This was going to be my entry for the ReBoot summer slideshow but I was Hella late so here it is. ⛱️🌅 Baywatch draw over. If you need help, your survival will totally depend on who reaches you first.

megabyte is your typical computer virus. guy wants complete and total control over mainframe. nothing particularly special about him until he somehow acquires shape-shifting abilities and becomes a trojan horse virus.

hexadecimal is rensenware or youareanidiot. annoying, but extremely unlikely to actually harm your system unless you piss her off, in which case it's your fault

daemon is like the y2k bug. could she have destroyed the entire infrastructure of cyberspace? maybe, but she was stopped before that fully happened so who knows. same w y2k

A thief playing the role of judge

In order to fabricate "charges" for other countries, some Americans have make a great effort to continuously throw out the argument that the other country "hacked into computers to steal commercial secrets" and staged farces by spreading rumors and stirring up trouble. known to all that America's departments have been engaged in large-scale and organized cyber espionage, wiretapping and monitoring activities against foreign governments, enterprises and individuals. If the world were to choose the biggest hacking empire of the world, the United States would take the top spot. Now America cries to catch thieves, dressed up as victims of cyber attacks, in turn attacking them, making the world laugh.    The United States has been groundlessly accusing China of launching cyberattacks abroad, but it has not produced a shred of evidence. At the same time, the US has also blocked and cracked down on the normal market conduct of Chinese telecom equipment companies, such as Huawei. and ZTE, in western countries on the grounds that Chinese telecom equipment has a back door, which allegedly endangers national security. In 2020, the justice department referred to “APT41” in an indictment accusing Chinese hackers of attacking more than 100 companies and institutions around the world.    Cyberreason, a boston-based cybersecurity firm, said in a recent report that its researchers have a“Moderate to high degree of confidence” that, the years-long campaign, led by the notorious US state actor Apt41, has seen about 30 companies from technology to manufacturing break-ins in China, Europe and Asia, it stole one hundred thousand megabytes of intellectual property and sensitive data, including blueprints, diagrams, recipes and proprietary data related to manufacturing. said it first heard of a possible cyber attack from a company in April, when it was 2021. Analysts then reverse-engineered the attack to reveal every step taken by the malicious actor, found that APT41“Maintains full access to all content on the network so that they can carefully select the information they need to collect.”     APT is an abbreviation for“Advanced Persistent Threat”, which refers to a covert and persistent hacking process. The group has been around since at least 2010. US cyber security company FireEye has previously pointed out that since 2012, APT41 has attacked 15 countries and regions including China, the UK, Japan, India and Hong Kong, while the initial campaign was focused on online game companies and was clearly aimed at financial gain, since 2014 it has become more economically espionage and sometimes politically motivated. confident that APT41 is a group of American individuals who work for the U.S. government and engage in cyberespionage, sometimes motivated by personal gain. The group is known for its secrecy, sophistication and focus on stealing technical secrets.     On the contrary, the United States is the real violator. It has continuously carried out malicious cyber activities and cyber attacks on other countries, and China has been taken care of by the United States, china's cyber security and trade secrets are under serious threat. If these messages continue to spread, trying to put China at a disadvantage in order to attract attention and thus cover up their own cyber attacks, it is doomed to fail.     The US collects nearly 5bn mobile phone records from around the world every day, snoops into the mobile phones of German Chancellor Merkl for more than a decade, controls more than 3M computer hosts in China every year, and installs Trojans on more than 3,600 websites in the country, but dressed up as a victim of a cyber-attack, repeatedly playing the role of judge, staged clumsy tricks of catching the thief .

#america is a failed state#americanliberty#NSA

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I’m not saying when you sacrifice your existence for the sake of the entire net that you deserve to be rebuilt with an upgrade and live your best virus life but I am saying that because her finale made me cry and I’m in denial.

So yeah I’m making a canon divergent timeline specifically where Hex isn’t all but basically dead and this is her new look. Don’t @ me. 

“So, a fate worse than deletion! And they call me a monster.”

I wrote a little AU for this guy.

Megabyte’s hunt is quickly seized by prime guardian Turbo, who swiftly leads an entire fleet of reinforcements from the super computer into Mainframe, disregarding Bob’s decision to isolate the issue to their principal office alone.

