[HN Gopher] All your old tech is haunted
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All your old tech is haunted
Author : HAARP
Score : 77 points
Date : 2022-10-28 13:05 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (therectangle.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (therectangle.substack.com)
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| My mother had a TV in the 90s that would spontaneously wake up at
| approximately midnight, at random. The family rumor was that it
| happened after being struck by lightning. Creepy.
| norwalkbear wrote:
| It was probably due to be bugs or a mouse
| scarface74 wrote:
| Usually when my computers are "haunted", it's caused by corporate
| mandated malware.
| simple-thoughts wrote:
| Haunting is overfitting data to a pattern (ghost) that can
| explain everything. The benefit is less thought about things that
| don't matter, but missing out on learning something useful is the
| disadvantage.
| erulabs wrote:
| Overfitting seems pretty great for survival - who cares if one
| in 100 canines is friendly - much safer to avoid them! Humans
| seem to be unique in that we occasionally second guess our
| overfit models. And in the case of avoiding dangerous animals,
| the result couldn't have been more wonderful: Dogs!
|
| Confronting and undoing a casually overfit mental model is
| harder the more subtle and useful they are - but those are the
| bits that hide the great secrets of the universe!
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > who cares if one in 100 canines is friendly - much safer to
| avoid them!
|
| Hum... That's really not overfitting. In fact, that's the
| opposite of it, an incomplete model.
| cpeterso wrote:
| I had a haunted USB cable that would somehow cause USB to stop
| working in any device I plugged it into (until I rebooted the
| device). Once I figured out it was a problem with a USB cable,
| identifying the faulty USB cable required rebooting the devices
| after testing each cable (because any cables plugged in after the
| faulty one wouldn't work either).
| beckingz wrote:
| Even our new technology is haunted. Random changes to Jira
| configurations with nothing in the audit logs...
|
| Ghosts in the machine, spirit in the system, hear the whispers,
| screams are distant.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I don't pretend to know how any of this stuff works, but I
| acknowledge it, respect it, and pay tribute when I can.
|
| Because I am working on a Web product which aims to be compatible
| with every Web server and Web browser in every configuration, I
| went out of my way to visit historic places, such as the Netscape
| offices in Mountain View, and Urbana-Champaign campus where
| Mosaic was developed.
|
| I sat and meditated on their history and the events which
| happened there. And I feel that my product better as a result.
| falcolas wrote:
| I'm reminded of the "I can't send email to anyone over 100 miles
| away" story. There is, of course, a perfectly rational
| explanation... but that doesn't change the spooky arbitrariness
| of it..
|
| EDIT: Not sure why I forgot to link this, out of one of my all-
| time favorite presentations. I give you: The Mechanical
| Transmogrification of Diodes into Capacitors!
|
| https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/Observed...
| deathanatos wrote:
| And the "more magic" switch:
| http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
| hinkley wrote:
| I've mentioned before how loud an argument we got into with a
| guy who aspired to being a hacker, and yet didn't understand
| that the magnetic domains on a HDD were essentially analog.
| Even after we asked him why, if hard drives were truly binary,
| that secure disk erase tools were so complex and slow he still
| insisted that everything was binary, soup to nuts.
|
| Even the simplest things are a fiction. Or maybe I should say
| _especially_ the simplest things are a fiction.
| pfarrell wrote:
| For those that haven't see it yet.
|
| https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
| grantonthenet wrote:
| That was a fun read
| ryanianian wrote:
| Any sufficiently advanced home automation is indistinguishable
| from a haunting.
| dottedmag wrote:
| Spectre-infested computer, you say? Yes, thanks to CPU
| manufacturers.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Why haven't Spectre et al been used as vectors to jailbreak old
| hardware yet? I get the impression they're not that practical
| of vectors and we freaked out and hobbled our cpu performance
| with patches for nothing.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what I would be jailbreaking? My x86-64
| motherboard that I can boot any OS I want onto?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| They're only useful for reading things out of memory, not
| writing. So it's not immediately obvious how you would use
| them to jailbreak a machine?
| w1nst0nsm1th wrote:
| There is a far better piece on the matter from the atlantic :
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-ame...
| jeegsy wrote:
| > Put it this way: I've never encountered groups of ghoul-lovers
| hanging outside abortion clinics and harassing women about
| hauntings.
|
| This made me throw up in my mouth and my eyes hurt from all the
| eye rolls
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Old tech? My current tech is possessed by those doing Satan's
| bidding.
|
| Constantly tempting me, always whispering in my ear to want more,
| making me covet what others have.
| mellavora wrote:
| and asking you to update it once per week so it can reorganize
| your files and workflow.
|
| For your own good.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Unless you use windows in which case "asking" is a bit of a
| euphemism.
