I know it's a broad question but how is it people get infected by viruses even when being careful?

I keep everything up to date, only download from sources I trust, use private window for most browsing. Somehow I got a crypto miner that windows defender could detect but not remove.

@northerner Man, there are countless ways. Just because you got infected doesn't mean you are to blame either. Sometimes attackers hack into servers of benign software and modify the installers there.

Anyways, good morning my friends!

@djsmiley2k-CoW Oh come on, you know we're in the room full of hackers :D

@MechMK1 I started to write more, on how to attach a debugger to explorer.exe, but it would have required a blog post and lot of experience to be useful. So the process hacker advice was already a compromise.

@A.Hersean "Methods of detecting indicators of compromise on a live system under the Windows Operating System" sounds like a master thesis that took way too long to write

@northerner In your list you forgot an ad-blocker. Which is far more useful to prevent infections than an AV.

@A.Hersean uBlock Origin makes the internet usable again

@J.J Good morning. How so?

I slept 3h hours to catch a plane, that I could not board in the end, due to strikes. I can feel your tiredness.

I don't even know how much I sleep. I drift in and out of sleep

I remember a dream where my uncle tried to convince me that cacao beans and coffee beans were the same thing, just that cacao beans are put into the cacao machine and coffee beans are put into a coffee machine.

At least I hope it was a dream

lol

@djsmiley2k-CoW But damn, yesterday was fun

lol

that's all I have to add :D

Lol, this article touches on sooooo many commonly mentioned topics around here that I can't not-share it, even if about a controversial topic...

nraila.org/articles/20191209/…

I'm going to be chuckling to myself about that all day.... They are former gun owners though, so no one cares if anything bad happens to them....

On a different note, managing a bug bounty program must get obnoxious sometimes:

We do get a lot of those. It would be fine if they managed to turn it into a good question, but that doesn't usually happen. I almost always close them for "Attempts to break a specific system are off topic unless they identify a specific problem".

99% of the time for these that close reason fits perfectly

Fuck bug bounty questions

If you have to ask, then the bug bounty should go to the person who answered your question

@ConorMancone In my opinion it's not just controversial. I think the right to own firearms should be a universal right. That is a controversial opinion

@MechMK1 I greatly appreciate the fact that we have that right spelled out explicitly in our constitution. That's the only reason gun ownership hasn't been outright banned in many states

You gotta love the government response there though: "Not my fault! I'm not responsible for the actions of a contractor I hired! This stuff happens all the time anyway..."

@ConorMancone That's not so nice

Man, this day...

The more I think about politics, the more frustrated I become. The more I talk with people about politics, the more frustrated I become.

I would rather have someone who opposed me politically than someone who doesn't give a fuck at all.

@MechMK1 That's a popular worldview these days, although the people who abide by it don't recognize it as such...

@ConorMancone I wish it was true though. So many people either don't care at all or just blindly apply labels to avoid thinking about things

> Oh, you're critical of this thing? You must be a thing-hater! You thingist!

Thee underlying issue is that our brains were not actually designed for rational discourse or following logical arguments. Some of us manage to fake it okay anyway (most of the time at least, or in some areas), but the reality is that our nature makes things like that the default

Goes back to that previous discussion about biases

@ConorMancone Yes, that's true. But I don't ask 100% objectivity from anyone. I know I'm not 100% objective

I used to discuss religion and politics a lot in the past, and apathy was probably the thing that I disliked the most. These days I just take it as a given that all people involved in the discussion are effectively crazy, and so it makes it much easier for me to say, "Yeah, talking with you further is not going to get either of us anyway, so I'm just going to walk away"

But if someone makes a point like "You know this and this is a fact..." and someone else retorts "Actually, official data about this topic seems to contradict that point. Multiple studies on this topic found no evidence that this is related to that", then the first reaction shouldn't be "Shut up, I know I'm right"

Although it takes some of the fun out of tv shows and movies like Star Trek, especially anything in the future-sci-fi genre. "Oh, you think human kind is going to travel to the stars, populate the galaxy, be awesome, and live in a nice utopia where we all play nice with eachother? Exactly what part of human history makes you think that is realistic?"

But wasn't that the appeal of Star Trek? The "message" they were trying to send? That maybe, if we stop the cold war, we could explore the universe together?

@MechMK1 No, it shouldn't be. And yet that's basically how brains work. I think it takes a lot of practice for someone to get past that reflex. Not that I'm trying to say that such reactions are okay - simply that they are the reality

@ConorMancone Absolutely true, sadly. It's hard to argue with facts though, and many people just like to point at numbers without understanding them.

@MechMK1 100% correct. And while the show can be fun sometimes, it's also completely laughable. Never going to happen. Human history has been filled with conflict from the moment the first people showed up. There are more wars going on today than at any other point of time in history. That's never going to change until we change, and we don't have the ability to change because of our nature

How does that old saying go? "Numbers don't lie, but if you torture them enough they'll say anything"?

@ConorMancone Human history is a history of struggle. And the only way you can unite people is though shared ideals and shared culture. That's why the roman empire had such a focus on exporting culture. Because here is the thing: If a roman citizen from Londinium feels just as roman as a roman citizen from somewhere in the middle east, then you have a united empire. Otherwise, it's just crumbling under its own weight

I'm now checking my statement that there are more wars now than ever (because I read that somewhere once...) and I can't decide if that statement is actually true :)

@ConorMancone That's hard to say, given how many "wars" in medieval times were extremely localized and more akin to a massacre than warfare.