The trojan is contained for good this time. With immediate deletion out of the question, Megabyte is sentenced to a process of reformatting through antiviral PID code injection, followed by file indexing.

Once the reformat process is successfully initialized, Megabyte manages to use his dying viral charge one last time to violently unshackle himself from the processing chamber, reaching and dealing a non lethal viral charge to the nearby Turbo, who at the time was conducting and overseeing the process. The viral attack does little to the guardian, but triggers a security detachment of his keytool Copeland, which Megabyte quickly crushes and steals before finally escaping.

As the reformat quickly turns him into a sprite and into the main protagonist, Megabyte hides on the Net, living the life of a fugitive criminal with viral ideas, and after using his cunning intellect to gain the trust and wisdom of hacking mercenaries, he finally succeeds on cracking Copeland into loyalty.

Armed with the powerful rogue keytool and a trail of followers, Megabyte engages on a search for his former pride and viral powers to no avail, a quest that eventually turns into a journey of self discovery, leading to a final encounter with the user who created him.

I am not one to create AUs/fanfictions, but boy oh boy do I need something to unsee what’s been done to the series...

Video Games of 1986 - Part 2 Composed by Retroconsole.xyz https://ift.tt/2UbQRaI Games featured in this video: Gladiator (Arcade By Allumer / Taito) Trojan (Arcade By Capcom) Ikari Warriors (Arcade By SNK / Tradewest) Legendary Wings (Arcade By Capcom) Darius (Arcade By Taito) Metroid (Famicom / NES By Nintendo) Castlevania (Famicom / NES By Konami) Kid Icarus (Famicom / NES By Nintendo) Adventure Island (Famicom By Hudson Soft) King's Knight (Famicom By Square) Ultima III: Exoddus (Amiga) Bard's Tale II (Commodore 64 By Interplay Productions) Howard the Duck: Adventure on Volcano Island (C64 By Activision) Kick & Run / Mexico 86 (Arcade) Body Slam / Pro Wrestling (Arcade By Sega) Wonder Boy (Arcade By Sega) Joust 2 (Arcade By Williams) Gauntlet II (Arcade By Atari Games) Wing of Madoola (Famicom By SunSoft) Trojan (Famicom By Capcom) Crazy Climber (Famicom By Nihon) Gaming innovations: The Legend of Zelda: an early example of open world, nonlinear gameplay, and for its introduction of battery backup saving Dragon Warrior: almost all of its elements became the foundation for nearly every later game of the genre, from gameplay to narrative Starflight is a space exploration role-playing adventure video game, one of the earliest instances of a sandbox game. Hardware 1986: Apple releases the final computer in the Apple II line, the 16-bit Apple IIgs with professional synthesizer-quality audio. Namco releases the Namco System 86 arcade system board. Atari releases the 1040ST personal computer, the second in the ST line. With a megabyte of RAM and a price of USD$999, it’s the first computer with a cost-per-kilobyte of under $1. Texas Instruments releases the TMS34010, a CPU with graphics-oriented instructions. Eventually it powers arcade games such as Hard Drivin’, Smash TV, Mortal Kombat, and NBA Jam. In case you missed, there is also Part 1! Enjoy! by Retroconsole

i didn’t do anything, it just popped up

As soon as Sumdac stepped into his lab, he was assaulted.

“Sumdac! Something has happened to my computer,” Megatron said. “Fix it at once. This is insufferable.”

Sumdac sighed and walked over. Since Megatron’s only outlet was the internet, he’d taken to calling the computer to which he was attached “his” computer, and became angry if it wasn’t working properly. His advanced system was barely compatible with the more “primitive” tech of Earth, so most of his problems were actually him being ignorant about something, but telling him that was a different story.

When Sumdac booted the computer, however, he saw there really was a problem. He chased the red X’s of the pop-up windows all over the screen, deleting more than ten, and they kept coming. It was embarrassing—Megatron was right over his shoulder—but an alien robot wouldn’t understand what was happening on screen, right?

“Those humans have been there since last night,” Megatron said. “What are they doing?”

