I don’t get why this is so confusing. This is basically a rotating theme restaurant/theme shop. Disneyland, Universal Studios, the new Nintendo park, etc. aren’t really about the rides or food either. Will tourists buy Stranger Things tchotchkes and Bridgerton merch? Sure, we’re a hyper consumeristic society that loves pop culture doodads and experiences. I somehow get the feeling this will fail, Netflix’s brand has lost its luster recently, but I don’t think this idea is totally out there.
I’m not confused why they’re doing it, I’m confused why they think b&m stores are the way to go. I’m sure they can subsidize any potential losses from other money making areas but why not just sell the merch online? Storefront overhead ain’t cheap.
While I completely agree, there’s a bit of a draw to certain experiences around shopping. Some instances:
FAO Schwarz in NYC
Nintendo flagship store in NYC
Tiffany & Co. in NYC on 5th Ave
LEGO store in Leicester Square London
Basically look up a list of Flagship stores, even Microsoft and Samsung have ones. They’re more of an experience and bragging rights than just walking in a random Walmart to get merch. Sure, you can just order it online, but it’s not the same.
Because it’s not about immediate sales, it’s about marketing. They’ve been between major culture defining hits for a while, but imagine if such a store existed when Squid Games was at its peak. Create a few instagrammable moments at two locations, a place for hyped fans to pilgrimage, and that’s much cheaper than TV advertising. Not saying it’ll be successful, but I think there’s some logic to this.
The orientation of my house sucks and our neighborhood has many old growth trees. I wish I could be that asshole, but after running the numbers I don’t even break even over the expected lifespan of the panels. :(
Tiny lot + aforementioned old growth trees means that’s also not viable. :( My “best” option (which I have) is a nat gas backup generator for when the grid goes down. It’s expensive, and very much NOT a clean energy source, but it’s what I have to work with. I work 100% from home and need full-time power.
I would love to get it, but I am getting hounded two or three times a weekend by door-to-door solar salespeople.
It’s always the same shit routine they pull about saying they are just passing the word about some change the power company just did or something. They supposedly just want to give a “consultation” about what that means and they are not trying to sell me anything.
If their blatant trespassing didn’t already piss me off, their bullshit faux consultation pitch absolutely does.
The end result? I really don’t want anything to do with any solar company, at all. It’s a shame, TBH. I really don’t want to start shopping for solar in full defense mode like I am about to buy a used car. The sales people in that industry have absolutely fucked it for me.
That reminds me. I have a three part Ring recording of one of those people going into mental meltdown saying that offering me a quote and consultation was not solicitation. It’s hysterical.
Honestly, that is something that really interests me. If there is anything that I am holding out for, it’s solid state lithium batteries. (A significant battery bank is high on my list of requirements and having garage full of current generation li-ion batteries still makes me cringe a little.) Prices should be much better once they go into mass production for EVs. Hopefully.
Lots of great content there! If you are remotely a DIYer and have the means, do a lot of the solar install yourself and hire pros to ensure you’re safe/ connect to grid if needed.
Buying used panels and mounting them yourself can be very cost effective, you would only need to hire an electrician. Of course be aware of local code regarding such things. I understand that the time commitment isn’t an option for some people.
Yeah, but I mean aren’t they the price of a small used car? My bill averages $100 a month, except in winter when it doubles. That’s a looong time for it to pay itself off.
This is a reminder that paying for a subscription means t&cs can be changed. You aren’t buying the engine etc just a license to access/use it for a period of time. Stop buying subscriptions!
I wonder if this is a good decision - you have to be very afraid of the publication of this data to pay millions to blackmailers without being sure that they won’t be at your door again soon.
It’s becoming the standard to just pay the ransom. Many large companies have a cybersecurity insurance policy anyways. Plus on the hackers side, they have a reputation to maintain. If word gets out that a specific group isn’t decrypting after payment, they will be less likely to get paid in the future.
This isn’t a crypto locker hack though where you can verify pretty immediately if they’re going to keep their word by them decrypting your data.
In this case the hackers actually physically have the data and are threatening to make it public if you don’t pay.
