De-escalation is easy: Russia can get the fuck out of Ukraine. All of it.

(thinks out lound…)

If you could force different speeds and different voltages, you can make some guesses as to what the cable might support.

USB packets use CRC checks, so a bad checksum may indicate a speed or physical problem. (Besides stating the obvious, my point is that doing strict checks for each USB mode gives CRC more value.)

I just looked over the source code for libusb (like I knew what I was looking for, or something) and it seems that some of the driver(?) components hook really deep into the kernel. There might be a way to test specific parts of any type of handshake (for dataflow or voltage negotiation) to isolate specific wires that are bad by the process of elimination.

I think my point is that a top-down approach is likely possible, but it’s probabilistic.

Cable testers can bypass all of the standard driver and USB negotiation bullshit before anything else. I would imagine building a device to manually control when and how the connections are made is much easier than fighting for low level device control on systems like Windows, macOS and Android.

That gave me the idea to toss in a coconut or two into bags this year. I’ll reserve those for the “kids” that are obviously too old for this stuff.

1. do_gro
2. get_si
3. ? page
4. …
5. Profit.

“Your TV has become a digital billboard.”

It’s been a digital billboard for at least 40 years of my life. Radio was no different, so be sure to drink your Ovaltine.

Have you never seen a commercial before? Cheap subsidized hardware? Bloatware loaded on phones? Bloatware on TVs? Games that require 5 mins of ad time? Google’s crippling of Chrome to break ad blockers? Unskippable ads on YouTube? Sponsored ad spots in YouTube videos? All the 3rd party logos on Smart TV boxes? Product placements in movies? Ad placements before the movie starts? The list goes on.

The entire entertainment industry is based around advertising. Every delivery platform is designed to show you ads first and entertainment second.

People have problems figuring that out?

This isn’t a new concept and it’s really stupid that Ars is presenting it that way.

If companies didn’t know this, then they are already out of business. If the viewers didn’t know this… well… I can’t help you.

11. Thou shalt not lay with OPs mother.

All the star trek. This is not negotiable.

Bi men, for men.

When you powered an old CRT down, the image would collapse to a single horizontal line, and then to a point.

I was thinking you could just cut the power to the deflecting coils.

It would be close to infinite refresh rate as the electron beams wouldn’t need to move. Also, the phosphors in that spot would probably burn away in a few minutes resulting in no refresh rate at all.

That is SOC2. In this context, it’s Security Operations Center.

It’s one of the better EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) tools on the market. For enterprises, they are able to suck down tons of system activities and provide alerting for security teams.

For detection, when I say “tons of data”, I mean it. Any background logs related to network activity, filesystem activity, command line info, service info, service actions and much more for every endpoint in an organization.

The response component can block execution of apps or completely isolate an endpoint if it is compromised, only allowing access by security staff.

Because Crowdstrike can (kind of) handle that much data and still be able to run rule checks while also providing SOC services makes them a common choice for enterprises.

The problem is that EDR tools need to run at the kernel level (or at a very high permission level) to be able to read that type data and also block it. This increases the risk of catastrophic problems if specific drivers are blocked by another kind of anti-malware service.

When you look at how EDR tools function, there is little difference between them and well written malware.

Crowdstrike became a choice recently for many companies that got fucked over by Broadcom buying VMWare. VMWare owned another tool, Carbon Black, which became subject to the fuckery of Broadcom so more companies scrambled to Crowdstrike recently.

I hope that was enough of a summary.

It was on old 3.5" drives a long time ago, before anything fancy was ever built into the drives. It was in a seriously rough working environment anyway, so we saw a lot of failed drives. If strange experiments didn’t work to get the things working, mainly for lulz, the next option was to see if a sledge hammer would fix the problem. Funny thing… that never worked either.

I used to take failed drives while they were powered on and kinda snap them really with a fast twisting motion in an attempt to get the arm to move or get the platters spinning.

It never worked.

Did you get bad sectors? Weird things can absolutely happen but having sectors marked as bad is on the exceptional side of weird.

Maybe? Bad cables are a thing, so it’s something to be aware of. USB latency, in rare cases, can cause problems but not so much in this application.

I haven’t looked into the exact ways that bad sectors are detected, but it probably hasn’t changed too much over the years. Needless to say, info here is just approximate.

However, marking a sector as bad generally happens at the firmware/controller level. I am guessing that a write is quickly followed by a verification, and if the controller sees an error, it will just remap that particular sector. If HDDs use any kind of parity checks per sector, a write test may not be needed.

Tools like CHKDSK likely step through each sector manually and perform read tests, or just tells the controller to perform whatever test it does on each sector.

OS level interference or bad cables are unlikely to cause the controller to mark a sector as bad, is my point. Now, if bad data gets written to disk because of a bad cable, the controller shouldn’t care. It just sees data and writes data. (That would be rare as well, but possible.)

What you will see is latency. USB can be magnitudes slower than SATA. Buffers and wait states are causing this because of the speed differences. This latency isn’t going to cause physical problems though.

My overall point is that there are several independent software and firmware layers that need to be completely broken for a SATA drive to erroneously mark a sector as bad due to a slow conversion cable. Sure, it could happen and that is why we have software that can attempt to repair bad sectors.

If I remember correctly from the good ol’ days, promoted sites/ads kinda stopped after the first few pages and it skipped past most of the SEO crap.

But yeah, I forgot how aggressive Google is with ads and AI now, those bastards.

It’s actually a good change, IMHO. You can just click directly on page 10 for anything that might be related to your original search.