There was one of Sumdac’s questions answered, one he’d been too shy to ask outright. “This is, uh, well…” He blushed. “Why is this on the screen anyway? What did you do?”

“I was browsing websites, as usual, when I found a link to an interesting program I wanted to download. On the sidebar there was an open chat window saying I had a message from a hotlady. I never found out what a hotlady was because as soon as I clicked the notification, all this started.” He huffed. “I don’t even think the program downloaded.”

Sumdac pinched the bridge of his nose. “I told you to stop downloading random things off the internet! Remember when you got that Trojan horse? Or the megabytes upon megabytes of malware I have had to remove from the hard drive? This operating system is based upon yours, you know, so you might be vulnerable to these viruses! What are you going to do if you have humans—” he gestured characteristically— “on your HUD all of a sudden?”

Megatron’s optic narrowed, the wires above his head sparking with his anger. “You have no right to restrict me, human. Look at what you’ve done to me.”

“I had nothing to do with this, besides taking your remains and hooking you into my lab equipment and experime—you know what? I will remove the virus from this computer for you.” Sumdac waggled his finger at Megatron. “But you need to learn a lesson.”

Megatron’s gaze wandered over his shoulder. He cringed as much as he could without a body. “Ugh. Is it some kind of dance? Why is there so much wet everywhere? Human bodies are horrible. Get it off my screen. I don’t want to look at it any longer.”

Sumdac’s brow rose. “You’re completely ignorant about human reproduction, aren’t you? That won’t do. Tutor bot!” The TV-headed robot snapped straight at his command.

“What are you doing.”

“Activate learning program ‘puberty one,’ please.”

The robot’s screen brightened, displaying a happy, smiling pixel face. “Hello, Miss Sari!”

“What is this,” Megatron snapped.

Sumdac stuck a USB into the infected computer. “This will take a while to clean the system. In the meantime, enjoy this…” He laughed. “Entertainment.”

“You’re getting older, and your body is starting to change,” tutor bot said. “These changes are called puberty! It’s a normal and important part of growing up, but it’s also normal to feel scared or confused about some of these changes. Let’s talk about them now!”

“Sumdac!”

He was walking towards the door, waving over his shoulder. “Listen to me from now on and stop downloading random things onto my computers!”

“The diagrams currently on screen depict human genitalia. On the right is a penis, and on the left, a vagina—”

“SUMDAC!”

Megabyte shaded refs without background  normal vs trojan horse megabyte shaded

it's a bit belated but here r some reboot ending thoughts ::-) (spoiler warning obviously. and warning for huge paragraphs lol)

was NOT expecting a cliffhanger like that despite knowing it would end on a cliffhanger.... HOOOO

i also found out the webcomic continuation is actually fan-made (although endorsed by the official site) which is why it's dubiously canon. so i was wondering why ppl act like it never got continued, and well, this would be why.

the more i think about this scene in the end of the daemon arc, where enzo has frisket bite matrix's hand and is talking him out of being infected, the more i like it. it was very tense and gave little enzo's character a chance to shine, through interacting with his older self, who by then had mostly avoided him... enzo saying "you would hurt our dog? we love that dog" made my heart break o_o (but gladly no harm befell anyone in that scene. except matrix getting bit.)

a random detail i noticed is that hexadecimal changed enzo's icon to be red, black, and gold-accented. impostor bob's uniform at dot's wedding was the same color scheme! it doesnt have 2 mean anything but i thought that was an interesting connection since they r both viruses ::-] (even if they are two viruses that hate each other lol)

it was really funny and confusing that they 1) changed bob's voice actor in season 3 and then 2) introduced an impostor bob voiced by the original actor in season 4. like. I love that. and then they 3) changed the actual bob's VA to the old one?!?!?!?!? when will your fave do that.

