The story is a joke. Literally. The version I herd decades ago was a guy keeps buying for everybody but the Jew at a table who ends up owning the bar.

For ntsc vhs players it wasnt a component in the vcr that was made for copy protection. They would add garbled color burst signals. This would desync the automatic color burst sync system on the vcr.

CRT TVs didn’t need this component but some fancy tvs would also have the same problem with macrovission.

The color burst system was actually a pretty cool invention from the time broadcast started to add color. They needed to be able stay compatible with existing black and white tv.

The solution was to not change the black and white image being sent but add the color offset information on a higher frequency and color TVs would combine the signals.

This was easy for CRT as the electron beam would sweep across the screen changing intensity as it hit each black and white pixel.

To display color each black and white pixel was a RGB triangle of pixels. So you would add small offset to the beam up or down to make it more or less green and left or right to adjust the red and blue.

Those adjustment knobs on old tvs were in part you manually targeting the beam adjustment to hit the pixels just right.

VCRs didn’t usually have these adjustments so they needed a auto system to keep the color synced in the recording.

Pretty specific use case. A normal OS handleds time slicing and core assignment for processes and uses it’s judgement for that. So at any time your process can be suspended and you don’t know when you get your next time slice.

Same with when you make wait calls. You might say wait 100ms but it may be much longer before your process gets to run again.

In a real time OS if you have real time priority the OS will suspend anything else including it self to give you the time you request. It also won’t suspend you no matter how long you use the core.

So if you need to control a process with extreme precision like a chemical manufacturing process, medical device, or flying a rocket where being 10ms late means failure they are required.

However with great power comes great responsibility. You need to make sure your code calls sleep frequently enough that other tasks have time to run. Including things like file io or the gui.

Cool. I remember having to use Red Hawk Linux years ago. It’s a real time variant of Red Hat. It was such a pain to get the dependencies workin on it.

Or toss a flash bang in the crib.

Wait till they see how the snake is killed.

It’s been over a decade since i’ve see this and I still remember the giant toilet snake.

Honestly Red Hat only has a big grip on the mid to small size business side.

Steam play. I spent nine years with linux as my main work os. Then I’d come home and game on windows. Once Steam play was mature I setup a dual boot to give it shot. I think I booted into windows twice after that.

It was something around 40 TB X2 . We were doing a terrain analysis of the entire Earth. Every morning for 25 days I would install two fresh drives in the cluster doing the data crunching and migrate the filled drives to our file server rack.

The drives were about 80% full and our primary server was mirrored to two other 50 drive servers. At the end of the month the two servers were then shipped to customer locations.

It was clearly an attack. By who is unknown.

Notably this was in 2003 before git (2005) so linux source was in a central bitkeeper repo. So a commit with no associated data about who did it should not have been possible.

Here is a more detailed article. https://lwn.net/Articles/57135/

It was caught and never made it in the kernel.

Years ago there was a commit to the Linux kernal that strangly had no author. This got some attention of several of the developers.

Looking into the code that had to deal with network transmission. there was a section that if you tried to get network access in a unusual way had a check that was written something like this.

If (usr_permission = ROOT) … Instead of If (usr_permission == ROOT) …

The first giving the user root if invoked and the second checking to see if the user was root.

It’s widely thought this was the NSA or some other intelligence agency trying to backdoor lin Linux.

Taxes in the US for crypto are easy. I sold some crypto I had and just put the amount in the other income box and paid the tax.

If you are trying to steel credentials from people with power and money passengers in first class are a good target.

Where else are you going to find a cluster of people like that that are using the wifi and are going to be there for hours. It’s about as optimal as I can think of.

Even better if you are targeting a spefic company. Just pick flights out of the headquarters for that company.

If you want to attack say Microsoft pick a flight from Seattle to DC. Pretty good odds of a Microsoft high up being on the flight and wanting to use the wifi for work.

Not only is it hard to get certified for things like rockets but they usually use a realtime os like red hawk (a red hat fork).

Right you can use a custom script as a service to make it do what it’s supposed to do. but for an app that’s for an advertised feature of a paid service it’s a complete shit show.

I do use wireguard. Mostly because the proton app for linux is so bad.

Look into how they have you setup port forwarding on linux using the official app. They want you to open a terminal and keep a looped script running as long as you are using it.

Not only that but when I was testing it the script would start erroring out after about 5 min requiring a restart.

If it’s as bad as their VPN app for Linux hard pass.

Came here to say this. Chart could have been as general as email.