After seeing this:

Using Nmap to extract Windows host and domain information via RDP

 
# Nmap 7.70SVN scan initiated Fri Jun 14 13:57:47 2019 as: nmap -p 3389 --script rdp-ntlm-info -oout 192.168.200.0/24
Nmap scan report for wolfsbane (192.168.200.1) # router, runs a (likely ancient) Samba + accompanying auth
Host is up (0.00022s latency).

PORT STATE SERVICE
3389/tcp closed ms-wbt-server
MAC Address: 60:38:E0:77:F0:61 (Belkin International)

Nmap scan report for DESKTOP-GOO4FB1 (192.168.200.13) # Slightly aging desktop, runs win 10 preview build, set to "weekly or so" updates
Host is up (0.00011s latency).

PORT STATE SERVICE
3389/tcp filtered ms-wbt-server
MAC Address: 00:0F:FE:EB:D0:3F (G-pro Computer)

<several unrelated devices deleted>

Nmap scan report for LAPTOP-UR57MFD8 (192.168.200.156) # Fujitsu touchscreen/wacom tablet laptop for ZBrush/Photoshop, runs Win 10 Home, defaults on everything. Supposed to be legit upgraded from Vista, but if it gave me crap about it, it's cracked. I don't remember how it went.
Host is up (0.038s latency).

PORT STATE SERVICE
3389/tcp filtered ms-wbt-server
MAC Address: 90:CD:B6:70:50:02 (Hon Hai Precision Ind.)

<more devices deleted>
# ---- TehEdn

# There's at least three more laptops with Win 10, one of which is booted and running right now. Win 10 Home OEM (legit came installed on it - I've done nothing afaik). The two others are very similar to the Fujisu, but they're very likely asleep/off.

# That sucked, so Redo, after I flip on RDP on the Desktop (I remember turning it off specifically, not sure why the others are off).

root@joe:~# nmap -p 3389 --script rdp-ntlm-info 192.168.200.13
Starting Nmap 7.70SVN ( https://nmap.org ) at 2019-06-14 14:11 UTC
Nmap scan report for DESKTOP-GOO4FB1 (192.168.200.13)
Host is up (0.00022s latency).

PORT STATE SERVICE
3389/tcp filtered ms-wbt-server
MAC Address: 00:0F:FE:EB:D0:3F (G-pro Computer)

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.65 seconds

# Huh? Perhaps it's the internal firewall thing. <check> Doesn't seem to be - 3389 has two rules - allow any TCP and allow any UDP. Trying to RDP to myself, it complains that I have a console up to the "remote comnputer" already.
#
# Installed "rdesktop" and attempted to connect, which timed out (very slowly) so perhaps something is blocked on another level somehow.
#
# nmap (and rdesktop/X) here runs on Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary on it, has X (xfce desktop) and virtualbox, both sort of unusual but not rare, has docker (exec environment, for dev/test, nothing running in it). nmap is Nmap 7.70SVN, built from repo linked in the article ("./configure && make && make install", added flex and libpcap (this is a *really* green install, used to be alpine, couldn't run vbox) and reran, built 2nd pass).
#
# So I dunno - I'm probably messing something up, might mess w/ more later.
root@joe:~# cat out
# Nmap 7.70SVN scan initiated Fri Jun 14 13:57:47 2019 as: nmap -p 3389 --script rdp-ntlm-info -oout 192.168.200.0/24
Nmap scan report for wolfsbane (192.168.200.1) # router, runs a (likely ancient) Samba + accompanying auth
Host is up (0.00022s latency).

PORT STATE SERVICE
3389/tcp closed ms-wbt-server
MAC Address: 60:38:E0:77:F0:61 (Belkin International)

Nmap scan report for DESKTOP-GOO4FB1 (192.168.200.13) # Slightly aging desktop, runs win 10 preview build, set to "weekly or so" updates
Host is up (0.00011s latency).

