Yeah. Stern is one of the few companies making new tables, and the stuff they produce these days is all about making an account and tracking your games with QR codes. They even have a few where there is a kind of meta-game that you play across multiple rounds. Not really my thing.

A friend of mine got a summer job working a pinball joint, so I’ve learned to appreciate the game a lot more recently. Helps to have an inside person giving me free plays.

As long as there’s one machine that’s not Sternslop

I see this article more about reporting unfortunate news rather than boosting fear. The news seems to be “Car manufacturers don’t take security seriously and people are exploiting it with a simple tool”.

I’d rather hear about this now than wake up one day to see that my flipper is illegal because some politician watched a tiktok video.

Me and my 300 clones spider-crawling over the seats to deplane.

There are some sites where Anubis won’t let me through. Like, I just get immediately bounced.

So RIP dwarf fortress forums. I liked you.

At the simplest level: An encryption algorithm doesn’t concern itself with whether or not the right key was provided*. It takes a key, some encrypted data, and then spits out whethever the math says it should.

Programmers will build on top of an algorithm to add more complex security features. An example of which might be “Tell the user whether or not their key actually worked” or “Tell the user if someone tampered with the encrypted data”.

The actual implementation of these security features is different for every situation, and can get quite complex.

Here is a very simple example of what someone might do:

1. Take the data that someone wants to encrypt eg “hello world”
2. Put a known constant value at the beginning of the data eg using the constant “sentinel” with “hello world” becomes “sentinelhello world”
3. Encrypt everything together

Then when decrypting, you look for the word “sentinel” at the beginning, and then spit back everything after that. If the word “sentinel” isn’t the first thing you see, then you know the key is incorrect.

In the case of AES algorithm, it has a special way of padding the plaintext before encrypting. If the padding doesn’t show up after decrypting, then the key is incorrect.

* A general statement, not necessarily representative of common encryption algorithms

Yes! Thanks

Everyone knows that the real racket is in selling “Open” signs https://youtu.be/unwQ_sLgeE0

Malware or not, remember to update WinRAR

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/08/high-severity-winrar-0-day-exploited-for-weeks-by-2-groups/

• I like sharing
• I never found any good direct downloads for all the movies and shows I wanted