WTF Bites
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@LaoC panoramic pictures are obviously stitched together from basically a video pan. A normal picture I expect to be a picture of one moment, not some arbitrary alteration of it.
But I guess that ship has sailed, what with everything applying a crap-load of filters and the Chinesium phones putting in fake pictures of the moon.
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@topspin Hmm.
...
...
New retirement plan. Know how there are those patterns embedded into physical money bills that will make (some) scanners/printers refuse to scan/print them?(*)
Sales idea: Develop software or, perhaps better, hardware that looks for something similar in an image and then edits out the corresponding item. Next, make uniforms/gear for use in e.g. police forces or other paramilitary organizations with that pattern embedded. Talk to government about making that software/hardware mandatory in all future phones, to protect the
childrencitizens or something. (Who needs civil rights and justice when you have them $$$?)(*) I tried it a few times. At one time, a colleague wouldn't believe that this existed, so I took him to the local printerscanner in the office. We put in a €20 of local currency and tried to scan it. Not only did it refuse the scan, but locked down the whole device.
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ETA: also a good time to link this again:
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Richard Branson says he won't invest any more money in Virgin Galactic. Apparently, charging people $450, 000 to go almost into space isn't a good business.
Virgin Galactic’s days were numbered when half of their market for expensive almost-space tourism died in a submersible accident earlier this year.
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article @boomzilla pledged in WTF Bites:
computational photography mistake.
since it was a panoramic photo capture.Oh. Well duh.
Now why it was a panoramic photo for something that can clearly be done in one shot....
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If you're fast/slow enough you don't even need the computational shenanigans:
TBF (and I'm probably repeating the video that I didn't watch) even analog cameras do that.
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@LaoC panoramic pictures are obviously stitched together from basically a video pan. A normal picture I expect to be a picture of one moment, not some arbitrary alteration of it.
TFA says they took it as a panorama though.
But I guess that ship has sailed, what with everything applying a crap-load of filters and the Chinesium phones putting in fake pictures of the moon.
Those were the Koriander phones.
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The website makes AJAX requests to the C++ application in undocumented custom format, which starts with
8=D
.
After adding one boolean field to the data, the app crashed. I think the author is a8=====D
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@LaoC panoramic pictures are obviously stitched together from basically a video pan. A normal picture I expect to be a picture of one moment, not some arbitrary alteration of it.
TFA says they took it as a panorama though.
Fair enough, that makes it not a WTF.
is you expect me to read TFA.
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If the app crashes, the website just logs the user out with no error message.
SECURITY THROUGH ADVERSITY
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Now the format was parsed without errors, but it updated the wrong record
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Ok, it works. Adding one checkbox took
7 files changed, 121 insertions(+), 76 deletions(-)
.
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We put in a €20 of local currency and tried to scan it. Not only did it refuse the scan, but locked down the whole device.
Photoshop also refuses to open images that contain it. I just looked for scans of €20 notes, and found this one:
Dragging it onto Photoshop’s icon produces:
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@Gurth another reason GIMP is superior
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@sebastian-galczynski said in WTF Bites:
custom format, which starts with
8=D
.To be fair, a lot of guys do try to claim that D = 8
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@TimeBandit I didn’t bother trying that, but I kind of doubt it would refuse, yes. However, it’s not just the EURion constellation that makes Photoshop recognise it as a scan of a banknote.
If I reduce the image to 1280 pixels wide, Photoshop opens it without complaining.
However, the full-size version of this:
… also causes the warning, despite all of the constellation being thoroughly blacked out.
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despite all of the constellation being thoroughly blacked out.
You missed some.
But it can't be just looking for that, as stopping problems with other types of banknote would be important too. It's also not perceptual feature detection; cutting the resolution wouldn't help defeat that.
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despite all of the constellation being thoroughly blacked out.
You missed some.
But it can't be just looking for that, as stopping problems with other types of banknote would be important too. It's also not perceptual feature detection; cutting the resolution wouldn't help defeat that.
Does dragging that Wikipedia depiction into Photoshop trigger the same warning?
Also
It's a bit old (2004), but describes similar attempts to bypass currency detection in Photoshop by blanking out parts of the image.
Initially it was thought that the “Eurion constellation” was used to identify banknotes in the newly deployed software based system, since this has been confirmed to be the technique used by colour photocopiers, and was both necessary and sufficient to prevent an item being duplicated using the photocopier tested. However further investigation showed that the detection performed by software is different from the system used in colour photocopiers, and the Eurion constellation is neither necessary nor sufficent, and in fact it probably is not even a factor.
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@Watson IIRC, it also varies from printer to printer. Back when we first tested this, we had the brillant idea to embed the EURion pattern into some PDFs that we knew people would try to print. We never got it to work (i.e., printer would refuse to print) on the specific printers at that office.
Edit: The reason I came here is to complain about Windows.
- opens up a network share so I can put a file that I need on the laptop there
- Windows: blocking dialog "Please wait for printer connection [...]"
ARGH. Windows, why do you have to be so ... Windows?
