10 ms·
Old tech is haunted
- beckingz 4y agoEven our new technology is haunted. Random changes to Jira configurations with nothing in the audit logs... Ghosts in the machine, spirit in the system, hear the whispers, screams are distant.
- dottedmag 4y agoSpectre-infested computer, you say? Yes, thanks to CPU manufacturers.
- jimmaswell 4y agoWhy haven't Spectre et al been used as vectors to jailbreak old hardware yet? I get the impression they're not that practical of vectors and we freaked out and hobbled our cpu performance with patches for nothing.
- sidewndr46 4y agoOut of curiosity, what I would be jailbreaking? My x86-64 motherboard that I can boot any OS I want onto?
- qull 4y agoOn someone elses boot code. There are tons of blobs from the cpu onward. Your x8664 mobo and cpu are anything but unlocked or open.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoThey're only useful for reading things out of memory, not writing. So it's not immediately obvious how you would use them to jailbreak a machine?
- rob74 4y agoI have a haunted TV: my 4 year old Sony Bravia (Android TV) reboots seemingly intentionally during the most interesting parts of TV broadcasts. And since a few weeks ago, it also regularly loses the Wi-Fi connection. Thanks Google and Sony!
- tenebrisalietum 4y agoI had a bad experience with the last (and final) cheap Android TV I got (Philips, really a rebranded FUNAI according to the Netflix device ID) - would take minutes to boot, often not power on unless unplugged, and would get slower and slower the longer it was on. Guess it was haunted as well. I left it in the house I sold.
- HAARP 4y agoAh, a classic case of haunted tech. My version is my electric bike that decides it wants to turn the power on and off as it pleases.
- newZWhoDis 4y agoUsually the culprit is aged electrolytic capacitors.
- rescbr 4y agoMine had cold solder joints on the bridge rectifier.
- ajoseps 4y agowow I also have a Sony Bravia around the same age and this also happens to me sporadically! drives me insane when it happens, but it's infrequent enough that I haven't replaced it yet.
- Minor49er 4y agoBeware. Newer TVs are haunted with so many persistent smart features that you might miss the Bravia
- 4y ago
- tempe1h1 4y ago
- _aavaa_ 4y agoOld tech? My current tech is possessed by those doing Satan's bidding. Constantly tempting me, always whispering in my ear to want more, making me covet what others have.
- mellavora 4y agoand asking you to update it once per week so it can reorganize your files and workflow. For your own good.
- _aavaa_ 4y agoUnless you use windows in which case "asking" is a bit of a euphemism.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y agoif only you knew how bad things really are
- danparsonson 4y agoI can attest to this; we have a vacuum cleaning robot that has recently taken to spontaneous vacuuming at random times - the first time was naturally just after midnight and scared the life out of me :-)
- _jal 4y agoDoesn't even have to be digital. My furnace, with a very old, very analog thermostat, has been randomly turning itself on.
- sokoloff 4y agoThat will often be a short in the thermostat wires; old thermostat tech worked by just dead-shorting the two "T" terminals together, so any degraded insulation could be calling for heat if it allows a short to develop. If it happens enough to be annoying, consider setting the T-stat to NOT call for heat and then go moving wires around until you find the place that has the intermittent short.
- outworlder 4y agoBe scared if it suddenly starts to play the "1812 Overture".
- booleandilemma 4y agoRelated: Fix your PC with a crystal pendulum https://youtu.be/-MM0Z_jCrGo https://youtu.be/-MM0Z_jCrGo
- gjsman-1000 4y agoMy mother had a TV in the 90s that would spontaneously wake up at approximately midnight, at random. The family rumor was that it happened after being struck by lightning. Creepy.
- norwalkbear 4y agoIt was probably due to be bugs or a mouse
- simple-thoughts 4y agoHaunting is overfitting data to a pattern (ghost) that can explain everything. The benefit is less thought about things that don’t matter, but missing out on learning something useful is the disadvantage.
