This is still largely a developing situation, but it's hard to understate it's significance. A small (ish) group of folks from Reddit successfully brought the 9th largest hedge fund in the world to its knees. 

How? Short selling. And they outplayed these folks at their own game. 

It's a relatively simple concept really, albeit somewhat dodgy. The short seller "borrows" a stock from someone who is holding it (strange as this may sound, the stock market allows for this). When someone is holding a stock they've borrowed, they can sell it. Literally, they can borrow/rent a stock and sell it, so long as they buy it again when it's time to return that stock to the lender. 

This is exactly what Citadel did. They borrowed what became billions of dollars worth of stocks, and they sold them. A lot of them. They sold them while they were $18 a share, while they were contractually obligated to return them eventually to their lenders. 

If this sounds like a roundabout way to make money, it is. They were betting on Gamestop's failure. They were counting on predictions that their stock would tank. When it did, they were going to buy back these stocks at a much lower price and then return them to the lender. In doing so, they pocket the difference and have pure profit from Gamestop's demise. 

This did not work as planned. A group on Reddit got wind of this. SpookyZalost has a much better explanation than I do, but in short, the folks on Reddit started buying stocks in large numbers via Robinhood. This drove the stock price up rather than down. The stock prices exploded by over 1000% over the span of a week, and they became short in supply and forced Citadel to buy back these stocks at exhorbant prices in order to ensure that they could even get a hold of them at all. They had no choice but to shell out billions of dollars in order to fulfill their contractual obligations. 

This sort of dodgy behavior from hedge funds and lenders was the leading factor for the 2008 market crash. It has been 12 years since the great recession, and it is clear that they did not learn their lesson. Citadel had made a risky bet, and is now salty that it did not work in their favor.

But even more shocking were Robinhood's subsequent actions. Stocks were quickly suspended by the popular trading app, preventing anyone from purchasing any more stocks from the company.

This is already suspicious because it's technically market manipulation. It's a private company arbitrarily attempting to inhibit the market from rising, which is illegal and frowned upon strongly by the SEC. But the story doesn't stop there, because Citadel so happens to be a 40% stakeholder in Robinhood. IIRC, this makes Citedel the largest stakeholder. And thus, they have more control over Robinhood than any other player/party in their sphere of influence. So when Robinhood subsequently choked off Gamestop's stock rises to protect Citadel from experiencing further losses, it raised a lot of eyebrows in the industry, and was evidently a very clear indication of collusion to the tune of several billion dollars. And it happened practically in plain sight.

What are your thoughts on this situation?

I have spent nearly an hour looking through various online threads on these two subjects. Goto and Eval. They are both widely considered inherently evil (and to be avoided at all costs). And it's largely for good reason. The viewpoint of the majority is not always correct, but in this case, it's a slam dunk. There are very few use cases where the presence of these constructs is truly justified (and with GOTO especially, as there are even fewer valid uses for GOTO than for EVAL). 

Why? 

Starting with EVAL, it's highly problematic for serious reasons. Eval allows arbitrary code to be executed from a variable. This opens the door for all kinds of PHP code injection vulnerabilities or other hard-to-trace problems. In fact, EVAL is most often encountered in the wild when it is accompanied by a malicious backdoor. Its presence is rarely a good thing. 

And yet there are (rare) uses where it makes sense to use it. Perhaps the best truly valid use is for evaluating mathematical expressions (where writing a tokenizer/parser yourself would be tedious). Certain template engines (including my own) also use eval as a fallback in the rare case that compiled/cached templates cannot be written to the filesystem. In such cases as this, it makes sense to use eval. There is simply no other way to render compiled templates from memory in the event that the filesystem fails.

However, (scary as it may seem), there are applications that actually rely on it. MyBB is a perfect example. Eval is used on almost every single page to render every single template in the forum software. Believe me, it's a security risk. They do a lot of very rigorous filtering of the templates before passing it to the parser to stop any malicious activity, which largely mitigates the problem. But without their rigorous filters, this would open the door wide for all sorts of issues. And even still, we're relying on the robustness of their security hardnening, and there is simply no guarantee that there aren't dormant vulnerabilities.

Goto on the other hand, is a little more of an enigma. It's the statement that's both ridiculously powerful and ridiculously messy. There is very little (nothing really) that it can do in ways that functions can't. And while in certain rare edge cases, goto might shave a line or two, it also confuses those reading it. Goto is one of those statements that is so rarely used that most people forget it even exists. 

The question has to be asked: Why are you using GOTO? Almost always, functions can solve this problem better, with less confusing syntax.

Relying on GOTO would be like building a house with PCP pipes as the backbone of its structure. Sure, it could be done. But it'd be a bit of a black magic science that would totally shatter every notion of what it means to be in the construction industry. To actually rely on such a silly substance for the bedrock of a building would be laughable. Such is the perception of using GOTO to handle program flow. It simply just isn't done on a large scale by any reputable programmer. Ever.

Either way, these two constructs still find themselves in the wild (from time to time). Have you ever encountered them? Have you ever seen a good, valid use for either of these?