There’s no way to verify that they will never release it once you pay them. They could just sit on it for years after getting paid and then come back and say pay up again or they’ll release it.
I work in the casino industry, our databases are full of ssns, addresses, emails, telephone numbers, birthdates, food/liquor/tobacco/vacation/entertainment preferences, players with lines of credit through us, people cash checks or get cash advances through their credit cards through us so we have that info, through our play history data you can infer habits of where someone is or isn’t at certain times, some casino companies are now offering “cashless/chip less” play which is an app on your phone hooked up to a bank account we set up for you and tie to Experian, etc etc etc
Casinos are essentially banks now, we have fuckloads of secure information and the casino industry hires the cheapest fucktards it can find on purpose to keep profits high. It’s no wonder we’re being targeted, we’re damn juicy targets. Even if IT tries our hardest, we’re handcuffed by cheap management and flat stupid users that fail phishing tests left and right and write down passwords on notepads or excel sheets
We can’t offer player points (that can be used on free play or free food or free hotel stays) without them being online and tracking the level of play on your card
It does if that user has rights to access those databases, that would be a non-zero number of marketing analysis, p&a, data scientists, IT staff who maintain that infrastructure, etc. The most dangerous one is a compromised IT admin account and from the looks of it that happened to MGM this week
Sadly this will probably not change unless attacks become so frequent that paying the ransom is more expensive than hiring competent people and teaching them proper opsec.
It’s bound to happen at some point, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Sadly we’ll never be able to reach proper IPsec to all staff, Kyle in marketing is ALWAYS going to fuck it up because he thinks he’s a big shot who makes great business moves by buying cheap casserole dishes to give to players as gifts. That numbnuts is going to click the obvious scam link every time thinking he just found a new deal
Much of that we do need to satisfy our regulatory requirements or offer products/services to players. You don’t get to be a big casino company by throwing a bunch of standalone slot machines in a building and having no reward/points program.
Are they a national group? A competitor? Another casino?
Or
A foreign government or a foreign entity … which begs the question … if it came to light that it was a hostile government … would it be classified as an act of provocation or even war?
For hacking a casino? A private business unrelated to any US domestic or foreign interests?
Not a chance in hell it would be an act of war. Businesses get hacked by China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran all the time. Hell, China hacked the US Office of Personnel Management and stole the security clearance records for 22 million people in 2015 and even that wasn’t declared an act of war.
If an adversarial government hacking the US military and stealing security clearance records isn’t an act of war, a bunch of rich mobsters having their casinos hacked sure as shit ain’t.
No one is going to war over a casino breach, now if they got Boeing or Lockheed or Raytheon and it’s proven to be the Russian state doing it then there’s a possibility but that would still be unprecedented to start a war over a cyber attack
You would need to do some pre-planning before going ahead with this and it's not as simple as Google Home for sure. For example, my household went all in on Zigbee lights and switches so we had to get a Zigbee antenna to connect to our old laptop running Home Assistant and make sure all our cool LED smart lights and other cool gadgets were compatible, etc. I'm also tagging @ISometimesAdmin who did a lot of the networking stuff in case he wants to add anything.
I'm attaching an image of my dashboard setup for my room, just as an example of what can be accomplished. (This may not federate to Lemmy so I will self-reply with a link if necessary) This shows my and my household's location, the downstairs Sensi thermometer climate (which can be controlled), the light controls, temperature/pressure/humidity which is a little Aqara sensor from Amazon, and the Air Quality comes from my Winix air filter which can also be integrated to Home Assistant. You can really do a lot.
There's also purchasable hardware that comes pre-installed with Home Assistant and has zigbee built-in, it looks like, which is neat (though expensive).
Home Assistant isn't "yet another" service. It's not trying to do vendor lock in: you can think of Home Assistant kinda like a "glue" framework.
It's meant to let you systemically attach devices/software across any number of mediums, and pre-existing services, and let them play nice.
So if you've already gone and set up your Google Home, or Alexa, or Apple Homekit, you don't have to abandon them to use Home Assistant.
Sometimes you can't even get away from it: the thermostat that came with our rental basically only has a useful Samsung Smartthings integration, but we can still use it with Home Assistant.
