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Comment: Re:Quick change needed [Re:Stop] (Score 1) 338

by Mr Z (#46470497) Attached to: Crowdsourcing Confirms: Websites Inaccessible on Comcast

I just checked it now on my end and it seems to be fine. Maybe it was just a transient failure?

$ host eztv.it
eztv.it has address
eztv.it has address
eztv.it has IPv6 address 2400:cb00:2048:1::a29f:f3f9
eztv.it has IPv6 address 2400:cb00:2048:1::a29f:f4f9
eztv.it mail is handled by 10 ezmail.es.
$ grep nameserver /etc/resolv.conf

Comment: Re:I've experienced it (Score 1) 352

by Mr Z (#46415707) Attached to: Vast Surveillance Network Powered By Repo Men

I wonder if that was what was up with a truck I saw a few months back, with a huge ol' camera on the side. It was just a boring black pickup truck, and just one camera on the driver's side.

I've seen the Google Car, and it was much smaller, painted rather obviously, and had cameras facing multiple directions.

Comment: Re:Umm safety? (Score 1) 305

by Mr Z (#46323041) Attached to: Why Your Phone Gets OTA Updates But Your Car Doesn't

Did the OTA process itself cause the instability, or would your device been just as unstable had you updated it over a cable? My comments regarding OTA updates are meant to apply to the OTA aspect only, not whether the update itself is good. That is, for a given update X, do you deliver that update via a programming cable plugged into the ECU at the dealership, or do you deliver that exact same update OTA. That was the point in debate.

Or is your (unstated) argument that by lowering the barrier for making updates (ie. OTA is easier and cheaper than calling everyone into the shop), that would tempt auto manufacturers to take shortcuts in their QA process in the name of getting updates out there more quickly?

Comment: Re:One of these things is not like the others... (Score 1) 184

by Mr Z (#46313453) Attached to: Steve Jobs To Appear On US Postage Stamp

Johnny Carson? Every one of his jokes was original? He mined Vaudeville humor and brought it to TV. He didn't even start the Tonight Show.

Elvis Presley? All of his hits were written by others. Let's face it: He made his money and fame bringing black music to white people.

James Brown? Definitely an original, whose life unfortunately went off the rails at some point.

Ok, that's enough rant. Every one of those folks earned their place on a stamp. I just wanted to point out your double standard. It's easy to dismiss one person or another with cherry picked criteria.

If you walked up to a random 20 or 30 something on the street today and asked them if they knew who Carson, Bergman, Presley, Brown or Jobs was, I imagine Steve would beat out most of them.

I'm no Steve Jobs fanboy. (I've never owned an iPhone or iPod, and I'm posting this from a Linux box.) But even I can recognize the reality of the situation.

Comment: Re:Umm safety? (Score 1) 305

by Mr Z (#46302025) Attached to: Why Your Phone Gets OTA Updates But Your Car Doesn't

I know you're just trying to be snarky.

Actually, proper OTA updates have a number of safeguards built into them to ensure the process has clean "before" and "after" states for each step of the update process, with no crash-inducing intermediate state. I can think of at least one vendor that has a product in this space. (Note: The link is not meant as an endorsement; it's merely an example.)

The only real thing I imagine you need to worry about is if the car has had damage or after-market "upgrades" that might interfere with the validity of the update, leading to safety issues with the combination. A trip to the dealer would at least give the dealer a chance to notice such things. I find it hard to imagine that in practice, though, that it would uncover many negative interactions at the dealer.

Comment: Re:People round down (Score 2) 166

by Mr Z (#46274561) Attached to: Why Improbable Things Really Aren't

The way I like to summarize it when talking to non-technical types is this: The odds of any one ticket winning the lottery jackpot are astronomically small. Regardless, people win the jackpot quite regularly.

Low probability per trial × many trials = reasonable probability of occurrence overall.

Rounding small probabilities down doesn't fully explain all the ways folks get tripped up thinking about probabilities. For example, the Birthday Paradox doesn't fit that model directly, because it's counter-intuitive what constitutes a "trial". As the number of people involved grows linearly, the number of potential pairings grows quadradically, and most folks don't really take that into account.

Extending that to the lottery example: It's far, far more likely that two people bought the same numbers than it is that anyone matched the jackpot numbers. (And that's before taking into account the fact that folks that pick their own numbers rarely pick very random numbers.) But nobody's interested in that coincidence until the folks with the same number also match the jackpot number.

Comment: Re:No notification yet. (Score 5, Interesting) 63

by Mr Z (#46258251) Attached to: Kickstarter Security Breach Exposes Customer Data

The notifications seem to be going out in waves, slowly. I'm not sure why. Across three folks I know (including myself) with Kickstarter accounts, the emails themselves all seem to have gone out within minutes of each other, but one of them arrived just minutes ago.

I'm guessing with the volume of emails, it got throttled along the way. You can see this in the Received: headers:

Received: from o2.e2.kickstarter.com (o2.e2.kickstarter.com. [])
xx.example.com with SMTP id xxxxxxxxxx
for <
username@example.com >;
Sat, 15 Feb 2014 21:49:50 -0800 (PST)
Received: by filter-219.sjc1.sendgrid.net with SMTP id
Sat, 15 Feb 2014 21:18:46 +0000 (UTC)
Received: from MTEzNDg (unknown [])
by localhost.localdomain (SG) with HTTP id
for <no-reply@kickstarter.com>; Sat, 15 Feb 2014 21:18:46 +0000 (GMT)

Notice that the earlier time stamps (corresponding to when the emails were generated) are around 21:18 GMT, but the arrival timestamps are around 21:49 PST, about 8 and a half hours later. And that's about how far apart our emails arrived. I imagine more are in the queue.

(And yay crapflooders for making it impossible to format things usefully in Slashdot comments.)

As far as passwords go, I'm not worried about anyone actually hacking my Kickstarter password. It's a password unique to Kickstarter, and it was generated at random.org as a 13 character mixed-case alphanumeric password. Good luck reverse-hashing that. Even if you do, it won't get you much.

Comment: Re:Pre-Teen cruiser.. (Score 1) 94

by Mr Z (#46107427) Attached to: Slashdot PT Cruiser Spotted In the Wild

No, it was indeed the Slashdot Pre-Teen Cruiser. Naked petrified Natalie Portman approved. Comes a lifetime of hot grits down your pants.

Oh, and I love this item from the old Slashdot FAQ:

If you're not corporate drones, whose idea was the Slashdot PT Cruiser?

Marketing. Personally, we (Rob and Jeff) think the Slashdot Cruiser was a really stupid idea, and if they'd asked us about it, we'd have told them so. Usually the marketing department consults with us about promotional ideas, but they're not required to, and in this case they didn't. Given that the reaction to it has been largely negative, we expect they've learned their lesson.
