20+ years ago I worked for a search startup before Google existed. Think the days of Lycos, Hotbot, Alta Vista, etc. it was trivial for us to watch searches in real time as we worked on tweaking search algorithms.

I was impacted by the 2015 OPM data breach. The OPM is basically the HR department for the entire federal government. It has personnel records on everybody from federal employees in DC to CIA officers to military and everything in between.

As a result of that breach I was given free top-notch credit monitoring for roughly ten years, and it served me pretty well. I guess it shows just how bad things have gotten in the federal government if the FBI is being told that they’re basically on their own.

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Used to live in a 2 story house built in the 1900’s. It had plaster & lath walls. I ended up with 4 AP’s scattered about before we had decent WiFi coverage.

I’d love to see the USA try to demand DNS blocking be applied to random cloud servers in Sweden, Croatia, Brazil, etc.

Can’t wait for this to get applied to every corporate site-to-site VPN, every remote worker, etc. My employer relies heavily on VPN services provided by AWS. I’d be willing to bet the number of corporate users of AWS VPN users would be enough to qualify for this.

After the great syrup catastropy of 1909

Was that anything like The Great Molasses Flood?

Smart washing machine: ours is in the basement and my wife and I used to regularly forget we had laundry in it. I now have Home Assistant text us when a load is complete. But it only texts us if we are home and can do something about it. If nobody is home it waits until one of us gets home to text us.

BUT: The washer and dryer are still dumb, pre-IoT generation. I built light sensors that are taped to the displays, and Home Assistant relies on those to determine if the appliances are on or off. No need for cloud-based monitoring, etc. A little creativity like that can work just as well or better than a convenient cloud-based solution.

I grew up boating up and down the New England coast. As long as there are big boats in the water there will be a need for good mechanics, and plenty of boat owners willing to throw money at you.

I remember stopping at a marina for fuel once and we saw a mechanic replacing an outboard engine on one of those big “cigarette” boats that often have 3 or 4 engines on them. We struck up a conversation and learned that the boat owner was a rich idiot who didn’t know how to operate the boat properly and would blow an engine almost every time he took the boat out. It happened so often that the mechanic had started keeping a spare $20,000 engine in stock just for this boat. He was more than happy to take money from the idiot boat owner to keep the guy happy.

Community theater can be a great choice if you have them in your area. $25 for a bunch of volunteers beats out the outrageous prices charged by megacorps like Ticketmaster any day of the week. I’ve seen many quality community theater productions, and have even seen some actors who have gone on to have professional TV and movie careers.

Now do private equity firms.

So start feeding it lots of random 2 to 8 letter/number strings.

Speaking of slot machines, every slot machine, electronic poker machine, etc. are just state machines that operate based on a stream of random numbers fed into them by another device.

The random number generators (RNG’s) used for gaming are highly regulated (at least here in the US) and only a small handful of companies make them. They have to be certified for use by organizations like The Nevada Gaming Control Board. RNGs have to be secured so only NGC officials and other key people can access them. If they are opened unexpectedly or otherwise tampered with then they need to go into lockdown and stop generating numbers until an official resets it.

The RNGs also need to be able to replay sequences of numbers on demand. If the same sequence of numbers are fed into a game and the user plays the same way then the result of the game should be 100% identical each time.