This sounds super similar to a prank I pulled in high school.
At school, it was sort of a cat-and-mouse game between the students and the sysadmin. Kids would find new ways of evading the school blocks (different proxies, someone getting a bypass login, etc so they could access myspace) that the admin would then catch a couple weeks later and close. A lot of these proxies were distributed on the fileserver that was shared between students.
One day, I wrote a small piece of software in my programming class (in VB6!!) that would wait a random length of time, and then open and close the CD tray. I wrote a short batch script that would copy that file to startup and then open the current popular proxy software. I then changed the icon on that script and placed it where people expected to find the proxy software, giving them reason to run my script.
Students then unknowingly disseminated my software all over the school, and the next day (after PCs were rebooted overnight) the software would take effect and randomly open/close the CD trays of computers all over the school.
They ended up tracing it back to me (windows user permissions/ownership, probably) and I was promptly banned from computers at school through the end of the year and for most of the next.
VB6 was the worst and best kind of software. You were NEVER (even as a professional) sure if it ran on the other/target machine, so you just hoped for the best.
Also, I quite like the cat-and-mouse analogy you mention, because I feel it was (mostly) a harmless way to hone skills, to level up knowledge essentially, with a (at the time) reasonable amount of risk involved, which kept it exciting enough to learn more. It would be cool to see schools have a bug-bounty type of environment here or there, just for those few kids who actually want to spend their time on getting better at networking.
Luckily the school was rather new so all of the PCs across the entire school were identical, whether they were for a teacher's use, the programming class, or the graphic design and yearbook clubs so I was luckily able to avoid any of those shortcomings.
Cant say my school had anything of the sort (they'd prefer to punish and force you back in line with other students) and while I like the idea, I know that in HS it'd feel too akin to snitching on my classmates to participate in that.
We had a battle with the sysadmins, we trying to do pranks and the sysadmins trying to find us. This was around 1996 or so (I remember this because Quake had just come out).
Anyway. I remember us communicating with the sysadmins by writing small messages in files we where not supposed to be able to access.
IT Support and Project Manager with 5+ years experience in the FEC industry. Planned and executed large scale AV and
network renovations, increased software sales by over 120%, and created support ticket workflows that increased customer
satisfaction by over 75%. Outgoing and auto-didactic, always willing to learn the skills needed for any project and then
disseminate that knowledge to others. Can discuss software solutions provided at my current employer that I otherwise cannot demonstrate on Github due to NDA.
Location: Southwest Florida
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Python3, HTML5, CSS3, JS, Git, Linux, Windows Server, SQL
Résumé/CV: https://momo.software/resume.pdf
Email: hello[at]momo.software or jessenhamilton[at]gmail.com
Not yet listed in the CV are my side projects. Most can be found on my site at https://momo.software/portfolio.html, and within the past week I launched a newsreader app on the Google Play Store (awaiting acceptance on iOS App Store) and am currently working with another client to get her event coordination/vacation booking site running.
It is my personal goal to move to the Toronto area. Ideally, I'd be working in the area under a worker's visa, or in the Buffalo/Niagara Falls area, either onsite or remote. Otherwise, I am open to positions all over the US and Canada.
Heaven forbid someone make a joke on the internet and not take your frustrations as seriously as you seem to take yourself.
To address your frustration at the analysis stopping there: What do you expect someone who is likely more versed in web dev and their unique distributed systems to do? Do you expect them to have the expertise to decompile an app from a third party, an app popular enough to cause this much traffic? And if they did, would it be worthwhile when their only concern is limiting/lowering that traffic?
> I agree with what people have already said, but I think there's one more point to add: people usually over-estimate how funny their own comments are. We have a tendency to think, "This idea of mine is hilarious! And different! Surely this witticism is the exception." And we are usually wrong. When you have N people all doing that, there's a lot of noise.
> I try to gently point this out to people who complain when their attempt at humor has been downvoted by the community. It's not that we don't like humor. We just don't like banal attempts at humor, which becomes noise. Or, put in a less charitable fashion, "You're not as funny as you think you are."
