Badabinski

Yeah, I’ve been wondering how the fuck they pulled this off. If it turns out that the only pagers that exploded belonged to Hezbollah members, then that would signal to me that this was done entirely digitally.

I’ve heard that batteries (can’t remember if it was laptop or phone batteries) contain the energy of a small grenade, but getting it to release that energy all at once without physical access is absolutely fucking wild and has serious fucking implications for device security.

the ability to write to busy executable files

Thank god, this has been such a pain in the ass for SO LONG.

I’m guessing it was because my comment is off-topic and lengthy. I would have sent you a DM, but I can’t seem to figure out how to do that in my mbin client 😅

Sorry for the off-topic question, but is your username a reference to the Culture books? I think that would have been a great addition to Very Little Gravitas Indeed/Zero Gravitas/Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall. Like, I can just imagine a book where the Very Little Gravitas Indeed, Zero Gravitas, and A Gravitas Deficiency all happen to be in the same incident group chat and constantly fuck around while the other ships debate and fuss, and then one or all three of them pulls a rabbit out of the hat and fixes the problem while the other Minds aren’t looking.

God, I miss Iain M. Banks. Also, if your username isn’t a reference then I probably sound like an absolute lunatic.

Very true! I was just in a rush and didn’t want to explain who he was.

For others, Bryan Cantrill (the guy in the video) is an incredibly gifted engineer who worked for Sun Microsystems before they got bought out by Oracle. He was deeply involved in Solaris (Sun’s really cool operating system that included pioneering shit like ZFS), and was then involved with Illumos, which was a fork of Solaris. He worked for a company called Joyent that made a super fucking cool thing called SmartOS, and now he’s the CTO for a company called Oxide Computer.

This is a hideously bad summary of his accomplishments. People who want to know more should read his Wikipedia article or watch the talk I posted. He’s a great presenter, so his talks are always pretty entertaining.

EDIT: The shit they’re doing at Oxide is absolutely nuts. They’re making what is effectively a datacenter contained within one 48u rack, and they’re writing all their own firmware and BIOS and shit for it. It’s crazy cool.

I was curious so I looked it up. I couldn’t find any quote like that, but I did find a biography about Larry Ellison titled The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison†: Inside Oracle Corporation;
†God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison.

https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software

Oh hey, the owner of the publisher is an Ellison! What a fun fact! Megan Ellison is Larry Ellison’s daughter. For those not in the know, Larry Ellison is the owner of Oracle. He and his company are profoundly interesting in the way a tornado’s effect on a wooden shack full of sheep is interesting. This section of a talk from a former Oracle employee does a great job of explaining why we should not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. It’s hilarious and I highly recommend checking it out.

All of this is to say that his children might be a bit like him. Children aren’t doomed to be like their parents, but they certainly can be like their parents.

EDIT: that talk is only of passing relevancy, but it’s really funny and I can’t pass up a chance to share it with people who may not have seen it.