I feel this was an ‘of it’s time’ thing, but I am so glad we have moved on from this. I wouldn’t enjoy working in a workplace where this was acceptable.
How about ascii art of a male penis every time you opened your IDE?
The point isn’t what you (MyPasswordSucks) would find objectionable, the point is what the median would find objectionable in a professional setting. Luckily we’ve gotten away from the locker room behavior being the median and now the median is approaching good-manners behavior. This is one of the situations where the Overton window shifting makes us better as a species instead of worse.
IMHO it's made the world worse. We're not sterile robots. To deny us mischievous ASCII art is to deny the very things that make us human. Bring on the IDE penis. Make it widescreen if you like. It's not nearly as offensive as having a censoring big brother overlord telling us what is and isn't acceptable for the workers' enjoyment.
As a gay dude, I'd have no problems at all with this out of a garage game developer.
And any reasonably well adjusted straight male would probably get a good laugh out of the art, same as I would.
We now live in a world where female colleagues can speak in whispers about how a male colleague is hot/attractive, but male colleagues cannot engage in the same behaviour.
Trust me, I know. Because of media stereotypes about gays most female colleagues don't have any problem engaging in "girl talk" once they know I'm gay. Like damn I don't care, I'm just a dude.
> How about ascii art of a male penis every time you opened your IDE?
Once again: So what?
> The point isn’t what you (MyPasswordSucks) would find objectionable, the point is what the median would find objectionable in a professional setting.
I'm part of this "median" you seem to hold in such high regard. If you try to silence all data points outside your preconceived notion of what the "median" view is, then what you have there isn't a median, but just a few vocal people who happen to be on your side.
Why would you assume other men want to see that shit either? It's weird, creepy, unprofessional, and weird and creepy. Mostly weird and creepy though. Like are you so lonely and horny that you need to plaster your shit with half-naked women?
Even if you restrict yourself to talking about men, asexual and gay men exist. And honestly, I suspect that such people are more common among developers than among the base population.
Funny that I and my coworkers have figured out how to make the office not an "unpleasant sterile place" without doing so in a way that alienates so many classes of people.
Oh yeah it's so unpleasant not having to see creepy and gross shit in the work place because some horny dork never grew up. Gosh won't someone please think of the incels?!
Interesting. How is that comment homophobic? Might be factually incorrect, but not homophobic. Quite the contrary, it implies that women prefer looking at women too.
It's teenager-ish, and the kind of thing that would make people uncomfortable if they saw it at our own workplaces. We can argue about whether companies 'should' punish people for stuff like this, but I can say for sure that I don't feel like I'm missing out on much here.
Another entertaining piece by the Lego Island guy!
My takeaway is that you should choose a passion project as your hobby and put in the time to learn and do whatever is necessary to achieve your goal on your own or together with similarly motivated people rather than relying on anyone external you have to pay - things go downhill fairly often and quickly it seems. Is any business a scam to some degree nowadays?
I'm not surprised by the data recovery company story, it feels like I only hear bad things about that industry. I remember something similar happened with LinusTechTips.
I once wrote a DAM that wrote to LTO tapes just using tar. The tape was operated with forward/rewind commands from mt. Nobody needed access to the tapes until after I was no longer at the company. Apparently, they spent weeks trying to install various backup software to read the tapes, but none could. They eventually contacted me, but due to how much software they had tried to use the original computer it was attached to was no longer the OS. At that point, they asked 3rd party companies for help and eventually found someone with a drive attached to a Linux system. I was then able to walk them through how to read and extract data.
Tape storage can be an absolute nightmare. Most will do the writes, some will say they verify with a read, but few actually test with a full restore. Just because the software says it can read the tape to show you the listings does not mean it can read the files themselves. This was alluded to in TFA(TFV??) but been there done that on trying to read from a bum tape/bad write. It gets worse if you write in one tape drive and read from another also mentioned in TFV. Now I feel old just thinking about it all
It is named and shamed in the comments of that video somewhere.
