Cable testers can bypass all of the standard driver and USB negotiation bullshit before anything else. I would imagine building a device to manually control when and how the connections are made is much easier than fighting for low level device control on systems like Windows, macOS and Android.
“Your TV has become a digital billboard.”
It’s been a digital billboard for at least 40 years of my life. Radio was no different, so be sure to drink your Ovaltine.
Have you never seen a commercial before? Cheap subsidized hardware? Bloatware loaded on phones? Bloatware on TVs? Games that require 5 mins of ad time? Google’s crippling of Chrome to break ad blockers? Unskippable ads on YouTube? Sponsored ad spots in YouTube videos? All the 3rd party logos on Smart TV boxes? Product placements in movies? Ad placements before the movie starts? The list goes on.
The entire entertainment industry is based around advertising. Every delivery platform is designed to show you ads first and entertainment second.
People have problems figuring that out?
This isn’t a new concept and it’s really stupid that Ars is presenting it that way.
If companies didn’t know this, then they are already out of business. If the viewers didn’t know this… well… I can’t help you.
When you powered an old CRT down, the image would collapse to a single horizontal line, and then to a point.
I was thinking you could just cut the power to the deflecting coils.
It would be close to infinite refresh rate as the electron beams wouldn’t need to move. Also, the phosphors in that spot would probably burn away in a few minutes resulting in no refresh rate at all.
Shrooms aren’t magic, believe it or not.
There was some serious pain involved in my own recovery and I don’t want to hide that.
The risk of what I did was also significant. If you have some addictions you need to eliminate and a life to rebuild, shrooms could probably help. There are also the bits where you need to see reality dissolve or have your visual cortex basically go into overdrive and basically nope-out for a few hours. Stuff like that tends to happen when you go on a mission to get your brain a bit softer.
The common AA trope is quite real for me: If I drink again, I’ll likely be dead. Heart issues or a bad liver isn’t going to get me, but it will be from absolute stupidity. There were some major changes I needed to make. (I don’t subscribe to most of the AA stuff, btw. It helps some people, but I am too stubborn. It’s got some good bits that are very helpful though.)
I only went into that stuff here just to underscore the seriousness. However, munching on a few grams every now and then probably could result in some positive changes too but you have to be self-aware enough to feel them.
From my research, neuroplasticity, neurogenesis and dendritic development and branching it is absolutely a factor in psychedelic use. (Ability to learn; neuron growth; neuron connection development)
Me being who I am, I tested this. My experience is my own and of course, highly subjective.
After several months of adapting to psilocybin and understanding what my tolerance was, I started some deep sessions at “breakthrough” or higher doses (+5g of potent strain mushrooms) on the weekends. My goal was to actually rewrite my behaviors as I was fresh into alcohol abstinence and had been struggling with depression and anxiety for most of my life.
While I could go on for hours about the details, I did have a basic plan. I would meditate and focus on specific issues I wanted to correct while trying to gain insight into how and why my mind and body behaved the way it did.
While there is a ton of illusion involved, it seemed that I could choose a different way to feel about something while in the depths of a trip. Mostly because perception is so wonky, it felt like I could isolate feelings and simply decide not to feel bad or anxious about something. I would focus on things like my alcohol addiction and simply choose not to crave the stuff anymore.
What I think the trips did was allow my brain to form alternative ways of thinking through illusion and creativity. By practicing new behaviors discovered during the depths of a trip, I was able to reinforce and make better behaviors a habit.
To simplify, I made my neuron pathways “soft” with psychedelics, focused on positive ways of thinking during a deep trip and then practiced those behaviors while my neuron pathways “hardened” over time.
I haven’t been on antidepressants for a long while now and the thought of drinking again is almost repulsive. While depression and anxiety can easily be linked to alcoholism, I believe alcoholism was a symptom of my underlying mental health.
To answer your question, I believe I was able to reset and rewrite, anecdotally. There are many studies that support this, or at least, suggest this because of the actual physical effects on neurons.
