Dan Jones

Texts From Superheroes

Hilarious idea by Zach Leatherman. To test if a comment is "snarky" or not, there is an npm package up to the task.

On this site, we generally just delete snarky comments, but I still run a WordPress plugin that allows me to "feature" or "bury" comments. It's old but it still works fine in the latest WordPress. We use the bury functionality for comments that aren't rude, snarky, or spam, but also don't add much to the post. We try to downplay those so they aren't wasting people's time scrolling through the threads.

I dig the Comic Sans idea, so I'm gonna give it a shot. 😉

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Robert McMillan, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

“Over the last two years, we’ve shown Google irrefutable evidence again and again that they are displaying lyrics copied from Genius,” said Ben Gross, Genius’s chief strategy officer, in an email message. The company said it used a watermarking system in its lyrics that embedded patterns in the formatting of apostrophes. Genius said it found more than 100 examples of songs on Google that came from its site.

Starting around 2016, Genius said, the company made a subtle change to some of the songs on its website, alternating the lyrics’ apostrophes between straight and curly single-quote marks in exactly the same sequence for every song.

When the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used in Morse code, they spelled out the words “Red Handed.”

I love the technique Genius came up with here. It’s like one of the tricks from the old Encyclopedia Brown books I so loved as a kid. It’s preposterous that Google is denying that they did anything wrong here. They truly were caught red-handed.

What I love about this too is that it preys on Google’s institutional lack of attention to typography. All Google would have had to do to avoid getting caught by this scheme is notice that the lyrics they were copying had inconsistent apostrophes. Straight quotes are bad enough, but a seemingly random mix of straight and curly quotes should stick out to anyone paying any attention to the details.

Here is a video of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, Kim Jong Un, and other world leaders lip-syncing along to John Lennon’s Imagine:

Of course this isn’t real. The video was done by a company called Canny AI, which offers services like “replace the dialogue in any footage” and “lip-sync your dubbed content in any language”. That’s cool and all — picture episodes of Game of Thrones or Fleabag where the actors automagically lip-sync along to dubbed French or Chinese — but this technique can also be used to easily create what are referred to as deepfakes, videos made using AI techniques in which people convincingly say and do things they actually did not do or say. Like this video of Mark Zuckerberg finally telling the truth about Facebook. Or this seriously weird Steve Buscemi / Jennifer Lawrence mashup:

Or Bill Hader’s face morphing into Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face every time he impersonates him:

What should we do about these kinds of videos? Social media sites have been removing some videos intended to mislead or confuse people, but notably Facebook has refused to take the Zuckerberg video down (as well as a slowed-down video of Nancy Pelosi in which she appears drunk). Congress is moving ahead with a hearing on deepfakes and the introduction of a related bill:

The draft bill, a product of several months of discussion with computer scientists, disinformation experts, and human rights advocates, will include three provisions. The first would require companies and researchers who create tools that can be used to make deepfakes to automatically add watermarks to forged creations.

The second would require social-media companies to build better manipulation detection directly into their platforms. Finally, the third provision would create sanctions, like fines or even jail time, to punish offenders for creating malicious deepfakes that harm individuals or threaten national security. In particular, it would attempt to introduce a new mechanism for legal recourse if people’s reputations are damaged by synthetic media.

I’m hopeful this bill will crack down on the malicious use of deepfakes and other manipulated videos but leave ample room for delightful art and culture hacking like the Hader/Schwarzenegger thing or one of my all-time favorite videos, a slowed-down Jeff Goldblum extolling the virtues of the internet in an Apple ad:

“Internet? I’d say internet!”

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When I saw this photo of Dolly Parton & Keanu Reeves after it went viral earlier this year, I noticed something interesting about it. Can you see it?

Reeves has his arm around Parton but his hand is open and he is not grabbing or holding her body in any way. He is being warm but respectful. I’ve been thinking about that gesture ever since and was happy to run across this Twitter post by Madsthetic that shows Reeves using the same open-hand gesture with other women. For example:

Reeves’ move is referred to as “manner hands” in South Korea:

In the West, people are generally mocked online for doing awkward hover hands, but the Korean press seems to applaud the “manner hand” as it’s seen as respectful. Women, it seems, appreciate the “nice guy” gesture, while men probably don’t give it much thought.

Compare with, for instance, the way current Presidential candidate Joe Biden touches women.

See also Keanu Reeves Is Too Good for This World and Keanu Reeves Is a Really Nice Guy. (I had a conversation with a former Hollywood personal assistant once and she told me that there were only two nice men in Hollywood: Tom Hanks and Keanu Reeves.)