I'll offer a counterpoint that humour containing a kernel of truth, or simply tickling enough grey matter to be stimulating, especially when coupled to topical opinion or informative substance, however obliquely, or by contrapunctus an uncomfortable notion delivered via a candy-coating of levity, is often appreciated, and although I am not generally concerned with the integer popularity contest it is helpful feedback for training one's temporal lobe, and I will reveal that on this occasion the jest has strong positive reinforcement, most likely due to diffusely enclosing a distorted subtext of real events and the innate conflict of reconciling this to the mock-paranoiac narrative, but perhaps also due to the coupling thereof to the construction of a pun, and further observe that my own stumbling path to exploring which modes of wit might be appreciated on this forum, vs those rejected as noise, has been largely empirical, and years in the walking, and remains an ongoing process for the ages, and although I cannot claim to have discovered a global maxima, but instead have merely blindly grasped the whimsical elephant, I would question whether the existence and forms of comedy could be otherwise derived from first principles or any other means, all of which is to breathlessly recommend: go ahead, crack a joke, see what happens.
I don't expect anyone to do anything. As a person reading this story, I just commented on the fact that it would be interesting to know more details as to how the app ended up making these requests in the first place.
I was just expressing my personal opinion that if I went this far investigating the situation, that's what I'd like to find out as well.
> [...] when their only concern is limiting/lowering that traffic?
If that were their only concern, they could have just (quoting my previous comment):
>> block[ed] the request URL/UA string pair, which was also an option
However:
>> since they already traced the culprit with a lot of effort [...] the logical ultimate step to conclude their investigation should be to see what the code does
Like everything else, this is just my personal opinion of course.
> your frustrations
> your frustration
Not really sure where this comes from but it's really unnecessary.
I'm glad for Wikimedia that they resolved the issue, and shared the details, which make for an interesting read.
most "professional" streamers will have a separate encoding/streaming PC w/ some sort of capture device (commonly one of those Elgato capture cards). They'll then hook in their main PC or console into the capture card.
Main reasons for this are to eliminate the overhead of reencoding video in OBS w/ multiple layers of images/videos/donationAlerts/etc which can have a negative impact on the game (or other software) they're trying to stream.
The virus has a multi-week incubation period, during which you're infectious despite not yet showing symptoms. Even if you never show symptoms, you can still carry and transmit the virus.
Symptoms (or the lack thereof) are not an indicator of whether or not someone has contracted it.
> The chance of them being an asymptomatic carrier is actually pretty low
I'm thinking this may be true. Dr. John Campbell has a fantastic video[1] that suggests we may be overlooking one possible symptom in otherwise asymptomatic populations: Skin rashes. That doesn't mean, of course, that everyone gets skin rashes with COVID-19, but it appears that it may be an early clinical feature of the disease even in people who are otherwise spared the worst.
Maybe they could do as VLC on iPhone does and raise a little web server that you could then "upload" the roms to, which would then save to a location the app has access to.
Alternatively, download from the web or access files in Google Drive?
This is disgusting. The value a worker provides the company does not magically go down just because their expenses go down. If I am providing the same value that another worker is, we should be compensated similarly regardless of where we choose to live.
One funny thing about entitlement is that it only matters if those who hold the power decides it matters.
> This is disgusting. The value a worker provides the company does not magically go down just because their expenses go down. If I am providing the same value that another worker is, we should be compensated similarly regardless of where we choose to live.
You are not paid according to the value you provide to your employer. Despite our best efforts at magical thinking, your employer is interested in the least amount of money they have to spend to get XYZ business goals hit and it happens that your skills are useful to get make that happen. However, unless you are very exceptional in your area, you are a replaceable human resource as far as the org chart is concerned.
