I, too, was forged in the fires of Macromedia.

Before the dark times. Before the empire.

The Stupendous Spider-Man #131:

“How Nefarious! It’s the National!”

Cover Art Description:

Man leaning out of a car window while pointing a gun at Spider-Man in the distance. The man’s license plate says “PRIVATE”, and there are multiple bumper stickers with the words “TRAVELLER” and “NON-COMMERCIAL VEHICLE”.

The National yells fiercely at Spider-Man, “I never entered into a contract with you, Web Head!”

Trump: “Nobody, and I mean nobody. And I mean that, really I do. No one knows more about Jeff than I do. He and I go way back. Terrific guy, really. Tremendous. Huuuge guy, whatever that means. But I think you know, don’t you? Look, you have to have a real smart, you know what. But I get that. There’s not a lot of smart people running Jeffrey Epstein Island. But at least we have Jeff. He’s all about that. I’m all about that. Americans know everywhere what I want, what I’m all about. I was talking to Jeff’s property… uh, whatever her name is. I don’t know her name, I just grabbed her by the pussy and said, ‘Listen. Listen. You hear that? Exactly. That’s what I mean, that’s what the fake news won’t tell you.’ And she looks at me and says, ‘What?’. And I gotta tell you folks, for real. This is real. And this is what I’m all about. We have to vote the Dems out. Sleepy Joe. Bengazi. Something about Iran or whatever, I don’t really care. But the point is, I think I’ve made my point. And they said to me, something that always sticks in my heart, and I’ll the you the secret. We just have to vote Epstein out. Get the democrats out, and stand up for freedom and vote for Red this year in December. On December 4, make your thing count, you know what I mean? Sleepy Jeff Biden doesn’t know that, does he? It’s sad, really. And I mean that. Just terrible. Sad day in America to be an Epstein, but a great one. Tremendous, even.”

The process of generating AI-Tom Cruise was trivial. They turned on Cruise Control, and it just did the rest of the work for them.

Edit: It is also dead inside.

Former Catholic, now atheist. I’m glad the Pope is making some progressive steps in the Catholic Church including the LGTBQ+ community.

I hope this was a misstep, and the case of a 90-year old man from a different country using language that he was not aware is a slur. I really really hope that, or else all that good will was for nothing.

This is something I’ve thought about too. I have some rare items on old DVDs that should be preserved. I’d love to upload it to Archive.org, but I’m hesitant because I don’t know if personal identifiers get attached to the media.

If I use a program like MakeMKV to rip my DVD to a computer, how do I check the file if there’s any personal identifiers? I’m aware I can right click and pick “Remover Personal Information” or whatever in Windows, but is there anything else that would attach any hardware identifiers to it? I want to preserve some of these discs since they’re long out of print and the company that distributed it is no more and you can’t buy this anywhere. I just don’t want my uploads to be linked back to me.

I haven’t read the first run of the Amazing Spider Man comics (1960s) in over a decade, but I remember that Peter gained the knowledge to create webbing from the spider bite, and then applied science to create web shooters and cartridges. There’s so many comics out there I haven’t read any other Spidey comic, and probably got halfway through Amazing Spider-Man v1.

Check your local library. I used to visit my local library a lot before the pandemic when I lived closer to one. I borrowed audiobooks all the time and ripped them to my PC.

Fair point. There is temporary obfuscation, and certainly not end to end encryption when torrenting.

The creator of BitTorrent himself has this to say:

“The so-called ‘encryption’ of BitTorrent traffic isn’t really encryption, it’s obfuscation. It provides no anonymity whatsoever, and only temporarily evades traffic shaping. There are better approaches to obfuscation, and I’ve got a great team of engineers who are quite eager to fight that battle, but I’m hoping that everything can be resolved amicably without getting into a serious arms race.” Source: https://torrentfreak.com/interview-with-bram-cohen-the-inventor-of-bittorrent/

In my opinion using a trusted VPN not just for torrenting, but also for sourcing pirated software or other content is just a best practice.

