I visit Prague often. I don’t know that I have enough exposure to feel like I should have known, but still I’m very surprised by the Czech Rep.

It was a risk not adding /s especially since I tried really hard to not be too absurd as to be obvious. I will take your unease as a compliment :)

A common misconception. Take the so called “light bulb” for instance. People think they emit light. They do not. They ingest darkness. They are dark suckers. They pull in all the darkness around them, but objects get in the way, and that’s why there are shadows. And when they’re full, they stop working. That’s why they have a brown spot when they stop working, they are full of dark.

Don’t fall for the light emitting conspiracy. LONG LIVE THE DARK SUCKERS!!!

Yup. I had a rental condo in Vegas I sold after 20 years because I read the writing on the wall. And Vegas is doing an amazing job of preparing for water issues.

not just any rando city, literally Austin https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/2/27/a-75-billion-boondoggle-advances-in-austin

It is not possible to explain the horribleness that is Austin road planning and the complete and utter lack of available transit. Exhibit 1 https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/2/27/a-75-billion-boondoggle-advances-in-austin

Just consider what it must mean for an average Californian to say traffic is bad. These aren’t people coming from rural Montana complaining about city traffic.

[face palm] that is an amazingly important point I hadn’t thought of / not heard discussed before, about the service fee vs actual increase hourly wages. I mean it’s totally obvious now that you said it.

And I really do agree with owners taking the risk if they want the reward. I will only say that there IS a place for balance, and reward for performance. I think the current tip system is tilted WAY WAY WAY too much to the server’s risk and needs to go away. I also think restaurant margins are actually too thin to go 100% wage based and put all that risk on the owners. I fear the bankruptcy churn in restaurants would be too much.

And yet it seems to work out in Europe so I’m probably wrong.

good point about the room.

as for an installed keylogger, there are organizations that will inspect for that and catch it. My point is this is a way to get an actually unmolested USB device into play.

But I hear you, this isn’t likely an ideal option right now, but it is an option for maybe some niche case. And these are early days, put enough funding behind it and it might become more viable. Or not. Mostly I’m just offering the thought that there ARE use cases if someone puts even a moment’s creative thought into trade craft and the problems it might solve like breaking the air gap, emplacement, avoiding detection, and data exfil. Each of those are problems to be solved at various levels of difficulty depending on the exact target.

Hmmm not totally. A bad actor could record the keyboard and then figure out a way to get it installed. Either through a logistics attack (not everyone maintains a secure supply chain), or an insider threat installing it. Everyone’s trained not to allow thumb drives and the like. But a 100% completely unaltered bog standard keyboard brought into a building is probably easier, and for sure less suspicious if you get caught.

Sure you might say, “but if you have an insider you’ve already lost” to which I say, your insider is at risk if they do certain things. But once this keyboard is installed, their own detection risk is less.

Now the question is, how far away can the mic be? Because that’s gonna be suspicious AF getting that installed. BUT!!! this is still a great way to break the air gap.

Because fuck you, that’s why. -HP

(that’s just speculation on my part though).

I see what you did there, even if you didn’t :)

or that people are only exposed to trivial/childish publicly available examples.

by that logic there was nothing novel about solid state transistors since they just did the same thing as vacuum tubes; no innovation there I guess. No new ideas came from finally having a way to pack cooler, less power hungry, smaller components together.

I think if you fed your response into ChatGPT and asked it to summarize in two words it would return,

“Regulatory Capture”

MY POOPLE NEED ME!!!