(There may be some evidence of permanent protein degradation around neurons with extended and massive dosing. I need to track the paper down again where I read that bit…)
Now, I’ll eat some mushrooms for fun every once in a while, but I don’t feel the need to do much more than that. I believe I found what I was looking for and have no desire to go further. The few “bad trips” I have had was probably transformative as well, and an overall positive experience in hindsight. (However, I can handle a bad trip. There are many cases of full-blown psychosis due to high dosages by people who are inexperienced and in a shitty environment. Set and setting is paramount.)
It was on old 3.5" drives a long time ago, before anything fancy was ever built into the drives. It was in a seriously rough working environment anyway, so we saw a lot of failed drives. If strange experiments didn’t work to get the things working, mainly for lulz, the next option was to see if a sledge hammer would fix the problem. Funny thing… that never worked either.
I used to take failed drives while they were powered on and kinda snap them really with a fast twisting motion in an attempt to get the arm to move or get the platters spinning.
It never worked.
Did you get bad sectors? Weird things can absolutely happen but having sectors marked as bad is on the exceptional side of weird.
Maybe? Bad cables are a thing, so it’s something to be aware of. USB latency, in rare cases, can cause problems but not so much in this application.
I haven’t looked into the exact ways that bad sectors are detected, but it probably hasn’t changed too much over the years. Needless to say, info here is just approximate.
However, marking a sector as bad generally happens at the firmware/controller level. I am guessing that a write is quickly followed by a verification, and if the controller sees an error, it will just remap that particular sector. If HDDs use any kind of parity checks per sector, a write test may not be needed.
Tools like CHKDSK likely step through each sector manually and perform read tests, or just tells the controller to perform whatever test it does on each sector.
OS level interference or bad cables are unlikely to cause the controller to mark a sector as bad, is my point. Now, if bad data gets written to disk because of a bad cable, the controller shouldn’t care. It just sees data and writes data. (That would be rare as well, but possible.)
What you will see is latency. USB can be magnitudes slower than SATA. Buffers and wait states are causing this because of the speed differences. This latency isn’t going to cause physical problems though.
My overall point is that there are several independent software and firmware layers that need to be completely broken for a SATA drive to erroneously mark a sector as bad due to a slow conversion cable. Sure, it could happen and that is why we have software that can attempt to repair bad sectors.
If I remember correctly from the good ol’ days, promoted sites/ads kinda stopped after the first few pages and it skipped past most of the SEO crap.
But yeah, I forgot how aggressive Google is with ads and AI now, those bastards.
It’s actually a good change, IMHO. You can just click directly on page 10 for anything that might be related to your original search.
Ultimately you need only a tiny fraction of that data to emulate the human brain.
I am curious how that conclusion was formed as we have only recently discovered many new types of functional brain cells.
While I am not saying this is the case, that statement sounds like it was based on the “we only use 10% of our brain” myth, so that is why I am trying to get clarification.
It’s not destructive, nor can it really be considered illegal access. I suppose there is something illegal about it if it’s classified as a DoS, I guess. There isn’t much on a payment PED aside from an encryption key and maybe some network information.
Entering your PIN and accidentally hitting 3 buttons hardly seems like something to get charged with. How you leverage that for other things could easily be a problem.
All I am saying is that the likelihood of serious repercussion is very low. Still, I have to agree: Only do it with permission and with purpose.
It serves a niché function in some situations. (Physical pen testing, in my case. I needed the person at the register gone in one case so I could setup a small network tap.)
Since we are sharing…
Holding down 1-5-9 or 3-5-7 can drop a POS card reader into debug mode, but it’s brand dependent. (I have had it also crash the host terminals in some cases as well.)
I would say most of the content is already poison.
Everyone else gives your data away for you. You don’t even need to lift a finger.
(thinks out lound…)
If you could force different speeds and different voltages, you can make some guesses as to what the cable might support.
USB packets use CRC checks, so a bad checksum may indicate a speed or physical problem. (Besides stating the obvious, my point is that doing strict checks for each USB mode gives CRC more value.)
I just looked over the source code for libusb (like I knew what I was looking for, or something) and it seems that some of the driver(?) components hook really deep into the kernel. There might be a way to test specific parts of any type of handshake (for dataflow or voltage negotiation) to isolate specific wires that are bad by the process of elimination.
I think my point is that a top-down approach is likely possible, but it’s probabilistic.