While people sometimes suggest ignoring it because they say that your ISP is only sending you those notices because the laws compel them to and you downloaded something that was tracked, you may want to evaluate your risk.

Nothing has happened so far. Could something happen in the future?

Your ISP has built an entire portfolio of the things you’ve done online and which content you pirated. Who know how long your ISP retains that data, or which companies or regulatory bodies it shares this data with?

Laws may change.

Up to you on what you want to do with this information.

I set my VPN to Russia. Russian viruses are known to not infect their homeland, by design. They promised they wouldn’t, so you know it’s good. I then run the program, and sometimes my CPU starts heating up and slowing down my computer a bit. It happens anytime I turn on my computer now that I think about it. Computer is always running slow. I guess that’s the CPU checking if the viruses are Russian and then rejecting their requests. I can verify this because when I open Task Manager, I don’t see anything showing high CPU usage. It’s probably my imagination since the thing is doing what it’s supposed to be doing and stopping the viruses.

Only downside is I occasionally get a random command prompt pop up that disappears immediately before I can read it. Plus, my identity has been stolen several times and I’ve had to get ahold of Macrosoft Support (they built Windows so I trust them) and buy their premium $500 virus total scam defender package that I pay for monthly, but I don’t think those are related.

The best way to get back at someone is to have a great life. Ignore him and block him, and carry on with your great life.

He’s obviously insecure, fragile, and arrogant. Move on - you’ll never win anything by stopping to his level, and you’ll never convince him to change his ways by putting him in his place. The older you get, the more you realize quickly people just aren’t worth your time.

When you see him next, just ignore him. When he gossips about you to his brother or your friends in an attempt to get a rise out of you, laugh and ignore him.

Have a great life, and fuck that guy.

In other related news, the makers of these shirts watched their stock prices plummet today:

According to Frank, the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds.

What? DICTATOR XI is rebranding!

Exciting Pokemon music ensues

Congratulations! Your - I mean Our - DICTATOR XI has rebranded into PASSIONATE LEADER XI!

… Sad Pokemon music whimpers

deleted by creator

The fastest method is contacting Bitwarden as another user mentioned. Bitwarden can discuss your options and may be able to help you recover access to your vault if you have emergency access setup for a trusted user or were on an enterprise plan. The second fastest method is starting over and changing the passwords to all the accounts you can remember or have bookmarked.

Because of entropy, a pass phrase is extremely hard to “crack”. It would take a modern computer hundreds of millions of years nonstop to typically crack a pass phrase. Just ask people who hold Bitcoin and lost their 12 or 24 word passphrase (seed) if they were able to recover their BTC. If your passphrase was 24 words like a BTC passphrase, increase the recovery time to several billion years. No, this is not an exaggeration.

Since you believe you know the starting letter of the missing word (and this assumes you’re 100% sure, there’s always risk your memory is wrong), you could start by using every word in the English dictionary that starts with that letter (would take you years). Hopefully all the other words are correct and you haven’t misremembered them or placed them out of order. If any word is out of order, unfortunately increase your recovery time to several million years. The other wrench in this problem is that Bitwarden vaults are not readily able to be brute forced. I won’t go into the specifics, but passphrases are not stored in “plain text”, but rather in “hashes”, which is kind of like a “fingerprint” of a file in that every file has a unique “fingerprint”. Bitwarden won’t let you constantly slam your vault stored on their servers with brute-force password attempts. You’ll have to figure out how to setup your own environment, using your encrypted vault, that would allow you to brute-force that local environment with your passphrase attempts, and set up a system that allows you to iterate until you have a matching hash. Since you’re asking for “a program to assist in guessing passwords”, I’m going to assume you’re probably not equipped to set up a local environment on your own and probably never locally backed up an encrypted archive of your online vault. So again, contacting Bitwarden is best.

