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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • Good luck with that, I suppose. Botnets can have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of infected hosts that will endlessly scan everything on the interwebs. Many of those infected hosts are behind NAT’s and your abuse form would be the equivalent of reporting an entire region for a single scan.

    But hey! Change the world, amirite?













  • remotelove@lemmy.catoxkcd@lemmy.worldxkcd #3094: Mass Spec
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    2 months ago

    Speculating, of course, I would say there wouldn’t be enough change to get a perceivable effect through other kinds of noise at the scale we are talking about. Yes, there would be an effect, but with all other environmental variables included, the results may appear completely random.

    Then again, I suppose much of this boils down to the accuracy of the tools that you use to measure the results.




  • I taught myself QuickBasic as it was the only thing I knew that was related to copying C64 BASIC out of magazines. (QBasic was packaged with DOS 3.11 I think and I was able to get a full copy of QuickBasic somehow. That was about +30 years ago? Dunno. I was about 12 at the time.) I didn’t know what other languages were out there besides TurboPascal. I did learn simple Pascal, but that was a short chapter.

    I actually met someone else in the area that was learning to code, and of course, we wanted to write a game. The only way to code for a mouse at the time was to write an INT33 handler, so it kicked off our interest in asm. (I still use asm for MCU stuff on occasion, but it’s limited.) I quickly diverged into writing some really nifty… eh… “boot sector code” so that kicked off my career in security.

    And yeah, it’s the same phenomenon for me: I just think in terms of bits and bytes getting shifted around and I still refuse to believe in “magic”. (Slight jab at Rust coders there, but in good fun.)

    Fast forward to today, I train “kids” fresh out of college as part of my job now. The first thing I do is start giving them weird tasks that require they actually understand how something like an fopen() actually works.

    (Funny story. I refused to “show my work” in math class for simple f(x) problems as I viewed it as unoptimized code. Lulz. I was such an autistic dork.)