Based on the vague description they gave, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were a simple IDOR attack—it was my first guess before I even read the article. IDOR is something so basic that it’s something moderately interested tech savvy people figure out intuitively without ever trying to learn about hacking…literally day 1 of security class shit. Hope we’ll get a more detailed exploit write-up at some point.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/1999/aug/24/spaceexploration
The late astronomer and author Carl Sagan was a secret but avid marijuana smoker, crediting it with inspiring essays and scientific insight, according to Sagan’s biographer.
Using the pseudonym ‘Mr. X’, Sagan wrote about his pot smoking in an essay published in the 1971 book Reconsidering Marijuana. The book’s editor, Lester Grinspoon, recently disclosed the secret to Sagan’s biographer, Keay Davidson.
Davidson, a writer for the San Francisco Examiner, revealed the marijuana use in an article published in the newspaper’s magazine Sunday. Carl Sagan: A Life is due out in October.
“I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high… in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theatre,” wrote Sagan, who authored popular science books such as Cosmos, Contact, and The Dragons of Eden.
In the essay, Sagan said marijuana inspired some of his intellectual work.
“I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves,” wrote the former Cornell University professor. “I wrote the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down.”
Sagan also wrote that pot enhanced his experience of food, particularly potatoes, as well as music and sex.
Grinspoon, Sagan’s closest friend for 30 years, said Sagan’s marijuana use is evidence against the notion that marijuana makes people less ambitious.
“He was certainly highly motivated to work, to contribute,” said Grinspoon, a psychiatry professor at Harvard University.
Grinspoon is an advocate of decriminalizing marijuana.
Ann Druyan, Sagan’s former wife, is a director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. The nonprofit group promotes legalization of marijuana.
Sagan died of pneumonia in 1996. He was 62.
Don’t forget the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism
I realize I’m probably in the minority here, but I infinitely preferred blue books over take-home essays. I love learning so I would usually fully engage with lectures and readings, but given two weeks and a blank document my ADHD and perfectionism would drive me up the wall and I’d often take a fat zero on the assignment. On the other hand, if you just shoved a blue book in my face and told me to write a few short essays in two hours, I’d make it happen somehow and then I could walk out of the exam having only endured a few hours of moderate stress instead of weeks of torturing myself.
From 2008 to 2011, Li made CRACK99 a reliable black-market marketplace, one that netted an estimated $100 million in sales. His inventory, investigators later said, was valued at over $1 billion.
Since it’s not clear from this write-up, those eye-popping figures (the ones concocted by the Department of Justice) are derived from the prices that the licenses were being sold for by the original companies, so it’s not $100 million in sales but $100 million in “value” (the idea of calculating a $1 billion valuation for the digital “inventory” is even more ridiculous). If you look on the actual crack99 website, you’ll see that most of the cracked software was being sold for anywhere from twenty bucks to maybe a few hundred dollars—this guy was not making millions from this. The government’s sentencing memorandum has the details; this includes the absurd figure of $3,812,241.57 for a single software license of some CAD software called “Catia VR520”, which Li sold to at least one other customer for the princely sum of $100.
TIL that the Holy Hand Grenade from Monty Python and the Holy Grail was based on a real item from the British Coronation regalia
Thanks for sharing! I also had the same misconception that RGB values would map neatly to subtitles, so it was cool to learn about the more complex reality as well as the world of non-striped subpixel geometries.
MyAnonamouse
Boston Chicken & KFC Rotisserie Style Chicken.txt
lmao
(thanks for sharing–I’ve never seen that verse before!)
According to a site admin from that forum post (which is from April 2021–who knows where things stand now):
If you use the OpenSubtitles website manually, you will have advertisements on the web site, NOT inside the subtitles.
If you use some API-software to download subtitles (Plex, Kodi, BSPlayer or whatever), you are not using the web site, so you do NOT have these web advertisements. To compensate this, ads are being added on-the-fly to the subtitles itself.
Also, from a different admin
add few words from my side - it is good you are talking about ads. They not generating a lot of revenue, but on other side we have more VIP subscriptions because of it :) We have in ads something like “Become VIP member and Remove all ads…”
Also, the ads in subtitles are always inserted on “empty” space. It is never in middle of movie. What Roozel wrote - “I think placing those ads at the beginning and end is somewhat OK but not in the middle or at random points in the film” - should not happen, if yes, send me the subtitle.