I tried using a pi3 but it kept crashing from going OOM like every 2 days (maybe I had too many devices?). I have it running on a more proper home server now and it’s always up as long as there’s no power outage.
Home Assistant is great, but it has a steep learning curve imo and it takes time to set up. I would only recommend it to tech savvy people.
That being said, if you are tech savvy (familiar with Linux, docker, self hosting, etc) then it is extremely powerful and it works with pretty much everything.
This is very true. It does look like they've made it much easier lately with pre-purchasable hardware though. I know that it's a steep price compared to Google Home, but the advantage is that you're not tied to a Google ecosystem which can just unexpectedly shut down at a moment's notice. (Listen y'all I'm still mad about Google Inbox.)
It’s not a walled garden, it’s kind of the opposite. You can connect devices regardless of brand and it’s a server you can run locally. In theory you wouldn’t need to update it or ever connect it to the internet again, as long as your devices can run locally.
If you have an old laptop or a raspberry pi 4, you can always give it a try before scrapping what you’re currently using.
I meant with commercial stuff like Google's. The easy stuff is all walled gardens, don't want that. So hoping stuff like Home Assistant gets easier to use.
If Starlink follows through on its reported vow to ignore the X ban, it is likely to face similar sanctions itself for ignoring a supreme court order.
That could have a big impact in the Brazilian Amazon, where Starlink antennae have spread rapidly since being made available in September 2022, bringing high-speed internet connection to far-flung regions. By the end of 2023 Starlink antennae were being used in more than 90% of the Amazon’s municipalities, according to BBC Brasil.
Flag proudly displayed in a spacecraft that highlights many of the ailments of the US industry in general, and the traditional aerospace industry in particular.
It’s even worse, they’re not getting paid. These shills only get rewarded by getting the phones slightly before general availability (but after actual reviewers)
Reviewers are paid actors tho, aren’t they? Since Google controls the youtube algorithms, they get to push which review ranks in search, featured in homepage, and recommended alongside other reviews. And the reviewers make money from ads which are run by Google themselves.
While some reviewers will likely claime they bought the phone, Google has the resources to reward positive reviews.
tldr: Mainstream reviewers are the last thing to base an opinion on a product.
Google definitely has the ability to do that, but I don’t believe it’s currently happening. First, it could get them in pretty big trouble in parts of the world that have the concept of consumer protection if anyone ever got ahold of any proof (and Google seems pretty terrible at keeping secrets). Second, have you seen ANY negative review of a phone? Every time I was researching which phone to buy, all the reviews were always very positive and avoided talking about its weak spots.
For example, my old Nokia 5.3 - every review I found, both in English and in my native language, made the phone sound like it is an acceptable phone for its price - nothing terrible and nothing outstanding. I doubt most of them even tried using half the features, because the rear fingerprint scanner was completely unusable (it got a nice 50/50 success rate if the air was dry and I had perfectly clean non-sweaty fingers, and plummeted down to maybe 10% success rate if any of these conditions wasn’t met), the touchscreen had ghost touch issues in even slightly humid air (meanwhile other phones work fine even with droplets of water on the screen in light rain), the camera app took 5 - 10 seconds to be able to take a picture from cold start (and Nokia/HMD didn’t bother to keep it in memory like other OEMs).
The last point might not sound like much, but it actually made me pretty much stop taking photos because anything that moves at all was simply a no go unless I had quite a bit of time to set up. I took a grand total of 732 photos and 28 videos over the three years I had that phone, which is ridiculously few compared to the over 6k photos I took with my previous Xiaomi phone. (talking about the 8k photos I took in a single year with my current phone would be cheating, literally any phone camera would look like a technical miracle to me after Nokia’s shitshow).
(edit: also, after one of the updates, the camera app would often get killed after taking a photo and the photo would be lost - so if you really wanted to take a photo of something, you would often have to try several times until it actually saved it. This was never fixed in the later updates, and the final update even introduced a fun feature where factory reset is now guaranteed to irreversibly brick the device in case you wanted to sell it. This is confirmed by HMD to be a wontfix because the phone is now EOL)
Oh, and the promised updates (it was Android One ffs) were all about a year late and generally very poor quality (also security updates were sparse), but that’s not something a reviewer could tell at the time.
