2700: Account Problems

|< < Prev Comic #2700 (November 18, 2022) Next > >|

Account Problems

Title text: arab soyjak lives

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a heckin' wholesome soyjak If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

>YOU WILL WEAR THE MASK
>YOU WILL SOCIALLY DISTANCE
>YOU WILL FOLLOW THE ARROWS
>YOU WILL CLAP FOR OUR HEALTH HEROES
>YOU WILL OBEY THE CURFEW
>YOU WILL STOP SEEING YOUR LOVED ONES
>YOU WILL REPORT DISSENTERS
>YOU WILL GIVE UP YOUR PRIVACY AND FREEDOM
>YOU WILL USE NEWSPEAK SUCH AS "COVIDIOT" AND "KAREN"
>YOU WILL EMBRACE MASS SURVEILLANCE ADVERTISED AS "TEST AND TRACE"
>YOU WILL TAKE THE TEST
>YOU WILL BE SODOMIZED, TO TEST FOR COVID-19
>YOU WILL SELF ISOLATE
>YOU WILL TAKE THE GENE MODIFYING "VACCINE"
>YOU WILL BE MARKED WITH THE DIGITAL "SMART TATTOO" MICROCHIP
>YOU WILL BE PLACED IN DEATH CAMPS IF YOU RESIST
>YOU WILL EMBRACE THE GREAT RESET, THE FORTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
>YOU WILL REJECT GOD
>YOU WILL LIVE IN THE SMART CITY
>YOU WILL LIVE IN THE POD
>YOU WILL EAT THE BUGS
>YOU WILL EAT THE SHIT CAPSULES
>YOU WILL DRINK THE COCKROACH "MILK"
>YOU WILL GIVE UP EVERYTHING YOU OWN
>YOU WILL RENT EVERYTHING, INCLUDING YOUR CLOTHES
>YOU WILL ONLY USE THE APPROVED PRODUCTS AND SERVICES PROVIDED BY FAGMAN
>YOU WILL ONLY BE ALLOWED SELF DRIVING ELECTRIC CARS
>YOU WILL EMBRACE THE CASHLESS SYSTEM
>YOU WILL TRADE IN CARBON CREDITS
>YOU WILL CONNECT WITH NEURALINK
>YOU WILL HAVE PROPAGANDA BEAMED INTO YOUR MIND, INCLUDING SISSY HYPNO
>YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO LEAVE YOUR ASSIGNED QUARANTINE REGION
>YOU WILL EMBRACE OUR NEW WORLD ORDER
>YOU WILL ACCEPT THEIR VERSION OF HISTORY
>YOU WILL ACCEPT THE NEW NORMAL
>YOU WILL OWN NOTHING
>AND YOU WILL BE HAPPY.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

>The soldiers on Omaha beach died to use tough at the end of their sentences?? MANDELA EFFECT i thought it was for biblically-accurate basedjaks listening to so-bad-it's-good lofi hip hop Plastic Love like in my uncanny valley immersive sim lost media metroidvania-inspired mature animes with no Ludonarrative dissonance because it's almost as if, for less than the cost of a Big Mac, fries and a coke, you can vote with your wallet and buy techwear and asmr pc music in the liminal spaces at the same femboy hooters where john lennon used to beat his wife like an irl boss battle along with the other low-end karens and male manipulaters who gatekeeped and gaslit the /mu/core prequel memes that fact checked that part of neon evangelion where the pope existed in the cars universe during a fucking pandemic like how Ed Edd n Eddy took place in purgatory or how Yakuza John Wick literally made comfy trope threads that trusted the science saying that an inheritance is just your relatives dropping loot when they die, though[1][2][3][6][11][14][19][22][24][25][28][33][39]. Fuck Jim Morrison.

|< < Prev Comic #2940 (May 31, 2024)

Modes of Transportation

Title text: My bold criticism might anger the hot air balloon people, which would be a real concern if any of them lived along a very narrow line directly upwind of me.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a Transportationally convenient but insidiously dangerous robotic car - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

