Vibrator w/16 gig memory (and gold-plated base), only $349)

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TazManiac
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Re: Vibrator w/16 gig memory (and gold-plated base), only $

Post by TazManiac »

Bah. Yer just showing off hoping those very same entities will look you up and offer you a job...
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Catawampus
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Re: Vibrator w/16 gig memory (and gold-plated base), only $

Post by Catawampus »

GlytchMeister wrote:
Alkarii wrote:Can you not send the flowers anonymously? That's what I would do, if it were possible.
Anonymously as far as the recipient goes, but if the FBI gets involved, you’d have to take several precautions;

Take non-traceable transport to a distant (1 hour drive at least) convenience store.

For example, find a family that is on vacation and steal their car while they’re gone, wearing two pairs of surgical gloves (replaced every five minutes because skin oils will go through and start leaving fingerprints), a surgical mask (breathing and talking can spread DNA via spit), hairnet (hair. Duh.), and a cotton outfit bought that day at a goodwill that is distant from both the car and your home that will cover all of your skin (to contain sloughed off skin cells and body hair). Then, find another vehicle of the same make, model, and color as your stolen car and swap the plates. Try to make sure you can put the plates back at the end of the day before it’s noticed.

Drive your re-plated stolen car to the chosen convenience store (CVS, Walgreens, whatever) and buy a visa gift card while keeping your face hidden from cameras (hoodies are good for this as they don’t conceal the face from people and are less memorable and suspicious than a ski mask... unless it’s really really cold out) Slouch and limp a little, too - this disguises your height, and your gait can be used as an identifying feature. Buy an ankle brace and maybe some ibuprophen as well, so the cashier is less likely to remember your face - cashiers really couldn’t care less, but you stick out less in a Walgreens if you buy something that matches your limp. Makeup is optional but helpful if it’s good. Contouring is especially helpful, as it uses optical illusions to change how your bone structure looks. Do not be especially grumpy OR pleasant. Be an average joe.

PAY CASH. Do not use any rewards program.

Go to a library.

Browse books until someone leaves a computer unattended but logged in, and sit down. Libraries usually require people to give an ID to get on a computer nowadays, but the average layperson won’t be so concerned about it. Most libraries are ghost towns, but college libraries are still usually fairly active.

If possible, plug in a flash drive and use the portable version of Tails (by Tor). If not, try to just use Tor from the flash drive. If that still doesn’t work, you should still probably be ok as long as your face isn’t seen on cameras at the library and as long as you use private browsing so your history isn’t saved locally.

Register your card under a fake name and a random nearby address chosen on google maps.

Now, use the card to order the flowers. As soon as you have the confirmation, close your tabs and open a new non-private one, during google to type in some innocuous book-related searches, and then leave the computer as you found it - hopefully you can get this done before the registered user comes back. If not, play it off like you haven’t been to a library in a while, and say you didn’t mess with any of their stuff. The user might check the history and will only find the innocuous searches.

Next, use a powerful magnet, kept away from your card by a couple pieces of paper, to scramble the read strip (rub the card back and forth in several directions over the paper and magnet). Cut the card into confetti. Throw it away.

Return the swapped plates. Return the car. Go home.

Take your goodwill outfit and burn it thoroughly. Flush the ashes. Clean your toilet.

Do not make any statements that reveal prior knowledge of the flowers online to the person who annoyed you. Wait. If they make no comment, do not fall into their trap. Do not check if the delivery went through, and do not call the flower shop or visit the shower shop’s website.

Behave as though nothing happened. If the mark does comment on the flowers, wait for several other users to respond (but don’t be last) before making a similar response to theirs.
Or, if you'd prefer to do things a bit simpler and not risk getting arrested for stealing or getting beat up by an irate librarian, you could just drive yourself in your own car to a florist that you haven't gone to in a town not too close to you, put on a wide-brimmed hat, wear some fake glasses if you don't usually wear any or take off your glasses if you do usually wear some, walk a few blocks to the florist, say that you want to send some flowers to that address, provide a fake address for yourself, pay in cash, and then leave.
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lake_wrangler
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Re: Vibrator w/16 gig memory (and gold-plated base), only $

Post by lake_wrangler »

