In reply to Adolf Osborne.

My guess would be: hot and sweaty club, relatively cool metal thing means condensation.  Repeat daily for a decade or more and you get things growing on it.

In reply to tfb.

pyenv.

I've got a family member who works for a cable company, and they sometimes bring home dead splitters. Never have I remembered seeing this nasty green goo on one...

In reply to jwq.

demonstrable positive effects which have gone a long way to solving problems

Yes, the web is much better now than it ... oh, wait.

In reply to mathew.

Thank you for the clarification, Mathew. That's sad. So basically, it is like robocalls.

Like spam, isn't there some kind of filter that can be employed to reduce its harm?

In reply to Nicolás Alvarez.

Use ipset

In reply to jwz.

#!/usr/bin/env python

I remember when that seemed like a good idea.  Now all my python scripts begin with a little Bourne shell wrapper which, via several intermediate steps and 20-30GB of data, bootstraps a virtual machine which contains code to download, compile and install appropriate version of python on itself.

Usually, none of the systems which host the intermediate steps are compromised by anyone but me.  Usually.

In reply to mathew.

That 225,000×225,000 PNG might be ok; it makes ImageMagick take forever, however Preview.app gives up on it immediately. So maybe it goes too far.

I thought I'd try it with lower resolution, but as is the way with everything fucking Python, the author's .py file doesn't run in any of the versions of Python on my system.

In reply to Kennedy maintains FOSS.

Like spam, the attack is cheap enough to carry out that there will always be a supply of sociopaths with enough money hoping to get rich quick by doing it.

In reply to jwz.

PNG bomb info I bookmarked:

https://www.bamsoftware.com/hacks/deflate.html

In reply to jwz.

Yes, the history is real and I watched it take place from afar.

But:  What is the nature of the eerily-consistent funk on all of those parts?

The terminator plugs have the funk.  The body of the splitter has the funk.  The only place I don't see the funk is the (input?) jack on the side, which is neat-and-shiny.  But a TV splitter with all outputs terminated, and only the input used, is not a splitter:  It's a dummy load.

But you already know that you can make such a dummy load with just one 75-Ohm terminator plug and none of the rest of that window dressing.

I don't see funk like that on RF devices that live outside, on vehicles, in periodic salt brine, in Ohio.  What you have reminds me mostly of the lichens I've seen growing on rocks and dead wood on mountainsides in Pennsylvania.

What kind of funk are you growing over there in your nightclub in SF?  Is the splitter available for academic study?

In reply to John Styles.

To be fair to Charlie Stross, he does mean it exactly in the Cory sense:

Enshittification, also known as platform decay, per wiki, is "a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders." Systematic capture of the US government and the global system of trade by capitalists has resulted in the creation of a framework optimized for enshittification all round, and the result is the enshittification of everything--all the infrastructure of the capitalist world is decaying and on fire as the post-privatization owners loot it.

In reply to Big.

Unfortunately the use of the word enshittification  has been enshittified (sic), in Cory's piece it didn't just mean "the process of becoming shit", it meant a specific bait and switch
1. Provide a useful service for free
2. Shaft the users for the benefit of the people who are paying you
3. Once you have lock in, shaft them too

In reply to tfb.

He hid it in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard."

In reply to tfb.

> But then, nobody does know what's coming.

I'm reminded of Charlie Stross's recent blogpost. "The Enshittification of History"

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/05/the-enshittification-of-histor.html

Back in 2022, and before that, in 2017 and even in 2007, I espoused a general rule of thumb about predicting the future, that:

Looking 10 years ahead, about 70% of the people, buildings, cars, and culture is already here today. Another 20-25% is not present yet but is predictable -- buildings under construction, software and hardware and drugs in development, children today who will be adults in a decade. And finally, there's about a 5-10% element that comes from the "who ordered that" dimension

2022 forced me to update the ratio to:

20% of 10-year-hence developments utterly unpredictable, leaving us with 55-60% in the "here today" and 20-25% in the "not here yet, but clearly on the horizon" baskets

Anyway, it's now 2026, and I officially give up.

The Stross Ratio for predicting events ten years hence is now 60/10/30. That is: 60% of the people, buildings, and culture are here today. 10% is predictably on the drawing boards, and a whopping 30% is utterly unpredictable.

In reply to tfb.

See also: why I won't ever join the ARRL (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/american-radio-relay-league-confirms-1-million-ransom-payment/ previously).

In reply to Jered.

It was a Channel Vision HS-8 passive coax splitter:
it seemed so innocent. 
If only he had known what was coming he would have destroyed it
there and then.
But then, nobody does know what's coming.

Old soldiers never die…

In reply to tfb.

Violence?

In reply to rollcat.

We appear to be heading for a future where the options are invite-only or a sea of grey goo.

In reply to Kennedy maintains FOSS.

I mean, I'm a layman in matters of security, etc. It is just that, with access to AI getting more and more expensive, and the cost of computing getting more expensive as well due to it, those large scale attacks will get more and more expensive, no? Again, I wouldn't be able to tell, just speculating from how little I know.

With the businesses that try to shove AI down our throats finally being pressured by shareholders to provide real gains/actual profit, leading to them slowly starting to offset costs to end-users, isn't there hope that these kind of attacks will go away?

I mean, AI has been operating at a loss and will continue like that for years. With tokens starting to get expensive, and AI slowly transitioning to the tail end of the Gartner Hype Cycle chart, isn't there hope this stuff is gonna stop?

How did you manage not to lose any of the caps?

In reply to Infoseepage.

It's a Channel Vision HS-8 passive coax splitter, like for for TeeVee was carried as the same signal going to many displays that selected their content by frequency.  Weird.  

Example: https://www.radwell.com/Buy/CHANNEL%20VISION%20TECHNOLOGY/CHANNEL%20VISION%20TECHNOLOGY/HS-8

strong hammerite energy. Thank you for your service.

In reply to Chris Adams.

Tbh if their web became shit and literally forces them to workaround it, then they shall file a class action lawsuit against them citing that their router firmware is complete bullshit putting customers at risk.

Is that a balun of some sort?

In reply to Guymac.

Much of the development happened on the Gemini mailing list until the list disappeared at the end of 2021 due to a hardware issue

Yes, we should definitely all be using tools created by people who don't do backups.

In reply to mattl.

I assume you mis-spelled UUCP there....