Randall's chart compares different modes of transportation by how convenient and dangerous they are. At the top-left (high in convenience and low in danger) are airliners and trains, as these are both fast-moving vehicles on which many millions of dollars have been spent to make them safer. In the top-right, motorcycles are at the same convenience level, but are rated much more dangerous, since they are easy to lose control of at high speeds, and careless drivers (of cars) can easily hit a motorcycle and cause extreme harm. Things like unicycles (bottom-left) are considered much lower on the convenience scale, being not very fast or easy ways to travel, but relatively safe, while towards the centre, skis are apparently moderately convenient and moderately dangerous, since they are relatively easy to fall on if going fast downhill. Way out on their own in the bottom-right, hot air balloons appear to be unique in being rated least on convenience and highest on danger. Presumably, modes of transportation similar to hot air balloons (like zeppelins and blimps) are left off the chart to increase the gap for comedic effect.

Because a hot air balloon is rated so poorly, if an optimization algorithm considers it the optimal mode of transportation, it must be the result of a sign error (e.g. having a minus sign where a plus sign is supposed to be, or vice versa), making the algorithm optimize for the opposite result by mistake. This could be because, unusually, on the y axis of the chart higher is better, whereas on the x axis lower is better. If these were treated the wrong way around, it would result in the air balloon appearing to be the best result. More typically, you might plot convenience vs safety, so that a higher value on either axis would represent a better result. However, both measures are still likely to need to take underlying data (for safety, incident counts, etc.; for convenience, travel time, etc.) and invert them, leading to potential for errors.

In order to compare the relative danger from each mode of transport, one can look at statistics of fatalities and injuries sustained during each activity. Traditionally this can be reported in fatalities/KSI per mile driven or passenger mile (or other unit of distance), to account for the fact that some modes are used much more than others and make valid comparisons. They may also be reported per capita (but this ignores the relative usage of different modes), or per journey (but this doesn't take into account the fact that different modes typically have different journey lengths and times). All of these are somewhat flawed, since they are really measuring the danger to users of that mode of transport, both from their own conveyance, and from other sources such as other road users. Since ballooning is not a very common mode of transport, hot air balloon incidents are correspondingly uncommon, and flights are not routinely monitored or registered, it is difficult to draw strong conclusions from the data for hot air balloons.

The title text makes a joke that if a hot air balloon enthusiast disagrees with the ranking and is angered by it, they may wish to remonstrate or retaliate, but will have a difficult time getting to Randall's house with their preferred mode of transportation, because they are limited to travelling in the direction of the wind. If they chose an alternative form of transport, they would be making his point for him. In reality, hot air balloons have some freedom to choose their direction of travel, since by controlling their altitude they can access different wind directions at different heights. Randall should, therefore, be concerned about hot air balloonists who live within a wedge spanned by the various wind directions accessible on a given day. In principle, if the weather conditions are favorable, this could cover every direction from Randall's house. The phrase "hot air balloon people" is reminiscent of "autogyro people" from the title text of 1972: Autogyros.

Curiously, the comic includes most common forms of transport, and a number of less common ones, but omits examples such as buses (a mass transit solution arguably more convenient than trains). It is not clear if this is an error, or a deliberate choice to maintain the comic's layout and presentation.

This is the second comic in a row to feature an algorithm.