PORT STATE SERVICE
3389/tcp filtered ms-wbt-server
MAC Address: 00:0F:FE:EB:D0:3F (G-pro Computer)

<several unrelated devices deleted>

Nmap scan report for LAPTOP-UR57MFD8 (192.168.200.156) # Fujitsu touchscreen/wacom tablet laptop for ZBrush/Photoshop, runs Win 10 Home, defaults on everything. Supposed to be legit upgraded from Vista, but if it gave me crap about it, it's cracked. I don't remember how it went.
Host is up (0.038s latency).

PORT STATE SERVICE
3389/tcp filtered ms-wbt-server
MAC Address: 90:CD:B6:70:50:02 (Hon Hai Precision Ind.)

<more devices deleted>
# ---- TehEdn

# There's at least three more laptops with Win 10, one of which is booted and running right now. Win 10 Home OEM (legit came installed on it - I've done nothing afaik). The two others are very similar to the Fujisu, but they're very likely asleep/off.

# That sucked, so Redo, after I flip on RDP on the Desktop (I remember turning it off specifically, not sure why the others are off).

root@joe:~# nmap -p 3389 --script rdp-ntlm-info 192.168.200.13
Starting Nmap 7.70SVN ( https://nmap.org ) at 2019-06-14 14:11 UTC
Nmap scan report for DESKTOP-GOO4FB1 (192.168.200.13)
Host is up (0.00022s latency).

PORT STATE SERVICE
3389/tcp filtered ms-wbt-server
MAC Address: 00:0F:FE:EB:D0:3F (G-pro Computer)

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.65 seconds

# Huh? Perhaps it's the internal firewall thing. <check> Doesn't seem to be - 3389 has two rules - allow any TCP and allow any UDP. Trying to RDP to myself, it complains that I have a console up to the "remote comnputer" already.
#
# Installed "rdesktop" and attempted to connect, which timed out (very slowly) so perhaps something is blocked on another level somehow.
#
# nmap (and rdesktop/X) here runs on Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary on it, has X (xfce desktop) and virtualbox, both sort of unusual but not rare, has docker (exec environment, for dev/test, nothing running in it). nmap is Nmap 7.70SVN, built from repo linked in the article ("./configure && make && make install", added flex and libpcap (this is a *really* green install, used to be alpine, couldn't run vbox) and reran, built 2nd pass).
#
# So I dunno - I'm probably messing something up, might mess w/ more later.

Kandy Pens RUBI Box, assembled device, and bottle of juice from Salt BAE

Disclosure: I received free product. I’m not sure from whom or to what exact end – I agreed to receive them and verified myself as a 21+ aged smoker to a non-descript intermediary, and if you give me seventy bucks worth of merch send it thought a cutout, I’ll happily respect your privacy. So let’s say some online influence campaign who respected appropriate laws did it, because that’s all I know.

I’m in my 40s, long time ~pack a day smoker. I’ve used three or four different e-cigarettes at various points, never very long nor even briefly to the exclusion of normal tobacco. I filled out a bunch of eligibility forms for smokers, mostly hoping to get some coupons, and along with them, got this offer. I have two daughters in HS and college respectively, whom I have not massively alienated and from whom I’ve heard of the rise and later mild stagnation of JUUL, but my roots are firmly planted in Gen-X rather than millennials/gen-y, and while I’d like to think I have a measure of respect in said groups, I only aspire to be an occasional bridge, cheerleader, and dropper of devastatingly bad dad jokes, not to join them or be “with it”.

I open the box pictured to find a small refillable pod, a battery/device, a small rubber stopper, and a short flat charging cable. The cable is a perfectly average USB micro-B,  as used by nearly all non-iPhones. After three decades of refilling ink cartridges, unlocking cell phones, and soldering bizarre adapters, supplying an intentionally refillable pod and using a standard cable give me an instant “These are my people!” vibe. The packaging is study feeling. The pod snaps in with a nice “click”, seemingly to stay in place. The device is kind of light, and appears to be made of aluminum. It’s Rose Gold (other colors were available) which matches my daughters iPhone and is obviously cruise control for cool (unless they changed that again).

