Professional hitmen don’t actually exist.
Sammy “The Bull” Gravano would probably disagree with you. He’d likely consider himself a professional since he admitted to involvement in 19 murders. Granted they were all mob related, and not “for hire” by anybody with a pile of cash and a grudge…
Back in the 90’s before the days of Windows 3.0 I had to debug a memory manager written by a brilliant but somewhat odd guy. Among other thing I stumbled across:
She talks about it in this video.
Smarter bots know how to easily avoid being detected based on the speed of their requests by simply adding a random delay to them. A few years ago we discovered a very slow speed credential stuffing attack (testing usernames & passwords) against my employers site. It was only testing one set of credentials every couple of minutes.
Once we discovered it we didn’t block it though. We were able to spot the attack fairly easily once we knew what to look for, so we updated our system to always return a login failure no matter what credentials they sent.
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Back in the late 90’s I worked for an internet search company, long before Google was a thing. We would regularly physically drive a dozen SCSI drives from a RAID array between two datacenters about 20 miles apart.
New Zealand. The wife & I spent 3 weeks there earlier this year. The people were all very friendly, and the range of things to do & see is just amazing if you’re into the outdoors at all.
I loved the bit where he spent a small pile of that money on an Inverted Jenny postage stamp then used it to send a postcard.
Speaking of slot machines, every slot machine, electronic poker machine, etc. are just state machines that operate based on a stream of random numbers fed into them by another device.
The random number generators (RNG’s) used for gaming are highly regulated (at least here in the US) and only a small handful of companies make them. They have to be certified for use by organizations like The Nevada Gaming Control Board. RNGs have to be secured so only NGC officials and other key people can access them. If they are opened unexpectedly or otherwise tampered with then they need to go into lockdown and stop generating numbers until an official resets it.
The RNGs also need to be able to replay sequences of numbers on demand. If the same sequence of numbers are fed into a game and the user plays the same way then the result of the game should be 100% identical each time.
I’ve heard of all sorts of issues with my fiber ISP (Verizon Fios) rolling out IPv6. It’s been years that they’ve been slowly rolling it out for testing in a few places. There’s virtually no useful documentation on their website about it. And it’s still not available where I am.
My employer has a pretty large presence in AWS. We finished migrating to Amazon’s Corretto (based on openjdk) months ago. It was pretty painless given we already use Amazon’s Linux distros.
Getting rear ended on the highway by a drunk driver. Had all of about 1 second of warning when she slammed on her brakes and started skidding.
My favorite when debugging some code for a memory manager, written in the days of DOS extended memory, was shit_cookie_corrupt.
The original author called blocks of memory “cookies”. If too many cookies were corrupted then eventually the function ohShitOhShitOhShit was called, which shut everything down.
A well thought out and implemented backup system, along with a good security setup is how you deal with malware. If backups won’t protect you from malware then you’re doing backups wrong. A proper backup implementation keeps a series of full backups plus incremental backups based on those full ones. So say your data doesn’t change very often, then you might do a full backup once a month and incremental ones twice a week. You keep 6 months of the combinations of full & incrementals, you don’t just overwrite the backups with new ones.
If you’re doing backups like that and you suffer a malware attack then you have the ability to recover data as far as 6 months ago. The chances you don’t discover malware encrypting your data for 6+ months is tiny. If you’re really paranoid then you also test recovering files from random backups on a regular basis.
My employer has detected and blocked multiple malware attacks using a combination of the above practices plus device management software that can detect unusual NAS activity and block suspect devices on our networks. Each time our security team was able to identify the encrypted files and restore over 99% from backups.
Suppose you’re hit by a ransomware attack and all the data on your NAS gets encrypted. Your RAID “backup” is just as inaccessible as everything else. So it’s not a backup. A true backup would let you recover from the ransomware attack once you have identified and removed the malware that allowed the attack.
As far as BitTorrent itself goes, your optimal speed is also going to depend a bit on your client and the number of peers in the swarm.
Suppose you’re seeding a file to 3 peers. It’s not very efficient if your client uploads part 1 of your file to each peer, then uploads part 2 to each peer, etc. A more optimized upload would upload part 1 to peer A, part 2 to peer B, part 3 to peer C, etc. Then the peers can share each of those parts with each other. This way you are effectively only uploading the file one time before other nodes start seeding as well.
The thing is, this sort of seeding only works well in specific situations, including when there’s only one seeder, etc. And not all clients support this. Take a look at qbittorrent’s super seeding option for an example of one client that does.
I’m a 50+ year old IT guy who started out as a c/c++ programmer in the 90’s and I’m not that worried.
The thing is, all this talk about AI isn’t very accurate. There is a huge difference in the LLM stuff that ChatGPT etc. are built on and true AI. These LLM’s are only as good as the data fed into them. The adage “garbage in, garbage out” comes to mind. Anybody that blindly relies on them is a fool. Just ask the lawyer that used ChatGPT to write a legal brief. The “AI” made up references to non-existent cases that looked and sounded legitimate, and the lawyer didn’t bother to check for accuracy. He filed the brief and it was the judge that discovered the brief was a work of fiction.
Now I know there’s a huge difference between programming and the law, but there are still a lot of similarities here. An AI generated program is only going to be as good as the samples provided to it, and you’re probably want a human to review that code to ensure it’s truly doing what you want, at the very least.
I also have concern that programming LLMs could be targeted by scammers and the like. Train the LLM to harvest sensitive information and obfuscate the code that does it so that it’s difficult for a human to spot the malicious code without a highly detailed analysis of the generated code. That’s another reason to want to know exactly what the LLM is trained on.
Sue the mine in China that supplied the raw materials that went into the dielectric material in the capacitors in the power supply of the computer that facilitated the downloading of illegal content….
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IANAL, but I believe these laws cover audio recording only. OP shouldn’t have an issue if they use something that records video only.
Think about it a second. I live in a two party consent state, but I see security & surveillance cameras everywhere. If two party consent was required for video then they wouldn’t be there.