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| if only you knew how bad things really are
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Do you mean that the tech is in a worse state than it would
| appear at first glance, or that literally most of society is
| built in order to accomplish those same goals.
| salawat wrote:
| Yes.
| tempe1h1 wrote:
| gausswho wrote:
| Haunting is the page blocking modal demanding I register at
| Substack. That site and Medium are begging for a Nitter.
| skyfaller wrote:
| Medium has https://scribe.rip/
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| It already exists: https://archive.ph/wFjRx
| Suzuran wrote:
| I should be safe; The switch is still set to More Magic.
| themadturk wrote:
| Many years ago, in my first tech job, we converted our
| typewriter-driven office to networked DOS PCs, running on
| Netware. One day, one of the legal secretaries, of self-described
| Roma ancestry, started complaining about her PC acting
| oddly...software not starting, spontaneous reboots ,etc. We
| replaced her machine to troubleshoot it, but the same thing
| happened with the replacement machine. We couldn't detect
| anything she was doing wrong.
|
| Finally, she got tired of our fruitless technology-driven
| attempts to help her and strung a few cloves of garlic along the
| tops and sides of her cubicle. Her problems went away,
| immediately. My boss, the director of IT, and I looked at each
| other, shrugged, and called it good.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| One time I had a horrible roommate I hated immensely. She did
| shit like make a friend of mine cry on her birthday. Her
| boyfriend broke up with her cause she was obviously a terrible
| person, so her response to this was visiting a witch doctor
| (This is an incident that happened in the third world so bear
| with me for a moment). His recommendation was to cut an X into
| limes and put them in the corner of each room in the house. He
| said if they were intact when she came back home from work, but
| if they were black when she came back from work then he'd DIE.
| She told me this with a smile on her face.
|
| I was like wow you're an idiot who believes in bullshit which
| might actually kill someone, fuck you. Called in late to work,
| went to the store, bought limes, cut X's into each of them and
| DOUBLED THE LIMES she put in the corners of the house.
|
| She left while paying rent for like two months and I had the
| best time of my life which occurred staying there after.
| rescbr wrote:
| > and DOUBLED THE LIMES she put in the corners of the house
|
| Now there's her problem. By doing that the spell changed from
| "kill ex-boyfriend" to "self eviction".
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Magic is the manipulation of belief space. If you're too
| ignorant to understand that, you're liable to its effects.
| yrgulation wrote:
| Roma "treatments" are fascinating, in a very positive way
| (sadly in europe you need to mention this, as roma are very
| discriminated against). I knew of one where they do a trick
| with lit matches at door corners that "treats" mild colds and
| "curses". Wondering if this wizardry originates from india,
| given their history [0][1], or they picked it up on the way to
| europe but i really wish there was a book on these practices
| and their origins. I am almost certain these involve
| psychology, somehow, but cant prove it.
|
| [0] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/roma-
| gypsi...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Romani_people
| hinkley wrote:
| The peculiar thing about having an aluminum cased laptop is
| that when the ground wires in the power adapter get frayed, or
| if the electrical circuit is hot garbage, you tend to get a
| little tingle when you touch the computer. Time to either throw
| away that adapter or get your wiring checked.
|
| But when you feed bad power into a computer, you get glitches,
| and quite often this 'haunted' equipment is just running in a
| bad way. For all we know this woman jiggled a wire and
| everything is fine.
|
| I've been on the other side of this: IT head says we're gonna
| swap a server out. It has nothing to do with the workload I/we
| have today so we say sure. Problem is that it's in the same
| rack as something with a deadline, and jiggling the wires
| causes a network connection to go down. I've had this happen
| three times and we've swapped the cables in each case. Because
| jiggling an ethernet cable should never be sufficient stress to
| lose connection.
|
| First time the manager threw the cable away on his own. Second
| one I had to make him give me the cable because 'it could still
| be good'. Third one started the same argument, then pulled out
| wire cutters, cut off the ends, handed them to me to shut me
| up. Bad equipment goes in the garbage, not into a drawer that
| means 'ticking time bombs'. Since the connectors are usually
| why a cable is 'bad', I was mollified.
| themadturk wrote:
| We completely replaced the machine, so the chances of the
| power or ethernet cable being plugged in wrong in exactly the
| same way on two different machines seems vanishingly small.
| This being well over 30 years ago, I have no idea anymore
| whether or not we tried swapping either cable. At any rate,
| it was a least a day between the most recent machine
| replacement, which didn't seem to solve her problem, and the
| garlic placement. I'm sure there's a rational explanation in
| there somewhere...but problem solved, however it happened!