You're paid according to your ability to negotiate which is a function of many things ( biases, average market, internal business deadlines, perceived value to the business etc.). Sure, your unique ability to drive sales up 100% YoY is a nice skill but turns out someone else is willing to hit the same goals for 50k less than you are because they live in a cheaper area and don't need the extra cash to live a comfortable life. In that case, you may be valuable but you have no leverage in the negotiation anymore.
Since salaries and budgets are kept secret and employers will always offer the least amount they believe you'll accept first, you are entering the conversation severely handicapped already. We will certainly see suppression in wages over the next few years.
I think the problem comes down to having different definitions of value. Devs think it's 100% based on their code output or their communication with others or things like that which are quantifiable outputs that can be achieved relatively equally and remotely. Management has a different rubric, and yes maybe geographic proximity is on that rubric (for reasons unknown or no reason at all).
Does the value that a worker provide the company actually go down or not, if transitioning to working remotely? I don't think it's so clear-cut as to be an automatic and obvious no (that it doesn't go down). If management thinks it does, then they will only be proven right/wrong over time through the labor market and attribution or through financial results.
Of course, the opposite could well be true, and this how a market opportunity is created: managers who think the opposite, can put their money where their beliefs are, and hire/pay workers based on a different value-rubric, and if they're more correct in their assessment, then they might win out in the long-run.
I want to agree but this problem is kind of weird.
If the situation was reversed, would you still say it’s fair because a worker gets paid for his/her value to the company?
For instance, let’s say you were working for a company in a rural area. Your pay is perfectly average for your position and others in your position at other companies get an equal salary.
Your company asks you to relocate to their office in central NYC, for the same job you’re doing now. Your cost of living doubles as a result. (Hypothetical amount) Should they increase your pay to account for this?
I sure do, but then why would the opposite be so wrong? I agree that you are paid for your value to the company, but we also can’t pretend like CoL is the same everywhere.
Edit: After posting this I remembered this was a big discussion in politics in my country recently. Dutch Call Centre’s were relocating to Spain during summer breaks and offering Dutch students jobs there (advertised using the fact that it’s Spain and you can party). As a result the companies would offer the students a lower wage since Spain’s minimum wage is a lot lower than the dutch one.
Your pay is a function of supply and demand here, not value provided. Working for a company is an opt-in choice, so it's not theft. If you want a better agreement go work somewhere else. And when enough people do that, pay will go up to compete for those people. But if a company can get away with paying less, they will. And arguably, they have a fiduciary responsibility to do so.
Why are you okay with working for a company to begin with? Presumably, whatever they pay you (perhaps your current high salary at the expensive place, perhaps even maintaining your high salary after you move to a cheaper place) is still less than the value they extract from you (most employees would like to think they "provide value").
One should think of any employment as just a temporary situation. At the moment, your life situation causes you to make the risk/reward calculation that you're willing to let a company capture some of the value you provide in exchange for steady income. Your goal should be to save enough out of that steady income so that the risk/reward calculus shifts in favor of leaving the company, working for yourself, and capturing all of the value that you provide the world.
Basecamp claims to--not including options. (Which is of course a big not including in some people's minds relative to the big public firms.) And they're probably (all?) relatively small.
Yet another example of how clueless managements are. They are incapable of actually assessing value of the actual work performed. So they use proxy metrics like LoC, hours worked, in-person presence in the office.
If you want to paid very well, then churn out thousands of lines of rubbish code, be in the office for 70+ hours, attend their meetings, pay rapt attention to their PowerPoints and laugh at their jokes. Bingo!
To help yoy grok why what FB is doing makes sense, view this from the reverse situation: Let’s say you live in a low cost area (e.g. AK) and then move to the Bay Area, working for the same company.
In that case, with your COL doubling, would you expect a pay raise? Of course you would! Because your net pay would reduce significantly otherwise.