It charged in 30 min, a little K on glowing red, then white to show full charge. In use, same deal – white mean charged, red means running low. I’ve never ran it completely out of power, so I don’t know exactly how the “red K” keeps working, but two-ish cig breaks seems ok. At my pace, it appears to last 6-12 hours or so.

Filling the pod was uneventful, open bottle, push juice into pod, push silicone stopper back into pod. Drawing on it automatically triggers the heat (a high-ohm coil, meant for nicotine salt solutions, I’m told). After a few false starts of not pulling long or hard enough and tinkering a little with the two “air carb” holes on the side that can limit fresh air mix, I get it to work and successfully inhale big clouds of faux-smoke. It’s not nearly as harsh as other e-cigs I’ve tried, about on-par with normal cigarettes but much smoother if inhaling directly instead of the “suck-inhale” cycle of cigarettes. It tastes strongly like ripe mango, which is nice. I can’t really offer a comparison to other mango flavors (non-cough*JUUL*non-cough) but I like it. I do like that I am clearly inhaling *something* that isn’t air, but it isn’t overly harsh seeming to throat or tongue.

The pod holds ~1ml, which, after some quick calculations that appear to jive with so-far field testing appears to be roughly equivalent to 1 pack or full-flavor filter shorts, possibly a little less. If you were hoping to cut back on nicotine and eventually quit, there’s apparently options for that. I’ve tried to quit a few times, but my heart isn’t really in it – at this point I’m hoping to perhaps transfer the addiction onto something less harmful, then regroup from there. Price wise, that works out to 70-80 cents a “pack equivalent” had I bought the juice as $20 (approximate online price), which is excellent both compared to actual packs (~$6 and on the way up) and pre filled pods for other vapes.

I’m on day three, so an evaluation might be slightly premature, but midway through day two, something interesting happened. I misplaced my vape, and didn’t notice for long enough that I was clearly wanting it. I thought “Oh well, I’ll just smoke a cig” to which my subconscious immediately recoiled with “NO! FIND VAPE!”. Now, that’s astonishingly fast, as well as unexpected – all other e-cigs, gum, patches, etc have been “I want a cigarette. Ok, FINE, I’ll do/chew/use this thing for a while, I *guess* I don’t quite want one as badly now”, never even remotely realigning what it is I’m addicted to let alone actively wanting the replacement rather than the original. I’ve smoked a total of six cigarettes in the days since I got it (normally, ~30-35 would have been typical), intentionally putting for absolutely zero effort into it – if I want to smoke, I smoke – which I’m quite impressed by. I’m in no way at all less addicted to nicotine, but while none of the other delivery systems were close, I really feel like this is cementing itself in as “the nicotine source”, for better or worse.

If I had paid for it, I’d feel a little hesitant about the starting kit price ($50), though really that puts the entire startup at around a carton of cigs, which it will, if nothing else, absolutely mange to replace over time in my case (likely in a week or two, certainly within a month), quite likely much more than that. I’m not really sure how I feel about it as a nicotine cessation aid, but if you’re not sure about kicking nicotine, you probably won’t anyway and moving to a safer delivery system is almost certainly a huge cut in harm, even if it’s not a safe alternative as such.

Pros:

• Exactly the size of two 100s cigs laid side by side, which is convenient.
• Actually succeeded in reducing my smoking by 95% in two days, without any particular effort on my part
• Intentionally refillable pods, no hacking/modding for use with arbitrary vape juice, putting the operational costs not just firmly below cigarettes or cigars, but all the way down to cheaper than any other tobacco product ever
• Good fit if you’re really not ready to quit smoking, but would like to not wreck your lungs inhaling a continuous stream of tar and partially burned leaf

Cons:

• Hasn’t magically made me want to give up nicotine, and probably won’t
• Wouldn’t hurt to have slightly longer lasting battery and/or user replaceable battery (I haven’t actually tore it down, so this is partially still up in the air – it may be hackable. There’s an element of a pro here, for once the device did pretty much everything I wanted, to the point where having it continue to work overwhelmed my urge to tear it down to see how it worked)
• Possibly a little too appealing to non-smokers who might want to “try” (and, in some cases I’m sure, still be “trying” It decades later) a convenient, safer, form of nicotine. Not that that’s really my problem or anything.
• It’d be nice to have some kind of gauge on how much you’ve used it just then, equivalent to a cigarette running out marking a “normal” stopping point

