When I was a lad, before pocket calculators, there was this thing about a million monkeys one a million typewriters for a million years, and the works of Shakespeare.
There are those who say we now have that answer, and the answer is cat videos, but they do not really get it.
This million monkeys story was about iteration and probability, by the time the works of Shakespeare had come out of the system, so would pretty much every other book ever written (which explains harry potter and all reality TV scripts) because if you are exploring EVERY POSSIBLE COMBINATION and you explore that realm fully, then by definition you get every possible answer / combination.
if we use binary and 3 places we get
000
001
010
011
100
101
110
111
and we have no explored the full extent of that realm, it doesn’t matter who composed the original “101”
What’s the probability your could guess the twitter password of a founder of a monster software system, pretty small you might think… what’s the probability you could guess the twitter password of a new father, dadadad works if your name is Mark Zuckerberg…
The Merchant of Venice is around 23,000 words, call the average word 6 letters to account for punctuation and spaces and that gives us around 138,000 characters, it’s a lot better than 8 characters when it comes to a password space.
But it is not as good as a 4 digit PIN tied to a specific IP address, which makes the “lock” a lot less virtual and a lot more physical, and in the case of an ATM router that is exactly what you get, everything locked down except a couple of tunnels with specific addresses, a couple of loopbacks, and a short list of acceptable remote IP addresses, and a tightly tied down xDSL connection over a proprietary circuit.
plug the xDSL side into the wrong xDSL circuit (easy enough when you have two or more ATM’s next to each other) and the whole machine refuses to work.
Your “weak” 4 digit PIN is uncrackable at that offline ATM, no money can be taken out of your account.
So we plug the right xDSL line back in, now the ATM will accept your card and pin, even if it is not you using it, so the security risk is by definition EXTERNAL to the ATM and its xDSL link to the bank.
I am in agreement with the bank that the EXTERNAL security of the card & PIN is not the bank’s problem…. because fixing it basically destroys all the utility of an ATM.
Stopping a million monkeys with a million typewriters stops Shakespeare because if he has to two factor autheticate every word he will stop writing at “In sooth, I know not why I am so…” aaah fuck this shit, I’m off for a beer…
It’s one of those problems, authetication was no problem back in the day when you went into your local bank where the staff knew you and vice versa, and wrote a counter cheque, but the very strength of the system, a human being who knew you authenticating you, was also the very thing that everyone wanted designed out of the system, so they could draw money from an ATM at midnight.
You cannot fix a problem CAUSED by removing human authentication without replacing human authetication.
So you *are* going to get fraudulent use of debit cards, ID cards, travel documemts, everything you can think of.
And the laws passed to prevent such abuses are worthless as far as the vast majority of the public are concerned, because they have no intention of abusing the system anyway, and they are no deterrent to those who set out to abuse the system, it just becomes a calculated risk….
The only way to 100% guarantee your card and PIN are never abused is the same as the only way to 100% guarantee your fuckbook account isn’t hacked, don’t have one.
If this stops you playing with other people’s systems, but you like playing with systems, then the only thing you can do is build your own systems to play with.
One way or another, we all do, and we call them “my policy” on any given subject.
I’m in one of these David v Goliath places now, well, actually I’m in a couple of them, but for the purposes of this post, I’m thinking of one specific one.
So this employee of Goliath comes to me and asks me if I can do something, so I say yes and give a price, so they give me a bunch of materials and I do a very small proof of concept sample and they say great.
So then they ask when it is going to be done, and I tell them, you’ll get it about 3 days after you have paid the invoice I gave you for this work.
So they say they will raise this with another employee of Goliath, and sure enough, one gets in touch, and tell me that being Goliath, they only pay after 30 days.
I reply that being David, I only take cash with order, so they better go find another David, and good luck with that, but either way, fuck you, you came to me with the work and those are my T&C written clearly on the website.
I suspect I know the eventual outcome of this one.
I don’t care.
Goliath does not have a way to make me care.
THIS is the crucial point.
There are many mnay many many things in life that you can ensure that Goliath cannot make you care, all you have to do is avoid Goliath, do not use fuck book, no not have a mortgage, do not have an overdraft, do not buy anything on credit, if you have an credit card use it for internet purchases for the added protection it gives you, and be a revolver, pay it off in full every month.
The government and bankers and so on cannot make me care about interest rates or house prices or brexit or anything else… I got no skin in that game.
Don’t let them convince you otherwise.
One way they try and do it is (UK) TV licencing, the law says, if you watch LIVE TV, does not matter what on, you must buy a TV licence.
The law does not say you have to register as someone who does not watch live TV, or even speak to their (Crapita) drones, or read their letters, or anything else.
So.. do not do any of those things, simple.
When the TV wanker comes to the door, as they all do, all having had the same training, to ask if you are the householder or what you name is, ask them who they are, if they refuse to tell you, tell them to piss off and do not utter another word to them ever, if they tell you they are employed by Crapita on behalf of TV licencing, then tell them to piss off and do not utter another word to them ever, do not accept any paperwork from them, do not acknowledge they exist.