Furthermore, historical data is extremely hard to come by. Even the idea of a "political map" is hard to come by

Excellent, I found some numbers that agree that wars have become more common recently /whew, I was almost wrong there

Borders of empires were constantly contested, unless there was a strong natural border (a large river, etc.) that solidified it

@ConorMancone Again, depends on how you define war. War as a declaration between two sovereign nations, with a defined beginning and end? Probably yes. Local armed conflicts where one group aims to kill another group? Probably no.

@MechMK1 If you didn't believe you were right about some things then we wouldn't have anything to talk about. I'm a firm believer in "Truth" (in the sense that there is an actual reality to be understood by us), so I never have a problem with people actually holding beliefs. In fact, it's impossible not to. Even the person who insists that we can't know anything is firmly holding onto that belief as being "True", whether they acknowledge it or not

I also believe that there is such a thing as actual, real truth. But I am aware that truth, to many people, is just what they choose to believe.

So yes, we should all firmly believe some things, because the reality is that we all firmly believe a lot of things! It's much nicer though when people recognize what they believe, admit it, and can coherently explain/defend it. Everyone has a world view. Many people just don't take the time to understand what their worldview actually is, especially when that world view is "Let's just be nice to eachother and let everyone do whatever makes them happy"

If they choose to believe that they are the victims of something, they will interpret the reality around them to support that narrative. If they choose to believe they are strong and independent, then they will interpret the reality around them to support that narrative.

@MechMK1 Yes, but that's not truth. I'm sure that many of the things I believe are wrong (and as soon as I figure out what those are I'll stop believing in them).

I understand what you're saying though and agree.

@ConorMancone "We should just be nice to each other and do whatever makes us happy" is the best philosophical contradiction I've ever seen.

There are certainly plenty of matters which don't have a "Truth", especially when it comes to how we interpret ourselves and interact with the world

And whenever I hear someone make that point, I say "What if it makes me happy to hurt you?"

@ConorMancone Yes, subjectivity is a thing, but when I say truth, I mean it more in a sense of measurable things.

Anything that requires interpretation can't be "true" in a way

I remember my sister having that exchange with one of my roommates at dinner. She was like, "Other people don't have the right to tell me what to believe" and my roommate responded quickly with, "Then why do you have the right to tell me what I can't do?"

There is no best painting, best music, etc...

(not the best paraphrase)

@ConorMancone I think what she meant was "I don't let other people influence what I believe"

@MechMK1 Not quite. For context, she was at a dinner with my friends, so as a "moral relativist" surrounded by a bunch of christians, she was going with a variation on the classic, "What's true for you isn't true for me".

Like I said, I'm poorly paraphrasing a conversation from 15 years ago..

Anyway, my tests finished running and now I have to get back to work :p

One second, a report needs fixing.

Oh, good coincidence

:)

But yes, to summarize, I like "Truth", I try my best to only believe things that are true (although I'm not trying to imply that everything only has one answer), and it drives me a lot less crazy these days when people can't defend their beliefs because the reality is that approaching our beliefs rationally is something that we're just not built for

I don't know if I would label my beliefs as "true" though. I believe them because of the information I have used to come to these conclusions. That doesn't mean that this makes it "true". Other people may value different things differently, and thus come to different conclusions

Complete clusterf*ck

@MechMK1 Sigh... irritating day... I'm debugging a quickbooks integration but every 5 minutes quickbooks needs to do something and locks me out for 15 minutes... quickbooks is the worst program ever (and that's a matter of indisputable fact), and integrating with it is the slowest job ever...

Some use Skype, some use Skype for Business, others use Lync & Teams which is fairly OK for a "within your organization" chatroom but I mean... can't they just rollback to MSN? Like... add the guy email, voila.

What's quickbook?

@ConorMancone At least some things are objective facts

Everytime I try a change it takes 5-10 minutes for quickbooks to try it out for me. I check as much as I possibly can on my end before hand with unit and integration tests, but quickbooks complains about the strangest things that I can't find out about until I actually try it. It takes just short enough that I don't have time to work on something else while it's going. I've spent so much time sitting around twiddling my thumbs today and yesterday, it's driving me a bit crazy...

OH MY GOSH! I finally figured out why this thing didn't work for me yesterday... QB returns an inconsistent response for one particular use case, breaking what has otherwise been a perfectly functional integration... sigh

Okay, I'm done whining now....

It's not whining if you are winning!

You know what really sucks? Alcoholism.

It's really distressing watching people slowly destroy themselves and hurt everyone in the process.

I know a gentleman who had some severe alcoholism for a long time. He finally stopped drinking after almost completely destroying his liver. Unfortunately his family found out he hadn't completely given up drinking when he went to the ER because he had been feeling generally terrible for a few days. His blood alcohol level showed he was very drunk, but he hadn't had a drink in a few days. His liver was so trashed it could only remove the alcohol from his system at a snails pace...

I didn't even know that was possible...

@ConorMancone Yes, if you recover from severe alcoholism your liver is so damaged that it can't metabolize alcohol anymore. Any small trace of alcohol will stay in your liver for a long time

But the far worst about it is the psychological impact

Indeed. Someone you know personally?

The constant assurances that things would change, the constant accusations that everyone else is to blame, the constant self destruction

Yes, sadly.

Sorry :( Sounds crappy

Yes, it is. But at least it doesn't affect me directly anymore

I'll quickly cook something, I'll be back soon

@J.J I like Angular, which is written in TypeScript. Let's not count the total number of lines needed to make my "Hello World" app. Also, why in the world does he insist on using such a bloated OS? If you're not running your own OS then you're doing it wrong.

Schroeder apparently agrees - he just deleted it