Data recovery companies ought to have the integrity to just say no to a job, if they cannot do it risk free. Trying and failing with the risk of damaging the original data could be very costly to the customer, even if they don't charge money - the customer's lost data could be priceless.
> Makes you wonder how easy or difficult it will be in 30 years to 'recover' data from today.
The challenges will be different. Flash loses its charge in 30 years, most disks are encrypted, and on-site physical backups are mostly a thing of the past. The source might survive in a cloud repo, but it'll either be tied up for legal reasons or deleted when the customer stops paying the bill. But storage is cheap and getting cheaper!
Data not continuously copied is lost. Ironically the most future proof media is becoming increasingly rare. Those gold layer dvds may last well into the future but the readers will not be available.
A major plot of my fictional book is going to be the resurrection of data from a DVD recovered from an archaeological site in from the ancient North American period (from the pov of the characters). It is a significant challenge fraught with perils, including the professor responsible being threatened with failure after failure in the field, budget cuts, and political barriers. But success will be the first glimpse after thousands of years into the unknown dark age that so little is known about.
Shor's algorithm is primarily relevant to asymmetric cryptography, and disk encryption is pretty much universally symmetric. Quantum computers do nothing to break modern disk encryption.
Regardless of the parent's statement, just normal compute in 30 years, plus general vulnerabilities and weaknesses discovered, will ensure that anything encrypted today is easily readable in the future.
I can't think of anything from 30 years ago that isn't just a joke today. The same will likely be true by 2050, quantum computing or not. I wonder how many people realise this?
Even if one disagrees with my certainty, I think people should still plan for the concept that there's a strong probability it will be so. Encryption is really not about preventing data exposure, but about delaying it.
Any other view regarding encryption means disappointment.
> I can't think of anything from 30 years ago that isn't just a joke today.
AES is only 3 years shy of 30.
If you used MD5 as a keystream generator I believe that would still be secure and that's 33 years old.
3DES is still pretty secure, isn't it? That's 44 years old.
As for today's data, there's always risk into the future but we've gotten better as making secure algorithms over time and avoiding quantum attacks seems to mostly be a matter of doubling key length. I'd worry more about plain old leaks.
30 years ago we had a good idea. Anything considered good 30 years ago - 3DES- still is. Anything not considered good has turned out not to be. We don't know what the future will hold so it is always possible someone will find a major flaw in AES, but as I write this nobody has indicated they are even close.
> I can't think of anything from 30 years ago that isn't just a joke today
The gold standard 30 years ago was PGP. RSA 1024 or 2048 for key exchange. IDEA symmetric cipher.
This combination is, as far as I am aware, still practically cryptographically secure. Though maybe not in another 10 or 20 years. (RSA 1024 is not that far from brute forcing with classical machines.)
In summary, it estimates the cost at $3.5 billion using commodity hardware, and I'd expect a purpose-built system could bring that cost down by an order of magnitude.
You are underestimating the exponential possibilities of keys.
>plus general vulnerabilities and weaknesses discovered, will ensure that anything encrypted today is easily readable in the future.
You can't just assume that there is always going to be new vulnerabilities that cause it to be broken. It ignores that people have improved at designing secure cryptography over time.
The reality is, as soon as humanity figures out how to distinguish between two values (magnetic flux, voltage, pits/lands, etc) we use it to store more data, or move it faster.
Don't forget that flash drives are not accessed linearly. Your data might look linear to you, but without that sector addressing table, you're looking at noise.
On top of that static wear leveling can move all your data around when your disk is idle, and TRIM will effectively zero your unused areas when you are not looking.
Flash seems to lose its charge a lot faster than that, -- I found ordinary SSDs left in a closet for two years to be full of errors while matched sibling drives left in running systems were fine.