Ultimately, racking up pros doesn’t really amount to much if one of the cons are “Didn’t actually have a noticeable impact on my smoking habits”, which is just a kinder way of saying “Didn’t work”. As an end user, I’m not really in a position to determine which, if any, of the cons might put this one vital pro in jeopardy. So in a sense, the short version would be “Pros: Didn’t not work – Cons: None that outweigh the pros”.

DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet, the company spun off from Google to contain all the edgy research things (self driving cars, huge AIs, whatnot) has showed off another Go engine, that is also a chess engine. It’s extremely good. Here’s an article:

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/how-the-artificial-intelligence-program-alphazero-mastered-its-games

Perhaps unfortunately, there’s no real normal threshold to cross here – AlphaGo (an earlier but different engine by Alphabet) has already beaten the top human Go players. DeepBlue, IBMs monster chess engine, beat Kasparov at chess in 1997 – we’re 21 years out from top humans dominating at chess, and we throw out phones with enough computing power to school grandmasters because they’re annoyingly slow. So the news this time isn’t so much that AlphaZero won over someone new (though it beat all other top software), but that it did it in a different way.

When DeepBlue won, some people pointed out that we didn’t learn that much about intelligence, or humans, or chess. It was a fair enough criticism. Machines tend to be better than people at things on the basis that they have more power. Pushing harder, moving faster, completing more calculations more quickly, that sort of thing. In a few areas, that’s an easy (by modern standards) win – you can’t outrun a car, or outdig a backhoe. But you might be able to, say, paint a nicer looking flower, or determine another human beings emotions by sight more accurately. Or, formerly, play better chess, and read distorted letters to prove your non-robot-ness online. But those that fell like the last two didn’t fall to machines and software becoming smarter. They fell to shuffling the problem around until having more power thrown at it helped *just a tiny little bit*, and then throwing *mountains* of power at it. DeepBlue (and AlphaGo, the former Go champ) would pound through million after million of potential game board positions, trying to sort out which ones might hold a slight advantage. Humans don’t do that, and never did, and still play very well. Way better than any machine with a hard limit of evaluating perhaps a few dozen different moves, looking at most a few back-and-forth moves deep along each. There was, and still is, something about humans that still make them better, on an apples-to-apples level. It’s as though a human could run faster than a vehicle with the same size, weight, and energy intake – sure, we could still do what we’ve always done and just grunt and build a bigger one, and it’d be useful, but there would be a nagging questions of *why* we needed to. What is it that makes us faster? Well, nothing, because vehicles can move much faster using less energy, and we know why (for starters they don’t heat themselves to 98.7 degrees and stay that way 24/7 or instantly stop working forever), but with intelligence.. we kind of really don’t. We get the core mechanics of the deal, it’s a network of nerves, sending signals to other nerves, triggering some layers of chemicals with some back and forth. It’s not especially fast. It’s rather big, but not *that* big, not so that it’d win by sheer size. But the actual details are hard to see and rather obscure, too intricate and surrounded by too many parts that do nothing but not be in the way.

