So wait a second then, it connects out using a websocket to its bot C&C server, right?
Which presumably passes it a URL to scrape and waits for it to return the data.
What happens if I write my own tool that connects to that C&C server, waits for a URL to scrape, and returns gigabytes of freshly brewed hot horseshit?
Not sure about Bright Data but these are usually SOCKS or HTTP CONNECT proxies because that's most flexible. But the customer might be paying by the gigabyte, so you can still feed them nonsense, maybe a 4 gigabyte TLS certificate.
Having been working with computers professionally for almost 40 years now I've seen quite a lot of things come and go. I'm not convinced that LLMs will stick around for that long although they're currently doing better than "fuzzy logic", which is what it used to be called when they could run on 68HC11s ;-)
You know what has stuck around though?
Thumping great Unix boxes running SQL databases.
Yes, there's a lot wrong with the whole concept, but everything else is in some important way worse.
In the olden days we called that a "RAM Disk" and it made our Atari STs go really fast!
On the old Amstrad PCWs that were everywhere at least in the UK in the mid 80s to mid 90s you could have up to 512kB of RAM, a fair chunk of which could be a RAM disk. This made compiling stuff in Turbo Pascal really fast too :-)
RAM disk is, like, the brd module on Linux, which allocates and exposes a /dev/ram0 block device.
From the project description this looks like it, exposing a raw block device backed by VRAM (with some trip through the nbd protocol, but that's an implementation detail to have it in userland, it could just as well have been implemented kernel side).
It's just that the usage of this mem-backed block device is different than the thing of yore (copy HD or floppy into RAM)
The more frequent alternative to brd, tmpfs, skips the block device part and does a filesystem directly. I wonder if it could be made so that it's swap directly and skip the block device part entirely like tmpfs.
I'm no Windows defender but this is nonsense. Windows has BY FAR the best multi monitor support of any of the major OS's, including any variant of Linux.
Are we talking about the same Windows that moves all your windows around when you temporary disconnect a display, even when the computer is locked?
Or is it the windows that sometimes ends up with windows positioned partially on a display that is no longer connected so that you can't move it because any control for that is offscreen.
How do you get it to work then? Because at the moment whenever I open my Windows laptop plugged into a docking station the screens just come up in a random order.
Sometimes all three are mirrored, sometimes by chance they're the right way round, sometimes the "main" screen is one one of the external monitors and then you're absolutely knackered if you don't manage to convince it to go onto the laptop's panel before you unplug because there's no way to get it back.
It's all just so half-assed.
In Linux multiple monitors have worked perfectly for about 20 years.
You're probably right but it's really sad that an OS that shuffles everything you have open when it hits power save and turns off the screens would qualify as the best.
Installing maybe… getting all the hardware to actually work was a completely different story. Broken WiFi was the norm. Bad display drivers that only worked in 640x480 or 800x600. Not to mention consulting website before installing to see how well your laptop was supported and what you could expect to never work.
So years ago you also generally had to understand partitioning and filesystem formats, which most people are clueless about.
Sure, they were learning opportunities, but most people weren’t trying to learn anything. They just wanted to get on MySpace, download free music, chat with friends.
I still have a wifi issue that forces me to pin to a specific wifi network. If I do not, it somehow cascades into a GPU driver failure that breaks everything.
My last laptop used an audio amplifier that made the speakers not work for ~2 years, that required patching the kernel to fix. It's only recently a vanilla version of the kernel works.
you still see these in velocipede-style vehicles commonly.
and to your point : a dead axle is an effort to reduce unsprung weight compared to a live axle; it also lets you actually use alignment as a remediation for asymmetry issues rather than just pre-delivery straightening.
Ah, like on my old Volvo 340 ;-) They were fun, all that weight at the back (the diff and gearbox were bolted together under the rear floor) gave it excellent balance. Bit of a shame all that 50/50 weight distribution was only pushed along by a 1.4 Renault engine then, I guess.
Have you ever seen the Jaguar IRS setup? It's more like a twin-wishbone suspension *but the driveshaft is the upper link!* It's in compression and stops the hub tilting out, and the rear brakes are inboard to reduce weight even further.
Up here in the north of Scotland the various council water and drainage departments often had to send data from remote data loggers (high tech stuff in the early 80s). Some of them would transmit a little ping of data every few seconds and if it heard a reply it would send several bursts of data quickly, using meteor scatter[1] to get it back to the receiving station hundreds of miles away.
All gone now, it's all 4G.
A few hours drive north of me is Mormond Hill, formerly the site of one part of the North Atlantic Radio System[2]. This used tropospheric scattering and huge dish aerials to communicate radar data down to RAF Fylingdales. There's not much up there now. There were various BT microwave links for offshore oil installations and assorted UHF and VHF links up, but the masts are pretty bare now.
> If your TV wasn't quite adjusted properly you could see the data scan lines at the top of the screen as flickering white dots and lines which was fun.
There was a stock fault on BRC 1400 series valve TVs where a resistor in the brightness network would drift high in value and cause uncontrollable bright flyback lines in the upper half of the screen, and you could see those wriggly dotty crawlies ;-) I can't remember the component number - I think I last replaced one when I was 15 or 16, they were the teenage bedroom hand-me-down set of choice in the 80s, absolutely scads of them about in all sizes - but I can still picture in my mind's eye exactly where on the board it is, 220kΩ, red red yellow.
All long gone now, I expect.
If you find one do not re-cap it - the capacitors will be fine. They always are, there aren't any tantalums in it. Instead pay attention to everything above about 200kΩ and find out which ones are now closer to 1 meg!
Which presumably passes it a URL to scrape and waits for it to return the data.
What happens if I write my own tool that connects to that C&C server, waits for a URL to scrape, and returns gigabytes of freshly brewed hot horseshit?
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