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@sebastian-galczynski said in WTF Bites:
If the app crashes, the website just logs the user out with no error message.
SECURITY THROUGH ADVERSITY.... This tells me that sessions are only stored in memory and not persisted in any way. Which is good for flash wear on embedded devices I suppose?
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Windows: blocking
Be glad the server search routine was backgrounded so the entire UI no longer freezes just because you typoed a server name....
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@Tsaukpaetra I'm glad my printer deigned to reply within a few ms, rather than making Windows -and in extension, me- wait.
But you make a valid point. The question is not only "WhyTF do you need to ping my printer if I want to copy a file around to a completely unrelated share?" but also "WhyTF isn't this done in the background, so that I never notice?"
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@sebastian-galczynski said in WTF Bites:
If the app crashes, the website just logs the user out with no error message.
SECURITY THROUGH ADVERSITY.... This tells me that sessions are only stored in memory and not persisted in any way. Which is good for flash wear on embedded devices I suppose?
No, they're stored in sqlite and I think it's actually the Javascript code that logs the user off by making some additional request or redirect. That's because most of the website is served PHP and only some requests go to the C++ app (which reads user sessions stored by PHP to check if the user is legitimate). Why didn't he just pass the requests through PHP and only listen on localhost, I have no idea.
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
This result can be recreated on any recent iPhone and many kinds of smartphone due to the limitations of computational photography dealing with mirrors. Younger generations have figured this phenomenon out and used it to generate silly images for social media.
It’s not a limitation. It’s a bug. Gone are the days when your camera would actually take photos. Instead we have social media-ready photos. Or a hack for people not buying wide view lenses.
Didn’t Samsung get caught out with this and the moon recently?
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despite all of the constellation being thoroughly blacked out.
You missed some.
I still am — I can’t find the ones you mean.
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
This result can be recreated on any recent iPhone and many kinds of smartphone due to the limitations of computational photography dealing with mirrors. Younger generations have figured this phenomenon out and used it to generate silly images for social media.
It’s not a limitation. It’s a bug.
It's not really either. The photo was taken as a panoramic photo.
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TBF (and I'm probably repeating the video that I didn't watch) even analog cameras do that.
Especially analog cameras. In an analog camera, the shutter is a physical thing and those can only move so fast, so opening the whole frame at once is not possible. Sliding across the frame is the only practical option.
Digital cameras don't need physical shutters, but the usual approach is still to energize the sensor by row, not all at once, so you get the same effect.
But while this effect is how you get those images of warped aircraft propellers, it shouldn't be noticeable on humans as they move much slower. But that photo was taken as panorama, where the images composing it are taken seconds apart, so of course the human can move between them.
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So on Friday we were trying to fix this problem that a CORS request suddenly stopped working after some minor changes.
This happens when the front-end wants to download some larger data, and the back-end responds with a redirect to the blob storage (with appropriate limited-time access token included) to avoid having to pull the data through our code.
The CORS rules on the blob storage were set correctly and nobody touched them. But suddenly it stopped allowing the origin. I looked at it for a while in disbelief and then I noticed the preflight grew an
Access-Control-Request-Headers: disable-error-handling
.There ain't no such header mentioned in any specification.
Of course there ain't. The front-end devs slapped that in some requests so they know whether the interceptor (a hook that runs on all HTTP requests) should report a generic error or a specific handler is used for this one.
Because until version 12, Angular didn't have any place to slap some metadata to a fetch request
https://netbasal.com/new-in-angular-v12-passing-context-to-http-interceptors-308a1ca2f3dd
and while we already had Angular 14, the developer ran across an obsolete example (and didn't notice it is obsolete).
There are some “cleaner“ hacks mentioned here too:
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We put in a €20 of local currency and tried to scan it. Not only did it refuse the scan, but locked down the whole device.
Photoshop also refuses to open images that contain it. I just looked for scans of €20 notes, and found this one:
Dragging it onto Photoshop’s icon produces:
Out of curiosity, what happens when you open this one?
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In an analog camera, the shutter is a physical thing and those can only move so fast, so opening the whole frame at once is not possible.
Depending on the shutter speed and type of shutter, there might be some time when the shutter is completely open.
Cheapie cameras, like disposables or cheap point-and-shoot, often have a single blade with a round hole that moves across the lens; when the hole is aligned with the lens, the entire frame is exposed.
Larger cameras generally have a leaf shutter within the lens. Somewhere between the pieces of glass, there are several metal blades that pivot to unblock the light. As they pivot, there is a period during which the shutter is fully open and the entire frame is exposed.
Focal plane shutters, as commonly used on 35mm and medium format SLRs, have two curtains that move across the film. Most commonly, these are some kind of rubberized fabric, although some are made of thin metal. The first curtain slides across the film as the shutter opens, and the second follows some time later as it closes. At fast shutter speeds, this creates a slit that moves across the film. However, at slow speeds, the first curtain is fully open before the second starts closing, leaving the entire frame exposed for a while. Typically, shutter speeds slower than 1/60 of a second have some time when the shutter is completely open, although some will fully open at 1/125.