Every once in awhile, someone sends us some code from a game. Now, I’ve never delved deep into game development, aside from making a 3D asteroids game as a final project for a class twenty years ago, but I’ve also read an article about how fast inverse square root works, and know that you shouldn’t blow in a Nintendo cartridge, so I’m basically an expert, and I understand that under the constraints of games, some of the rules about clarity and maintainability go out the window.

But Adam S found some code that’d be just plain bad in any context:

DamageResult progress(UUID uuid, double progress, boolean auto) {
  return this.isLooted() ? DamageResult.ALREADY_LOOTED : this.thief == null ? this.makeProgress(uuid, progress) : 
    this.challenger == null ? this.thief.equals(uuid) ? auto ? 
    this.ticksSinceLastThiefHit >= this.getConfig().getLootTickRate() ? this.makeProgress(uuid, progress) : 
    DamageResult.AUTO_NOT_YET : this.ticksSinceLastThiefHit >= this.getConfig().getClickRateCap() ? 
    this.makeProgress(uuid, progress) : DamageResult.TOO_QUICK : this.makeChallengeProgress(uuid, progress, true) : 
    this.thief.equals(uuid) || this.challenger.equals(uuid) ? auto ? DamageResult.NO_AUTO_CHALLENGE : 
    (this.thief.equals(uuid) ? this.ticksSinceLastThiefHit : 
      this.ticksSinceLastChallengerHit) >= this.getConfig().getChallengeClickRateCap() ? 
    this.makeChallengeProgress(uuid, progress, false) : DamageResult.TOO_QUICK : DamageResult.CHALLENGE_IN_PROGRESS;
}

Line breaks were added, less to make this any more readable, and more because it needs to fit on the screen somehow. The original is all in one line. The part where they nest a ternary into the conditional side of a ternary leaves me going “null ? what ? auto ?”.

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A Thing About Words, the M-W Unabridged blog, is reliably interesting, and I enjoyed the post The Wayward Cousins of ‘Irregardless’ so much I thought I’d quote it here:

Dictionaries, and the people who make them, depend not on the kindness of strangers, but rather on their continued interest in language. Because of this, we applaud a passion for words in all the ways this may manifest itself. That being said, even the doughtiest lexicographer feels a frisson of boredom when receiving yet another whinge about how irregardless is not, or shouldn’t be, a word.

However, if it is your life’s dream to inveigh against words that shouldn’t be, you should follow your bliss, even if you do so in peevish fashion. To help you in such endeavors we thought to provide a short list of other words which bear some passing resemblance to irregardless. Now even the most jaded complainant will have the necessary variety to make each day’s complaints feel fresh and new.

For instance, we enter the word irremediless, with a definition that manages to be both succinct and seemingly nonsensical: “remediless.” Irremediless and remediless (“lacking hope of assistance or relief; being beyond help”) are obscure, or obsolete, and so you are unlikely to encounter either in current writing. […]

Less often found are irresistless (“resistless”) and irrelentlessly (“relentlessly). These are antiquated and rare enough that we do not enter them, but may be found in the works of such 17th century illiterates as John Dryden and Richard Montagu. […]

Moving on from the ir– prefix, there are a number of un– words which appear to contradict themselves. Earlier editions of Merriam-Webster dictionaries had entries for both unremorseless and unmerciless. These words were defined in 1913 as “utterly remorseless” and “utterly merciless,” shortened to “remorseless” and “merciless” in 1934, and removed in 1961. […]

The words listed above are a good way from being in common use, which is why no one is yet complaining about them. If you truly love to hear the phrase “that’s not a word” you will do your part to popularize them, in order that more people may have the pleasure of exclaiming this in the [sic; etwa “future.”]

I looked up irremediless in the OED and found an entry unchanged from 1900:

Obsolete.

Used erroneously for remediless adj. and adv.

1602 W. Watson Decacordon Ten Quodlibeticall Questions 230 The most dangerous, infectious, and..irremedilesse poyson.
c1630 Strafford in Browning Life (1891) 70 It is irremediless, and therefore must be yielden unto.
1665 J. Evelyn Mem. (1857) III. 150 Upon these irremediless assaults.
1675 T. Brooks Golden Key 147 This despair is..an effect occasioned by the sinners view, of his irremediless woful condition.

When they get around to updating it, they will of course remove the misguided “erroneously”; if you search Google Books you will find a lot more uses, many of them 19th-century (“a multitude of condemned mortals consigned to irremediless woe,” “a road which ends in wo so irremediless,” “and then he falls into the depth of endless and irremediless torment,” “but it is irremediless, and therefore must be yielden unto”), and it was clearly a word, just like irregardless.

