- written from my flying roadster

But they found him? If he was alive, he probably would have been caught eventually, no?

Maybe. The average homicide clearance rate in the US is only around 60%. But that includes a lot of killings where nobody really cares about anyone involved. This was a much higher profile crime so it would get a lot more attention. But there are high profile cases that get a lot of (at least local) attention that don't ever get solved either.

It is really difficult to ascertain motive and suspects when it’s a chronic homeless case getting murdered. It could be a thing from drugs to just looking at a crazy guy wrong one night, you literally have no leads unless there is a video or some other piece of hard evidence. It isn’t really about caring, judt that the environment they live in is so chaotic and uncontrolled that you’d have a suspect pool that is too big to reasonably investigate.

Sorry, to make my point more clear: They knew the identity of the killer, and this is part of how they found his dead body. If he hadn't killed himself, they would have found him regardless, since they knew who he was, and knew the license plate of the car he was driving.

I mean I guess all criminals die or are caught, yes.

There were plenty of somethings found at the time.

My experience with tapes does not match yours. I've seen both audio and VCR tapes unspool by playing or trying to remove them from the player.

I estimate renting over 1200 VCR tapes in my lifetime, and I've never had one unspool. The cassette problem was common enough that fixing it with a pencil was part of the zeitgeist, but I can't remember anything like that for VHS.

i had ONE cassette unwind. my less careful friend was always winding them with a pencil. the culprit? button mashing between fast-forward and play.

I grew up in the 80s, and was a prolific user of both video tapes (mostly VHS) and cassette tapes. I can't recall ever having a tape get eaten by any deck, either video or audio.

Not saying it never happens, but if it was common I absolutely would have encountered it many times over.

> I can't recall ever having a tape get eaten by any deck ... if it was common I absolutely would have encountered it many times over.

Common enough that you know the slang for it, despite it not happening to you.

Touché

I think it happened more as the players aged and wore out. In the 90s and 2000s I remember it happening pretty commonly although cd or dvd skipping was way worse. A couple years ago we took the old family vcr player out of the parents attic and tested it out. It was a great vcr at the time, sony with all the bells and whistles. But it immediately at the tape and I mean ate it. Had to take it apart and route the tape out myself and I'm pretty sure its ruined the tape. We spent 2 hours on youtube with it taken apart and gave up the project indefinitely.

That must be an issue with the player

Game was really good. Fun gameplay, fun dialog. I played through it multiple times. I can't think of many games that I've done that for.

If you haven't seen it, and aren't inclined to play it, there are some good playthroughs on youtube to get a sense of what it's about.

You could figure it out, but if you're the one getting sued, it's going to cost you a lot of money to pay their lawyers to prove that you didn't have the rights, and someone else did.

I tried it out, and found out that my primary internet connection had failed, and I was on the backup due to a power outage earlier today. Useful!

The route less travelled.

Or, it was lower priority for discovering exploits due to the number of users.

It's a possibility. Graphene has some traction though and if a potential high-importance target is running the OS, Cellebrite wouldn't want to be doing emergency vulnerability research to respond.

Perhaps there is an argument to be made that this is a reason "computer security" should not be delegated to a third party, such as an advertising services company like the ones in Silicon Valley, Redmond or Seattle

The reasoning is that the company, being concerned with online advertising and reach,^1 has the incentive to ensure that the software becomes popular with the largest possible number of users, perhaps even achieving monopoly power. According to traditional HN commentary, this makes the company and its software a preferred target for exploits by virtue of its popularity

1. Online surveillance practices to potentially support targeted advertising services, where the companies wantonly collect enormous quantities of data about millions of people, also makes them a target for exploits, e.g., "data breaches"

Consider an alternative status quo where computer owners, i.e., software users, have many options to choose from, including many operating systems, browsers, "app stores", "platforms", and so on

None of the options may be necessarily better choices for "security" for technical reasons^2 but the fact that those who target software from a small number of advertising services juggernauts with millions of users ("lucrative targets") are denied access to such lucrative targets, because the lucrative targets do not exist, is an improvement to "security" overall

2. But some may compete and attempt to distinguish themselves on this basis

In this alternative status quo there would likely be requirements that software be compliant with open standards and interoperable, allowing computer users to write, edit, compile, install and choose whatever software they desire, from any source, including their own brain, i.e., they might choose to write, compile and install their own software on their own computers

The point being made is that the death penalty does not serve a rehabilitation purpose for a pretty obvious reason.