Or maybe, of all things Russia is running low on, North Korea is supporting them by supplying train loads of desperately needed tarps.

I used to be a reseller of this highly specialized navigation software. The licensing was handled via hardware fingerprinting of the harddrive. I'm not 100% sure on how it worked, but it grabbed some raw data off of the boot device, and from that generated a fingerprint. This fingerprint was then sent to the guys who made the software, and they would then send us a license key and a hefty bill. The license key only worked with syatems running off of that particular harddrive. If a customer had a harddrive failure, we had to send them the actual harddrive for them to verify, so they would issue a free key to whichever replacement drive was used.

I did a lot of experimenting with that software. It was linux based and very tweakable, but the licensing part of it was a bit of a mystery. I managed to crack it through some surprisingly simple out-of-the-box thinking, but one limitation I could never figure out how to circumvent was its refusal to generate a fingerprint from virtual drives.

For starters, it only worked with drives registering as /dev/hdX or /dev/sdX. Anything outside of that and it wouldn't generate a fingerprint.

This was especially frustrating when a well-paying customer offered a nice bonus if we could install it on a macbook for him. After a few days of tweaking I managed to install and run it, only to discover that fingerprinting the drive couldn't be done due to the device node being/dev/nvmeSomething. And after avfew more days of hacking I managed to fake that too, and they outright refused to issue a license due to them not wanting to support our unofficial hacks.

Where was I going with this? Oh, right, vmware.. i never managed to get it to run in vmware. We had this other well paying customer who wanted the ability to alt-tab between the software and Windows. Unfortunately, any fingerprinting done from within vmware, regardless how I set up the storage, resulted in a fingerprint file with no data.

Fun fact: the software ui was written in raw xlib. I got to know the owner and lead dev fairly well, and he hinted that the codebase was a complete mess to the point where something as simple as an input dialog for a config option I recommended was A LOT of work.

There's no way Meta will not appeal. I'm sure it'll end up in our supreme courts eventually.

I'm a norwegian, and part of growing up is learning about the folk stories of Askeladden. There are a lot of them, and quite a few involves an encounter with a Troll.

In one of these stories Askeladden and the Troll agree on an eating contest where the Troll will let him go if he loses. Askeladden wins by faking it all, sticking the "eaten" food in a small bag in his lap. When the troll asks how Askeladden can eat that much, Askeladden convinces the troll that it's easy - he just has to take a knife and slice open his stomach. Of course the troll does it and dies.

I never thought much of it until the topic of these kinds of stories came up while I was living in Czech Republic quite a few years ago. "This is the kind of stuff youbtell kids??"

The takeaways are:

• Norwegian stories for children are grotesque for anyone who didn't grow up with them.
• Trolls are stupid.

The execs at my company continues to say that we're an office based company, citing collaboration and social reasons. However, I have not heard of a single person below VP level share this opinion.

Luckily, many of us are "field personnel", and mostly work either in the field or at home. Mandating that we work from the office would mean that we're "office personnel", who cannot be required to do field work. I love how corporate definitions make it easier to defend against corporate wank.

I know next to nothing about neither Ow1 or OW2, but from the sound of it they turned OW2 into a game focused on grinding, where you can pay to skip (part of) the grind. Is my assessment correct? If so they must've looked at War Thunder and taken that idea.

Same reason but different vibe with Kali for me. I'm sure it's good for its intended purpose, but I get the feeling that there are many who install it in an attempt at being a kewl h4x0r. I used used Parrotsec for work for a while, and it's a lot less flamboyant about it.

Salinists are just tankies who are extra salty

You don't. Not everything he does and says is newsworthy. Those who are really interested follow him in socials anyway.

Stop reporting on what he wants you to, and instead report what he doesn't.

From the article, it seems more like a capacitor than an actual battery. While it would still have its uses, such as smoothing out surges and dips in power demand, you won't see anything powered by these any tume soon.

Plus I'm curious as to the energy density. High energy density capacitors can already be made via other cheap materials.

I used to work with internet service for trains. I remember one support ticket filed by the train conductor:

"Internet doesn't work"

No info regarding area
No info regarding when
No info regarding which carriage
...or even which train.

Well, I managed to jump through a few hoops, figuring out the schedule for this particular individual, and could deduce which train at least. Nagios reported everything as fine, but sometimes Nagios can lie, so I tracked it down and did the usual diagnostics onboard. Couldn't find anything wrong.

I phoned up the guy and it turned out he'd forgotten to enable wifi on his phone.