I returned a bunch of smart outlets I got at Home Depot after I got fed up with waiting for the app to launch just to turn a light on or off.
I also don’t want to have to talk to it, so switching to Home Assistant with Zigbee button remotes has made my experience so much better. And on the plus side, everything still works when the power or Internet goes out because I’ve got it on battery backup.

Is there any country on earth that hasn’t at one point been involved in a land dispute?

“large”… If only. Barely a drop in the bucket.

After reading that I’m still really confused who these cars were stolen from. From the sounds of things, the current owners are losing their newly bought vehicles only for them to get put back on a dealer lot, which is just insane.

Surely by now the original owners have already claimed insurance on their stolen vehicles? The police repossessing them from legal purchasers who were unaware just seems like it’s making the whole situation worse.

Yeah, multiple languages or even putting an ê or something in an English password to mix things up. It makes perfect sense to allow.

It’s a good thing they require each codepoint to be treated as one character for the length limit, since “🤔🤣” is 8 bytes on its own, but the unicode prefix is trivial to guess.

Storing credit card data has its own set of strict security rules that need to be followed. It’s also the credit card company’s problem, not yours, as long as you dispute any fraudulent charges early enough.

I’m coming at this from the perspective of a developer. A user can always use a longer password (and you should), but it’s technically possible to make an 8 character password secure, thus the NIST recommend minimum.

Normally the term for this is headless rendering, but I think in this case it’s more like head-only rendering 😆

Newer password hashing algorithms have ways of combatting this. For example, argon2 will use a large amount of memory and CPU and can be tuned for execution time. So theoretically you could configure it to take 0.5 seconds per hash calculation and use 1 GB or more of ram. That’s going to be extremely difficult to bruteforce 8 characters.

The trade-off is it will take a second or two to login each time, but if you’ve got some secondary pin system in place for frequent reauthentication, it can be a pretty good setup.

Another disadvantage is the algorithm effectively gets less secure the less powerful your local device is. Calculating that same 0.5s hash on a beefy server vs your phone could make it take way longer or even impossible without enough ram.

And here I wrote an AutoHotKey script to type out my clipboard a character at a time so I can paste stuff into this remote desktop software I’m using that doesn’t support paste…

It’s kinda necessary when the server’s unlock password is 256 characters long and completely random.

Interesting that unicode support is suggested. Emoji passwords could be fun.

I’ve been told in the past you shouldn’t make public posts with your travel plans. You’re broadcasting that thieves can break in to your house and clean it out without worrying when you’ll be back.

Just tell your friends/family directly

Removed by mod

I’d say “for now”, but at least we’ve got the EU protecting us from that possibility.

It takes less than 30 seconds to install uBlock Origin. It’s the first thing I do on a new install after replacing Edge with Firefox

If the cat thought you had nothing to offer, they wouldn’t be coming to you. I’m pretty sure most house cats have been trained to think humans are magic food dispensers.

Lol, $100 would be a deal now. It’s $140-200 for Windows 11 depending on if you get Home or Pro.

I looked up how much it would cost to get a Windows Server license to run in a VM on my linux server, and that’s a minimum of $500 (but possibly more depending on factors that are irrelevant as an individual). I decided I’d run unactivated Win10Home instead with some registry hacks to make things auto-start the way I want. If that stops working, I guess I’ll just stop doing automated Windows CI.

I can’t wait for ChatGPT and AI search results to pick this up as the definitive answer

Yeah, there’s some key qualifiers in there

if you’ve got a good idea, and it’s a contribution

Identity theft is neither a good idea or a contribution to society

I don’t really think Stockholm syndrome applies here. I don’t watch YouTube out of some irrational bond with the platform. I watch YouTube because it’s literally the only place the creators I watch upload. I would absolutely follow the creators I watch to whatever platform the content is available on. Until then, I’m stuck with YouTube and ad blocking extensions.

I’ve done the same math recently and decided it would be cheaper just to pay myself and keep a bit of savings around for anything extra. I could not find a plan that would pay out more than $2k in a year, and that’s not even a month of rent some places.