- erulabs 4y agoOverfitting seems pretty great for survival - who cares if one in 100 canines is friendly - much safer to avoid them! Humans seem to be unique in that we occasionally second guess our overfit models. And in the case of avoiding dangerous animals, the result couldn’t have been more wonderful: Dogs! Confronting and undoing a casually overfit mental model is harder the more subtle and useful they are - but those are the bits that hide the great secrets of the universe!
- marcosdumay 4y ago> who cares if one in 100 canines is friendly - much safer to avoid them! Hum... That's really not overfitting. In fact, that's the opposite of it, an incomplete model.
- themadturk 4y agoMany years ago, in my first tech job, we converted our typewriter-driven office to networked DOS PCs, running on Netware. One day, one of the legal secretaries, of self-described Roma ancestry, started complaining about her PC acting oddly...software not starting, spontaneous reboots ,etc. We replaced her machine to troubleshoot it, but the same thing happened with the replacement machine. We couldn't detect anything she was doing wrong. Finally, she got tired of our fruitless technology-driven attempts to help her and strung a few cloves of garlic along the tops and sides of her cubicle. Her problems went away, immediately. My boss, the director of IT, and I looked at each other, shrugged, and called it good.
- nyc_data_geek1 4y agoIn some cases, waving a dead chicken over it works, apparently!
- jamal-kumar 4y agoOne time I had a horrible roommate I hated immensely. She did shit like make a friend of mine cry on her birthday. Her boyfriend broke up with her cause she was obviously a terrible person, so her response to this was visiting a witch doctor (This is an incident that happened in the third world so bear with me for a moment). His recommendation was to cut an X into limes and put them in the corner of each room in the house. He said if they were intact when she came back home from work, but if they were black when she came back from work then he'd DIE. She told me this with a smile on her face. I was like wow you're an idiot who believes in bullshit which might actually kill someone, fuck you. Called in late to work, went to the store, bought limes, cut X's into each of them and DOUBLED THE LIMES she put in the corners of the house. She left while paying rent for like two months and I had the best time of my life which occurred staying there after.
- rescbr 4y ago> and DOUBLED THE LIMES she put in the corners of the house Now there's her problem. By doing that the spell changed from "kill ex-boyfriend" to "self eviction".
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mellavora 4y agoMy brother worked in tech support at a Christian college. People would come in with a PC that wasn't working. He would look at it thoughfuly for a few moments, then, in a loud voice and great dramatic flair would say "Demon, Be Gone" and smash his hands into the keyboard (carefully, such that he was actually hitting control-alt-delete-- but you wouldn't notice this because of the acting). the computer would shut down, reboot, and he would look at them and cheerfully and calmly say "All better now. You can go home."
- hef19898 4y agoAh, that's how ComStar and the Word-of-Blake got their religious ideas from!
- w1nst0nsm1th 4y agoThere is a far better piece on the matter from the atlantic : https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-ame...
- gausswho 4y agoHaunting is the page blocking modal demanding I register at Substack. That site and Medium are begging for a Nitter.
- forgotmypw17 4y agoIt already exists: https://archive.ph/wFjRx https://archive.ph/wFjRx
- skyfaller 4y agoMedium has https://scribe.rip/ https://scribe.rip/
- Suzuran 4y agoI should be safe; The switch is still set to More Magic.
- lelanthran 4y ago> You’d be surprised at just how many people believe in the supernatural. I wouldn't - the majority believes in an invisible sky friend.
- snapcaster 4y agoAnd out of those who don't, a bunch believe in an invisible simulation programmer
- NateEag 4y ago...who built a simulation so robust that we've yet to demonstrate any actual bugs. This world is freakishly consistent, if it's the work of anything remotely like human intelligence (though I hold out hope for modern physics to wind up unresolved and unreconcilable, because I love mysteries).
- saghm 4y ago> ..who built a simulation so robust that we've yet to demonstrate any actual bugs I heard the simulation has an issue with recursion, which is why my code has a lot of bugs; I implemented it right, but the simulation has bugs when simulating me running it.
- int_19h 4y agoFor all we know, the bugs are all around us - we just don't know what the normal behavior is supposed to be.
- NateEag 4y agoPossible, but physics is still really consistent, apart from maybe at the cosmological scale.
