If a company is required to pay, say, $3,000 to a corrupt official to pass a checkpoint and get access to an area where they have some business to tend to, then scale that economically to a multinational conglomerate like Microsoft who might do business in that same area 35 times in a week for various reasons and the amount of bribe money flowing out of their coffers increases to scale.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30017084

Points: 111

# Comments: 24

Photography was hard in the 80s when you had to do your own lighting and process and develop film. Not anymore.

As a normal, stupid person who interacts with coders frequently I find this to be not in the least unusual.

They simply don't understand what it is to be without a $4,000 apartment within walking distance of everything they could possibly want and so much money that figuring out what to do with it all is a real and ever present problem for them.

They love to humble brag about how the only people who shop at walmart are people who believe in despotic employment practices, never conceding to the fact that a lot of people shop there because they can't afford to pay $5 for a single apple (no seriously, at the Stanford Shopping Center there's a produce shop that sells a single apple for $5).

If you block 500 numbers and then you apply for a job and the person who wants to call you back about the job just got a new prepaid phone, you might be blocking their number.

Or do.

They're taking away all of our rights and there's nothing we can do about it.

I don't have any bars on my windows to prevent that.

You need to draw the line somewhere.

Did you know if you force remove Edge from Windows 10 it will forever after ignore the "always use this" checkbox and prompt you to choose your default browser every time the browser is called from a link in an application?

How would you go an entire decade without noticing this?

Wouldn't you have to use that missing source code for something within ten years?

And also that there's no standardized definition of what a "supercomputer" is.

My iPhone is not a "supercomputer" even though it has thousands of times more computing power than a Cray 1, which is considered a "supercomputer."

It was perfect in every way.

It never crashed, it was never slow and it had GNU tools built right in, but out of the way so I could enjoy the simple and practical UI.

Then one day my X key started missing a keystroke now and then.

Later it started missing strokes.

Then after a while it started to input 'x' when I wasn't pushing the key once in a while.

Eventually the entire computer became unusable because as soon as it powered on it would start to repeatedly ghost type the letter X, resulting in the OS disabling the X key at boot.

So I took it to the Apple store.

"They'll just pop the key off and replace it, maybe clean out under it" I thought. "Worse case scenario I'll have to pay $20 for a new keyboard."

Haha no.

Apple wanted $400 to fix the X key because they refused to simply fix one key. And they refused to simply replace the keyboard. No, the only way they would fix it would be to replace the entire lower deck and that would cost $400.

I had no choice. I needed my computer for business because all of my work depended on it. So I gave the $400.

My computer came back and it worked great for a while, about 8 months.

Then one day the G key started to miss a keystroke once in a while.

I think you know where this is going.

I continued to use the computer until the G key completely failed and began to ghost type G all the time.

This time I didn't have $400, so the broken key rendered my computer completely useless because my disk unlock password had the letter G in it, rendering the OS unbootable.

Even using an external keyboard didn't work because when the OS disabled the letter G at boot it disabled it on both the internal and the external keyboard.

So now I have a computer rendered useless by poverty.

If it was a Lenovo laptop, I would have called Lenovo and they would've overnighted me a free replacement keyboard, which I would have replaced myself in five minutes by removing a few screws, swapping it out and replacing the screws (I've done it on several Lenovo laptops).

I have a perfectly usable Macbook Pro sitting there in the corner rendered unuseable by a single broken key.

I live in Silicon Valley where I don't care where people who live anywhere else do it because they don't matter.

The whole debacle of solving this mystery could've been avoided by not stealing mail from someone you don't know and instead marking it return to sender.

There were at least a dozen well known ones used for different purposes.

Some of them were for tormenting people by sending automated IMs, some were for flooding mailboxes and some were for "phishing" but they were terrible; all they would do is open an IM to a random member and dump in a preset block of text that tried to convince them to hand over their password, and the scripts were bad. They were obviously written by young teenagers.

These tools often had a small user interface that floated over the AOL window. They had panels that would slide out to perform various functions.

The most popular tool for a while was Super Mad Cow.

Super Mad Cow was a swiss army knife of AOL tools in one application.

Here are some of the functions it had that I remember:

* Phisher - You could set up macros that would randomly choose and IM accounts with preset blocks of text to try to social engineer people to give you their password or create a subaccount for them.

* Forwarder - The application would open your mailbox, index all of your mail and then present an interface with checkboxes that you could multi-select to mass forward mail.

* Lister Bot - In order for this to work you have to know that AOL had no limit on the size of your email inbox, so you could have gigabytes of data stored in your own inbox.

This function would take a CD image, large zip or rar file, split it into small chunks of a few megabytes, attach each chunk to an email to yourself and tag the subject of each email with a serial number so lister clients could identify all the chunks for that file, download them and re-assemble them. This way you could have dozens of CD images, floppy images and other archives in your inbox that you could trade with other "couriers" (people who traded warez).

The lister bot would automatically scan your inbox and make a list of all the packages you had, including packages that had been forwarded to you by other bots, then it would create an email with an index that you could forward to other screen names.

The lister bot also had a chat bot function where you could enter a chat room and it would announce itself, and if someone typed a special keyword the bot would email them the list of your warez. The bot would also announce a specific list of hot items you had and chat participants could request those items straight away. Then that person could type a special keyword followed by the serial number of the package they wanted and your list server bot would automatically forward all the parts of that package from your inbox to the requesting screen name.

The requested packages would arrive in the recipient's inbox and could be downloaded instantly, because you were just forwarding emails -- the way AOL forwarded emails inside their own system is they would just copy the files directly into your mailbox via their own filesystem, so there was virtually zero wait time.

* Hidden keyword menu - AOL employees occasionally created silly content that could be accessed using unlisted keywords (the infamous cop eating a donut keyword comes to mind). The authors of Super Mad Cow would update the known hidden keywords with each new version and present a menu of them for easy access.

* Mailbox manager - The mailbox manager would create a personal index of all the packages in your inbox and let you perform maintenance tasks on them at the package level, such as deleting and forwarding, without having to work with the individual emails that had chunks of the packages in them. It would also read emails from your other subaccounts with commands to forward packages to them, then it would delete the main copy so you could manage different kinds of packages using different subaccounts. For example you could have one subaccount for trading ebooks, one for music, one for games and one for porn.

* List parser - The list parser would enter known warez chat rooms and watch for the LIST keyword. This was a keyword used by lister bots that indicated they were about to either dump a list of warez or offer to forward their list. The list parser would either read the list from the chat room and present a list of packages you could request with checkboxes and then automatically request all the necessary parts of the package for you, or it would request an email with the package list, open your inbox, parse the list and then do the same. Later on, list parsers gained the ability to scan your inbox to see if you already had some chunks of a package and only request the missing chunks.

Overhead accounts were subaccounts of AOL employees.

There were different levels of administrative ability with different types of OH accounts.

There was also an employee version of AOL that had special menus to perform administrative functions.

For a while I had a L3 OH which let me create sub accounts under anyone's account without their knowledge, log any screen name off with the click of a button, boot people from chat rooms and disable accounts.

Unfortunately I got cocky (I was 15 so what'd you expect) and booted a catcwatch account, which of course immediately disabled my OH account.