Hard, but it depends on backup / duplication strategies; this is why e.g. the internet archive is so important, and I hope there are multiple parties doing the same thing for redundancy.
Hard. I am slowly writing a book set in the future where we are a “digital dark age” where little to nothing is known about our time tentatively called Professor Bitrot.
This seemed to be a point of confusion in the original story and the video wasn't super clear but:
Pretty much all tape backup software writes headers as it is streaming the file to tape. Just more bytes in the buffer.
For normal restores it consults its local database because that is way faster. If you don't have the local database you do a "Catalog Tape" operation that scans the file headers on the tape to reconstruct the database. For whatever reason ARCServe couldn't complete the catalog with that specific kind of tape. Whether that was the specific version he found or was a general problem with support for those tape drives I don't know.
AFAICT the way most 'recovery' places work is that they'll recover data if there are no issues and any ordinarily skilled IT tech could also recover it. And then otherwise they'll claim it's unrecoverable. Sometimes, it seems, they'll even just claim its unrecoverable because they didn't happen to have or find a compatible drive when that's all that was needed.
I've recovered data from media a number of times a recovery company said it was unrecoverable with no particular difficulty.
The source code: https://github.com/HighwayFrogs/frogger2-vss
I enjoyed skimming through this: https://github.com/HighwayFrogs/frogger2-vss/blob/main/teamS...
Line 427 makes this game NSFW !
Which file? Now I'm curious :)
The second link in the comment, the devlog.
Ahhh ok I was thinking it was in the actual code. Because the devlog wouldn't be part of the game. Thinking too literally :)
This is dedicated to the people in the other thread about forbidding swearwords in code.
Take this!
Committing ASCII-art of a scantily clad woman is quite the power move.
In those days every save was a commit?
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I feel this was an ‘of it’s time’ thing, but I am so glad we have moved on from this. I wouldn’t enjoy working in a workplace where this was acceptable.
> I wouldn’t enjoy working in a workplace where this was acceptable.
I understand Americans are prudish to depictions of nudity, however objecting to ASCII art is simply beyond my comprehension.
Anyone objecting to such a thing here would, quite rightly, be considered a nutter.
People aren't objecting to the ASCII art itself, but the context in which it is used — a workplace.
The context being ASCII nudity (!) should not be seen in a workplace?
Is that honestly the problem you have?
I'm not being unkind when I say that if such a 'concern' was raised in Blighty, people would question your sanity.
The consequence is that the workplace is a sterile no mans land and you're better off remote.
Like I said: if being there were actually meaningful it might make sense to be there.
And it was. The developer above posted an ascii dragon and the other posted a topless woman. Tasteful too.
Both ASCII artwork of different things. No idea why folk are so riled up about this.
seriously, what makes that so bad?
It's an ASCII art of a nude woman. So what? It just seems like such a busybody thing to get one's feathers ruffled over.
How about ascii art of a male penis every time you opened your IDE?
The point isn’t what you (MyPasswordSucks) would find objectionable, the point is what the median would find objectionable in a professional setting. Luckily we’ve gotten away from the locker room behavior being the median and now the median is approaching good-manners behavior. This is one of the situations where the Overton window shifting makes us better as a species instead of worse.
>makes us better as a species instead of worse.
IMHO it's made the world worse. We're not sterile robots. To deny us mischievous ASCII art is to deny the very things that make us human. Bring on the IDE penis. Make it widescreen if you like. It's not nearly as offensive as having a censoring big brother overlord telling us what is and isn't acceptable for the workers' enjoyment.
As a gay dude, I'd have no problems at all with this out of a garage game developer.
And any reasonably well adjusted straight male would probably get a good laugh out of the art, same as I would.
We now live in a world where female colleagues can speak in whispers about how a male colleague is hot/attractive, but male colleagues cannot engage in the same behaviour.
Trust me, I know. Because of media stereotypes about gays most female colleagues don't have any problem engaging in "girl talk" once they know I'm gay. Like damn I don't care, I'm just a dude.
