The rings remind me of shock diamonds. Is the similar appearance a coincidence, or is it a similar physical process too (but with gravity pulling the column downward instead of a jet engine pushing exhaust outward)?
> Restricting access to certain networks is supposed to be hard in 2026?
Part of the power of LLM agents is that they can discover information on the internet as part of responding to a prompt. What kind of Allowlist or realistic denylist would permit that while also preventing them from accessing an obscure public wiki or Huggingface?
When testing, you restrict to a LAN which simulates the real internet. This would not be hard for a company which already copied the entire space-time of the internet. The LAN should be physically disconnected from the real internet. This is the first thing off the top of my head, and I have zero credentials in this space. C'mon.
If it makes you feel any better, I've also never had any luck finding hidden rock art, petroglyphs, or similar using multispectal bandpass filters or decorellation stretching.
I was super excited about DCS based on some of the recovered petroglyph photos online, and integrated it into some software I wrote years ago.[1] Still hoping I find something as interesting with it as the fellow mentioned in the article. It works, but I haven't had a "gosh, I never would have seen that without DCS!" moment.
VMware Workstation has historically been the most "it just works" option if one needed solid USB passthrough support. I've bought my own license for about 15 years because of that. Obviously I won't be doing that anymore because I refuse to subscribe instead of buying a permanent license.
I've been out of the infrastructure engineering space for a long time, but when that was still my career, vSphere was extremely reliable and easy to manage. When I've poked my head back in during pen tests since then, it's seemed like that was still the case.
Feels like Broadcom wants to use the Microsoft/Oracle/Cisco business model. They'll probably get away with it (at least for awhile) in the enterprise space, but they seem to have reached the same conclusion as me - Workstation and Fusion don't have enough exclusive aspects to be make the consumer market worth pursuing.
> Does the existence of lock picks or bolt cutters render padlocks pointless today
A padlock shouldn't be the only component of the bigger physical security picture.
A random person carrying/using bolt cutters or trying to pick a lock looks suspicious, and should be noticed by on-site staff or whoever is monitoring the security cameras.
If the padlock is decent, there will also be an inherent delay involved in bypassing it using those tools, which should increase the likelihood of the person being noticed.
If the padlock is used in an unattended/unmonitored location (i.e. a remote vacation house with no neighbours and no security cameras), then the padlock is probably only good for keeping honest people honest.
A lot of physical security => information security analogies are misleading for the same reason. In information security, it's very possible for an adversary to have effectively unlimited time to perform their attack (or to develop the means to perform the attack quickly).
Imagine a scenario where any determined person could e.g. spend a month in their home workshop and develop a pair of gloves containing transducers that would vibrate any padlock open in seconds. They could mimic the action of using the key or entering the combination to avoid looking suspicious. Also, the gloves have a button that instantly creates another pair of the same gloves at no cost. How much value would a padlock have in that scenario? That's the kind of asymmetric playing field one has to consider in information security contexts.
Some screens are like that, but it's not an inherent property of all visual displays.
For example, you'll see a sort of barber-pole effect when pointing a video camera at a raster-scan digital display whose refresh rate isn't synced to the camera's frame rate. To avoid that, sync them, or maybe use a colour e-ink display.
Alternatively, print a high-resolution version with a decent photograph printer and take a picture of the print with the C2PA camera.
I don't know how common it is, but Control (PS4 era) has an extensive cheat system accessible from the options menu, and Saros (PS5 era) has a wide variety of settings to make the game more or less difficult.
Yeah, I think overall it is trending better again, with the strictest terms being the Xbox 360/PS3 era. (Especially under the banner of Accessibility.)
> Those last maybe 6 months and then they start getting dimmer and then all the lights in the circuit get worse at once.
Have you checked the wiring? I may be stating the obvious, but in household electrical wiring every fixture or receptacle is connected to its circuit in parallel.
I can't think of a way for one bulb on a correctly-wired circuit to fail in a way that causes other bulbs to dim, unless the failed bulb is essentially shorting out the circuit but not causing the breaker to trip for some reason.
If you know why it's behaving that way, I'd love to know too. I've never seen anything like that.
I'm in my late 40s. I grew up on an island in Washington state. Truly commercial-grade fireworks (the kind that professionals would launch for an audience of thousands) were banned by that time, but plenty of fireworks that would be categorized as "commercial-grade" today were sold publicly by multiple vendors every year.
I love fireworks now, but my first memory of them was terrifying. I would have been about 3 to 5. My parents drove our VW bus to a nearby beach to watch the local display. It was total madness. Teenagers threw explosive fireworks onto and underneath our car.
Even a lot of the smaller home-use fireworks back then had hilariously unsafe behaviour. I remember in particular one called something like "Saturn Missile Battery". It was a box that launched a 10x10 grid of 100 whistling, finless plastic rockets (each about 4-5cm x 5-6mm), with each rocket exploding when their propellant ran out. Because they had no stabilization, they would fly in all directions, change direction in flight, etc. When my dad set it off, one of them literally flew right over our heads into the house and exploded in the basement.
My experience is that outside of Seattle, enforcement of fireworks restrictions is pretty lax. For example, if one watches the professional display in Tacoma, one will also see most of Dash Point / Browns Point continuously lit up by fireworks that are unambiguously well outside the legal restrictions.
I agree that a lot of people are reckless, and it's just a matter of time before it causes a high-profile disaster somewhere in the state. But I also agree with the parent comment that it's such an ingrained part of American culture that it would be very hard to change - at least until there's a local disaster that gives people a visceral feeling for the danger.
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