My wife borrows a lot of ebooks from our library, which are delivered to a kindle through Amazon. I’ve used this USB download option to remove the DRM from some of those borrowed books. Guess I’ll have to figure out a new approach now…

My wife and I enjoyed it so thoroughly that when we were in London a few months ago we took a Ted Lasso tour of Richmond. It was so much fun to see all the spots that were locations in the show.

Same. Can’t wait for season 3!

Time for the US military to replace all their humvees?

My employer is switching from Microsoft to Google for office tools next month and they’ve been championing its availability to all of us. I’m not looking forward to it…

In this day and age you need to be very careful abandoning anything in the cloud. My employer regularly contracts with HackerOne to test the security of our websites. On at least one occasion they demonstrated an exploit by creating an AWS S3 bucket with the same name as a bucket we stopped using years ago. We still had an old DNS record pointing to that old bucket if I recall correctly…

Well not immediately… Years from now when the military develops something even better then this will all become surplus and sold off to SWAT teams etc. for next to nothing.

At least it’s not 100 trillion James Bonds.

Next up, you’re going to have to register your drill press, lathe, etc.

Fun fact: the US Coast Guard used to have a base in the Oklahoma panhandle. It’s sole purpose was a LORAN transmitter.

At least the ads on broadcast TV are placed appropriately in breaks throughout the TV programming. Some of the streaming services seem to inject ads wherever they feel like, sometimes in mid sentence. It completely turns me off of those streaming services.

So the copyright industry will push again for back doors that they are given the keys to.

Simple. After they gain access to the routers and realize everything is encrypted then they’ll start throwing piles of money at politicians to outlaw encryption.

Exactly. I know folks that live on the 3rd floor of an old walk-up. Stairs are the only way in & out. So if you want to replace delivery people then it would need to be a robot that can navigate narrow & windy stairs.

Nah, they just send the entire family to forced labor camps…

But I want my own personal luxury car that I paid $100,000 for to go out on its own in the middle of the night while I’m asleep and have it earn money for me as a self-driving Uber…

Because the entire world is designed around the human body and the way it moves. It’s theoretically much easier to introduce a humanoid robot into an existing workspace than it is to retrofit all the doors, stairs, etc. to allow a wheeled robot to move around.

Spoofing is a whole hell of a lot easier said than done. Content delivery networks like Akamai, Cloudflare, etc. all know exactly how different versions of different browsers present themselves, and will catch the tiniest mistake.

When a browser requests a web page it sends a series of headers, which identify both itself and the request it’s making. But virtually every browser sends a slightly different set of headers, and in different orders. So Akamai, for example can tell that you are using Chrome solely by what headers are in the request and the order they are in, even if you spoof your User-Agent string to look like Firefox.

So to successfully spoof a connection you need to decide how you want to present yourself (do I really want them to think I’m using Opera when I’m using Firefox, or do I just want to randomize things to keep them guessing). In the first case you need to be very careful to ensure your browser sends requests that exactly matches how Opera sends them. One header, or even one character out of place can be enough for these companies to recognize you’re spoofing your connection.

AKA greed. Why license your content to Netflix when you can have your own streaming service and lock your viewers into your piddly little hoard of content?

Just how many streaming providers are there today? That number likely changes almost daily at this point…