Finally, the purpose of a password manager is to have only one password or passphrase to write down (not remember, but write down). Never, ever trust your memory, because human memory is fallible - one fall to the ground and hitting your head could wipe out your memory or cognitive function. You didn’t even fall, and as you can see, you forgot your passphrase. Write your next passphrase on paper in graphite pencil (pencil lead last thousands of years longer than ink) and store it in a fireproof safe. If you want to be extra sure, you can stamp it in stainless steel. Don’t store things in lock boxes at banks - banks have a tendency to lose your stuff, or if they shut down they have no obligation to provide you the contents of your lock box. Don’t take pictures of it, don’t store it in an encrypted note on your phone, don’t cleverly try to split it into parts or store it in a book by underlining one letter of a certain a page, etc. Keep it simple, keep it safe for your future self - write it down and store it.

Best of luck to you.

https://bitwarden.com/help/forgot-master-password/

I’d like to see the average user on a Swipe keyboard beat me typing on a real computer keyboard.

Interested in friendly competiton? Take the typing test and compare your results!

Typing Test: https://www.typingtest.com/

My Results:

Test Type: Medium

Two baselines performed, third test is the result.

Words Per Minute: 120 wpm net speed (123 wpm x 97% accuracy = 120 wpm)

Screenshot of results: https://i.postimg.cc/VNCJT1nX/artifact.png

Edit to Add:

I selected “Medium” because that seemed like just enough difficulty and word variety compared to the “Hard” mode. Most average users should not be typing text with much more complexity often, so Medium seems best.

I don’t see this happening. Our organic bodies begin to dramatically deteriorate before we come anywhere close to age 100. We’ll have to stave off natural cellular deterioration with medicine and special treatments to prolong our lives now. None of those exist today - we only have surgeries to make ourselves look younger, and take certain steps to stay more healthy as we age. We haven’t beaten cancer, Alzheimer’s, etc. Being wealthy today doesn’t solve those problems.

Provided humanity doesn’t kill ourselves off by fighting against ourselves or losing the war against microplastics and global warming over the next 10,000 years, I see us migrating to a new form of existence. That may involve two branches: We become cyborgs, or we merge ourselves into the digital realm, effectively leaving our organic bodies completely behind.

Our advances in robotics and prosthetics is quite likely to be the more preferred approach. If we could keep our brains alive and somehow transplant our synaptic makeup safely into a new mechanical body, we’ll dramatically extend our lives (until natural brain cells begin to break down and we cease to exist or become someone entirely different).

The less likely approach is to upload ourselves into the digital realm, whatever that looks like. We already have a distributed, decentralized, and global internet. We’re experimenting with VR, and we’re starting to begin layering the digital world on top of the physical world via the use of Augmented Reality. Over time, perhaps we’ll be able to terraform the digital world and be able to achieve 1:1 digital likenesses of ourselves (an example would be seen in Sword Art Online, where humans put on a headset that transfers their consciousness into the Digital VR world where you can smell, taste, touch, etc, and would virtually be unable to distinguish the VR world from the human world). The brain after all is electrical impulses of prodigious complexity. We certainly should be able to replicate that ability, but the programming will have to dramatically transform into something we’ve never seen before. ChatGPT and “AI” are precursors to that evolution in our ability to one day emulate, and dare I say replicate, actual sentience. But we’ll need to build a new programming language that computers can understand and execute autonomous instructions that are not based on statistics or logical expressions - it would have to be similar to thinking, or true AI. We are nowhere close to that.

Unfortunately any of us here reading this won’t be alive when any of this happens, but that’s where I see humanity going. We won’t be able to extend our organic bodies due to organic decay. If we do not become cyborgs or somehow migrate our existence into the digital realm, then evolution is the next step. Humans would have to evolve over the next million years in order to have longer organic lives, or we’d have to be able to splice our genes with animals that can live longer like certain tortoises. Then we’d be a new branch of human that moves on from the homo sapien line.

Thank you so much! I’m going to look into figuring out how to stream it via a VPN. I already use a popular one so I’m gonna assume some of its endpoints may already be blocked - worth a shot though.