Mister Facetious posted:

Why would anyone bother with that bullshit when the restaurant industry solved this a decade ago with infrared sensors mounted just under the faucet/next to the seat/stall?

eXXon posted:

You mean the ones that flush the toilet you're sitting on if you lean too far forward, or the ones that refuse to turn the faucet on unless you position your hands just right? Let alone the fuckers that make you run your hands together before they turn on.

That's the real tech nightmare.

Mister Facetious posted:

1.) I've never experienced that, personally. Do you wear your winter coat on the toilet or something?

Mister Facetious posted:

2.) You mean like, under the faucet? Cause the sensor is mounted directly underneath the spout barely four inches away.

Mister Facetious posted:

3.) Never seen one that requires motion, just that your hands are in front of the sensor.

FilthyImp posted:

Ate those the sensors that don't trigger for black people?

FilthyImp posted:

Ate those the sensors that don't trigger for black people?

eXXon posted:

Since I am not alone in this, I might have been wearing a dark shirt and unwittingly confounding it.

quote:

Have you never been to a lovely airport bathroom where the faucet wouldn't turn on unless you moved your hands right under the faucet, or at all? Most likely the battery was running low or dead entirely

quote:

You've never seen an automatic faucet with a sign instructing you rto rub your hands together on a washing motion to activate it?

Mister Facetious posted:

Weird. You'd think with using body heat it wouldn't matter, because anything above ambient should work. Or is a heat sensor and an infrared sensor different things?

quote:

At around 4 pm, Jere checked Snapchat. An email notification popped up on his screen. His hands began to shake. The subject line included his full name, his social security number, and the name of a clinic where he’d gotten mental health treatment as a teenager: Vastaamo. He didn’t recognize the sender, but he knew what the email said before he opened it.

A few days earlier, Vastaamo had announced a catastrophic data breach. A security flaw in the company’s IT systems had exposed its entire patient database to the open internet—not just email addresses and social security numbers, but the actual written notes that therapists had taken. A group of hackers, or one masquerading as many, had gotten hold of the data. The message in Jere’s inbox was a ransom demand.

“If we receive €200 worth of Bitcoin within 24 hours, your information will be permanently deleted from our servers,” the email said in Finnish. If Jere missed the first deadline, he’d have another 48 hours to fork over €500, or about $600. After that, “your information will be published for all to see.”

Jere had first gone to Vastaamo when he was 16. He had dropped out of school and begun to self-harm, he says, and was consuming “extreme amounts” of Jägermeister each week. His girlfriend at the time insisted he get help; she believed it was the only way Jere would see his 18th birthday.

During his therapy sessions, Jere spoke about his abusive parents—how they forced him, when he was a young kid, to walk the nearly 4 miles home from school, or made him sleep out in the garden if he “was being a disappointment.” He talked about using marijuana, LSD, DMT. He said he’d organized an illegal rave and was selling drugs. He said he’d thought about killing himself. After each session, Jere’s therapist typed out his notes and uploaded them to Vastaamo’s servers. “I was just being honest,” Jere says. He had “no idea” that they were backing the information up digitally.

In the cafeteria, Jere grabbed his bag and told his friends he’d turn in his portion of the physics project the next day. On the bus ride home, he frantically texted his best friend to come over. Then his mother called; as the adult listed on his old account, she’d received the ransom note too. She and Jere were on good terms now, but if she got involved she might learn what he’d said in his sessions. Then, he says, he’d probably lose her from his life completely. He told his mother not to worry. That afternoon, he filed an online police report.

Jere poured himself a shot of vodka, then two or three more. He found his vape pen and took a Xanax, prescribed to him years earlier for anxiety. He’d stored a few pills in his bedroom drawer just in case, but he never believed he’d need them again. He passed out shortly after his friend arrived.

...

But the slick exterior concealed deep vulnerabilities. Mikael Koivukangas, head of R&D at a Finnish medtech firm called Onesys Medical, points out that Vastaamo’s system violated one of the “first principles of cybersecurity”: It didn’t anonymize the records. It didn’t even encrypt them. The only thing protecting patients’ confessions and confidences were a couple of firewalls and a server login screen. Anyone with experience in the field, Koivukangas says, could’ve helped Vastaamo design a safer system.

...