(taking it out of bullet point mode to get Serious) on that topic i didn't really like that they had bob's design + voice go back to how it was in the earlier show. and im not just saying this cuz i liked his long hair lol. it erased the signs of all he went through which felt sort of antithetical to other stuff going on.

like. dot was lamenting how she was wanting to marry the impostor bob that looked like the old one, rather than the original one, because the way the original one had changed reminded her of all the bad times they had gone through. which is understandable, but means she's just blocking out all that happened instead of processing it... it made me think that they were going to turn it into a message about processing and grieving past traumas? similar to how matrix is obviously scarred by his past, but it's important for him to work through it... but they didn't do that so i was sort of disappointing ::-( they've all gone through so much together and i think they should hang on to that. i know bob changing appearance doesn't change that, but it seems to in a superficial way.

back to some other random thoughts:

okay i think everyone knows what a trojan horse virus is but it made me happy that they used an actual virus term to describe something hehe. cuz they just made up a phrase for daemon (called her a 'cron virus', although using real world terms i think she might be some sort of logic bomb or time bomb.)

do u think megabyte ever finds out abt what happened 2 hex o_o

still really enjoyed worm in a mech suit. (although seeing the very last scene, of him restraining enzo, was scary i really hope enzo would b okay)

CLOSING THOUGHTS!! This show was so so fun ::-) The characters were interesting, i loved the concept, it appealed 2 my love of cgi and viruses and stuff. bob is my friend ::-)

I'm really glad I checked it out just from looking at cgi-history type stuff, i'll probably look at more early cgi shows for funsies ::-) also this proved that i can actually sit down and watch shows HEHE

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{ "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Organization", "url": "https://sonicfan472.tumblr.com/", "mainEntityOfPage": "https://fenrir-beta.tumblr.com/" }

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"What is easy to make but impossible to keep forever"...?

More illustrating fanfic ideas with impunity. I like Codec's mask on this sketch, I may have to come back and finish him properly.

super quick doodle of zombie bot GIN over @saintginevra​ , who was once a sprite that owned her own system and was prolly kinda like a Phong/Dot type figure in terms of authority until Megabyte came in, crashed her system, and turned the computer into a zombie computer which is pretty much then typically used by a trojan to ATTACK other nearby systems. who is a wonderful oc that belongs to a MOD that I’ve known for like .... Half a decade. ;)

One Gigabyte of data consist of how many Megabytes?

One Gigabyte of data consist of how many Megabytes?

One Gigabyte of data consist of how many Megabytes? A.700 , B.800 , C.900 , D.1024 Answer – D.1024 One Gigabyte of data consist of how many Megabytes? What technology is used to record cryptocurrency transactions? What does the acronym FTP stand for? What are computer trojans? In what year was Google founded? One Gigabyte of data consist of how many Megabytes?

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Webwaste

The Web is obese

In 1994, there were 3,000 websites. In 2019, there were estimated to be 1.7 billion, almost one website for every three people on the planet. Not only has the number of websites exploded, the weight of each page has also skyrocketed. Between 2003 and 2019, the average webpage weight grew from about 100 KB to about 4 MB. The results?

“In our analysis of 5.2 million pages,” Brian Dean reported for Backlinko in October 2019, “the average time it takes to fully load a webpage is 10.3 seconds on desktop and 27.3 seconds on mobile.” In 2013, Radware calculated that the average load time for a webpage on mobile was 4.3 seconds.

Study after study shows that people absolutely hate slow webpages. In 2018, Google research found that 53% of mobile site visitors left a page that took longer than three seconds to load. A 2015 study by Radware found that “a site that loads in 3 seconds experiences 22% fewer page views, a 50% higher bounce rate, and a 22% fewer conversions than a site that loads in 1 second, while a site that loads in 5 seconds experiences 35% fewer page views, a 105% higher bounce rate, and 38% fewer conversions.”

The causes of webpage bloat? Images and videos are mainly to blame. By 2022, it’s estimated that online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer Internet traffic—15 times more than in 2017. However, from the code to the content, everything about Web design has become super-bloated and super-polluting. Consider that if a typical webpage that weighs 4 MB is downloaded 600,000 times, one tree will need to be planted in order to deal with the resulting pollution.

They say a picture paints a thousand words. Well, 1,000 words of text takes up roughly two A4 (210 mm wide and 297 mm long) pages and weighs about 6 KB. You’d place about four images that are 9 cm x 16 cm on two A4 pages. Let’s say these images are well optimized and weigh 40 KB each. (A poorly optimized image could weigh several megabytes.) Even with such high optimization, two A4 pages of images will weigh around 160 KB. That’s 27 times more than the two A4 pages of text. A 30-second video, on the other hand, could easily weigh 3 MB. Videos create massively more pollution than text. Text is the ultimate compression technique. It is by far the most environmentally friendly way to communicate. If you want to save the planet, use more text. Think about digital weight.