| mxuribe wrote:
| Little did they know, that those early computers were actually
| powered by garlic odors[0]! Like calculators that can be
| powered by light - the "magic" that we call solar power. So, of
| course, the user's implementatin of garlic cloves clearly
| "fixed the glitch". Happy pre-Halloween!
|
| [0] No, of course garlic isn't an energy source. ...At least,
| not one that we (yet) know how to harness. ;-)
| nyc_data_geek1 wrote:
| In some cases, waving a dead chicken over it works, apparently!
| [deleted]
| lelanthran wrote:
| > You'd be surprised at just how many people believe in the
| supernatural.
|
| I wouldn't - the majority believes in an invisible sky friend.
| snapcaster wrote:
| And out of those who don't, a bunch believe in an invisible
| simulation programmer
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Oh, please do not bring the juvenile rhetorical flair of reddit
| here.
| EarlKing wrote:
| Even worse: Some of them still use proprietary software.
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| If you've ever worked on a codebase with developers who are no
| longer around, you come to understand the data structures,
| algorithms and comments they leave behind give a sense of their
| personality. A 'ghost' if you will.
| lob_it wrote:
| mark_undoio wrote:
| Periodically, my diagnosis on test failures has been "maybe a
| ghost did it".
|
| Test failures that are flaky / sporadic _often_ signal something
| you really need to look into - either you 're not in control of
| your test's corner cases or your product's. Either way you can't
| ignore it.
|
| But, sometimes, with the whole "running hundreds of thousands of
| tests of complex, interacting software on cloud infrastructure
| that has virtualisation, custom kernels, whatever ..." the answer
| is just "woooooo spooky". When it comes to customer boxes, it's
| even weirder ;-)
|
| === When PTRACE_SINGLESTEP got haunted ===
|
| A few years ago, we saw a particular issue in which the
| PTRACE_SINGLESTEP operation (which should, you know, step by a
| single instruction!) would sometimes step two instructions - but
| it basically only happened in testing.
|
| Eventually we figured out that:
|
| * For a particular older enterprise distro on x86.
|
| * If you tried to single-step a thread in one process.
|
| * And a thread _in another process_ hit a watchpoint at the same
| time.
|
| * Then your thread would step by two instructions.
|
| Spooky action at a distance. This _might_ also have required you
| to be running on a virtualized system - it didn 't matter to us
| at that point, since clearly we need to work around issues people
| may see on cloud infrastructure.
|
| Of course, unless you tested debugger workloads extensively you'd
| probably never have two processes under debug simultaneously in
| order to notice this.
|
| === When transparent hugepages got haunted ===
|
| When RHEL backported support for the Linux kernel's THP
| optimisation, quite a few years ago, to one of their enterprise
| kernels a bug _also_ got backported that I 'd call "extremely
| haunted".
|
| THP worked fine, maps would automatically get huge pages where
| appropriate and would get split up again if necessary.
|
| EXCEPT ... if a THP-ed memory location was:
|
| * Write-protected because of COW memory sharing (e.g. after fork)
|
| * And the page was split by a write
|
| * And that write had come from a PTRACE_POKE operation, not an
| in-process write.
|
| Then something crazy would go wrong in the system. That process,
| IIRC, would hang and become unkillable.
|
| Some sort of goblin got into the memory management subsystem at
| that point and there was no getting it out again - gradually the
| whole system would start to lock up until it became unusable -
| eventually requiring the box to be reset. This happened even from
| an unprivileged process.
|
| Again, this is something most workloads wouldn't see but - once
| we'd understood the underlying issue - we had to find ways to
| prevent it happening. You just can't trigger a kernel bug like
| that, even if you know it's not your fault. If you're always
| there when it happens, nobody is sympathetic to you!
| mellavora wrote:
| My brother worked in tech support at a Christian college. People
| would come in with a PC that wasn't working. He would look at it
| thoughfuly for a few moments, then, in a loud voice and great
| dramatic flair would say "Demon, Be Gone" and smash his hands
| into the keyboard (carefully, such that he was actually hitting
| control-alt-delete-- but you wouldn't notice this because of the
| acting).
|
| the computer would shut down, reboot, and he would look at them
| and cheerfully and calmly say "All better now. You can go home."
| hef19898 wrote:
| Ah, that's how ComStar and the Word-of-Blake got their
| religious ideas from!
| danparsonson wrote:
| I can attest to this; we have a vacuum cleaning robot that has
| recently taken to spontaneous vacuuming at random times - the
| first time was naturally just after midnight and scared the life
| out of me :-)
| _jal wrote:
| Doesn't even have to be digital. My furnace, with a very old,
| very analog thermostat, has been randomly turning itself on.
| sokoloff wrote:
| That will often be a short in the thermostat wires; old
| thermostat tech worked by just dead-shorting the two "T"
| terminals together, so any degraded insulation could be
| calling for heat if it allows a short to develop.
|
| If it happens enough to be annoying, consider setting the
| T-stat to NOT call for heat and then go moving wires around
| until you find the place that has the intermittent short.
| outworlder wrote:
| Be scared if it suddenly starts to play the "1812 Overture".