Transportation	Description	Convenience	Danger	Zone
Trains	Mass transit on rails, typically between urban centers.	Convenient and comfortable, provided proper funding/maintenance and filled timetables. Allows relatively cheap travel for many people at once.	Exceedingly safe, due to dedicated tracks along a controlled environment. Accidents are largely limited to individuals wandering onto the off-limit tracks.	Practicality
Airliners	Mass transit by aircraft	Extremely fast travel between population centers for larger groups of people. Less comfortable and more expensive than trains.	Extremely safe due to strong regulation and relatively little traffic interactions. However, the few catastrophies that do happen have high death counts.	Practicality
Cars	Motorised road vehicle Most common method of long distance travel, used by many individuals to reach specific destinations	Owners of a car can usually go easily to any road-accessible location within a 200 mile/300 km radius. Requires constant focus, but can transport a few passengers or some cargo. Parking, maintenance, and infrastructure requirements are often ignored when judging car convenience.	Insides of cars are covered with safety features, because collisions are relatively common. Assuming appropriate speed limits and proper focus by the driver, accidents can largely be avoided. Driving is the most dangerous thing most people do, and cars are very dangerous to nearby pedestrians and cyclists.	Practicality
Scooters	Either: Kick scooter - Less convenient than the placing would suggest. Low powered motorbike/moped - More dangerous than the placing would suggest. Engine-powered scooter - A middle-ground.	Kick scooter-style vehicles are probably less convenient than bicycles as they do not provide seating. A low-powered motorbike is about as convenient as a bicycle, requiring refueling in lieu of pedalling, and going much faster.	Kick scooters are much slower – and therefore safer – than bicycles. A motorized scooter can exceed bicycle speeds, but falling might be slightly safer. Low-powered motorbikes often go much faster than bicycles, and would therefore be much more dangerous.	Practicality
Bicycles	Human-powered (or mostly so) two-wheeled road vehicle	Assuming proper road connections, bicycles are highly accessibly for traveling to any location within a ~10 km radius, or further.	Bicycles mostly move slow enough for falls or collisions to have little impact, though they are vulnerable to motorized traffic where it shares the road.	Practicality
Boats	Watercraft of various types	Specialized for water traffic, which is a very common form of transportation. Quite comfortable, but usually very slow.	Sinking, whether by collision or misuse, can be lethal, especially on the sea. However, collisions are very rare.	Practicality
Walking	Personal bipedal ambulation	Can travel between any two connected points regardless of infrastructure, but only comfortable for a few kilometers. Very slow compared to even bicycles, but the energy intensity is good for exercise.	One of the safest way people get around, as long as you don't get hit by a motorized vehicle. Walking up or down stairs is particularly dangerous.	Practicality
Motorcycles	...	As practical as cars to move between locations, but generally less comfortable, especially in rough weather.	Cars with all the safety features of bicycles. Exceedingly dangerous at higher speeds, especially when sharing the road with cars.	Speciality/Recreational
Helicopters	...	Effective to move between any two points as long as there are landing pads of reasonable size. Can be used to hover relatively still in the air. Very slow for actual transport, very loud, and very difficult to learn.	As per Harry Reasoner: "An airplane by its nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying; immediately and disastrously. There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter."	Speciality/Recreational
Light aircraft	In the United States, the general category of small aircraft covers a variety of aircraft certified to weigh 19,000 pounds (8618 kg) or less at takeoff. Maximum allowed weight varies by specific category.			Speciality/Recreational
Go-karts	...	A lack of proper suspension makes for a bumpy ride, and the maximum speed is quite low.	Crashing is much more likely to cause spinal damage than bicycles, but the relatively low speed would make them much safer than other motorized vehicle options.	Speciality/Recreational
Skateboards	A board on four wheels	Much slower and less energy-efficient than bicycles.	As long as you're not doing mad tricks in a quarterpipe, using a skateboard for transportation carries little risk. Safety gear is common.	Speciality/Recreational
Rollerblades	Shoes with wheels at the bottom	Much slower and less energy-efficient than bicycles.	As long as you're not doing mad tricks in a quarterpipe, using rollerblades for transportation carries little risk. Safety gear is common.	Speciality/Recreational
Skis	Narrow strips of material to stand on while sliding down a hill	A fine way to move downhill relatively fast, but maintenance of the slope is required.	Downhill skiers can reach high speeds at which collisions could cause significant injury to the skier's lightly protected body. It can be hard to control your speed at lower skill levels, but as long as low speeds are maintained (as it might when used as a transportation option), skiing is not that dangerous.	Speciality/Recreational
Unicycles	One-wheeled human-powered vehicle	Can be a practical form of transport for skilled riders. Because unicycles lack a gear system, they are less mechanically efficient than bicycles and have a much lower top-speed.	Because of the lower top-speed, unicycles would be safer than bicycles, though you may fall off it more frequently.	Speciality/Recreational
Sleds	A construction that can slide over snow, ice, or sand	Useful in limited conditions in which other forms of transport might struggle to cope with.	It is hard to properly control your speed downhill, but extremely safe on level terrain or slight slopes.	Speciality/Recreational
Bumper Cars	Small electric karts with rubber bumpers	Only really convenient for making very short journeys. Typically require an electronic mesh in the ceiling to move at all.	Apparently safe enough to be a hardly-supervized children's entertainment attraction.	Speciality/Recreational
Hot Air Balloons	A basket tied to a huge bag of heated air	Provide limited control and low speeds. They were the only form of air-travel available in the 19th-century, but were overtaken by powered air-travel.	A malfunction in the balloon can result in a very rapid descent, from great height.	?????

