dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Aside from the terrorism aspect, the remaining non-blown reactors were still providing power up until I think 2000 before it was finally fully shut down. Russia has obviously had a fixation on trying to destroy Ukraine’s infrastructure and outside of any other potential fuckery is probably concerned that Ukraine will be able to power it back up again if they need to, especially if more of their infrastructure elsewhere is blown up.

Plus, even if the Russians lose Ukraine will still be left holding the bag for cleaning up and repairing whatever additional damage was done to the containment structures.

You, uh, didn’t turn multiplayer off in your options, did you? That setting doesn’t follow your account around, it’s per machine.

I leave it off on my laptop because it causes the Space Anomaly to devolve into single-digit frame rates when other players are present and rendered, especially when docking.

Note that this doesn’t prevent you from seeing other players’ bases, nor impact the ability to see people on your friends list or their status. Your game will still connect to the servers if it can. It only prevents other players’ keisters and ships from being placed in your universe.

In my case the pattern appears to be some manner of DDoS botnet, probably not an AI scraper. The request origins are way too widespread and none of them resolve down to anything that’s obviously datacenters or any sort of commercial enterprise. It seems to be a horde of devices in consumer IP ranges that have probably be compromised by some malware package or another, and whoever is controlling it directed it at our site for some reason. It’s possible that some bad actor is using a similar malware/bot farm arrangement to scrape for AI training, but I’d doubt it. It doesn’t fit the pattern from that sort of thing from what I’ve seen.

Anyway, my script’s been playing automated whack-a-mole with their addresses and steadily filtering them all out, and I geoblocked the countries where the largest numbers of offenders were. (“This is a bad practice!” I hear the hue and cry from specific strains of bearded louts on the Internet. That says maybe, but I don’t ship to Brazil or Singapore or India, so I don’t particularly care. If someone insists on connecting through a VPN from one of those regions for some reason, that’s their own lookout.)

They seem to have more or less run out of compromised devices to throw at our server, so now I only see one such request every few minutes rather than hundreds per second. I shudder to think how long my firewall’s block list is by now.

I have and there’s nothing noteworthy, other than tons of other retailers selling the same thing of course.

It doesn’t quite work that way, since the URL is also the model number/SKU which comes from the manufacturer. I suppose I could write an alias for just that product but it would become rather confusing.

What I did experiment with was temporarily deleting the product altogether for a day or two. (We barely ever sell it. Maybe 1 or 2 units of it a year. This is no great loss in the name of science.) This causes our page to return a 404 when you try to request it. The bots blithely ignored this, and continued attempting to hammer that nonexistent page all the same. Puzzling.

Maybe, but I also carry literally hundreds of other products from that same brand including several that are basically identical with trivial differences, and they’re only picking on that one particular SKU.

Negative. Our solution is completely home grown. All artisinal-like, from scratch. I can’t imagine I reveal anything anyone would care about much except product specs, and our inventory and pricing really doesn’t change very frequently.

Even so, you think someone bothering to run a botnet to hound our site would distribute page loads across all of our products, right? Not just one. It’s nonsensical.

I run an ecommerce site and lately they’ve latched onto one very specific product with attempts to hammer its page and any of those branching from it for no readily identifiable reason, at the rate of several hundred times every second. I found out pretty quickly, because suddenly our view stats for that page in particular rocketed into the millions.

I had to insert a little script to IP ban these fuckers, which kicks in if I see a malformed user agent string or if you try to hit this page specifically more than 100 times. Through this I discovered that the requests are coming from hundreds of thousands of individual random IP addresses, many of which are located in Singapore, Brazil, and India, and mostly resolve down into those owned by local ISPs and cell phone carriers.

Of course they ignore your robots.txt as well. This smells like some kind of botnet thing to me.

I’m interested, in a fascinated and horrified way, how HP could possibly make their products and services worse. I’m sure they’ll find a way, and I’m sure it’ll be so terrible that none of us will be able to look away. But at the moment I’ll be damned if I can think of how.

Click The Monkey And Win!

It’s like we’re in 1999 all over again.

Obligatory XKCD insertion.

This is one of those rare cases where regardless of where you place the hyphen, “old-ass clowns” or “old ass-clowns,” both are accurate descriptions of the clowns in question.

Nothing, which is why the letter phrases it as a “request.”

In order to be extradited he’d have to actually be charged with a specific crime, insofar as I am aware.

Even outside of scripting and so forth, which I use a lot, often it’s far easier and faster to just cook up a wildcard string or a regex or whatever when you’re faced with a folder with eleventy bazillion files in it, only some of which you’d like to move somewhere else.

Yes, you could point-and-click on all of those for the next hour and a half plucking them all out of your file browser window. Me personally, I’d really rather not.

Other similar use cases abound.

They already sell their vehicles to Altima drivers. I think doom was already on the menu.

Gamers Nexus did a whole thing on this a while ago. It was quite illuminating.

What it mainly illuminated to me is that I will never buy a prebuilt gaming PC from anyone, let alone lease one. If it’s not my own grubby fingers touching every component I don’t trust it.

You separate out the isotopes. You don’t create U-235, but rather you extract the fissile isotope from your sample. There’s only a limited amount of the stuff in the world and the majority of uranium still buried (and in fact, the majority of it at all) is non-fissile U-238. Only something like 0.7% of the uranium in the world is U-235.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium

I suspect this is highly dependent on the level of enrichment of said uranium.

Even buying it piecemeal in dinkum quantities from scientific suppliers as a private customer, I’m seeing depleted uranium — i.e., 99.9% U238 and not realistically fissile material — priced at $32.50 per gram online. 2 kilos of that would thus be $65,000. Although I’ll be damned if I know just what the hell you’d do with the stuff.

I reckon weapons grade would run you just a smidgen more than that.

Correct on that count. The whole thing is now just a boy-who-cried-wolf situation.

That’s not why. It’s because it’s cheaper for a manufacturer of your widget to just slap a Prop 65 label on anything and everything out of an overabundance of caution rather than go through all the testing and certification required to verify if there is or isn’t any such material in the product. There’s no penalty for false positives, so to remain “complaint” suddenly every manufactured good on Earth suddenly sprouted the warning.

That was Violet Beauregarde’s fate. Veruca was the one who was a bad egg (or a bad nut, in the book/Depp adaptation).

But in keeping with the theme, Trump wins nothing. He loses, good day sir.