On the morning of Wednesday, October 21, the hacker posted a message on Ylilauta, an anonymous public discussion board. “We have attempted to negotiate with the Ville Tapio, the CEO of vastaamo, but he has stopped responding to our emails,” they wrote in English. Until they got their 40 bitcoin ransom, they were going to leak 100 patient records each day. The first batch was already up on a Tor server. Anyone who wanted to could go read them.

...

Either way, ransom_man soon changed tactics and started extorting individual patients. This was unusual. Most of the time, cybercriminals go after institutions, according to Hyppönen. He knew of only one earlier instance of patients being singled out—in late 2019, after a breach at the Center for Facial Restoration in Miramar, Florida. (Since the Vastaamo attack, he adds, two other hacks have also targeted patients of plastic surgery clinics.) “Most attackers want money, and health care data is not directly monetizable,” Hyppönen says. But with real-world examples of the crime paying off, he adds, “it could become more common.”

...

“Being honest about my mental health turned out to be a bad idea,” Jere says. He worries about identity theft, about some debt collection company calling him out of the blue and demanding tens of thousands of euros. He worries that his history of teenage alcoholism, so well documented on the web, will make it hard for him to find meaningful work as an adult. And he still worries that his mother may read his file one day. It’s somewhere in the ether, accessible to anyone.

Strawberry Pyramid posted:

Good writeup on that big Finnish mental health record breach:
They Told Their Therapists Everything. Hackers Leaked It All


I think we're going to see more and more attacks like this going forward, and it'll just hasten the unraveling of the fabric of polite society further. People will be even more reticent to talk to mental health professionals when they can't trust that anything they say won't inevitably be stolen, pored over, and weaponized by the absolute scum of the earth.

Phy posted:

in the vein of goods-as-a-service/internet of things tomfuckery, this made it into Cycle Asylum earlier this week:



https://jalopnik.com/this-dystopian-biker-airbag-crash-vest-only-saves-your-1846823791

It's an airbag vest for motorcyclists. You can pay $12/mo or $120/year (or a $400 one-time fee) to activate it, and if you forget to, or your cell service is poo poo, or you forget to charge it, uh, oops, guess it doesn't airbag when you need it

This is on top of $400 for the equipment alone.

Or, you can buy a vest from a different company that costs $650 and just activates by a tether to your bike! It won't help so much if you go down and slide next to the bike, but if that happens there's a good chance you wouldn't have needed the airbag, and the company can't revoke a tether.

(I guess this isn't really a "companies circling the drain" event, because Klim aren't going anywhere any time soon. They make decent if expensive motorcycle gear otherwise, especially for the BMW and KTM-riding "adventure bike" set, it's just, this is bullshit)

Doggles posted:

RPATDO_LAMD posted:

There is no reason why they would die now
they're losing the same amount of money they always were.

The of self-driving car poo poo only existed as a post-hoc justification for their sky-high stock prices so investors would think there's something to the company other than losing money on every ride and having no plans to achieve profitability
but they've realized that the stock market is way stupider than they thought and they don't even need a justification

MickeyFinn posted:

I am always astonished by the idea that technology advances through big dreams instead of the laborious process of extracting knowledge from the void of our understanding and then grinding out the practical engineering issues.

No one thinks traffic congestion or disease is good poindexter, do the hard work.

Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:

rip stupid flying car concept, you were the same as thousands of other stupid flying car concepts and you will be the same as the thousands of stupid flying car concepts to come, all of which equally feed the hollow emotional needs of gullible consumer tech advocates and business journalists on tight deadlines

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuWOUEFB_IQ

it is fun going back through empty promises long after they've expired

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LpDsYzRQ8k

Mister Facetious posted:

Don't know why anyone would want a flying car when they can't land on top of their office tower or near a crowd of people like a helicopter can.

Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:

parking is the immediate problem that comes to mind, personally

Libra posted:

The flying cars never land, you just parachute out, like the popular game Fortnite.

Strawberry Pyramid posted:

It's the same assholes who's choose flight over invisibility: they want everyone to see what obnoxious douchebags they are and also be physically unable to do anything to them for it.

Strawberry Pyramid posted:

It's the same assholes who's choose flight over invisibility: they want everyone to see what obnoxious douchebags they are and also be physically unable to do anything to them for it.

aphid_licker posted:

Wait what? What's a noncreepy thing you could be doing with invisibility? gently caress that, be a birb.

aphid_licker posted:

Wait what? What's a noncreepy thing you could be doing with invisibility? gently caress that, be a birb.