Catawampus wrote:Or, if you'd prefer to do things a bit simpler and not risk getting arrested for stealing or getting beat up by an irate librarian, you could just drive yourself in your own car to a florist that you haven't gone to in a town not too close to you, put on a wide-brimmed hat, wear some fake glasses if you don't usually wear any or take off your glasses if you do usually wear some, walk a few blocks to the florist, say that you want to send some flowers to that address, provide a fake address for yourself, pay in cash, and then leave.
Sure, but where would be the fun in that... :roll: :lol:
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jwhouk
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Re: Vibrator w/16 gig memory (and gold-plated base), only $

Post by jwhouk »

I think they'd guess something if I put the return address as "1060 W. Addison Avenue, Chicago, Illiniois," though...
"Character is what you are in the dark." - D.L. Moody
"You should never run from the voices in your head. That's how you give them power." - Jin
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TazManiac
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Re: Vibrator w/16 gig memory (and gold-plated base), only $

Post by TazManiac »

jwhouk wrote:I think they'd guess something if I put the return address as "1060 W. Addison Avenue, Chicago, Illiniois," though...
(yeah, I went ahed and Googled that address...)

Even better might be 1600 Penn. Ave, District of Columbia... , no wait- make it Langley, VA... yeah.
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jwhouk
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Re: Vibrator w/16 gig memory (and gold-plated base), only $

Post by jwhouk »

Or:
  • 1265 Lombardi Avenue, Green Bay, Wisconsin
  • 1000 Vin Scully Drive, Los Angeles, California
  • 500 E. Veterans Way, Tempe, Arizona
  • 60 N. Temple, Salt Lake City, Utah
  • 401 Chicago Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota
  • 600 Maryland Avenue SW, Washington, DC
"Character is what you are in the dark." - D.L. Moody
"You should never run from the voices in your head. That's how you give them power." - Jin
Alkarii
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Re: Vibrator w/16 gig memory (and gold-plated base), only $

Post by Alkarii »

jwhouk wrote:I think they'd guess something if I put the return address as "1060 W. Addison Avenue, Chicago, Illiniois," though...
I think they'd guess you live with Elwood and Jake.
There is no such thing as a science experiment gone wrong.
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GlytchMeister
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Re: Vibrator w/16 gig memory (and gold-plated base), only $

Post by GlytchMeister »

221b Baker Street...
He's mister GlytchMeister, he's mister code
He's mister exploiter, he's mister ones and zeros
They call me GlytchMeister, whatever I touch
Starts to glitch in my clutch!
I'm too much!
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GlytchMeister
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Re: Vibrator w/16 gig memory (and gold-plated base), only $

Post by GlytchMeister »

Catawampus wrote:Or, if you'd prefer to do things a bit simpler and not risk getting arrested for stealing or getting beat up by an irate librarian, you could just drive yourself in your own car to a florist that you haven't gone to in a town not too close to you, put on a wide-brimmed hat, wear some fake glasses if you don't usually wear any or take off your glasses if you do usually wear some, walk a few blocks to the florist, say that you want to send some flowers to that address, provide a fake address for yourself, pay in cash, and then leave.
If you drive in your own car, your liscence plates could be picked up by security cameras. If not, at least the make and model, and maybe the year of the car. You and your car may also be tracked back by going through security camera recordings of shops you passed on your way there, or potentially be detected and saved by the plate readers of cop cars, if they are equipped. It’s even easier if you live somewhere like DC or London, both of which have highly advanced and extensive cctv camera networks on the roadways and public spaces, which, IIRC, can record and save for future analysis. Even Peoria IL has intersection cameras, though they don’t record.

Also, in most internet situations, you’ll probably be sending flowers to someone several time zones, if not an ocean or two away.