Algorithms improve, though. The best chess or Go engines couldn’t be what they are without some improvements in more generally evaluating positions without running them all to ground. That’s where AlphaZero has now made a serious advancement. It’s only trained against itself, and its evaluations are significantly shallower than prior engines, and it’s still better. In other words, it’s taken a significant step toward learning the way humans learn, and winning the way humans win. It’s not there yet, of course. The actual playing part of the engine is still closer to traditional engines than it is to humans, and the learning part is so computationally demanding that it’s not even worth trying to recalculate it into centuries of PC time or some other metric that’s supposed to sound impressive – it’s just above human visualization stupid lots of power. But even so, it’s a step *toward* functioning more like a human. It used to be that human intelligence had a 1,000,000 to 1 advantage over brute computational power, and we built winning machines by making them 1,000,001 times bigger. AlphaZero takes a small step in the other direction, throwing the power behind tuning up a system that can only needs to be 100,000 times bigger, and still win. And while doing so, it also manages to somewhat highlight what is different about a top human player (intuition, elegance, insight) as opposed to a robot (unyielding borg-like repetition, cold, unimaginative depth-and-precision strong arming).
This is still not the type of path that we can all explore, not with this level of demands. But it’s going to be very interesting to see what else it can do, when the same tactics get to hit other problems we solve by sheer force. Integrated circuit designs, road network routing, street light timings, turbine blade shapes, stealth airfoils, six-axis-unstable flight.. there’s a lot of things we build that are only possible because we can crunch numbers at them until something works. Because human imagination and intuition isn’t enough to “see” the elegant, clever, beautiful solution, and machines can only find the cold, pragmatic, by-the-numbers, sufficient one. What we see here is a step toward a remedy for that, a sort of finder of solution finders, and as a proof-of-concept finding at least a few that are much more like the ones we wish we could build rather than the best we can do while working on abstract problems that are too complex to reel back into human visionary space no matter how we try to reformulate them.

Someone asked me to write a description of why the international dateline makes sense. I didn’t totally get why it would as a kid, but eventually figured out a way to look at it that made sense to me. Apparently they were in the same situation, and it worked for them as well. Anyhow..
The international dateline is a particular North to South line (slightly zigzagged for bureaucratic reasons) that works like a time zone line, except instead of gaining/losing an hour or two, crossing it gains or loses 24 hours. It’s located mostly around 180 longitude (diametrically opposite 0, i.e. Greenwich, England), location chosen to interfere as little as possible with normal things, which is probably a thinly veiled synonym for “English things” or “European things”.

There is a reason we’re stuck with it, provided we use local time at all. Local times are set so that the sun is approximately as high in the sky as it will go at 12:00 noon. This used to be a lot more useful, but it’s still the norm. Moving with the earths rotation will make that occur sooner (as opposed to just standing there waiting for the earth to move you along), so moving east will put local noon sooner. Going “counter rotation”, i.e. west, will do the opposite. Since pegging “noon local” at exactly when the sun peaks isn’t precise enough to coordinate some things, so rather than define it as noon wherever you are, blocks of area will agree to follow a certain exactly synchronized time. The edges usually follow national or in-country borders of some kind, and usually agree on an even to the hour offset (but not always, 30 minutes off zones exist). Within these time zones, the sun will usually peak less than half an hour before or after noon, sometimes the desire to be “on the same time” as a larger block has larger offsets, but rounding it off a little.

So, lets suppose you stand at a spot, and then travel eastwards, a whole 360/24 degrees along the earth. You’ve moved over the equivalent of one hour, and indeed local time is now one hour forward from when you started. If it was noon when you started (and you didn’t spend any time moving) it’s now 1 pm. Sweet, things are going according to plan. Move another equally-sized chunk, bam, 2 pm. You’re two hours ahead, and all is well. Keeping it up, after 23 times, you move yet another time and.. you’re 24 hours ahead, and back where you started. And it’s true too – you did spin around the earths axis one more time than those around you who just stayed there. But you can’t have your own 24-hours-offset timezone. Well, you can perhaps, but the area you’re in can’t ambiguously be two separate zones at once – if everyone in your local zone is to agree on a time, including date and year, you must somehow come to terms with that you’re not 24 hours ahead – you must at some point *not* go one more hour ahead, but instead 23 hours *back*. It’ll all be the same to you if you’re merely looking at a clock (no date) – you’ll be at (say) 4am, then it’ll be 5am, but it’ll really go 4am, Tue Aug 7 to 5am, Mon Aug 6.

Or, if you don’t feel like overly complicating certain time zone boundaries (they were so nice and understandable after all) you could just designate a specific pseudo time zone line for just that – go east, lose those 24 hours of illogical offset you’ve built up the rest of the lap, go west, add them on. And that’s what they did – thus the international dateline.

