For a few minutes today the package "fs" was unpublished from the registry in response to a user report that it was spam. It has been restored. This was a human error on my (@seldo's) part; I failed to properly follow our written internal process for checking if an unpublish is safe. My apologies to the users and builds we disrupted.
More detail: the "fs" package is a non-functional package. It simply logs the word "I am fs" and exits. There is no reason it should be included in any modules. However, something like 1000 packages do mistakenly depend on "fs"
Best posts made by bb36e
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NPM package that does nothing accidentally removed, breaks shit AGAIN
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Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze
TL;DR $400 internet-connected juicer that only lets you use their custom juice packet things is crappy. Silicon Valley invests $120M. Thing is still crappy.
One of the most lavishly funded gadget startups in Silicon Valley last year was Juicero Inc. It makes a juice machine. The product was an unlikely pick for top technology investors, but they were drawn to the idea of an internet-connected device that transforms single-serving packets of chopped fruits and vegetables into a refreshing and healthy beverage.
Juicer + IoT = ???
Doug Evans, the company’s founder, would compare himself with Steve Jobs in his pursuit of juicing perfection. He declared that his juice press wields four tons of force—“enough to lift two Teslas,” he said.
Everyone in the Bay drives Teslas. Y'know, the Bay.
Google’s venture capital arm and other backers poured about $120 million into the startup.
Proof that the tech industry has too much money in its hands
Bloomberg performed its own press test, pitting a Juicero machine against a reporter’s grip. The experiment found that squeezing the bag yields nearly the same amount of juice just as quickly—and in some cases, faster—than using the device.
A person close to the company said Juicero is aware the packs can be squeezed by hand but that most people would prefer to use the machine because the process is more consistent and less messy. The device also reads a QR code printed on the back of each produce pack and checks the source against an online database to ensure the contents haven’t expired or been recalled, the person said. The expiration date is also printed on the pack.
This is what really upset me -- instead of just putting a machine-readable expiry date on the pack they check against an online DB to verify that the pack hasn't expired. This sums up most of the IoT bullshit I see these days:
- take existing appliance/product
- add internet capability
- remove all old capabilities
- force internet connectivity
The end result is a buggy, unsupported, crippled POS that turns into a paperweight the moment the company's servers go offline.
And this is what the valley is investing in. bloody hell.
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RE: Sonos bricking devices intentionally
@the_quiet_one said in Sonos bricking devices intentionally:
Time to check the audiophile forums
You can actually hear the difference between audio over HTTP and HTTPS. HTTPS encrypts the data to make it look random, so the sound actually has a very small amount of random noise in the background. If you don't hear it, then I suggest comparing the two with a high quality DAC and headphone amp.
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RE: Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it
I swear mom, I don't know who ordered it! It must have been a bug on amazon!
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RE: Blockchain Tomato
all these crypto people talk about salts and hash browns, seems to me that this can only be unhealthy for us and should be banned
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seriously, the guy has a point
https://gregfallis.com/2017/04/14/seriously-the-guy-has-a-point/#
I'm sure some of you have heard about the new 'Fearless Girl' statue:
Here's an interesting bit of history and backstory behind the bull and the new girl:
Back in 1987 there was a global stock market crash. Doesn’t matter why (at least not for this discussion), but stock markets everywhere — everywhere — tanked. Arturo Di Modica, a Sicilian immigrant who became a naturalized citizen of the U.S., responded by creating Charging Bull — a bronze sculpture of a…well, a charging bull. It took him two years to make it. The thing weighs more than 7000 pounds, and cost Di Modica some US$350,000 of his own money. He said he wanted the bull to represent “the strength and power of the American people”. He had it trucked into the Financial District and set it up, completely without permission. It’s maybe the only significant work of guerrilla capitalist art in existence.
People loved it. The assholes who ran the New York Stock Exchange, for some reason, didn’t. They called the police, and pretty soon the statue was removed and impounded. A fuss was raised, the city agreed to temporarily install it, and the public was pleased. It’s been almost thirty years, and Charging Bull is still owned by Di Modica, still on temporary loan to the city, still one of the most recognizable symbols of New York City.