That only makes sense if you consider someone like Alex Jones to be “just another person who happens to have different opinions about some things than some other people”. He never got shit from anyone for merely offering unpopular opinions, his history (and present) is much more complicated and fucked up than that. He’s definitely on a short list of people for whom humanity in general is worse off overall for having him in it. Like a negative contributor on a team who just makes work for other people, he’s a negative contributor in many, many ways for all of humanity, and not just from spreading transparent lies and obvious disinformation. He never got in trouble for simply saying something someone else disagreed with, he got in trouble for directly fucking with the lives of victims of horrible tragedies, over and over again.
What does this even mean? Are you suggesting a private company should be forced to host content they don't want to? Should Fox News be forced to host Rachael Maddow and a Huffpost show? Is Fox News "censoring" Huffpost by not hosting a show on their network?
Imagine a public town square. Would you want any company acting as the gatekeeper, deciding what speech is allowed or not in that setting?
YouTube, Twitter and a few others are effectively the new town square. I don't think we want to end up in a position where a few corporations are dictating acceptable speech and open debate.
Just because you can apply a rule with one set of nouns and achieve an unjust outcome doesn't mean the rule is bad.
There's no daylight between "we can't restrict shitty speech because one day we might restrict non-shitty speech" and "we can't have laws against bad things because one day we might have laws against non-bad things". It's an obviously stupid argument and it's not any less stupid because the operating verb is speech.
I don't understand this attitude that we shouldn't say "don't do bad things" because someone else might come along and disagree about which things are bad.
Nothing is set in stone. Everything is a spectrum, and fights for where to draw lines on a spectrum will continue in society in perpetuity.
You are absolutely right. Right now, it isn't an issue, because Alex Jones is a legitimately awful, possibly insane human being who contributes nothing to actual political discourse, and directs hatred at parents of murdered children for his schtick. It's Youtube, not the federal government.
And while I do believe "The Internet" is the public square, I don't think Youtube is /quite/ that protected yet, and I don't think Alex Jones deserves that protection.
Other people may get shut down like AJ did, and I may not like it, and I'll argue against it.
Verb (with object)
> to agree together, especially secretly, to do something wrong, evil, or illegal.
verb (without object)
> to plot (something wrong, evil, or illegal).
We all know that "conspire" has connotations beyond just to "join or act together", otherwise there would be no difference between "coporate" and "conspire".
Nobody burned anything. You can head over to his website and watch his videos if you want.
Not giving someone a platform isn't taking their free speech away, any more than me telling religious people attempting to convert me to get off my property is violating their religious rights.
one can be against censorship and against the message being censored.
in other words : don't assume those that defend people like Alex Jones are defending his opinions.
Many are defending his ability to transmit his message, regardless of the quality of that message, in the interest of preserving that ability for themselves and causes that they support.
Nah, they are using that as a front to push their agenda, because otherwise they'd be super in favor of google and youtube's free speech too, which they are not.
Alex Jones isn't legally prohibited from saying lies about Sandy Hook, and the people up in arms defending those hateful lies and saying we should be careful to preserve hateful lies on private platforms are either idiot patsies or purposefully misleading liars(like Alex Jones himself actually.)
I think you're confusing YouTube's "free speech" with YouTube's ability to censor anything they want. I have no issue with Google uploading YouTube videos or blog posts spreading essentially whatever message the company wants to spread.
At school, it was sort of a cat-and-mouse game between the students and the sysadmin. Kids would find new ways of evading the school blocks (different proxies, someone getting a bypass login, etc so they could access myspace) that the admin would then catch a couple weeks later and close. A lot of these proxies were distributed on the fileserver that was shared between students.
One day, I wrote a small piece of software in my programming class (in VB6!!) that would wait a random length of time, and then open and close the CD tray. I wrote a short batch script that would copy that file to startup and then open the current popular proxy software. I then changed the icon on that script and placed it where people expected to find the proxy software, giving them reason to run my script.
Students then unknowingly disseminated my software all over the school, and the next day (after PCs were rebooted overnight) the software would take effect and randomly open/close the CD trays of computers all over the school.
They ended up tracing it back to me (windows user permissions/ownership, probably) and I was promptly banned from computers at school through the end of the year and for most of the next.