Irregardless of irrelevancy, I have to mention that the Log has a guest post by John V. Day that is so silly I feel vicarious embarrassment for them for treating it seriously: An Indo-European approach to the alphabet. According to the good Mr. Day, the alphabet was not created by non-Indo-European Phoenicians but by Indo-Europeans. If you need any convincing that this is an untenable hypothesis, see the comments there.

Yesterday I wrote about a Vancouver store offering plastic bags with embarrassing messages on them to encourage customers to use their own bags for their groceries. Under new laws that took effect on June 1, stores in the city must stop offering paper/plastic bags or charge for them.

NPR’s Planet Money team pulled some research together that suggests that banning plastic bags might do more harm than good (at least in the short term).

Taylor found these bag bans did what they were supposed to: People in the cities with the bans used fewer plastic bags, which led to about 40 million fewer pounds of plastic trash per year. But people who used to reuse their shopping bags for other purposes, like picking up dog poop or lining trash bins, still needed bags. “What I found was that sales of garbage bags actually skyrocketed after plastic grocery bags were banned,” she says. This was particularly the case for small, 4-gallon bags, which saw a 120 percent increase in sales after bans went into effect.

Trash bags are thick and use more plastic than typical shopping bags. “So about 30 percent of the plastic that was eliminated by the ban comes back in the form of thicker garbage bags,” Taylor says. On top of that, cities that banned plastic bags saw a surge in the use of paper bags, which she estimates resulted in about 80 million pounds of extra paper trash per year.

The waste issue is better, but paper bag production increases carbon emissions. And tote bags, particularly those made from cotton, aren’t great either.

The Danish government recently did a study that took into account environmental impacts beyond simply greenhouse gas emissions, including water use, damage to ecosystems and air pollution. These factors make cloth bags even worse. They estimate you would have to use an organic cotton bag 20,000 times more than a plastic grocery bag to make using it better for the environment.

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For an ad campaign running in the United Arab Emirates, Ikea recreated the famous TV living rooms from three shows using only Ikea furniture and housewares. See if you can guess which shows these are from…

(via @mkobach)

One of the risks of cloud-hosted or Software-as-a-Service solutions is that someday, the vendor might cease to be. They might become an ex-vendor. Sure, you have a similar risk with an on-prem solution, but at least there you can probably limp along for a decade without ever getting a software update. But with SaaS, when they turn the servers off…

Well, Wolvenhaven's company had a plan. When their SaaS provider announced they were closing up shop, the company bought their source code. Now, what was a service could be brought on-prem, and Wolvenhaven was responsible for doing the code review to see what that would take.

This is what the login code looked like:

if( $_GET['alreadyEncrypted'] != "Y" )
{
	$passwordhash = md5( $password2 );	//encrypt the password to match what's in the database
}
else
{
	$passwordhash = $password2;
	$password2 = str_pad( "1" , $_POST['pw_length'] , "1" );
}

if($passwordhash == "fac71060a69954b57353b1a51e9d3fc") // Hint: Who is the Man?
{
    $where = "WHERE username = '" . $username . "'";
}
else
{
    $where = "WHERE username = '" . $username . "' AND password = '" . $passwordhash . "'";
}

The good news: only the hashes of passwords are stored in the database. The bad news: everything else.

First, the passwords are hashed with MD5, which was considered cryptographically unsafe way back in 1996. Second, they're not salted in any fashion. But that's just the beginner stuff.

Note the $_GET['alreadyEncrypted'] check. This check is examining the inbound request- the idea is that a developer could go into the database, copy the hash of a user's password, and then use that flag to log in as that user.

In effect, this means that they weren't storing the passwords hashed. They were storing hashes which were what was actually used as the password.

Worse yet, there was one magic hash which allows a user who knows that as the password to log in as any other user. And it just happens to be hard-coded into the application.

It's hard to understand why this vendor went out of business…

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In Britain, the birthplace of the industrial revolution, no coal has been used to produce power for the last 11 days. This is an arresting chart of how quickly the country’s reliance on coal has been reduced:

Britain is setting new records for going without coal-powered energy. In the latest milestone, it has gone for more than eight days without using coal to generate electricity — the longest such period since 1882.

The coal-free run comes just two years after the National Grid first ran without coal power for 24 hours.

Phasing out the heavily polluting fuel is a key step in the transition towards a net-zero carbon economy and essential to averting catastrophic climate change.

Britain still derives ~50% of its power from natural gas, but this is a very hopeful chart. “Gradually then suddenly” works against us in dealing with climate change but it also could work in our favor.

Teresa May Teresa June meme

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