The researchers didn’t find a wide-open door so much as the security employed by a 1920s speakeasy: once they learned the secret knock, the unidentified test car’s controls let them in no questions asked. The team sent fake warning messages from 40 meters away, and in another experiment, got the test car to flash a warning that a tire had lost all pressure while beaming the signal from another car as both drove 68 mph.
Because each sensor uses a unique ID tag, it was also possible to track specific vehicles, in a way that would be far less noticeable than roadside cameras.
I’m talking people so fucking stupid that when you tell them to press any key to continue, they look on their keyboard for the key that says ANY. Were it not for these individuals, the Geek Squad would starve, because these are the only people who would happily pay for what the Geek Squad offers.
For the unfamiliar, the Geek Squad is Best Buy’s squadron of deployable nerds ready, willing, and able to perform ambiguous tasks for outrageouslyusuriousfees. To over-simplify what they do… at best, they either do essentially nothing at all, or they do nothing that the average 12 year-old couldn’t handle if you gave them the quick start-up sheet that comes with every computer. At worst, they completely fuck up everything they touch.
Their services run the gamut from installing bloatware to turning things on to charging you to reboot your computer to not following simple safety procedures to taking forever to fix the simplest of problems. A more diverse non-skillset you would be hard-pressed to find in any competitor’s organization. Case in point… the e-Reader configuration “service” (and I use that term loosely) that they offer.
For a mere $29.95, they will (dramatic pause)… TURN YOUR SONY READER ON FOR YOU! (trumpets, confetti, etc.)!!!! WHAT A BARGAIN!!!!
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of facebook.com, apparently played it fast and loose in the area of privacy with his social networking prototype at Harvard, referring to those that submitted their personal information to his site as “dumb fucks.”
Now, I have a facebook account, and like many others, have noticed a disturbing trend toward the amount of your information that is left open to everyone by default. That being said, because of this trend I periodically check my privacy settings to make sure that they are adjusted accordingly. I also make sure that I don’t put every aspect of my life on public, or even semi-public display. This goes for every social networking site on which I participate, not just facebook.
I don’t have a ton of sympathy for those who put their entire life on social networking sites and but then proceed to bitch about invasions of privacy. These individuals are kind of like the people that whine about their weight while they’re eating six big Macs and a diet Coke. On this level, Zuckerberg has a point.
However, referring to the whole of your userbase, whether a few thousand or a hundred million, as “dumb fucks” shows what can happen when your company has a CEO just out of puberty with no adult supervision.
I was tasked with building a test server so that a client could test a new feature in a hotfix that was going to be applied to their software package. The server is installed with software and configured to look like a mirror of their production box, right down to the hardware on which the software runs and I’ve done this many times before so I didn’t think this was going to be a huge problem. As soon as that sentence entered my thoughts, I should have known better.
Once the hardware was secured and the OS (Windows Server 2003 SP2) was installed, it was time to get about the business of making this look like the client’s production environment. Two of the tasks involved in this were…
Installing Citrix so that the client could access the box for testing, and
Adding system DSN’s via the ODBC administrator so that data could be pulled from SQL server to the locally installed database application (to be installed later).
Citrix came first. Once that was completed, I opened the ODBC administrator and found to my horror that when I either tried to create a new system DSN, the ODBC administrator shut down the second you hit the configure button. I won’t bore you with the details, but this led to myself and the intrepid I.T. staff I work with running down several plausible, but incorrect and time-wasting paths (A missed Windows software update? Bad disk cluster? Bad OS install? Me being the pawn of a vengeful supreme being’s sick sense of humor?). Fortunately, as with so many other things, the interwebs came to our rescue because huddled in an obscure little corner of the web was the solution to our problem.
Once the frustration was vented and our thoughts were collected, we actually did something we should have done from the beginning: looked at the event logs from when the ODBC administrator failures occurred. We found this stream of jibberish:
0000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74 Applicat
0008: 69 6f 6e 20 46 61 69 6c ion Fail
0010: 75 72 65 20 20 6f 64 62 ure odb
0018: 63 61 64 33 32 2e 65 78 cad32.ex
0020: 65 20 33 2e 35 32 36 2e e 3.526.
0028: 33 39 35 39 2e 30 20 69 3959.0 i
0030: 6e 20 75 6e 6b 6e 6f 77 n unknow
0038: 6e 20 30 2e 30 2e 30 2e n 0.0.0.
0040: 30 20 61 74 20 6f 66 66 0 at off
0048: 73 65 74 20 35 62 62 33 set 5bb3
0050: 31 32 64 65 12de
Actually, it’s the computing environment and the OS that runs it, but I’ll take the giant-ass monitors, gloves, and touch-screens too. Those of you who have seen Minority Report will recall the old adage from Arthur C. Clarke about today’s science fiction being tomorrow’s science fact.