I don’t know how expensive it would be to order flowers for someone in, say, Tunguska, from Beck’s Florist in East Peoria, IL.
He's mister GlytchMeister, he's mister code
He's mister exploiter, he's mister ones and zeros
They call me GlytchMeister, whatever I touch
Starts to glitch in my clutch!
I'm too much!
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Catawampus
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Re: Vibrator w/16 gig memory (and gold-plated base), only $

Post by Catawampus »

GlytchMeister wrote:If you drive in your own car, your liscence plates could be picked up by security cameras. If not, at least the make and model, and maybe the year of the car. You and your car may also be tracked back by going through security camera recordings of shops you passed on your way there, or potentially be detected and saved by the plate readers of cop cars, if they are equipped. It’s even easier if you live somewhere like DC or London, both of which have highly advanced and extensive cctv camera networks on the roadways and public spaces, which, IIRC, can record and save for future analysis. Even Peoria IL has intersection cameras, though they don’t record.
Yep, your car will be recorded. As will all of the other hundreds, thousands, or millions of other cars passing through. Which means nothing, so long as there's nothing directly connecting that car to the person who bought the flowers. No law enforcement agency is going to bother looking up the owners of every vehicle caught on every camera in the general region, track down the owners, and try to find out where they were at a given time, just on the off-chance that the person who bought some flowers might have driven their own car rather than walking or taking a bus. You driving along legally in your own car is the best camouflage available: you don't even need to hide, because there's nothing to hide.

On the other hand, if one of those cameras happened to catch sight of a car that's flagged as having been stolen. . .

You always want to keep an operation as simple as possible. Don't worry about everything that your opponents can technically do, worry about the things that they would do. Try to avoid little side-operations that risk exposing you without even accomplishing the main goal, when you can just find an ordinary and legal method to set things up in the same general way.
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jwhouk
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Re: Vibrator w/16 gig memory (and gold-plated base), only $

Post by jwhouk »

LEO's don't bother to investigate the law-abiding citizens. They investigate those who are breaking the law.

And sending someone flowers would be incredibly simple.
"Character is what you are in the dark." - D.L. Moody
"You should never run from the voices in your head. That's how you give them power." - Jin
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TazManiac
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Re: Vibrator w/16 gig memory (and gold-plated base), only $

Post by TazManiac »

You guys never heard of SkyNet or Colossus, have ya?
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Dave
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Re: Vibrator w/16 gig memory (and gold-plated base), only $

Post by Dave »

TazManiac wrote:You guys never heard of SkyNet or Colossus, have ya?
Oh, they're not a problem.

The white mice made sure they were deleted from the simulation, this time around.

Speaking of simulations - my office-mate was running into a rather bizarre problem in a C++ program having to do with floating point numbers (it turns out that "smallest possible number" means two entirely different things depending on the floating-point number format you're using). He mentioned that in a computer system he'd been working with, a big part of the problem was doing linear-algebra solutions, and in those solutions a lot of the entries and operations were trivial (the majority of them turned out to be either "add zero" or "multiply by one").

He said that someone had actually designed a CPU for handing those sort of operations effectively. The CPU had a large number of floating-point processing units, but most of them were (in effect) dummies... they could detect an "add zero" or "multiply by one" and just pass the original value through unchanged, and any other inputs would cause them to "bail out" and pass the operation to one of the real floating-point processors that could process arbitrary floating-point numbers. This let the instruction pipeline process big equations very efficiently, with very littie silicon space on the die being used up for these minimal FPUs. The vendor called them "trivializers".

I told him he'd just given me the plotline for a great block-buster movie. A young mathematician discovers that he's living in a virtual reality... and the cyber-system which is creating the virtual universe consists mostly of trivializers.

The title of the movie would, of course, be The Sparse Matrix.
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Re: Vibrator w/16 gig memory (and gold-plated base), only $

Post by Typeminer »

Dave wrote:The title of the movie would, of course, be The Sparse Matrix.
I bailed on differential equations when I was a teenager. And that still hurt. :mrgreen:
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cansodabar
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Re: Vibrator w/16 gig memory (and gold-plated base), only $

Post by cansodabar »

maybe a dumb question, but why do you need rubber gloves? Couldn't you just ski mitts or something and not have to replace them every five minutes?
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TazManiac
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Re: Vibrator w/16 gig memory (and gold-plated base), only $

Post by TazManiac »

cansodabar wrote:maybe a dumb question, but why do you need rubber gloves? Couldn't you just ski mitts or something and not have to replace them every five minutes?
Easy peasy; you can get the thicker Playtex gloves meant for cleaning ovens n' stuff.

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