Someone on reddit asked if it could be a less restrictive license than GPL v3. It was mostly GPL v3 because something I used in it was, and after it was written out, I didn’t change it. So.. magic “Lesser” added. Good luck.

slow-hash.py

This has been a while coming. Like many others, after bumping into cryptonight, the memory intense hash function behind Monero, I’ve been trying to optimize it. As a first step to doing this, I started to rewrite it in full, and then immediately realized that involves quite a lot of fairly stock stuff that really isn’t time critical. And like (almost) everyone else, I thus dropped that and started messing with other aspects. But then, off and on, I did rewrite parts of it, until I decided to just gather it all up, fill in the left-out parts, and put it together. So here it is:

slow-hash.py

FAQ

What is this?
This is an implementation of cryptonights slow-hash in python. It has no dependencies, reimplementing AES, Keccak, Blake, JH, Groestl, and Skein in pure Python. It also comes with a small main() that runs an example case and checks it. It can be adjusted for before and after the upcoming Apr 2018 hard fork.
Why?
Mostly to have a single, self-contained implementation to base other things on.
Is it fast?
Goodness no. As mentioned, it runs everything in pure python. It’ll do a little less than two hashes a minute on a machine that typically does around 50-70 hashes per second using a typical implementation.
Can I mine with it?
As presented, no. It doesn’t implement a full daemon, nor a way to fetch work from pools. There isn’t much point, since it’s extremely slow. If you mean “am I allowed to mine with it?” then sure, feel free to, but there isn’t much point.
Can I base other implementation on it?
I don’t know, can you? (rimshot) Yes, certainly, that’s the point here. I don’t know how much easier to follow it ended up being, but by all means learn from it and use it to implement it in other ways.

Since the temperature is rising fast on the need to regulate/modulate/curb the online information flow, social media in particular, I think it’s time to take a deep breath and think through a few things before narrowing the blinders even further and recklessly barreling forth.

Your media is filtered. It always has been, always will be, and in fact it *must* be. If you heard all seven billion humans at once, you would hear nothing. Somewhere, somehow, a choice was made. Drafts were drafted, editors edited, librarians curated, the deafening feedback screech of the world quieted, and you received information. It’s both the largest conspiracy in the world and no conspiracy at all, because it’s too decentralized to really be wielded by mortals.

You can’t just “choose yourself”. You can’t eat everything on the menu to decide what to eat. That isn’t an artificially imposed limit. You must, to some degree, go meta on it – choose people who will choose for you, or even choose people who will choose people who will.. and so on. But one thing used to be quite clear – to greatest extent possible, you should be free to do just that, not have it done for you. Unless, and this is where the clear ethical lines suddenly get squashed, you chose someone that role. But either way, some of these choices have gotten a little more accessible.

I say “a little”, because if you’re alive, it was never that hard. You could read the New York Times, or the St Petersburg times, or the Beijing Times, or your choice of a thousand other carefully collated chunks of data. You could hit a local library and read about almost any subject. You could change the TV station. You could flip through the back pages and have scores of very enthusiastic wingnuts drown you in Xeroxed zines with lots of ALLCAPS opinions. You can walk into an overpriced coffee shop at your local college, or at Berkeley, or NASA, or Yale, and partake in vibrant discussion. You could direct-dial any consulate, corporation, or even a random number, and ask if they’d mind sharing their opinions. You could write a really mean-spirited letter to your favorite government official and mail that bad boy right to their office. It was all there, and making them marginally less inconvenient changes nothing in principle. You weren’t information starved, nor silenced, nor in any position to just “pick all of it”. So what did change? Something must have changed, right?

There were a few subtle changes. You were usually guided (mostly consensually) by making you incur some form of cost, inconvenience.. for lack of a less dramatic term, pain. Pay for it, sit through a sales pitch, unravel the spin to make it useful, return your books, don’t hog the mic, renew your subscription.. They’re minor, but they’re there, and most of the choices are made by not choosing due to them. New media, instead, usually guides you (with your implicit consent) with rewards. Facebook found a person they think you’ll really like. Google is so convenient it can often literally give you what you were just about to look for before you typed it. Keep your snapchat streak going and we’ll brag to your friends about how much we like you. Tumblr will only show you the very finest funny cat videos. Carrot beats whip, and then candy cane beats carrot, and all of a sudden you wonder why you’re eating codeine-syrup-soaked cotton candy, and why no one is stopping you.