- unethical_ban 4y agoOh, please do not bring the juvenile rhetorical flair of reddit here.
- mark_undoio 4y agoPeriodically, my diagnosis on test failures has been "maybe a ghost did it". Test failures that are flaky / sporadic often signal something you really need to look into - either you're not in control of your test's corner cases or your product's. Either way you can't ignore it. But, sometimes, with the whole "running hundreds of thousands of tests of complex, interacting software on cloud infrastructure that has virtualisation, custom kernels, whatever ..." the answer is just "woooooo spooky". When it comes to customer boxes, it's even weirder ;-) === When PTRACE_SINGLESTEP got haunted === A few years ago, we saw a particular issue in which the PTRACE_SINGLESTEP operation (which should, you know, step by a single instruction!) would sometimes step two instructions - but it basically only happened in testing. Eventually we figured out that: * For a particular older enterprise distro on x86. * If you tried to single-step a thread in one process. * And a thread in another process hit a watchpoint at the same time. * Then your thread would step by two instructions. Spooky action at a distance. This might also have required you to be running on a virtualized system - it didn't matter to us at that point, since clearly we need to work around issues people may see on cloud infrastructure. Of course, unless you tested debugger workloads extensively you'd probably never have two processes under debug simultaneously in order to notice this. === When transparent hugepages got haunted === When RHEL backported support for the Linux kernel's THP optimisation, quite a few years ago, to one of their enterprise kernels a bug also got backported that I'd call "extremely haunted". THP worked fine, maps would automatically get huge pages where appropriate and would get split up again if necessary. EXCEPT ... if a THP-ed memory location was: * Write-protected because of COW memory sharing (e.g. after fork) * And the page was split by a write * And that write had come from a PTRACE_POKE operation, not an in-process write. Then something crazy would go wrong in the system. That process, IIRC, would hang and become unkillable. Some sort of goblin got into the memory management subsystem at that point and there was no getting it out again - gradually the whole system would start to lock up until it became unusable - eventually requiring the box to be reset. This happened even from an unprivileged process. Again, this is something most workloads wouldn't see but - once we'd understood the underlying issue - we had to find ways to prevent it happening. You just can't trigger a kernel bug like that, even if you know it's not your fault. If you're always there when it happens, nobody is sympathetic to you!
- falcolas 4y agoI'm reminded of the "I can't send email to anyone over 100 miles away" story. There is, of course, a perfectly rational explanation... but that doesn't change the spooky arbitrariness of it.. EDIT: Not sure why I forgot to link this, out of one of my all-time favorite presentations. I give you: The Mechanical Transmogrification of Diodes into Capacitors! https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/ObservedFailures4.html https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/Observed...
- pfarrell 4y agoFor those that haven't see it yet. https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
- grantonthenet 4y agoThat was a fun read
- deathanatos 4y agoAnd the "more magic" switch: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
- yellowapple 4y agoAnd Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html#id3141171 http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html#id3141171 > A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. > Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.” > Knight turned the machine off and on. > The machine worked.
- hinkley 4y agoI've mentioned before how loud an argument we got into with a guy who aspired to being a hacker, and yet didn't understand that the magnetic domains on a HDD were essentially analog. Even after we asked him why, if hard drives were truly binary, that secure disk erase tools were so complex and slow he still insisted that everything was binary, soup to nuts. Even the simplest things are a fiction. Or maybe I should say especially the simplest things are a fiction.
- forgotmypw17 4y agoI don't pretend to know how any of this stuff works, but I acknowledge it, respect it, and pay tribute when I can. Because I am working on a Web product which aims to be compatible with every Web server and Web browser in every configuration, I went out of my way to visit historic places, such as the Netscape offices in Mountain View, and Urbana-Champaign campus where Mosaic was developed. I sat and meditated on their history and the events which happened there. And I feel that my product better as a result.
- ryanianian 4y agoAny sufficiently advanced home automation is indistinguishable from a haunting.
- nuc1e0n 4y agoIf you've ever worked on a codebase with developers who are no longer around, you come to understand the data structures, algorithms and comments they leave behind give a sense of their personality. A 'ghost' if you will.
