Triumph

Later model VCRs had a thing where they kept a list of shortcuts for time/channel/length. The eight (ten?) digit code, you’d just plug that into the VCR and you didn’t have to program all the details.

It was a standard system for setting up a VCR to record your selected program, because every VCR was different. I believe you connected the VCR to a phone line and it would dial out to get new codes? It was sort of like DNS (really like a distributed HOSTS file), but for media recording instead of websites.

TiVo was the “VCR code in the TV Guide” for the early digital age.

And this is just the first fallout. We’re going to end up with a dearth of advanced skills for possibly decades if there aren’t places for people starting off to gain experience. We won’t get the level of creative innovation we should expect, but at least we won’t be able to fix things that break, either.

Aliens

You just have to laugh when a network security company has malicious actors in their systems, undetected for probably years.

The article only alludes to answering the question “Who is engineering this?”

It’s the ad platforms. They’re doing it. They’re selling ads, then they’re also using bots to pump up the impression numbers, so that they get paid more.

This is fraud.

Marketing doesn’t work nearly as well as marketers would like you to believe, so much so that they have to fake their effectiveness.

“The” admins? All that spam was coming from new accounts made at instances with little oversight.

Yellow: no more raids or pillages can be started. If you are in the middle of a raid or pillage, finish it hastily and make way.

$20 of the time

I’ll get my pikey.