Honeypot.net

Very fancy electronic badges at BSidesSF this year.

Conference tracks where more than a few people are wearing khaki:

• Defending your AI assets
• Defending your assets from AI
• Defending your assets with AI

Additional conference tracks where more than a few people have primary colored hair:

• Prompt injection for lolz and cash

While I dropped a friend off and helped him unload his stuff, I told him about the Oakland Ballers cap I was wearing and how I’m glad we have a new local baseball team. Not 10 seconds after we’d finished talking about it, a woman on the sidewalk yelled “Go Ballers!” to me, and that started a new conversation with her about opening day, season tickets, the new ballpark renovations, and all that.

I think I’ve convinced my buddy that he should get tickets, too. 100% of the time he’s heard of the Ballers, they were so popular that complete strangers entered the chat.

My credit union called this morning: “Did you just make a purchase from OnlyFans?” Nope. Thus ends my longest recent streak of not having my debit card compromised. The security department said it looks like I’ve been the victim of a “BIN stuffing” attack where a criminal tries random combinations of card numbers, expiration dates, and CVV numbers until they get lucky. One day I may have a debit card that reaches the expiration date printed on it. Not this time, though.

I got the first “your credit card was declined” email from one of my monthly bills a few minutes later. This will be an irksome week.

Keeva wants pets.

The BASIC programming language turns 60 | Ars Technica

Like so many others, I got my start typing in program listings for games, utilities, art projects, and all kinds of other things I found in magazines. Inevitably there’d be some small thing I wished a program would do differently, so I’d tweak and alter it — usually breaking things horrendously along the way — until I made it do what I wanted. That was an addictive rush of magical power.

While BASIC wasn’t a great language, I’ve never seen a programming environment more approachable an alluring than turning on a Commodore 64 and instantly seeing the word “READY.” and a blinking cursor waiting for me to give it instructions.

What sadist invented this captcha?

I spent 1 hour and 25 minutes on a call with Goldman Sachs about their mistakes on my Apple Card statement. It’s not resolved but I think we’re finally making progress.

I’m a stickler about reconciling my monthly account statements. My dad taught me how to balance a checkbook when I was a kid and I’m diligent about that. This was the first time I’ve ever been unable to make sense of a statement. The process normally looks like this:

1. Start with last month’s balance.
2. Subtract any money you paid toward that balance.
3. Add any new transactions.
4. Add any fees and interest.
5. Compare the result to what the bank says your new closing balance is, and if it’s not an exact match, go back to the beginning until you find the missing piece.

Last month’s Apple Card statement worked like that. So did the month before that. And the month before that, all the way back 5 years. This month they threw a twist:

1. Start with last month’s balance, $1000.00¹.
2. Subtract the $500.00 payment I made.
3. Add $100.00 in new transactions.
4. Add $50 in fees and interest.
5. My arithmetic came out to a new balance of $650. Goldman Sachs computed my new balance as $425.

However I juggled the numbers, I couldn’t reproduce their result. I gave up and contacted the support chat. That was useless. The conversation went like this:

Me: There’s a problem with my statement.
Them: Your balance is $425! Is there anything else I can help you with? disconnect
Me: reconnecting There’s a problem with my statement.
Them: Oh no! It looks like that’s $425. Have a nice day! disconnect

I asked them to escalate, which resulted in someone sending me an email like:

Here’s how we resolved your case: Start with $1000.00. Now, the moon weighs more than a duck, so carry the 5 and you get $893. Add the length of the Titanic and subtract purple. That’s $425. Share and enjoy!

Today I called them and repeated “talk to a human” into the phone tree until it connected me to a person. This time I got to explain my situation to a sentient being, who went off to repeat my calculations before uttering those magic tech support words: “huh, that’s strange.” It sure is! The agent was able to reproduce my math and couldn’t figure out how to compute Goldman Sachs’s balance. I can’t exaggerate the relief I felt. I’m not alone. It’s not my imagination or inability to add a few numbers together.

Although we haven’t fixed the problem, a thinking person wrote up my problem and opened an official inquiry for me. I’m optimistic.

And don’t waste your time on Apple Card’s online chat. Nothing good comes from it.

Today’s first software update for the Rabbit r1 adds missing keys to its on-screen keyboard, and now I can type in our Wi-Fi password. That’s a nice fix!

Next up: Make it trust its own GPS instead of IP geolocation so that it doesn’t think we’re 50 miles away from here. That wreaks havoc on its weather reports.

On the subject of Drug Scheduling:

Schedule IV

Schedule IV drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with a low potential for abuse and low risk of dependence. Some examples of Schedule IV drugs are: Xanax, Soma, Darvon, Darvocet, Valium, Ativan, Talwin, Ambien, Tramadol

So the devil’s lettuce is currently Schedule I with "a high potential for abuse”, but Xanax and Valium are not. Got it. That tells you what you need to know about the DEA’s evaluation processes.