No one is stopping you because that’s kind of your job. Yes, FaceTubeInstaSnapGoogle could, and probably should, help you with that a bit by making your choices more explicit, more accessible, and more nuanced in terms of “I’d like for you to be *this* aggressive when you make my choices”. But you still pick the picker, and you need to own that. Just like before, the choices aren’t exactly medieval. Don’t chase facebook content you didn’t come looking for. Use duckduckgo once in a while. Hit some aggregators with more explicit and less fine-grained choices, reddit, blogger, reuters, stumbler.. Pick some RSS feeds, hang in some chatrooms. By all means, be judgmental, but take it up a notch and aim it at whom or what presented you with the information, not the little cherry picked atom of data and the random person behind it. Do what you did before – endure a little inconvenience, intentionally, in exchange for experiencing something actually new. Get used to the new telltale signs that you’re getting cornered or snowed. You know the reaction you get from millennials when you ask them to use a dictionary? Don’t be like that to their tools either – they require a slightly difference skill set to wield, but OMGWTFBBQ rein in the drama – it’s a tiny bit uphill, not a rabid squirrel gnawing your left <blank> off. Are you seriously wanting to ban candy because you can’t quit eating it? We’re supposed to be the generation of inner fortitude and character FFS, can we maybe act a little more like it?

Just noticed these. The numbers kind of speak for themselves, started 16h ago, rare prior:

(reddit post where I say slightly more about it, and others may hopefully weigh in)

[EDIT]It keeps going, another 4000, still 3%%. Added another table, times will be odd since it’s “time since”.

(.. and some more, these from the perspective of 10 hours later)

General FYI – I’ve dug through the mess of wireless providers (as I try to do on a biannual-ish basis) and this rounds winner is.. tello.com (currently +coupon 15OFFAFF -> 15% off)

Cheapest possible “has a working number”: $4.98/month ($5 (plan) + $0.73 (BS surchrages/tax) – $0.75 (15% off)
(give 100 minutes, unlimited texting)
“Internet of Things”-slave device: $5.98/month ($7 (plan) – $1.05 (15%) + $0.73 (BS))
(give 200 mb 4G/LTE (~5Mbit) then indefinite 64kbit 2G/1X, unlimited texting, no calling at all)
Resonable minimalist use: $13.48/month ($17, -15%+BS)
(unlimited text/voice, 200 Mb 4G)

All functional sprint phones work, most get in even with unsettled accounts/sprint blacklist (no official word on what’s what, had a few denied, a few accepted). Boost phones with more than 6 months cumilative on-network use work, some decrepidly old never activated work.

Pros:
Tethering explicitly allowed, including while on 64kbit. USB, bluetooth, on-phone hotspot – no problem, any data welcome.
Switch phones whenever, no human involvement. Just fork in IMEI online and wait two-three minutes, dial ##72786# (reset provider), bam, done.
Porting in number from Sprint continually went super smooth and without human interaction – acc # + pin + phone# + exact name and address, five minutes, reset provider, done.
Cons:
Autorenew required – needs disposable/virtual CC or cancel for one-off lines.
Asks for a phone number that can’t be the one you’re just now buying for billing (doesn’t appear to verify how real it is, but still corners you with “No, we need your phone number!” vs “I don’t have one, hence my intended purchase!”)

Pro or con depending:
Charges $10 for new SIM cards. Some Sprint SIMs transfer, some do not – those that do not costs $10 takes a 2-day mail round, plus exposes your real address (or locks you down to 3G or less data == no 4G/LTE burners). On the plus side, they do in fact 2-day you a functioning SIM no questions asked, no human interaction – Sprint usually requires you to speak to two-three levels of highly confused tech support before actually sending out a new SIM.

Not affiliated with nor get commission from these people, just what I ended up with this round.