> How about ascii art of a male penis every time you opened your IDE?
Once again: So what?
> The point isn’t what you (MyPasswordSucks) would find objectionable, the point is what the median would find objectionable in a professional setting.
I'm part of this "median" you seem to hold in such high regard. If you try to silence all data points outside your preconceived notion of what the "median" view is, then what you have there isn't a median, but just a few vocal people who happen to be on your side.
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Why would you assume other men want to see that shit either? It's weird, creepy, unprofessional, and weird and creepy. Mostly weird and creepy though. Like are you so lonely and horny that you need to plaster your shit with half-naked women?
None of those things. I personally laugh at it for shits and giggles.
"Andy, lol."
It's not weird, nor creepy. Unprofessional maybe, but it's a developers morning shit post and humorous for its time. 1999.
Stop applying the future on to past antics.
If a women had posted a half naked man in ASCII this thread would have different tune.
> If a women had posted a half naked man in ASCII this thread would have different tune.
No, that would be fucking weird too, dude.
What's weird is how we're taught that the human body is uniquely something to be ashamed of.
To you perhaps. I would still find it lol worthy. What makes it "weird" to you?
It's ASCII art, non threatening, and compared to the degraded stuff you can find online is none of that.
What about anthropomorphic animals is that weird to you because I find that idealisation more creepy than a half topless naked woman.
Even if you restrict yourself to talking about men, asexual and gay men exist. And honestly, I suspect that such people are more common among developers than among the base population.
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Funny that I and my coworkers have figured out how to make the office not an "unpleasant sterile place" without doing so in a way that alienates so many classes of people.
As a gay man lmao no that's not the reason. Don't get salty just because you can't make homophobic jokes anymore.
When it comes to sexual openness, kinks, volume of sex, etc us gayz/queers got you beat by a long, long shot. We generally aren't prudes at all.
Oh yeah it's so unpleasant not having to see creepy and gross shit in the work place because some horny dork never grew up. Gosh won't someone please think of the incels?!
ascii cart nude woman is "gross"? What is it about yourself that makes you uncomfortable with this?
>I think everyone can agree women are nicer to look at
How is this toxic bullshit upvoted on HN. What the actual fuck. No everyone does not agree with your bullshit.
I have reported your homophobic comment.
Interesting. How is that comment homophobic? Might be factually incorrect, but not homophobic. Quite the contrary, it implies that women prefer looking at women too.
> How about ascii art of a male penis every time you opened your IDE
I already do, it's called VSCode and it definitely operates like a phallus.
It's teenager-ish, and the kind of thing that would make people uncomfortable if they saw it at our own workplaces. We can argue about whether companies 'should' punish people for stuff like this, but I can say for sure that I don't feel like I'm missing out on much here.
I still design and add banners to my servers' MOTD to add a little fun to my day. No NSFW stuff, however.
Mine is a corporate style # rectangle but instead of legal crap it just says "msgodel's laptop/vps/robot/whatever\n Be Nice!"
Mine are old BBS style banners, generally glorifying the hostname, and a small tagline for the server itself, related to its function.
A hypothetical DNS server might greet you with "All your zones belong to us!".
> A hypothetical DNS server might greet you with "All your zones belong to us!".
DNS is usually UDP, so it's tricky.
Maybe a database server? We don't even have to modify the original quote.
Sounds like you should go and work at blizzard
Related:
The long road to recover Frogger 2 source from tape drives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36061574 - May 2023 (213 comments)
Another entertaining piece by the Lego Island guy!
My takeaway is that you should choose a passion project as your hobby and put in the time to learn and do whatever is necessary to achieve your goal on your own or together with similarly motivated people rather than relying on anyone external you have to pay - things go downhill fairly often and quickly it seems. Is any business a scam to some degree nowadays?
