run even on a 8086 PC).
Once installed, SvarDOS is a minimalistic DOS system that offers only the FreeDOS kernel and the most basic tools for system administration. It is up to the user to install additional packages. Care is taken so SvarDOS remains 8086-compatible, at least in its most basic (core) configuration.
SvarDOS files are published under the terms of the MIT license. This applies only to SvarDOS-specific files, though - the packages supplied with SvarDOS may be subject to different licenses (GPL, BSD, Public Domain, Freeware...).
Article note: LOL. Google doing google, retiring their old, functional software and replacing it with a less-functional alternative that somehow sprung a full-fledged chat app.
I’ve been doing some component stocking lately, and haven’t really set up a solid storage system, so I picked up a Harbor Freight 40+1 drawer cabinet thing to manage various small size + small quantity parts.
There are slots in the drawers to take dividers, but Harbor Freight doesn’t sell them, and Akro-Mils charges a bit much – somewhere in the vicinity of $10/16pcs – for injection molded dividers that experience says don’t fit terribly well. The set of Akro-Mils drawers I use on campus for kitting out instructional labs has first-party dividers that tend to float just enough to get pins trapped under them, which leaves me less than enthusiastic about spending money on those.
I saw some folks 3D Print their own, but always feel silly 3D printing flat parts, and wanted something clear.
..So I took some measurements, ordered some 0.078″/2mm polycarbonate sheet, and CAD’d up the shape.
I did a quick parametric sketch/extrude/profile in FreeCAD 0.18, and unlike the last couple times I tried to build something in FreeCAD, the Sketch constraint system didn’t bug out, the Path workbench didn’t crash, and it posted reasonable gcode. I am very pleased by this development.
Now, it is a trivial part (rectangular, 2mm thick, 34mm tall, 50mm wide for the bottom 17mm, 51mm wide for the top 17mm), but I had earlier versions of FreeCAD fall over on similarly-trivial projects, usually in the path workbench. I’d really like to have (and be vaguely competent at using) a decent all-FOSS design flow for the router, so this is an exciting development. File here if anyone wants it.
There was the usual CNC fuckery (losing Z steps because I plunged too aggressively for the bit, tapping the Z- stop because I had the spindle raised in its clamp for working off a vise and forgot, etc.), some of which were solved by finally switching my Z axis motor to a slightly higher current since I keep having problems with running out of Z force.
Had I looked a little closer I would have noticed there are third party laser-cut acrylic dividers available for like $0.33/ea compatible with the Akro-Mils small drawer size, but if you ignore the …$1000-odd of CNC machine and tooling and the value of my time… these come out to like $0.16, so it’s not completely absurd from that angle, and it was a good tool-chain test. Also, happily, they fit significantly tighter than the Akro-Mils injection molded ones, so no trapped pins.
Article note: Well that's adorable and neatly executed.
I've been looking for a reasonably-priced VT220 or later for a while, and the era of them being cheap surplus available everywhere is very much over.
When he went shopping for a vintage serial terminal to go along with his reproduction PDP-8/I computer, [Michael Gardi] came down with a bad case of sticker shock. But rather than be discouraged, he reasoned that if his “retro” computer could stand to have modern components at its heart, so could the terminal he used to talk to it. Leaning on his considerable experience in designing 3D printed replica hardware, he’s built an absolutely gorgeous scaled down DEC VT100 terminal that any classic computer aficionado would be happy to have on their desk.
Now to be clear, [Michael] hasn’t created a true serial terminal. Since the faux PDP-8/I is running on a Raspberry Pi, all he needed to do was come up with something that could connect to its HDMI and USB ports. Put simply, he’s essentially just made a 3D printed enclosure for the Pi’s monitor and keyboard. Oh, but what a gorgeous enclosure it is.
Recreating the VT100 in CAD was made more difficult by the fact that [Michael] couldn’t get his hands on the authentic hardware. But of course, that’s never stopped him before. It turns out DEC provided some very detailed dimensions for the terminal in their original documentation, and while comparing them to photographs of the actual terminal did uncover a few key differences, the overall look is spot on. Once the design was done, he reports it took two rolls of filament and more than 200 hours to print out all the parts for the enclosure.
To help sell the authentic look [Michael] tracked down a 4:3 LCD of the appropriate size, and the use of an off-the-shelf portable mechanical keyboard should make text entry a pleasure. For a little fun, he even came up with a themed arcade controller for the VT100 that can be used with RetroPie. The printed logo plate is an especially nice touch, and we’re more than willing to forgive the fact that he had to print it at a larger scale than the rest of the terminal to get all the detail in with his printer’s 0.4 mm nozzle.
On a technical level, this is perhaps the most straightforward replica we’ve ever seen from [Michael]. But even on a relatively simple project like this, his signature attention to detail and craftsmanship is on full display. It’s always a good day when he’s got a new build to show off with, and we’re eager to see what he comes up with next.
A consumer doesn’t take anything away: he doesn’t actually consume anything. Giving the same thing to a thousand consumers is not really any more expensive than giving it to just one.