And that brings us to March 7th of this year, the day before International Women’s Day. Fearless Girl appeared, standing in front of Charging Bull. On the surface, it appears to be another work of guerrilla art — but it’s not. Unlike Di Modica’s work, Fearless Girl was commissioned. Commissioned not by an individual, but by an investment fund called State Street Global Advisors, which has assets in excess of US$2.4 trillion. That’s serious money. It was commissioned as part of an advertising campaign developed by McCann, a global advertising corporation. And it was commissioned to be presented on the first anniversary of State Street Global’s “Gender Diversity Index” fund, which has the following NASDAQ ticker symbol: SHE. And finally, along with Fearless Girl is a bronze plaque that reads:Know the power of women in leadership. SHE makes a difference.
Note it’s not She makes a difference, it’s SHE makes a difference. It’s not referring to the girl; it’s referring to the NASDAQ symbol. It’s not a work of guerrilla art; it’s an extremely clever advertising scheme. This is what makes it clever: Fearless Girl derives its power almost entirely from Di Modica’s statue.
Why is this being talked about? Because Di Modica, the artist behind the bronze bull, wants 'Fearless Girl' removed. I'm not arguing for either side, but I just thought how it was kind of funny how the bull, intended to represent the spirit of the people and paid for by the artist himself, has been turned into an icon representing greed and the 1% by the investment-fund-financed girl.
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RE: Apple's newest iPhone, 2016
@stillwater stop making phones thinner and instead make the battery bigger
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Facebook scraped call, text message data for years from Android phones
This past week, a New Zealand man was looking through the data Facebook had collected from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site. While scanning the information Facebook had stored about his contacts, Dylan McKay discovered something distressing: Facebook also had about two years worth of phone call metadata from his Android phone, including names, phone numbers, and the length of each call made or received.
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RE: THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
@lucas1 said in THE BAD IDEAS THREAD:
@benjamin-hall But are you comfortable knowing that your dick isn't as long or as thick as mine?
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RE: WTF Bites
@cartman82 the goal is to use tools that are so buggy as to provide plausible deniability when it turns out that the elections were rigged
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RE: WTF Bites
When a vfat thumbdrive which contains `` or $() in its volume label is plugged and mounted trough the device notifier, it's interpreted as a shell command, leaving a possibility of arbitrary commands execution. an example of offending volume label is "$(touch b)" which will create a file called b in the home folder.
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RE: I don't like developing firefox/chrome extensions
I'll try to start writing it, and use this as my horror log. worst comes to worst, I guess I can always check the mozilla forums—OH JESUS CHRIST
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Equifax Part 2
Equifax employee systems in Argentina were publicly-facing and wide-open:
Earlier today, this author was contacted by Alex Holden, founder of Milwaukee, Wisc.-based Hold Security LLC. Holden’s team of nearly 30 employees includes two native Argentinians who spent some time examining Equifax’s South American operations online after the company disclosed the breach involving its business units in North America.
It took almost no time for them to discover that an online portal designed to let Equifax employees in Argentina manage credit report disputes from consumers in that country was wide open, protected by perhaps the most easy-to-guess password combination ever: “admin/admin.”
It gets worse.
Each employee record included a company username in plain text, and a corresponding password that was obfuscated by a series of dots.
However, all one needed to do in order to view said password was to right-click on the employee’s profile page and select “view source,” a function that displays the raw HTML code which makes up the Web site. Buried in that HTML code was the employee’s password in plain text.
It gets worse.
A review of those accounts shows all employee passwords were the same as each user’s username. Worse still, each employee’s username appears to be nothing more than their last name, or a combination of their first initial and last name.
It gets-
But wait, it gets worse.
From the main page of the Equifax.com.ar employee portal was a listing of some 715 pages worth of complaints and disputes filed by Argentinians who had at one point over the past decade contacted Equifax via fax, phone or email to dispute issues with their credit reports. The site also lists each person’s DNI — the Argentinian equivalent of the Social Security number — again, in plain text. All told, this section of the employee portal included more than 14,000 such records.
The portal was taken offline by Equifax after Krebs contacted them.
Shortly after receiving details about this epic security weakness from Hold Security, I reached out to Equifax and soon after heard from a Washington, D.C.-based law firm that represents the credit bureau.
I briefly described what I’d been shown by Hold Security, and attorneys for Equifax said they’d get back to me after they validated the claims. They later confirmed that the Veraz portal was disabled and that Equifax is investigating how this may have happened.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
Over 3 years ago, curtains were invented, which provided "full-window protection". No longer could people be observed sleeping in their bedrooms from the street. However, homebuilders generally opted to not build bedrooms with an internet-connected video camera, which government agencies would only access under a court order.
