Yeah lmgtfy.com was funny bc at that time Google search really was good, and some questions really were super low effort and annoying, and lmgtfy was a little in joke to let off some steam, kind of like rick rolls.
Of course some people were a dick about honest new people trying to get started. A problem since the original Septembers and perennial during this eternal September.
This is something I've never understood about firewalls. If the vacuum cleaner is uploading and downloading stuff from https://somecorpo.net/, what stops it from listening for remote commands on that same connwction?
Earlier in the article he says that he only disabled some of the network connections but he left open the ones for firmware updates and stuff so to me it's not impossible that it was able to receive remote commands although I would certainly want to see more technical details to satisfy my curiosity.
The article says in words that it was a remote command. But again, we don't have any details supporting that description. So maybe the journalist got it wrong.
Not to fear! Here is the relevant part so the next person coming by doesn't have to read the article:
deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command, and after he reversed it and rebooted the appliance, it roared back to life.
(Image credit: Harishankar)
So, why did the A11 work at the service center but refuse to run in his home? The technicians would reset the firmware on the smart vacuum, thus removing the kill code, and then connect it to an open network, making it run normally. But once it connected again to the network that had its telemetry servers blocked, it was bricked remotely because it couldn’t communicate with the manufacturer’s servers. Since he blocked the appliance’s data collection capabilities, its maker decided to just kill it altogether. "Someone—or something—had remotely issued a kill command,” says Harishankar. “Whether it was intentional punishment or automated enforcement of 'compliance,' the result was the same: a consumer device had turned on its owner.”
The thing about web pages though is they're primarily 2D, with height /depth as an extension. That stick figure is "standing" in the "flatland" xy plane in the top picture, and has no height or depth from my point of view, where Z is canonically height/depth.
It is all a matter of perspective.
Shut up, I know it.
Me either
Thank you for warning me not to click this.
Maybe he keeled over to vom
How is it possible to be terrified of butterflies?