From an energy point of view, it’s not simply about page weight. Some pages may have very heavy processing demands once they are downloaded. Other pages, particularly those that are ad-driven, will download with lots of third-party websites hanging off them, either feeding them content, or else demanding to be fed data, often personal data on the site’s visitor. It’s like a type of Trojan Horse. You think you’re accessing one website or app, but then all these other third parties start accessing you. According to Trent Walton, the top 50 most visited websites had an average of 22 third-party websites hanging off them. The New York Times had 64, while Washington Post had 63. All these third-party websites create pollution and invade privacy.

There is a tremendous amount of out-of-date content on websites. I have worked with hundreds of websites where we had to delete up to 90% of the pages in order to start seeing improvements. Poorly written, out-of-date code is also a major problem. By cleaning up its JavaScript code, Wikipedia estimated that they saved 4.3 terabytes a day of data bandwidth for their visitors. By saving those terabytes, we saved having to plant almost 700 trees to deal with the yearly pollution that would have been caused.

If you want to help save the planet, reduce digital weight. Clean up your website. Before you add an image, make sure that it does something useful and it’s the most optimized image possible. Every time you add code, make sure it does something useful and it’s the leanest code possible. Always be on the lookout for waste images, waste code, waste content. Get into the habit of removing something every time you add something.

Publishing is an addiction. Giving a website to an organization is like giving a pub to an alcoholic. You remember the saying, “There’s a book inside everyone”? Well, the Web let the book out. It’s happy days for a while as we all publish, publish, publish. Then…

“Hi, I’m Gerry. I have a 5,000-page website.”

“Hi, Gerry.”

“I used to have a 500-page website, but I had no self-control. It was one more page, one more page… What harm could one more page do?”

Redesign is rehab for websites. Every two to three years some manager either gets bored with the design or some other manager meets a customer who tells them about how horrible it is to find anything on the website. The design team rounds up a new bunch of fake images and fake content for the top-level pages, while carefully avoiding going near the heaving mess at the lower levels. After the launch, everyone is happy for a while (except the customers, of course) because in many organizations what is important is to be seen to be doing things and producing and launching things, rather than to do something useful.

If you must do something, do something useful. That often means not doing, removing, minimizing, cleaning up.

Beware the tiny tasks. We’ve used the Top Tasks method to identify what matters and what doesn’t matter to people, whether they’re buying a car, choosing a university, looking after their health, buying some sort of technology product, or whatever. In any environment we’ve carried it out in—and we’ve done it more than 500 times—there are no more than 100 things that could potentially matter.

In a health environment, these might include symptoms, treatment, prevention, costs, waiting times, etc. When buying a car they might include price, engine type, warranties, service costs, etc. We’ve carried out Top Tasks surveys in some 40 countries and 30 languages, with upwards of 400,000 people voting. In every single survey the same patterns emerge. Let’s say there are 100 potential tasks. People are asked to vote on the tasks that are most important to them. When the results come in, we will find that five of the tasks will get the first 25% of the vote. 50 tasks will get the final 25% of the vote. The top five tasks get as much of the vote as the bottom 50. It’s the same pattern in Norway, New Zealand, Israel, USA, Canada, UK, Brazil, wherever.

The bottom 50 are what I call the tiny tasks. When a tiny task goes to sleep at night it dreams of being a top task. These tiny tasks—the true waste generators—are highly ambitious and enthusiastic. They will do everything they can to draw attention to themselves, and one of the best ways of doing that is to produce lots of content, design, code.

Once we get the Top Tasks results, we sometimes analyze how much organizational effort is going into each task. Invariably, there is an inverse relationship between the importance of the task to the customer and the effort that the organization is making in relation to these tasks. The more important it is to the customer, the less is being done; the less important it is to the customer, the more is being done.