Sorry about the rant, my experience just made me really hate HMD/Nokia. The main point is that all the reviews were incredibly positive even for a crappy phone and a brand that doesn’t seem to be paying off the reviewers - even tiny local reviewers who couldn’t have possibly be on HMD’s radar were way too excited about it.
And my last point: we’re not talking about reviewers here. This is about “#TeamPixel”, Google’s “organic” marketing campaign. They get a phone and hype it up, they’re not even meant to compare it to other stuff.
I think they’re making a joke about how AI generated code is ridiculously insecure and shouldn’t be used by anyone.
That said, AIs with the ability to pen test will be a hell of a lot better at finding obscure exploits than any human, so the joke is kind of damaging.
I mean it holds a kernel of truth, but only in one specific use case.
And I can tell you from personal experience if enough people bandwagon the joke, it will kill any interest in developing actually useful AI penetration testing products.
Just like how you chucklefucks broke NFTs.
They could have been THE SOLUTION to protect content creators from platform abuse, but because everyone focused on ONE use case (links to pictures) and joked about it, all the actual useful NFT development to secure creator’s rights and force cross platform compatibility has been completely abandoned and a shitton of you will downvote me for even mentioning it.
One, the blockchain is a benefit, it is only the modern ‘proof of work’ blockchains people hate for their energy usage and poor scalability. There are other much less intensive proof methods like Proof of Stake, and Proof of Historic Compliance. Independently confirmed ledgers are still the best form of distributed high-confidence low-trust dynamic archives. ‘Mining’ for the blockchain is separate from upkeep of the blockchain, but almost none of you naysayers even understand that because you only know what you’ve learned from online memes and jokes.
Two, while those stupid profile pics provided no value to anyone, the built-in programattically triggered contract function is of IMMENSE value to content creators. It is literally the way to guarantee youtube can never screw over small creators again and give them an effortless way to move their content to other platforms without requiring their current platform’s blessing.
And I can explain it to you in detail, but you will still just crackle “But but NFTS are a whack yo” because you haven’t actually bothered to look at the fundamental underlying technology and instead form your opinions from other people’s jokes on the internet.
And people like you outnumber the people who actually understand the value by several orders of magnitude, so your constant dismissive humor (based on rank ignorance) is actively damaging development into the ONLY open source project that can guarantee content creators rights and give them leverage against greedy platforms.
So, instead of helping your favorite content creator secure the rights for their own work, you post stupid image macros based off of 3rd hand incorrect knowledge and keep any tools to help the little guy fight for their fair compensation from being created in the future.
This is what they mean when they say ‘a little knowledge is dangerous’.
In Switzerland we basically had ISP monopolies back in the day on cable (DOCSIS) and on the phone (xDSL) networks. Prices were ok, but not low. Then fiber optic as a viable tech came around, but neither of the large ISP was particularly eager to build out a fiber infrastructure, as it was more lucrative to just sit on their “old” tech, knowing the ohter party won’t be building fiber, so won’t have a better offer either
So what happend then was that munincipalities built their own fiber networks, renting them out to the ISPs, large and small ones, either as an IP service or as dark fiber for ISPs which want to provide their own equipent. Only the largest ISP still builds their own fiber infrastructure, in parallel, and they are required by law to rent out that infrastructure to other ISPs as well.
This has really leveled the playing field, brought good competition and lowered the prices.
So I think government owned infrastructure is the way to go, but it takes a long time to build out and needs the right policies and legal framework to succeed.
That would require the government to not be bought out by billionaires. That would require the government NOT working for the billionaires that control them. That would require the government to actually give a fuck about anyone poor.
Worked in my home town for about 20 years until they outsourced to our version of Comcast as a ‘cost-saving measure’. Wow, were they stupid.
It actually worked astoundingly well before that. Hated ISP a? Make a phone call and within an hour your same gear was now on ISP c.
At a recent job I worked closely with some muni IT people. Their plan is to fibre their area and then price the backhoe access out so the ISPs have to compete over the common infrastructure and can’t restrict access. City doesn’t want to be an ISP; just manage the glass.
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