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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2023

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  • Why? I think there’s a decent chance they don’t survive this - at least their commercial airplanes. I won’t fly on a Boeing any time soon, if ever. It will take years to get back to a safety culture and there are tons of shit planes manufactured in the past several years that will be in service for decades.

    If I was a pilot, I wouldn’t want to fly one either. They just had another incident where a pilot says the gauges went blank and he lost control. If a pilot union starts pushing back, it’s game over.

    Would you fly on one of their planes?



  • People with private jets often charter them out when they’re not using them. The best place for an airplane is in the air. Only bad things happen when you let it sit around on the ground all the time. It’s not much different than commercial planes that spend most of their time in the air.

    Sure, a private jet will have more emissions than an Airbus, but it’s a marginal increase. It’s not like rich people with their planes are producing a million times more pollution that wouldn’t exist if they didn’t have a private jet. They’re still going to fly, at least for longer trips.

    It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole with this line of reasoning. Who else is using less efficient aircraft or taking unnecessary flights? Are all those police helicopter flights necessary? What about people flying to go party on an island somewhere versus some more noble purpose? Or airlines with a half empty flight? Meanwhile, it’s the oil companies producing the vast majority of carbon emissions while we squabble over travel itineraries and choice of aircraft.



  • Nobody is buying this and I don’t think they are trying very hard to sell it either. Notice that this pricing is only in the U.S. This seems like a ploy to bolster their case for damages and/or royalties in a settlement. Or maybe just part of their patent defense strategy. This company is primarily in medical tech. Even if they aren’t so interested in the consumer market, they have to protect their patent or someone in a market they do care about will get away with it too. I would assume it strengthens their case if they can demonstrate material damages in a market they participate in. So quickly unveil a prototype, price it so there’s little to no demand, don’t bother manufacturing a product nobody wants, win the case, cancel the product.













  • In all fairness, 13 days is a fairly quick turnaround for patching in the enterprise. The breach was only 6 days after disclosure. They were almost certainly in the planning stages already when this happened.

    I used to be the head of IT in a large organization that worked with clients in highly regulated sectors. They all performed regular audits of our security posture. Across the board, they expected a 30 day patch policy. For high profile vulnerabilities like this one, they would often send an alert and expected imminent action within a commercially reasonable time frame. We would get it done anywhere from 24 hours to days later depending on the situation and whether there were complications. It was usually easy for us because we were patching every device and application on the network every couple weeks anyway. A hotfix is much easier to deploy when everything is up to date already and there are no prerequisite service packs. We knew we were much faster than most and it took a lot of work to get there. Thirteen days is a little slow for a 0-day by our standards but nowhere near unreasonable.

    The reality is many enterprises don’t patch at all or don’t do it completely. They may patch servers but not workstations. They may patch the OS but not the applications. It’s common to find EOL software in critical areas. A friend of mine did some work for a railroad company that had XP machines controlling the track switches. There are typically glaring holes throughout the company when it comes to security. Most breaches go unreported.

    Look, I hate Comcast as much as anyone. They suck. But taking 13 days to patch isn’t unreasonable. Instead, people should be asking why there weren’t other security layers in place to mitigate the vulnerability.




  • This is wild. I almost wonder if it’s actually a real thing or an elaborate hoax. It’s impressive in either case.

    As far as the concept of AI news, there are obvious drawbacks but also some advantages. In particular, the anchors are less animated and emotional, which eliminates quite a bit of bias. Cable news anchors with their incredulity, snide remarks, and expressions have done a lot to help ruin the news. That alone can easily undermine a story or a guest in a way that causes the audience to pick a side.

    The idea of using AI to scour public records and create stories is another really cool idea. There’s so much out there and not enough reporters with the time or inclination to investigate everything.

    I’m not too keen on the AI generated imagery, although traditional news outlets essentially do the same thing. It’s a dangerous thing to be presented with artificial pictures and videos in a news format. Before long, you can’t distinguish between reality and artificial, which is more or less the same problem a significant portion of the country has had since the 2016 election. In that case, they were mostly fed stupid memes and fabricated stories on social media. This is a completely different level. In the wrong hands, this is a weapon of mass destruction.