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Relevant philosophical discussion: Koestler (1967)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_in_the_Machine
|
| This work has informed quite a bit of art and literature ever
| since, from the manga/anime series Ghost in the Shell to a fair
| bit of William Gibson's work (see 'semiotic ghosts' of futures
| that might-have-been in The Gernsback Continuum).
|
| As far as religious belief in modern civilization, Frank Herbert
| in Dune (Appendix II) describes what I imagine is the common
| modern view among the 'power elite':
|
| _The agnostic ruling class (including the Guild) for whom
| religion was a kind of puppet show to amuse the populace and keep
| it docile, and who believed essentially that all phenomena - even
| religious phenomena - could be reduced to mechanical
| explanations._
|
| With respect to as belief, I think anyone who says 'I believe in
| <insert whatever here>' is actually expressing doubt in their own
| world view. I'm more impressed by the so-called religious
| fanatics who instead say, 'I _know_ of <insert whatever here>'.
| Consider the person who hears the voice of 'invisble sky friends'
| in their heads and writes it down in an (eventually holy) text -
| who is to say with certainty whether that's the result of
| schizophrenia and auditory hallucinations, or an actual
| interdimensional communication from the architect of this virtual
| reality simulation we're all (okay, perhaps) living in?
|
| As far as haunted old tech:
|
| " _We build our computers the way we build our cities - over
| time, without a plan, on top of ruins._ " - Ellen Ullman, Life in
| Code
| anthk wrote:
| > who is to say with certainty whether that's the result of
| schizophrenia and auditory hallucinations, or an actual
| interdimensional communication from the architect of this
| virtual reality simulation we're all (okay, perhaps) living in?
|
| Russel's Teapot. Also, Occam's Razor.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Related: Fix your PC with a crystal pendulum
|
| https://youtu.be/-MM0Z_jCrGo
| anonym29 wrote:
| I have observed my hibernating linux desktop receiving and
| transmitting data through the onboard GbE interface to IPs that
| were owned by an ASN owned by an LLC with a registered address
| matching the WHOIS for the ASN - an address that didn't exist
| according to the postal service. Captured upstream with an
| OpenWRT router running a packet capture and that desktop as the
| only device downstream of that router.
|
| Either ghosts or the PSP on my AMD processor chatting with
| spooks.
| rob74 wrote:
| I have a haunted TV: my 4 year old Sony Bravia (Android TV)
| reboots seemingly intentionally during the most interesting parts
| of TV broadcasts. And since a few weeks ago, it also regularly
| loses the Wi-Fi connection. Thanks Google and Sony!
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Our Google Chromecast tend to become very hot and then restart
| when the kids watch Disney+.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| I had a bad experience with the last (and final) cheap Android
| TV I got (Philips, really a rebranded FUNAI according to the
| Netflix device ID) - would take minutes to boot, often not
| power on unless unplugged, and would get slower and slower the
| longer it was on. Guess it was haunted as well. I left it in
| the house I sold.
| HAARP wrote:
| Ah, a classic case of haunted tech. My version is my electric
| bike that decides it wants to turn the power on and off as it
| pleases.
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| Usually the culprit is aged electrolytic capacitors.
| rescbr wrote:
| Mine had cold solder joints on the bridge rectifier.
| ajoseps wrote:
| wow I also have a Sony Bravia around the same age and this also
| happens to me sporadically! drives me insane when it happens,
| but it's infrequent enough that I haven't replaced it yet.
| Minor49er wrote:
| Beware. Newer TVs are haunted with so many persistent smart
| features that you might miss the Bravia
| cpeterso wrote:
| My Samsung TV remote used to stop working once a week, every
| week. The only fix was "rebooting" the remote by popping the
| batteries out and back in.
| hiidrew wrote:
| My sister is very into crystals, actually works at a shop
| financed by some billionaire's daughter.
|
| Every now and then she likes to remind me of that most of our
| screens are made out of quartz, and highlights the associated
| qualities of the crystal.
|
| I can't recall them but I always find it interesting, something
| about assigning beliefs and extra qualities onto your everyday
| objects. Some people believe in a white god with long hair in the
| clouds while others believe in the magical qualities of rocks. I
| find the diversity of beliefs beautiful.
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(page generated 2022-10-28 23:02 UTC)