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Laptops with Stickers

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431–440 of 785 posts

Re: Laptops with Stickers

#431

I got rid of all mine after getting disillusioned with every one of the causes they represented.

This is the main reason I've never gotten a tattoo - how I feel about whatever it is will almost certainly change.

I get this, but thankfully the regrettable tattoos I got back in the day were small/simple enough to hide under cover-ups. My former tattoos were drug-related, but these days, they're all themed with the retrovideo games I still love play, especially when I need a breather from everything else.

As a result, I am that guy that tells people a few rules about tattoos:

1. Don't get a tattoo of a band. They will eventually fall out of favor or do something stupid.

2. Don't get a tattoo of any person unless they've been dead for a long, long time. Like a band, a person will also eventually fall out of favor or do something stupid. Even after they're dead, it may still be uncovered that they did something stupid in secret.

3. Don't make your self-expression about other people. Rules 1 and 2 should have already put you on this path.

4. Consider time. So you like cars, especially the 1987 Pontiac Firebird you had in high school. Have you always liked cars? Will you always like cars? Have you and will you always like that car? If there is doubt, rule it out.

5. Are you drunk or high? Best sleep on it.

6. Can you be honest with yourself? This is the Catch 22 question, but an important one. We tend to have a few versions of ourselves to contend with; the one we want to be, the one others perceive us as, and the one we need to be. Sometimes they align, sometimes they don't, but self-expression hinges on understanding the difference and allowing that we might be deceiving ourselves about who we really are, sometimes.

Getting a tattoo is a remarkably difficult and personal thing that I see a lot of people not take seriously enough, then live to regret it, myself included. The artist who has now done all my visible work is an absolute master at getting people to slow down and think about what they want, which was a terrific boon in my life, because he probably did more for me as a person than my therapist did. His clients are life-long, one even having traveled from another country to get more work done by him. That's to say nothing of his absolutely radical art and style that always produces something unique and fit for the person to make part of their lives.

It's something I often think about when I look down at my arms, see those old game homages and realize, regardless of what else has happened in my life or whoever I thought I was at the time, they have been with me since the beginning and are still here, helping me through it.

Re: Laptops with Stickers

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can also use them as a reminder of how you felt/who you were when you got them. Even someone who get a very trendy tattoo should keep it: "look how I used to follow every trend and how I evolved because I would never do something like that now". Biologically and philosophically, tattoos are scars.

Getting scars on purpose is a quite questionable decision.

> Getting scars on purpose is a quite questionable decision.

Interesting. Why?

Isn't it a common and longstanding cultural practice, even among indigenous peoples? Intuitively, I'd say body modification is based on the desire to shape one's own body, something we usually embrace in fitness culture and medicine, for example.

I don't have any tattoos or scars, but I can't think of anything that would make them questionable.

Perhaps some of the objection arises from a confusion between body modification and self-harm?

Re: Laptops with Stickers

#433
post #428

My laptop hasn't had stickers since a CTO asked why mine didn't have any stickers like the ones on the laptops of his cool cloud team. Personally I've found laptop stickers bad taste since then.

To me stickers on laptops are as tasteless and kitschy as tattoos. I would never get a tattoo for the same reason I would never put a sticker on my laptop. Besides nobody gives a shit about your stupid political opinions or the software stack you use.

Well, nobody cares about you're views about stickers and tattoos, but you still commented. Compared to you though, nobody here called you a retard; maybe that says something about how people are here or how you tend to use inflammatory language when it's not needed.

Re: Laptops with Stickers

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m struggling to understand how you’ve put pride flags and death threats in the same category of “extremely divisive”. I see others have asked the same question, but you don’t seem to have the courage to respond. What’s divisive about a pride flag?

I struggle to believe you don't understand what they mean. There is many a homophobe in the world. GP isn't saying homophobia is good, simply that espousing a pro-LGBT viewpoint may upset people. Maybe they deserve to be upset, but that doesn't change that it may become your problem.

I think that normalising LGBT and its symbols was a necessary step towards acceptance. If it's still a controversial idea to some, it's on them.

Re: Laptops with Stickers

#435

I used to put stickers on my work laptop. Then one day I upgraded my laptop, which meant handing over my old one with stickers. Which meant scrubbing it (there's no reason I'll let whoever receives it to scrub it for me) Which was an absolute pain. I don't put stickers on my laptops anymore.

There's a big difference between the materials that's used for the sticker itself (paper, plastic) and the glue they used. By now I have a good feeling about the "removability" of a sticker once i have it in my hand.

Re: Laptops with Stickers

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but I have heard something similar from a sec conf before. Gist being if a laptop has stickers like this, then the chances of the owner being an engineer is significantly higher, so pentest teams / malicious actors can better focus their efforts on those individuals, and have a higher chance of gaining access to internal systems than if they targeted random folks in public. Doesn't help as well that argua…

That sounds like info you would already have by taking a look at LinkedIn or am I missing something?

You're missing something, but that's sorta the point. The idea of what a full-stack developer or back-end engineer or hacker (or whatever term we want to bandy about) looks like is largely based on stereotyping and a bit of myth. You can't tell what someone does for a living just by looking at them all of the time, but you can some of the time, so it's easy to play on that by dressing the part because we humans can be easily tricked into trusting our own information by default. If you cosplay as a network engineer, it's pretty likely that's what most people will think you do.

Say you're red teaming, and you are on-site looking to gain access to the server closet of a business. Some initial setup about you being there comes into play, but once there, it's up to you to look like you belong there, when some unwitting person with access to the server closet will lead you to it, then leave you to do your thing on the pleasant notion that you'll have the "problem" fixed by the end of the day. This is an ultra-simple scenario used as an example, but looking the part sometimes means having some stickers on your laptop that tell people you're really into a specific language or tool chain, or that you've been in the SOC trenches long enough to know what a lot of those inside jokes mean. Details often sell the lie.

Re: Laptops with Stickers

#437
post #392

I saw laptops like those on hackathons and always sort of assumed they were their personal machines. Kind of surprising to read here that some of those were apparently (company-owned) work laptops. Startup culture?

You see this at quite large companies. FAANGs and such.

Re: Laptops with Stickers

#438
post #114

One of mine is on quite a few laptops and at least one server: https://shop.kyefox.com/products/were-here-were-queer-connec... I was hoping, though not expecting, to spot it in here.

This one is hilarious

Re: Laptops with Stickers

#439

“We’re all unique and special, just like everyone else” (Some of the stickers are kind of cool, but I just can’t understand the logic behind thinking your MacBook #12,372 with a Python sticker on the back is worth flaunting online)

The same logic applies to commenting on forums. Or doing anything publicly really.

A political speech to address constituents is public, and is not the same importance as a random posting online.

Also, I’m under no illusion that my comments are anything but digital detritus, but at least comments here have the potential to be valuable (to me), I’m not sure about laptop stickers.

Re: Laptops with Stickers

#440
post #392

I saw laptops like those on hackathons and always sort of assumed they were their personal machines. Kind of surprising to read here that some of those were apparently (company-owned) work laptops. Startup culture?

When everybody is issued with a dull grey laptop, putting a few stickers on it is a nice way to know which one is yours when there's ten laptops on a meeting table and it can help users feels more responsible of their laptop. The nastiest/dirtiest laptops I saw were always sticker less.

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