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Curtains significantly limit our capacity to investigate these crimes and severely undermines our efficiency in the fight against terrorism. Why should we permit criminal activity to thrive behind drawn curtains, unavailable to law enforcement? To investigate these cases without bedroom video surveillance is to proceed with one hand tied behind our backs.
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in the absence of cooperation from homebuilders, regulators and lawmakers in our nations must now find an appropriate balance between the marginal benefits of curtains and the need for local law enforcement to solve and prosecute crimes. The safety of our communities depends on it. -
RE: I hate printers, with a passion
If I had a gun with two bullets and was in a room with Hitler, Bin Laden, and HP, I would shoot HP twice
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RE: Re: Lorne Kates on web advertising and camelid phalluses
@the_quiet_one times square with adblock:
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RE: WTF Bites
My first name ends with an 'M'. This letter was missing from my flight itinerary when I booked a flight with Air Canada. After calling them, this appears to be a very common issue. The support person explained to me that because I did not include a personal title when booking and because my first name ends with an M, the system will automatically chop it off and add a title of 'Mr.'. This is because of the way titles are handled in French.
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RE: Aussie software developer had to answer some Python questions to enter the US
@Groaner said in Aussie software developer had to answer some Python questions to enter the US:
why manhole covers are round
Duh! The pipes are also round, so if the cover wasn't round then the water wouldn't fit
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
I was once working with a customer who was producing on-board software for a missile. In my analysis of the code, I pointed out that they had a number of problems with storage leaks. Imagine my surprise when the customers chief software engineer said "Of course it leaks". He went on to point out that they had calculated the amount of memory the application would leak in the total possible flight time for the missile and then doubled that number. They added this much additional memory to the hardware to "support" the leaks. Since the missile will explode when it hits its target or at the end of its flight, the ultimate in garbage collection is performed without programmer intervention.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
“Give someone a program, you frustrate them for a day; teach them how to program, you frustrate them for a lifetime.” — David Leinwebe
“Unix will give you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot. If you didn’t think rope would do that, you should have read the man page.” — @mhoye
“C is memory with syntactic sugar.” — Dennis Kubes
“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle
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We shouldn't let people get used to the idea that software fails
If you asked a member of the general population in the 90s or early 2000s about computers and the internet, I bet most of them would sound optimistic. That’s what everyone is talking about, right? Soon, we will do everything with computers! Computers are super smart!
While this is anecdotal evidence, today most of the people I know are frustrated with technology. Apps are buggy, the web is filled with ads and intrusive useless notifications (would you like some cookies?), touch screens everywhere suddenly made simple things like washing machines and car control panels barely usable.
We just got used to that. Electronics is something that’s wonky and buggy. That’s what we expect.
And this is scary.
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RE: WTF Bites
A group of video game preservationists wants the legal right to replicate "abandoned" servers in order to re-enable defunct online multiplayer gameplay for study.
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The Entertainment Software Association (ESA), which represents many major game publishers, argues that simulating proprietary server code in this way requires copying large parts of the "expressive nature" of the games in question—server-hosted content that often was never distributed to the public.
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This gets to the heart of the ESA's argument against an expanded DMCA exemption; namely, the industry's fear that such efforts will go beyond mere "preservation" in research institutions and expand to allow the general public to log in to these old games once again.
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The ESA fears a new exemption for these games could lead to an "online arcade" where defunct online games could be played outside the confines of a museum.
...Consumers: Hey this game I bought from you is shutting down and I literally cannot play it anymore.
Industry: Hey there's a new game coming out, pls buy it and you'll be able to play for a few years
Consumers: We're gonna reverse engineer this shit and get it working again
Industry: no fair! -
RE: Firefox is Square, but only sometimes
@Lorne-Kates looks like a Firefox 22 issue to me bud. switch to ff50 and the title bar won't be there anymore
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New Intel microcode license disallows benchmarking
New timing/side-channel resistant microcode patches have a license with a small change attached:
You will not, and will not allow any third party to (i) use, copy, distribute, sell or offer to sell the Software or associated documentation; (ii) modify, adapt, enhance, disassemble, decompile, reverse engineer, change or create derivative works from the Software except and only to the extent as specifically required by mandatory applicable laws or any applicable third party license terms accompanying the Software; (iii) use or make the Software available for the use or benefit of third parties; or (iv) use the Software on Your products other than those that include the Intel hardware product(s), platform(s), or software identified in the Software; or (v) publish or provide any Software benchmark or comparison test results.