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[A chart is shown, where the Y axis is labeled "Convenient for travel" and has an arrow pointing up and the X axis is labeled "Dangerous" and has an arrow pointing right.]

[The following modes are shown in the "Zone of practicality" (a large irregular area fitting in to the top left corner of the chart), highlighted with a gray background, starting with the first few bunched at highest convenience, :]

Trains [very convenient, very safe]

Airliners

Cars

Scooters [the most dangerous of this set, at medium-low danger]

Bicycles

Boats [medium-high convenience, a slight amount of danger]

Walking [the least convienient, at roughly half, and lowest danger of this set]

[The following modes are shown in the "Zone of specialty and recreational vehicles" (a large irregular swathe from the top right to the bottom left, not quite touching the prior zone), highlighted with a gray background, the nodes spread in rough order from high convenience/danger to low convenience/danger:]

Motorcycles [highly convenient, nearly maximum danger]

Helicopters [not quite fully convenient, most danger]

Light aircraft

Go karts

Skateboards

Rollerblades

Skis

Unicycles

Sleds

Bumper cars [lowest convenience and lowest danger item]

[The following is labeled "?????" (in the bottom right corner), and has a gray background all to itself in a small blob notably distant from the nearest other group:]

Hot air balloons [placed as almost the least convenient and most dangerous, of all labels]

[Caption below the panel:]

Hot air balloons are the optimal mode of transportation, if your optimization algorithm has a sign error.

 add a comment! ⋅  add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅  refresh comments!

Discussion

What was going on with this page? Sarah the Pie(yes, the food) (talk) 00:58, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

Vandalism. I mentioned it on the Admin requests page. It's getting reverted back to normal pretty quickly when it happens, but it will probably keep happening until an admin bans the person doing it, or the person doing it gets bored and stops on their own. Equites (talk) 01:05, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

are two nazis actually in an edit war or is it just one person astroturfing --162.158.63.100 01:18, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm trying to combat it, but I'll only be able to keep this up for around another 20 minutes or so. InfoManiac (talk) 01:21, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

Is TheusafBot ofline or something? Generally it handles this sort of stuff pretty well--Mapron01 (talk) 01:44, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure he is. Starstar (talk) 02:23, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

This reminds me of the time I used a character in my password that was the "stty kill" character for one workstation's default console terminal settings. I normally logged in via ssh, and occasionally logged in via xdm, but the time I tried logging in via the console, it really didn't like what was left of my password. 162.158.62.180 01:25, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

Ah, the good old days when ordinary printing characters were used for erase and kill. Barmar (talk) 01:43, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

Vandals are just looking for a fun time, generally. Solution: make it not a fun time for them. Revert their edits dryly, patiently, with no particular comment or anything. Eventually they will get bored and find something else to do. Or, perhaps they'll sit there vandalizing while we revert them, we dozens against probably just one vandal. But if you make your irritation clear, that's "fun" to them, and they'll keep at it with renewed vigour. 108.162.216.239 01:37, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

I accidentally used a backspace character in a username one time. It caused all sorts of problems with my account.

