It was purchased by Epic Games a year ago, who recently sold it to Songtradr, a licensing platform for background/‘mood’ music. Songtradr only retained 50% of existing Bandcamp staff (the rest were laid off a few weeks after the sale AFAICT, with the worst affected departments including Bandcamp’s editorial team and customer support. Epic Games handled the severance package, for some reason.)

People are pretty upset about the editorial team being laid off because it provided exposure for smaller/niche artists in a weekly publication. I’ve never checked it out personally checked it out because I never knew it existed - wishing I had now

Such a large layoff so quickly by the new owner feels like a sign of darker times ahead for Bandcamp IMO, seeing that it’s apparently been profitable since 2012 (Wayback link, new owners have nuked this from the site?). No need to milk the cow even more when the bucket is full…

In the day and age of streaming sercices like Spotify, record labels/companies like Sony Music etc should not exist IMO.

Back when people purchased their music from brick and mortar stores on vinyls, cassettes, and CDs, they had a place to facilitate a relationship with distributors etc to get your music on the shelves, handle marketing and a bunch of other stuff. Nowadays, this all can be done digitally, independently.

Edit: clarify record label

R.I.P. Bandcamp

I miss seeing the “Macromedia Shockwave” loading screen when firing up online games on Win 98 back in the day 😢

It kinda depends on the setup I think, especially when vlans and firewalls are involved, you’d likely need additional payloads to make further progress in that kind of environment IMO. Something granting persistent remote access to the compromised machine would be the most ideal option.

As always physical access is pretty much game over though lol.

My cams are only accessible via an authenticated endpoint hosted on a dedicated machine, which acts as a “bridge” between the VLAN that the cameras are on (no internet access), and another VLAN hosting internal services, like home assistant, plex etc.

Aside from physical access, the only way to access the cams (that I can think of) would be via some exploit in Home Assistant, or by brute forcing the password to (any of) my network switches to access the management VLAN, changing the VLAN the cameras are set on to something else (bypassing the routing, firewall setup, and auth “bridge” entirely). Or maybe just exploiting the bridge machine directly and dropping a payload to forward the cams out to the net via the services VLAN

With physical access, you could chop up the PoE for an external camera and using that as an ingress point - but you’d only have access to the cameras and the bridge machine unless you exploited that too. At this point the zabbix client on the bridge machine would have notified me that a camera’s dropped off the network, unless you dropped a payload to force it to return a good status lol

Does sound like a very fun exercise though tbh

100% this is the best choice for op IMO.

A big pro is that they literally don’t need any Google services whatsoever by the sounds of things

Seems like a smart strategy, sounds a lot like a bus but just automated and much smaller in size, particularly running through residential areas that are typically seen as not worth transport investment.

The minivans are probably much easier to climb into (for injured or impaired individuals) compared to an SUV which may have an unnecessarilly high ride height and a door that doesn’t slide across for extra room

Mic drop

I agree here entirely.

The article is pretty much at fault here, as far as the bot is concerned if garbage goes in, garbage comes out

Nice, thanks for the link 👌

Adobe is the one company i’d never, ever, ever want to support, especially with a subscription. 🏴‍☠️ all day every day

The tldr bot is pulling directly from the article - it used to use ChatGPT wayy back when it was originally created, but it got expensive for the creator, so now I believe it uses some sentence interpreter library to compare relevance of paragraphs, in combination with semantic HTML tags/markup.

The code for it is on GitHub

Flash drive hidden under the carpet and connected via a USB extension, holding the decryption keys - threat model is a robber making off with the hard drives and gear, where the data just needs to be useless or inaccessible to others.

There’s a script in the initramfs which looks for the flash drive, and passes the decryption key on it to cryptsetup, which then kicks off the rest of the boot mounting the filesystems underneath the luks

I could technically remove the flash drive after boot as the system is on a UPS, but I like the ability to reboot remotely without too much hassle.

What I’d like to do in future would be to implement something more robust with a hardware device requiring 2FA. I’m not familiar with low level hardware security at all though, so the current setup will do fine for the time being!

Steroids? They’ve done a complete speedrun lol

Imagine if it was a more mundane issue, let’s say the air line in a carriage has blown out and none of the doors work under their own power. Roll the train into the third party workshop to carry out the fix… a copyright notice flags up on the panel screen and now you’ve got a long 20 ton dead brick in your workshop

Imagine this happened with cars, that would be outrageous man

With the fake parts scandal for airplanes I wonder if this should be mandatory for parts that impact public safety for public transport like trains, buses, planes and so on.

Airplanes are vastly more complex though. Four engines, flying at extremely high altitudes at hundreds of km/h, fully airtight, powerful onboard generators, food prep areas, bathroom etc, extensive ethernet networking for the small IFE units and WiFi access points, list goes on…

Whereas a train doesn’t have anything close to that, even the high speed ones with all the bells and whistles, so I think it would be a bit unreasonable to expect them to be held to the same standards as an airplane.

The only train I’d suggest an exception for would be a maglev though - OEM parts only there please, especially for traction and em equipment 😳

Dont get me wrong, I want a full right to repair enshrined in law and using a system like this just to prevent it is clearly wrong, but if it could be adapted to allow for critical parts to be made under license by third parties and helped prevent fake parts then may be a small amount of good can come from this shitty practice.

Some independent validation of the manufacturing materials, their grade and assembly quality could work well here, since I’m not too sure if blindly trusting the parts manufacturers would be a great idea as long as they have profits in mind

Free real estate 😂

Missed one

• CEO

If MIT AppInventor is still kicking around, you should be able to use it for this… although sadly you won’t have access to the source code since it’s a Scratch-like way to create apps.

By default the Android voice assistant uses Google tech AFAIK, if you’re after a truly source-available solution then there’s ”Futo voice input" to handle STT, and “RHVoice” to handle TTS - though these would still need a HTTP API bridge to do what you want

Is Tesla still training the Autopilot neural network in 3D worlds, or are they now entirely relying on driver data?

Honestly I think developers should just use push notifications to tell the app to directly fetch the notification contents from their server, rather than sending the contents of the notification using push, where it is stored by Apple/Google.

Or do what Element and Syncthing do, which is bypass that entire Google push infrastructure (FCM, formerly GCM?) and connect directly to their own ones instead - at the expense of some additional battery consumption, particularly when there’s poor cell service. Due to iOS restrictions on background apps, this probably isn’t possible on that platform?

Edit: add clarification