I'm not surprised by the data recovery company story, it feels like I only hear bad things about that industry. I remember something similar happened with LinusTechTips.
I once wrote a DAM that wrote to LTO tapes just using tar. The tape was operated with forward/rewind commands from mt. Nobody needed access to the tapes until after I was no longer at the company. Apparently, they spent weeks trying to install various backup software to read the tapes, but none could. They eventually contacted me, but due to how much software they had tried to use the original computer it was attached to was no longer the OS. At that point, they asked 3rd party companies for help and eventually found someone with a drive attached to a Linux system. I was then able to walk them through how to read and extract data.
Tape storage can be an absolute nightmare. Most will do the writes, some will say they verify with a read, but few actually test with a full restore. Just because the software says it can read the tape to show you the listings does not mean it can read the files themselves. This was alluded to in TFA(TFV??) but been there done that on trying to read from a bum tape/bad write. It gets worse if you write in one tape drive and read from another also mentioned in TFV. Now I feel old just thinking about it all
Absolutely heroic effort. And that data recovery company should go out of business.
It is named and shamed in the comments of that video somewhere.
Data recovery companies ought to have the integrity to just say no to a job, if they cannot do it risk free. Trying and failing with the risk of damaging the original data could be very costly to the customer, even if they don't charge money - the customer's lost data could be priceless.
A lot of work, but with success as reward! Makes you wonder how easy or difficult it will be in 30 years to 'recover' data from today.
> Makes you wonder how easy or difficult it will be in 30 years to 'recover' data from today.
The challenges will be different. Flash loses its charge in 30 years, most disks are encrypted, and on-site physical backups are mostly a thing of the past. The source might survive in a cloud repo, but it'll either be tied up for legal reasons or deleted when the customer stops paying the bill. But storage is cheap and getting cheaper!
Data not continuously copied is lost. Ironically the most future proof media is becoming increasingly rare. Those gold layer dvds may last well into the future but the readers will not be available.
A major plot of my fictional book is going to be the resurrection of data from a DVD recovered from an archaeological site in from the ancient North American period (from the pov of the characters). It is a significant challenge fraught with perils, including the professor responsible being threatened with failure after failure in the field, budget cuts, and political barriers. But success will be the first glimpse after thousands of years into the unknown dark age that so little is known about.
Easy. The “deleted” even overwritten data can leave ghosts even multiple layers deep (think of a clay tablet or painting with multiple inscriptions)
Encryption for 30 years ago? Trivially breakable with quantum
Shor's algorithm is primarily relevant to asymmetric cryptography, and disk encryption is pretty much universally symmetric. Quantum computers do nothing to break modern disk encryption.
> Encryption for 30 years ago? Trivially breakable with quantum
I wouldn't be so sure - quantum computers aren't nearly as effective for symmetric algorithms as they are for pre-quantum asymmetric algorithms.
I would go as far as saying anyone who mentions quantum computers breaking block encryption doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Regardless of the parent's statement, just normal compute in 30 years, plus general vulnerabilities and weaknesses discovered, will ensure that anything encrypted today is easily readable in the future.
I can't think of anything from 30 years ago that isn't just a joke today. The same will likely be true by 2050, quantum computing or not. I wonder how many people realise this?
Even if one disagrees with my certainty, I think people should still plan for the concept that there's a strong probability it will be so. Encryption is really not about preventing data exposure, but about delaying it.
Any other view regarding encryption means disappointment.
> I can't think of anything from 30 years ago that isn't just a joke today.
AES is only 3 years shy of 30.
If you used MD5 as a keystream generator I believe that would still be secure and that's 33 years old.
3DES is still pretty secure, isn't it? That's 44 years old.
As for today's data, there's always risk into the future but we've gotten better as making secure algorithms over time and avoiding quantum attacks seems to mostly be a matter of doubling key length. I'd worry more about plain old leaks.
I'll concede your point re: current status of some encryption. However there are loads that were comprised.