If the subtitle is from tv series, there are dialogues from beginning usually. System is finding “quiet” place where ads would fit, and yes, this can be after 3 minutes of dialogue…
This is important to know, I hope now it is more clear about subtitle ads - why we are doing this, there is possibility to remove them and how system works.
so a scenario like in the screenshot isn’t supposed to happen. I guess if you really wanted to see if it happens you could grab all the English subs via the API and just do a quick grep or what-have-you
Ah, the halcyon days of DeepDream
deleted by creator
Full text
A prominent US think tank has urged Washington to streamline bureaucracy, strengthen institutions and recalibrate its policies with allies to solidify cooperation and consolidate its foothold in the escalating rivalry with China.
Intelligence sharing, coalition planning and arms sales are suffering from structural flaws which hinder multinational effective collaboration, risking “potentially catastrophic” results, according to a report published by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies on Tuesday.
“If the United States fails to make these changes, China will find it much easier to dominate East Asia,” the report warned.
“At worst, it risks defeat in a war between an increasingly assertive and powerful China and a disjointed coalition of strong but poorly coordinated allies and partners.”
The report, co-written by seven analysts, was based on interviews, discussions and workshops between June 2024 and March 2025 with more than 100 officials and experts across Europe and the Indo-Pacific, including from Australia, South Korea, Japan, Denmark, Germany and Taiwan.
The report comes as the US faces a pivotal test in managing its alliances after President Donald Trump returned to office amid shifting global power dynamics.
The Trump administration has stressed that Nato members and Indo-Pacific partners should bear more of their defence burden, pointing to the risk of the US being unnecessarily drawn into regional wars, while also receiving more opportunity to strengthen alliances amid strained ties between Beijing and some partners, such as India and the Philippines, the report said.
It noted that the US’ global allied network was becoming more important as the strategic competition with China in the Indo-Pacific emerged as the “primary driver” of US policy.
“Nowhere is the necessity of allies truer – or more important – than in the Indo-Pacific region, where China’s rise and increasingly aggressive behaviour demand a concerted multinational response led by the United States,” the report said.
It advised the US to reform its systems and environment in allied security cooperations, prioritising “faster arms sales, broader intelligence sharing and more coherent multinational strategic planning”.
US intelligence sharing was hampered less by unwillingness than by overclassification, trust concerns, autonomy anxieties and incompatible systems, it said.
Some partners, including those in Asia, had expressed frustration over delays in sharing intelligence or operational plans on issues involving mainland China, such as issues around Taiwan and the South China Sea, the report said.
Bureaucratic inertia driven by “not releasable to foreign nationals (NOFORN)” rules and a risk-averse culture further delayed intelligence sharing, it said.
Coalition planning remained US-centric and ad hoc, with military-to-military ties particularly lacking institutional support, which reduced strategic coherence and undermined effective collaboration, which was “particularly problematic” in long-term competition with China, the report said.
As for the current arms transfer system, it said, the US was too slow and bureaucratic, with inconsistent guidance and rigid barriers to co-development, co-production, technology transfer and timely delivery under “complex and opaque” regulatory frameworks.
According to a 2023 Government Accountability Office study, the defence department did not deliver 75 per cent of equipment, construction and training programmes to allies as scheduled, and the evaluations of partners’ ability to absorb and sustain training was “not high quality”, leading to the transfer of unsuitable or unreliable equipment.
“The results are potentially catastrophic,” the report said, adding that allies might doubt US commitments to their security, become less convinced about US threat projections and its willingness to support them in a crisis, and thus be “more receptive to overtures” from China and Russia.
Foundational pillars of collective security strategy, arms sales and defence industrial cooperation must be reframed, which required not only regulatory reforms but also “a cultural shift” within the US government and defence establishment towards “viewing partners as contributors to shared deterrence, not merely as customers or risks to be managed”, the report said.
A US that neglected to proactively manage its alliances might wake up to a world in which “traditional American allies and more neutral countries also start working together – but against the United States”, it warned.