Also, I've never found the whole "The trolls will leave you alone if you don't move." thing to be effective. But I've never found anything else to be effective at universally adjusting behavior either. -Master Areth

I wrote most of the current page after the first paragraph. It's a fairly sloppy first draft that could probably use some editing. Anyone who can should feel free to clean it up. Especially since the page is now protected (I'm not complaining; it was necessary) and so I can't edit it any more. Equites (talk) 05:57, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi Equites, I rewrote the explanation, hope that's okay. I removed the references to the security aspect because I didn't think it was relevant. (Also pinging FrankHightower.) --Hddqsb (talk) 07:59, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

The first paragraph seems a bit superfluous - it's basically just a description of the comic, so isn't really adding anything to the explanation. Also, I think the bit about Pascal could come out of the second para - it doesn't appear to be relevant to what's going on in the comic, so it could just skip to the bit about null terminators.172.70.91.54 16:46, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

I removed the most superfluous part from the first paragraph, and pared down the explanation of Pascal strings (diff). I didn't remove the first paragraph entirely because I think it provides important context and details which are implicit in the comic. And I think it's important to at least mention Pascal strings because that sets the scene for the explanation of C strings (which don't explicitly store the length). --Hddqsb (talk) 10:08, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Seems to be another Tech issue comic, its a tech issue with Cueball talking to Megan and the tech issue is extremely cursed. Should we add this one?162.158.22.98 06:00, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

"since there is no sequence of keys he could type that would result in a null terminator" ... I can type a NULL (ASCII 00) just fine in my editor on Linux (ctrl-v ctrl-@, the latter I type as ctrl-shift-2). However, I am not quite sure how to phrase this in the explanation without sounding like "Áctually! ...." Henri

I am amused that both in the main text and in this comment something has converted the "at sign" into [email protected].

The title text is likely a reference to this reddit post. Pb (talk) 07:06, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

I don't think that's likely... --Hddqsb (talk) 08:50, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

The only thing is I'm pretty sure it's not terribly difficult to enter a null string character, you just have to know what it is. On a PC with a keyboard that has a number pad, you can press Alt-[Number] to enter special characters using their ASCII code (Alt-65 will get "A", Alt-8 is backspace or delete, I forget which but I think BS, etc. MIGHT need leading zeroes to be 3 digits). The 0 to 31 codes - 32 is space, starting the normal characters - tend to have all the special characters, I think null string is 0? NiceGuy1 (talk) 04:14, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

It is. And (with caveats, depending upon other issues and circumstances) Alt-numpad0 would give me the null-char wherever it's practical and not blocked (intentionally or just because it isn't specifically catered for).172.71.178.206 15:25, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

I know a sysadmin friend of mine had to help a user whose account name was "🦙" (The Llama unicode symbol) and he was on a computer where not all layers between the username field and the password authentication understood unicode. Examples like this will happen in real life. IIVQ (talk) 11:16, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

Were they Spanish, by any chance?172.70.90.173 16:49, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

As Cueball is showing and handing over his laptop, I don't think the issue is about a website account (where he could probably do a password reset), but his local account on the laptop, of which he is now locked out, and hopes Poneytail can break into it? ghen (talk) 18:28, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

Good point, updated to avoid referring to "website" specifically. (Another possibility is that it is the password for some installed application.) --Hddqsb (talk) 07:17, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

"Suppose a website's registration form allows the user's new password to have up to 20 characters, but due to a programmer error the login page only accepts passwords with up to 18 characters."
There are also cases where page or application is updated with the expectation that old user accounts will still be working, but updated page no longer accepts same characters (or number of characters) than the old one, locking some people out. -- Hkmaly (talk) 01:35, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