How do you tell which will fall, and which will succeed in 30 years?
All this said, I just think proper mental framing helps. Considering the value of encrypted data, in 30 years, if it is broken.
In many cases... who cares. In others, it could be unpleasant.
> However there are loads that were comprised.
There are a lot of interactive systems that have attacks on their key exchange or authentication. And there are hashes that have collision attacks.
But compromises that let you figure out a key that's no longer in use have not been common for a while. And even md5 can't be reversed.
I agree with you about being wary, but I think encryption itself can be one of the stronger links in the chain, even going out 30 years.
30 years ago we had a good idea. Anything considered good 30 years ago - 3DES- still is. Anything not considered good has turned out not to be. We don't know what the future will hold so it is always possible someone will find a major flaw in AES, but as I write this nobody has indicated they are even close.
> I can't think of anything from 30 years ago that isn't just a joke today
The gold standard 30 years ago was PGP. RSA 1024 or 2048 for key exchange. IDEA symmetric cipher.
This combination is, as far as I am aware, still practically cryptographically secure. Though maybe not in another 10 or 20 years. (RSA 1024 is not that far from brute forcing with classical machines.)
I was wondering exactly how hard factoring RSA-1024 would be today and found this stackexchange answer: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/111828
In summary, it estimates the cost at $3.5 billion using commodity hardware, and I'd expect a purpose-built system could bring that cost down by an order of magnitude.
>normal compute
You are underestimating the exponential possibilities of keys.
>plus general vulnerabilities and weaknesses discovered, will ensure that anything encrypted today is easily readable in the future.
You can't just assume that there is always going to be new vulnerabilities that cause it to be broken. It ignores that people have improved at designing secure cryptography over time.
From a security perspective, I argue ypu must assume precisely that.
An example being, destroying sensitive backup media upon its retirement, regardless of data encryption.
Not this tripe again.
The reality is, as soon as humanity figures out how to distinguish between two values (magnetic flux, voltage, pits/lands, etc) we use it to store more data, or move it faster.
The end.
Sure but we are talking 30 year old disks so they don’t have that
Don't forget that flash drives are not accessed linearly. Your data might look linear to you, but without that sector addressing table, you're looking at noise.
On top of that static wear leveling can move all your data around when your disk is idle, and TRIM will effectively zero your unused areas when you are not looking.
So, it's a very different landscape.
Has this been proven for flash storage? Once a flash charge is depleted its gone forever, its not like magnetic storage of old.
Flash seems to lose its charge a lot faster than that, -- I found ordinary SSDs left in a closet for two years to be full of errors while matched sibling drives left in running systems were fine.
Hard, but it depends on backup / duplication strategies; this is why e.g. the internet archive is so important, and I hope there are multiple parties doing the same thing for redundancy.
Hard. I am slowly writing a book set in the future where we are a “digital dark age” where little to nothing is known about our time tentatively called Professor Bitrot.
This seemed to be a point of confusion in the original story and the video wasn't super clear but:
Pretty much all tape backup software writes headers as it is streaming the file to tape. Just more bytes in the buffer.
For normal restores it consults its local database because that is way faster. If you don't have the local database you do a "Catalog Tape" operation that scans the file headers on the tape to reconstruct the database. For whatever reason ARCServe couldn't complete the catalog with that specific kind of tape. Whether that was the specific version he found or was a general problem with support for those tape drives I don't know.
Here’s a gist that might be enlightening:
https://github.com/Kneesnap/onstream-data-recovery/blob/main...
AFAICT the way most 'recovery' places work is that they'll recover data if there are no issues and any ordinarily skilled IT tech could also recover it. And then otherwise they'll claim it's unrecoverable. Sometimes, it seems, they'll even just claim its unrecoverable because they didn't happen to have or find a compatible drive when that's all that was needed.
I've recovered data from media a number of times a recovery company said it was unrecoverable with no particular difficulty.
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