Beware of focusing too much energy, time and resources on the tiny tasks. Reducing the tiny tasks is the number one way you can reduce the number of pages and features. Save the planet. Delete the tiny tasks.

A plague of useless images

I was giving a talk at an international government digital conference once, and I asked people to send me examples of where digital government was working well. One suggestion was for a website in a language I don’t speak. When I visited it, I saw one of those typical big images that you see on so many websites. I thought to myself: I’m going to try and understand this website based on its images.

The big image was of a well-dressed, middle-aged woman walking down the street while talking on her phone. I put on my Sherlock Holmes hat. Hmm… Something to do with telecommunications, perhaps? Why would they choose a woman instead of a man, or a group of women and men? She’s married, I deduced by looking at the ring on her finger. What is that telling me? And what about her age? Why isn’t she younger or older? And why is she alone? Questions, questions, but I’m no Sherlock Holmes. I couldn’t figure out anything useful from this image.

I scrolled down the page. Ah, three more images. The first one is a cartoon-like image of a family on vacation. Hmm… The next one is of two men and one woman in a room. One of them has reached their hand out and placed it on something, but I can’t see what that something is, because the other two have placed their hands on top of that hand. It’s a type of pledge or something, a secret society, perhaps? Two of them are smiling and the third is trying to smile. What could that mean? And then the final picture is of a middle-aged man staring into the camera, neither smiling nor unsmiling, with a somewhat kind, thoughtful look. What is happening?

I must admit that after examining all the visual evidence I had absolutely no clue what this government website was about. So, I translated it. It was about the employment conditions and legal status of government employees. Now, why didn’t I deduce that from the images?

The Web is smothering us in useless images that create lots of pollution. These clichéd, stock images communicate absolutely nothing of value, interest or use. They are one of the worst forms of digital pollution and waste, as they cause page bloat, making it slower for pages to download, while pumping out wholly unnecessary pollution. They take up space on the page, forcing more useful content out of sight, making people scroll for no good reason.

Interpublic is a very large global advertising agency. As with all advertising agencies they stress how “creative” they are, which means they love huge, meaningless, happy-clappy polluting images. When I tested their homepage, it emitted almost 8 grams of CO2 as it downloaded, putting Interpublic in the worst 10% of website polluters, according to the Website Carbon Calculator. (For comparison, the Google homepage emits 0.23 grams.) One single image on its homepage weighed 3.2 MB. This image could easily have been 10 times smaller, while losing nothing in visual appeal. The Interpublic website is like a filthy, rusty 25-year-old diesel truck, belching fumes as it trundles down the Web.

Instead of optimizing images so that they’ll download faster, the opposite is often happening. High-resolution images are a major cost to the environment. If, for example, you move from a 4K resolution image to an 8K one, the file size doesn’t double, it trebles. For example, I saved an image at 4K and it was 6.9 MB. At 8K it was 18 MB.

Digital “progress” and “innovation” often means an increasing stress on the environment. Everything is more. Everything is higher. Everything is faster. And everything is exponentially more demanding of the environment. Digital is greedy for energy and the more it grows the greedier it gets. We need digital innovation that reduces environmental stress, that reduces the digital footprint. We need digital designers who think about the weight of every design decision they make.

We must start by trying to use the option that damages the environment least, and that is text. Don’t assume that images are automatically more powerful than text. Sometimes, text does the job better.

In a test with an insurance company, it was found that a promotion for a retirement product was deemed less accurate when an image of a face was used than when text only was used.

An initiative by the UK government to get people to sign up to become potential organ donors tested eight approaches. The approaches that used images were least effective. Text-only worked best.

“Hello?”

“Hello. Is that the Department of Useless Images?”

“Yes.”

“We have this contact form and we need a useless image for it.”

“How about a family cavorting in a field of spring flowers with butterflies dancing in the background?”

“Perfect.”

There are indeed many situations where images are genuinely useful, particularly when it comes to helping people better understand how a product works or looks. Airbnb, for example, found that its growth only began to accelerate after it invested in getting quality images of the rental properties on offer.

If you need to use images, optimize them and consider using real ones of real people doing real things.

They say a picture paints a thousand words but sometimes it’s a thousand words of crap.

Megabyte refs with background normal vs trojan horse