I know from experience that (at least one version of) Windows Server allows very long passwords and that the Windows Server installer will accept very long passwords when setting up the initial admin account, but that the installer silently truncates the password to a "normal" length when actually setting up said account. If you aren't aware of this (and you have a client that uses ridiculously long passwords), you can easily trick yourself into thinking you mistyped and locked yourself out, and have to reinstall. Once installed with a shorter password, it can be changed to whatever length you want.172.70.134.122 16:16, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

Concerning the password described in the title text. If the characters are used in the order they appear in the Unicode Table the password starts with the Null String Terminator and therefor you will essentially end up with an empty password if C or a programming language is used handling strings the same way. Kimmerin (talk) 12:51, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

Good point, added (snapshot). --Hddqsb (talk) 15:38, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

I've actually had this problem long ago; I used the @ sign as part of my password, and it didn't let me log in anymore. Some systems in the good old days (I think it was an FTP server) used the @ character to separate username and password when authenticating. Also, I am still running into this problem sometimes with usernames (emails) allowing "+" in the address on registration, but not when logging in. Pbb (talk)

The @-sign is used to separate authentication and hostname information in an URL, e.g. http://user:[email protected]:port/... Within an FTP-session it was commonly used in FTP-proxy scenarios, i.e. you've connected to an internal FTP-proxy-server providing username and hostname as username in the form [email protected] (similar to the syntax used for scp/sftp) and the password as is. An @-sign in the password in the latter shouldn't have any effect and within the URL an @-character would get URL-encoded not having an effect, either. URL-encoding might be the reason for the last problem, you've described leading to a space in the stored value on the server side. Kimmerin (talk) 15:50, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

A very similar situation happened when I was network manager at Moravian College back in the mid-‘90s. A user was unknowingly typing an ASCII 0 character as a “special” character for their password, and doing it as like the 4th character typed, so the rest of what they typed (which was about 8 more characters) was simply ignored, the system thought their password was just the first 3 characters, the user was none the wiser, until the day I implemented checks to require “strong” passwords that included a minimum length. The user came to me all huffy that their password *was* long enough, but they system was making them change it, but not accepting the change. I never ask users for their password, so diagnosing the problem took a few tries, I had to think to ask them to prepend 8 x’s to the front of their password, and when that worked then I understood the problem.

NULL was also a headache for me in the early 2000’s, working with Oracle web forms, and some weird interaction of software bugs between a particular version of Safari web browser, Apache web server, and Oracle somehow allowed the string “NULL” to get into the Oracle database, breaking the SQL Boolean function IS NULL. The kludge was to change the IF [string] IS NULL” test to be IF [string] IS NULL OR [string] = “NULL” (Unfortunately not the ugliest code I have ever written) John (talk) 12:40, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

Not with null-character, that I'm aware, but when our small company (with Novell-based networking, for fule-servers, printers and most asynchronous communications to the outside world via a somewhat proprietry email gateway over a dial-up) merged into a larger company (with NT servers, and the rest, and now tied directly into their worldwide-WAN by ISDN) there were various hiccoughs in making sure existing and extended infrastructure didn't have conflicting ideas of what was acceptible in the now unified logins. (Not to mention that our username system had been initial-based, but we were now needing formats based upon full names. We had to keep both continuity (for our own long term usage validation) and a migration (to integrate into theirs) and otherwise competent users who were big experts in their own field of data analysis often could not handle the technicalities of multiple/nested logins or the logistical fallout from having their initial login profiles 'remembering credentials'. The fuss it took, until we phased through a full migration (helped by some staff turnover) and relegated the much more competant Novell system to backup/archive servers only.

And then there was the printer that aperiodically 'broke' because the replacement Windows printserver was somehow unable to pass some particular control characters (not sure if null was ever amongst them) that were occasionally used as the daily-changing hashed output to 'sign' the printouts and thus prove their legacy/providence.

I got a great deal of experience with system migrations, from all that, but also a strong dislike of being pushed into them or things that aren't themselves 'broke' being 'fixed' by mandatory upgrades. 172.70.91.58 14:53, 25 November 2022 (UTC)