OK noes, people tell you, they will get a warrant.
Really? I’ll see them in court and ask the court to show the evidence that they need to provide in order to get said warrant, and by the way, here are my expenses for the day, 3x the annual TV Licence fee.
It’s a better hobby than watching the fucking kardashians of game of clones or some such shit on the idiot’s lantern.
If it had the same user participation as a 2 am re-run of I Love Lucy the fucking system would grind to a halt, but clearly it doesn’t.
There is in all probability more people in the UK deliberately downloading and watching child pornography than there are standing up for their rights… think on that for a moment.
If you give a fuck about your rights and decency, you are probably in a smaller minority than those who like fucking pre-pubescent children.
A literal drop in the ocean compared to the kardashian loving chip & PIN users, who love to complain but still use daily.
Outnumbered by a million monkeys, or several billion actually.
Do not sit there and take comfort in the fact that you are some sick fuck who just got 22 life sentences for sexually abusing asian childen.
To the billions of monkeys you and him are both outsiders, they just know what his sick ass was up to, and now he has 22 life sentences, what about you, what is your ass up to? No good, that’s for sure, cos you ain’t one of us.
Don’t sit there and think that the courts and banks and political offices are inhabited by non-monkeys either, you’re in for a rude shock the first time you go to one to stand your ground… half a dozen monkeys and a banana standing up there in front of them and complaining about the shit flinging…
It’s an ART form, complain just enough, but not too much.
Never pull that “Freeman” stuff, that’s too much, the idea of the ART form is to fuck with their heads, just a little, don’t be the banana complaining about the shit flinging, or the sicko monkey that eats shit and flings bananas, be the wierd monkey who says that time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana, so you should be flinging shit at fruit flies, not bananas, says so right here in this here subsection 7 paragraph 14a of law 763,765 of 1885.
The million monkeys story was about probability, but it was also about improbable but beautiful things that human beings can imagine and create, things that if you JUST explore the full extent of any realm will get buried and lost in all the garbage.
The million monkeys story was about probability, 100% of Shakespeares output was middlin good to excellent, and all of it was communication, none of it was random noise, what was the probability of that if it was attempted by monkeys?
So substitute monkey for rapefugee, monkey for banker, monkey for lawyer, monkey for politician, sure, eventually, somewhere, buried in all the shit, they may indeed produce something of worth, but as a whole, is it worth it?
Adolf Hitler can be argued as being great or being greatly evil, what you cannot argue is that he was just another monkey.
And there lies the problem, to have the facility to produce something great, by necessity you have the facility to produce something awful… you cannot have the potential for great kings without also having the potential for tyrants.
Replacing them all with monkeys … wellll…
It’s a scientific fact that intelligence / IQ can be plotted along a bell curve distribution.
It’s a scientific fact that the extents of that bell curve fall in a narrower range for females than it does for males, the range from the dumbest to the smartest female is a lot less than the range from the dumbest male to the smartest male.
There are LOTS of males that are way dumber than the dumbest 1% of all females, but there are also LOTS of males that are way smarter than the smartest 1% of females…. the joys and perils of XY vs XX.
With billions of monkeys experimenting for billions of iterations over billions of years, this is what nature came up with… in a two sex strategy where one sex has a limited number of gametes and one has an unlimited number it’s no wonder the risky XY one gets the greater range of pretty much everything.
Talking about an exceptional female is like talking about an exceptional monkey or rapefugee or banker or lawyer or politician, they can just about hold a candle to an ordinary human, within certain limited areas.
Ray Charles sure was a talented musician, he wasn’t worth shit as a driver though.
If this is “human” then it’s time to bring on planet of the apes, the morlocks and eloi are here today, trouble is, the fucking eloi are all fags in san fran working for apple on the iWatch2 to sell to the morlocks.
Preaching about this shit is like preaching to the million monkeys, or the other old adage, if you wrestle with a pig, you get dirty, and the pig enjoys it.
You problems start (like when you abandon human authentication) when you abandon having a pig so you can fatten it up, kill it, and eat it…. nothing else.
You can’t get back to that by trying to improve or fix whatever you are doing now with the pig instead of fatten / kill /eat + nothing else
The million monkeys would also have eventually typed the original US constitution, but they would not have fought and died and killed others to bring it about and turn it from words on paper into a set of enforced rules that applied to everyone.
Any and every rule that does not apply to EVEYONE is part of the problem, and nowadays no human rules are applied universally, hell, corporations are “people” in law only when it suits them.
Some skinny white fuck got 22 life sentences for fucking underage asian kids.
Union Carbide got a (relatively) small fine for incinerating 4,000 and injuring half a million of the bastards in Bhopal, they aren’t in prison with no rights until 2550 AD
We are moving closer to the cusp…