Without even opening the article, I’m going to guess this woman is a person of color.

Opens article

Why am I not surprised?

Shit, I’m even grateful for when you all tell me off.

Oh fuck off!

Just kidding! I haven’t seen any of your posts here (mostly because I sort by all) but yeah the people in this sub are top tier.

A few weeks ago I came here to ask about building my own computer and which parts to get because it had been years since I’ve done so and everyone was nice about it.

Look into the benefits offered by your other credit cards. My identity was stolen a few years ago and I learned like a few months ago that one of my credit cards offers free identity protection services if/when your identity gets stolen.

They handle all of the annoying shit like contacting the bank, getting the debt off of your credit card, etc.

If not, and you were part of the Equifax (or any) hack, you likely have this same service available to you for free.

I don’t think we need more licenses. OSS license proliferation is bad as it is. IMO, people should do their best to stick with the major licenses: GPL, AGPL, MIT, or Creative Commons if it doesn’t fit the above.

The problem with a tax that you’ve proposed is that it would be nearly impossible to enforce. How would you know which companies are pulling your library?

What I’ve been doing is adding the Commons Clause to my license and that I think helps. I don’t write wildly popular software so I don’t really see people donating or asking to purchase a license.

I personally like the Mozilla model where they donate to various open source projects from a common fund. I’d like to see more stuff like that.

It sort of is by license. Not directly but if you’re using one of the more restrictive licenses like GPL 3, it often doesn’t pass legal review due to many of the copy left provisions.

Most companies simply find a similar library that has a more permissive license. A handful will contact the dev and buy a license.

As much as the MIT license has made code more accessible, its permissiveness is the main reason I don’t use it for my own software, unless I really don’t care for it.

Why do you have so many porn tabs open?

There was an encryption system a few years ago that offered this out of the box.

I can’t remember the name of it but there was a huge vulnerability and basically made the software unusable.

Crypt box or something like that.

If it’s for software you like, yes. Lemmy apps are a great example of this.

A lifetime license isn’t going to sustain the dev long term. If you like the app, buy a monthly subscription that gives them predictable income every month. Do a year if you feel confident about it. But honestly monthly is probably best.

For shitty corporate apps like Adobe, pirate that shit.

Yup. Never ever buy lifetime licenses.

Even on software you love. Especially for software you love.

They don’t need to be a techie. Just someone who can click a button.

I am remembering Julian Assuage has/had a payload that was distributed via BitTorrent. The file was encrypted with a private key and his public key was posted either as a file in the package or on the site where the magnet file was downloaded.

Before he was arrested, he encouraged everyone to download the file and sit on it and to keep seeding it. He said in the event of his untimely death, the password would be released for everyone to decrypt.

That would be another option but you sort of need the notoriety to make this work.

I’ve actually given this a lot of thought over the years. The biggest issue for me is all my AWS services that no one in my family knows about.

So the idea would be to, at minimum, let my family know what services are being used.

Unfortunately there isn’t a turn-key solution. I’ve seen a number of well-meaning solutions and some that are quite novel but they all suffer from the same problems: how do you deal with false positives and how do you verify your deadness.

I imagine that the problem is similar to the Yellowstone trash can problem, in that any solution to mitigate one will make it harder on the other.

The best solution I’ve found is to have a two-person solution, similar to launching a nuke. You have automation that tests if you are active that emails a close friend or relative to verify you are indeed dead.

Ideally there would be more than one person on this list a confirmation from two people would kick off all of the automations you code.

The IT Crowd

I’m imagining the scene from Step Brothers:

Spider: Can you eat the ants but not my eggs?

Frog: YUP! Can you protect me from other things that want to eat me?

Spider: YUP! Did we just become best friends?!

Frog: YUP!

This exactly. NAS+RAID gives you a backup of your local media. It can account for one of your three copies and one of your storage mediums. But you still need something off site.

So assuming you had a copy on your computer proper, it could work. Better than no backups.

I wish there was a good way to store a backup of my media. I recently suffered a terrible hard drive issue. I lost a terabyte of media. Fortunately, the pirate ship has saved me and has me rethinking some of my backup methodologies.

Outside of periodically backing up onto an external hard drive, I haven’t been able to find a reasonably priced online backup solution that isn’t going to fuck me when I have to pull data out. Egress fees are killer.

The problem is that they can’t control open source drivers. They could, however, release a printer that ran on proprietary closed source drivers. But they’d have to spend money on developers to maintain that code whereas right now, drivers are more or less stable and developed for free.

What they could do is require the use of HP printer paper, with embedded RFID or watermarks that would be readable by HP printers. I’m honestly surprised they haven’t gone down this road.

Can confirm. Vim is my operating system.

Edit: I just saw your edit. Great job fixing it! God I hate that you had to do this.

What is the make and model of the wheelchair and the wheels?

Links to their official website would be helpful.

Did your wheelchair come with a regular manual? A link to a PDF would also help.

If you want to go down a more…questionable route, you could call the wheelchair provider number. Use social engineering by saying you’re from a doctor’s office and you can’t get the wheels to activate.

It helps to have a friend do this for you. You want a buffer and you want your friend to say “I am not sure” or “I don’t know” a lot. That way the company gives him or her more information on what to do next before calling you back.

This is a terrible situation. Maybe your insurance will spring for the cost. It’s so infuriating that if I had access, I probably wouldn’t sleep until I figured it out and posted it everywhere.

Jesus fucking mother of Christ.

Ok, I’m going to skip my indignation.

I’m not an app developer or a wheel chair person. That said, we need some info to help you better.

• What phone? Android or iOS?
• link to the app (and a link it’s APK or whatever iPhones equivalent to an APK would be)
• instructions on how you register, e.g. is registration tied to your phone, the wheelchair, or both?

Here is some general hacking advice:

• check online for your wheelchairs “provider” manual. I “hacked” my CPAP machine a few years back. My doctor forgot to turn on heated tubing and the setting was hidden behind a “provider” menu. Chances are good that there will be a similar manual for your wheelchair.
• if you haven’t already, search for the make and model of your wheelchair and see if there are forums or discussion boards
• typically, physical access is the best access. Depending on how your phone communicates with the chair, you might able to spy on the signals that it uses. My guess is Bluetooth. It probably is encrypted but medical devices are notoriously easy skimpy on their tech security. Might be worth a try
• If you have the tools and the knowledge, consider taking apart the wheelchair to access the physical components. Information like the processor, chip set, etc will make it easier to understand how it works. While you might expect custom boards and software, more and more devices are going the Raspberry Pi or Pico route because they are cheaper to manufacturer than to do a whole custom board. If it’s a run of the mill consumer board, you have a lot more attack vectors.

Often settings like these are based on PKI(Public Key Infrastructure), meaning that the program on your wheelchair likely knows the public key for the company and will test any input to change the settings will require the private key. Again, generally speaking.

But also generally speaking, medical equipment, especially consumer equipment, has to deal with the lowest common denominator, meaning people who don’t have apps, who don’t know what a smart phone is, etc. Because of that, my hunch is that the setting is in plain text and you just need to change it.

You also have to remember that the people setting this up are often in doctors offices, which means it must be easy to do because time is of the essence. The doctor would not recommend their product if it takes more than a few minutes to set up.

I’m sorry I can’t give you better more specific advice but hopefully you can figure this out.

Wait, I thought Google wanted Apple to start supporting RCS. So that everyone can talk to each other.

So Google is just…trying to strong arm apple to give up their proprietary protocol for their own?

That’s so fucked up.