This is why, back before this kind of thing was automated, with the details hidden from ignorant users, there was a maximum shutter speed at which you could use electronic flash. The light pulse from an electronic flash is very brief. It must be triggered when the shutter is completely open; if the shutter is only partially open, only the portion of the film that is uncovered at that instant will be exposed.
(Trivia: Old-fashioned flashbulbs had to be triggered before the shutter was fully open, or even started to open, because it takes some time for the magnesium to start burning and producing light, and the light lasts long enough for the shutter to expose the entire frame, even if it doesn't do so all at once.)
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@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:
The first curtain slides across the film as the shutter opens, and the second follows some time later as it closes.
The video linked about shows that really nicely. That was a TIL for me... (pretty cool!)
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@sebastian-galczynski said in WTF Bites:
Out of curiosity, what happens when you open this one?
Since you asked: it opens it fine :)
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@sebastian-galczynski said in WTF Bites:
Out of curiosity, what happens when you open this one?
Since you asked: it opens it fine :)
That's bad news, they can print even more :/
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@sebastian-galczynski On the other hand, it does not make a big difference if you have a single one fuckzillion Zloty, or a few thousand fuckzillion Zloty..
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Didn’t Samsung get caught out with this and the moon recently?
But I guess that ship has sailed, what with everything applying a crap-load of filters and the Chinesium phones putting in fake pictures of the moon.
Those were the Koriander phones.
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@BernieTheBernie said in WTF Bites:
@sebastian-galczynski On the other hand, it does not make a big difference if you have a single one fuckzillion Zloty, or a few thousand fuckzillion Zloty..
That was the whole point. This note is a communist-era PLZ1000 note with fuckzillion and PM Morawiecki in place of Copernicus. A certain candidate started throwing these from the stage during a rally, mocking Morawiecki's inflationary policies.
Then some prestigious lefty journo (who didn't look too closely) claimed on Twitter that the candidate is buying votes and asking where's the police. You don't hate journalists enough, as they say.
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@sebastian-galczynski said in WTF Bites:
Morawiecki
Who was renamed to
Mao-wiecki
on that banknote, too.
But did the Chinese have such an inflation during the Mao era?
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Bunch of bastards...
When fetching processes in powershell using
Get-Process
, the process ID is returned with datatypeInt32
.
When fetching process statistics usingGet-CimInstance Win32_Process
, the process ID is returned with datatypeUInt32
.When storing one of these in a hash table and fetching using the other, no result will be returned.
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@BernieTheBernie said in WTF Bites:
@sebastian-galczynski said in WTF Bites:
Morawiecki
Who was renamed to
Mao-wiecki
on that banknote, too.Other nicknames include VATeusz and Pinocchio.
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@BernieTheBernie said in WTF Bites:
@sebastian-galczynski said in WTF Bites:
Morawiecki
Who was renamed to
Mao-wiecki
on that banknote, too.Other nicknames include VATeusz and Pinocchio.
My favorite is Matousz.
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@PleegWat That doesn't make any sense!
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
@PleegWat That doesn't make any sense!
You are referred to this for an adequate and sufficient explanation:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
Bunch of bastards...
Welcome to Windows!
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@dkf No. The WinAPI that lies underneath the process ID call and the WMI class both have
DWORD
as the type.Powers-hell is . And not only because it insists on having a signed integer type for a numeric identifier, but because it doesn't throw on the cast it silently pulls out of its ass. The C# compiler requires an explicit cast.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
@dkf No. The WinAPI that lies underneath the process ID call and the WMI class both have
DWORD
as the type.Powers-hell is . And not only because it insists on having a signed integer type for a numeric identifier, but because it doesn't throw on the cast it silently pulls out of its ass. The C# compiler requires an explicit cast.
I'm not sure what it's doing but it's not a cast. An explicit cast fixed the issue.
Since the hash was not declared with an explicit type, I'd guess it could contain keys of mixed types, and it was looking for UInt32s in a hash which only contained entries with Int32 keys.
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@PleegWat And people wonder why having a simple general
Integer
type for all integers of all sizes (i.e., the object entirely hides the storage size) is a good idea?
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You can't rate our service once the service is done
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@LaoC panoramic pictures are obviously stitched together from basically a video pan. A normal picture I expect to be a picture of one moment, not some arbitrary alteration of it.
TFA says they took it as a panorama though.
But I guess that ship has sailed, what with everything applying a crap-load of filters and the Chinesium phones putting in fake pictures of the moon.
Those were the Koriander phones.
Koriander = coriander = cilantro
Phones that taste like soap.
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@BernieTheBernie said in WTF Bites:
@sebastian-galczynski said in WTF Bites:
Morawiecki
Who was renamed to
Mao-wiecki
on that banknote, too.
But did the Chinese have such an inflation during the Mao era?Not in the usual sense. Money printing in a planned economy manifests as shortages instead of rising prices (since the latter are explicitly set by the planners), and monetary overhang. Once you free the prices, the usual price inflation appears, sometimes (in the case of Poland) immediately reaching three digits.