- photochemsyn 4y agoRelevant philosophical discussion: Koestler (1967) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_in_the_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_in_the_Machine This work has informed quite a bit of art and literature ever since, from the manga/anime series Ghost in the Shell to a fair bit of William Gibson's work (see 'semiotic ghosts' of futures that might-have-been in The Gernsback Continuum). As far as religious belief in modern civilization, Frank Herbert in Dune (Appendix II) describes what I imagine is the common modern view among the 'power elite': The agnostic ruling class (including the Guild) for whom religion was a kind of puppet show to amuse the populace and keep it docile, and who believed essentially that all phenomena - even religious phenomena - could be reduced to mechanical explanations. With respect to as belief, I think anyone who says 'I believe in <insert whatever here>' is actually expressing doubt in their own world view. I'm more impressed by the so-called religious fanatics who instead say, 'I know of <insert whatever here>'. Consider the person who hears the voice of 'invisble sky friends' in their heads and writes it down in an (eventually holy) text - who is to say with certainty whether that's the result of schizophrenia and auditory hallucinations, or an actual interdimensional communication from the architect of this virtual reality simulation we're all (okay, perhaps) living in? As far as haunted old tech: "We build our computers the way we build our cities - over time, without a plan, on top of ruins." - Ellen Ullman, Life in Code
- anthk 4y ago> who is to say with certainty whether that's the result of schizophrenia and auditory hallucinations, or an actual interdimensional communication from the architect of this virtual reality simulation we're all (okay, perhaps) living in? Russel's Teapot. Also, Occam's Razor.
- NateEag 4y agoYet those are probabilistic heuristics, not things which grant certitude. (Also, Russell's Teapot is not at all a fair comparison. A vast, incomprehensible, inconceivably simple unitary consciousness as the fundamental substrate of reality is much closer to most religious conceptions of God than is a teapot in orbit.) (...and, of course, a single entity which underlies reality is ultimately simple. Push it pantheist and you reduce the number of entities to one - no other worldview can reduce the number of entities further.)
- lob_it 4y ago
- jeegsy 4y ago> Put it this way: I’ve never encountered groups of ghoul-lovers hanging outside abortion clinics and harassing women about hauntings. This made me throw up in my mouth and my eyes hurt from all the eye rolls
- anonym29 4y agoI have observed my hibernating linux desktop receiving and transmitting data through the onboard GbE interface to IPs that were owned by an ASN owned by an LLC with a registered address matching the WHOIS for the ASN - an address that didn't exist according to the postal service. Captured upstream with an OpenWRT router running a packet capture and that desktop as the only device downstream of that router. Either ghosts or the PSP on my AMD processor chatting with spooks.
- cpeterso 4y agoI had a haunted USB cable that would somehow cause USB to stop working in any device I plugged it into (until I rebooted the device). Once I figured out it was a problem with a USB cable, identifying the faulty USB cable required rebooting the devices after testing each cable (because any cables plugged in after the faulty one wouldn't work either).
- scarface74 4y agoUsually when my computers are “haunted”, it’s caused by corporate mandated malware.
- hiidrew 4y agoMy sister is very into crystals, actually works at a shop financed by some billionaire's daughter. Every now and then she likes to remind me of that most of our screens are made out of quartz, and highlights the associated qualities of the crystal. I can't recall them but I always find it interesting, something about assigning beliefs and extra qualities onto your everyday objects. Some people believe in a white god with long hair in the clouds while others believe in the magical qualities of rocks. I find the diversity of beliefs beautiful.
- paxys 4y agoRegarding their point about religion, the big shift that has happened in the last few decades is people rejecting organized religion. Mega churches using their power and influence to commit crimes. Pastors buying mansions and private jets. Having a political stance forced on you by your congregation. Being ostracized due to your personal beliefs. Belief in spirituality, the supernatural, a higher power all can and do exist independently of any particular religion.
- WalterBright 4y agoI always wondered why hospitals weren't haunted, considering that most people die in them rather than in their homes.
- saghm 4y agoEven ghosts don't like staying there longer than they have to.
- aaron695 4y ago