HY 

i`m Need Help to MYBB Plugin Avatar Gallery

Hey guys, sorry but once again it's not going as it should

After the installation and after creating a new gallery (e.g. Test1), when I click on it in the ACP, the error occurs:

Warning [2] count (): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable - Line: 599 - File: admin / modules / user / avatar_gallery.php PHP 7.4.14 (Linux)
File line function
/admin/modules/user/avatar_gallery.php 599 errorHandler-> error
/admin/index.php 824 require

LINE 599 /admin/modules/user/avatar_gallery.php = if (count ($ avatar) == 0)



I tried to upload an AVATAR anyway, after that it no longer shows the error in the ACP in the called gallery, the uploaded AVATAR is NOT shown in the ACP but in the user CP when you call this gallery it is available.

see my screen,
#############
   
   
   
   
#############
Then I have in the /admin/modules/user/avatar_gallery.php

Line 599

if (count ($ avatar) == 0)

changed on

if (is_array ($ avatar) && count ($ avatar) == 0)

changed
the images are now also displayed in the ACP, however
BUT :!
when I do that comes:


Warning [2] asort () expects parameter 1 to be array, null given - Line: 606 - File: admin / modules / user / avatar_gallery.php PHP 7.4.14 (Linux)
File line function
[PHP] errorHandler-> error
/admin/modules/user/avatar_gallery.php 606 asort
/admin/index.php 824 require
Warning [2] Invalid argument supplied for foreach () - Line: 607 - File: admin / modules / user / avatar_gallery.php PHP 7.4.14 (Linux)
File line function
/admin/modules/user/avatar_gallery.php 607 errorHandler-> error
/admin/index.php

Line: 606/607:
asort ($ avatar);
foreach ($ avatar as $ key => $ file)

And that BUT: if I upload an avatar to the new folder despite the error, the error message is gone and the avatar is also displayed in the new folder

I've already tried to get help at Mybb.de, but unfortunately I didn't get any help

Here the Plugin
Lg Tc4me

With the demise of Flash, I think it's time we had a thread for people to recommend good HTML5 games, which can replace any Flash games that people used to play, but no longer can .

I'll start with a couple of Pac-Man games. As you might expect from such an iconic game, there are quite a lot of HTML5 versions of Pac-Man out there. Sadly, many of them seem to be pretty lousy: a lot of them are missing key gameplay components altogether (the fruit being a common example of this). However, I did eventually find a good one, which did have the fruit, and everything else that a good Pac-Man game needs to have:

HTML5 Pac-Man

So far, this is the most faithful recreation of the arcade original that I can find. However, I will mention that it's quite a bit easier than the version I'm used to: the pace of the game is slower, the ghosts stay vulnerable for longer, and you get extra lives more frequently. As a result, I got up to level 15 on my first attempt (and then I didn't die: I just stopped because the game was no longer challenging me!)

As for Ms Pac-Man, there aren't as many of those; however, finding a good-quality one was actually easier:

HTML5 Ms Pac-Man

I will warn you, however, that this is a faster-paced game than the Pac-Man recreation that I linked above - and the difficulty ramps up rather quickly!

So, do you have any more that you'd like to recommend?

hi
i am @katrina kaif

Congrats @tc4me on your selection as Member of the Month for January 2021!

As many of you all are aware, MS Ocean is a long-standing community favorite. It has existed largely in its current form since 2014, and we have kept it over the years as a nostalgic reminder of the design we grew successful with. 

In fact, our current default themes (and every single variation of them) is based directly upon the very same theme. They all share the same HTML/templates, and the variations are solely stylesheet driven. Only a handful of lines of CSS diffrentiate them from each other, as different as some of them look. 

But with that said, we were digging through some older posts and screenshots, and we wanted to address some valid, long-standing requests from the community to simplify the official, default design. The idea of going back to the drawing board has long been under consideration. Should we refresh? 

What are your thoughts on MS Ocean? Could you see a variation of it being present as the MS frontrunner? 

Share your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions below! 
-Darth

I'm *this* close to deleting my Discord account. Discord has an unknown but probably high level partnership with Tencent. Unfortunately Discord is essentially my only point of contact with many friends at this point since I've deleted my Facebook account.

I'm actively working on getting rid of my reliance of Microsoft services such as OneDrive. I used to be deeply ingrained in the M$ ecosystem, having owned a Surface and a Windows Phone. Unfortunately running a Nextcloud isn't feasible for me. I don't trust myself to be able to keep it secure and to keep backups. Any advice would be appreciated!

I also want to delete my Google account, but that will severely hamper the usability of Android on my phone. At some point I'd like to try running Lineage OS in place of Android though.

Have any of you struggled with doing this, or have successfully taken the leap to rid yourselves of daily reliance on these companies?

Does anyone know what's up with Darth-Apple? Did I miss something? Haven't read or heard from him for a long time? Is everything ok with him? lg Tc4me

Happy Birthday That Punk Guy