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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The drive case itself didn’t, though. The server, air around the components within its case, the air around the server within the rack, the rack, and the other ferrous materials in the room are what provide enough interference to prevent bit flipping on the disk for the most part. This is assuming a reasonable source of magnetic radiation and not a massive bench power supply on a crash cart powering a rolling EMP. (Of course, I’m being hyperbolic, and it would really just be a more powerful electromagnet and not an EMP)

    An electromagnet or even in some cases, a powerful enough rare earth magnet exposed to the drives themselves, or left in proximity to a single computer for an extended period of time can cause destructive data loss to a spinning platter hard disk.


  • A hard drive can be corrupted by minimal exposure to a basic electromagnet like a CRT degaussing coil, even without exposing the platters.

    It would do nothing, however, in a server environment filled with racks, raised floors, and lots of barriers between a person and the drives. You’d still need to pass the coil over the drives themselves, while nearly making contact for several seconds to a minute to cause any significant data loss.




  • Commented on another thread - Rising costs, inflation, stagnant wages, a pandemic, and the specter of Long COVID. Not to mention that the country is so relentlessly polarized that nearly everyone I know is reluctant to let anyone new into their circle for fear of learning that new person has been duped into supporting literal fascist Nazis. We’re exhausted and we don’t want to argue all the time.

    With Cheeto Benito and the Brown Shirts in office, there’s a palpable tension in nearly every interaction right now. It’s only going to get worse, until eventually we will either have to start socializing in the form of local community organizing or we’ll rapidly find that we no longer have a hope of a future for ourselves.

    For a nation typically sitting firmly in dumb, fat, and happy territory, this is a level of existentialism that none of us are accustomed to. Unless of course you’re Black or maybe Latino, in which case you probably know what’s up.







  • The Switch was just the Wii U refined into something consumers actually wanted, rather than an innovation on its own.

    I’d argue that Nintendo has always been pretty similar in terms of the amount of innovation they bring to their segment barring perhaps the quality of the Wii motion controls when launched and compared against similar attempts both by Nintendo and their competitors prior.

    The Famicom / NES and the subsequent Super Famicom / SNES / N64 were just iterations on the same home console market for which Nintendo was far from the first to launch. The GameCube and the Wii shared a lot of DNA, with the motion controls really being the innovation. The Wii U, Switch, and Switch 2 seem to be a lineage of refinement as well.

    In handhelds, they went from monochrome, to backlit monochrome, to backlit color, to two displays and some touch controls. You could argue that the 3D effect of the 3DS was innovative, but the allure of the feature died as soon as the industry realized the demand wasn’t there to keep developing it. Hardly as revolutionary as other competitors products, but more in touch with what their consumers wanted than their competitors, hence the market lasted longer for Nintendo than Sony with the PSP and Vita.

    Ironically, the things Nintendo has done at the base system level that truly attempted to innovate have mostly been failures. The Virtual Boy was way ahead of its time, but the form factor was half baked and the eyestrain was horrendous. The Wii U was a success in that Nintendo learned what about the console was worth iterating on, but otherwise it was an abject failure as well because it didn’t offer enough to differentiate itself from the Wii.

    For innovation to occur, there needs to be a predicating breakthrough in technology around which these companies can build a product. We’re in an age of rapid miniaturization and simultaneous increased power of integrated systems. It feels like more power = better, but this trajectory is going to yield new potential applications of technology in form factors that haven’t been fully explored yet. It’s just cyclical, and things take time to develop.

    Plus - everything is slower when consumers demonstrate they’re satisfied with what the company is selling them. No need to dramatically change course when the current model is satisfying customers. The confluence of a new technology landscape and a dip in consumer enthusiasm for existing offerings is the typical spot for a hardware developer to innovate.


  • This is dramatically unlikely for FIDO2 MFA services. It’s possible, but would require the device you’re using to remain connected to both the vault and the attacker infrastructure long enough for the data to be scraped. It happens, but nowhere near as frequently as just stealing the login credentials and using them asynchronously from the origin.

    The strawman here would mostly apply to high value targets, which most people aren’t. At the scale of the internet, most cybercriminals are going to pivot to stealing accounts that don’t require additional investment to harvest. It’s simple economics. Having MFA is an essential part of using the internet for anything you actually care about.

    Strong passwords are rapidly becoming worthless when we’ve been building ever more powerful compute farms for several decades. What used to take months or even years to crack in 2010 can be done in seconds today. But all of that info neglects that it’s irrelevant because most passwords are lost due to social engineering, malicious software, or the leading cause…… password reuse.




  • In today’s world, MFA (multifactor authentication) is a necessity for literally any account in which you store information you don’t want to be stolen by someone. I’m more upset that several services I use still don’t support it, or only support MFA via text or email, neither of which is secure enough to be of much use.

    You don’t want the place where you store your passwords, likely including your bank account, health insurance, social media accounts, etc. to be more difficult to hack? You live in a post-quantum world. Passwords aren’t enough.