Posts by willfe

'We hate what you’ve done with the place – especially the hate' Australia tells Twitter

Pretty easy technical solution for Twitter to solve...

Add to the server block in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf on their frontend loadbalancers (bit of pseudocode here, bear with me):

server { if (geoip.country = "aus") { return 451; } }

We have the 451 HTTP response code for a reason. Countries that fail to respect free speech need not burden themselves with access to platforms which do.

You may now whine about why [particular kinds of speech you hate] doesn't count and why [every idiot who forgot where the [close window] button lives] must be protected at all costs from seeing mean words on their screens, and why that protection simply must come in the form of doing everything physically possible to stop the mean words from being written rather than just teaching people how to close their browsers.

Reddit confirms BlackCat gang pinched some data

Solve the problem from the other end...

Don't be such a juicy target. Follow best practices to secure data and systems, and of course don't be viciously nasty, callous, incompetent jerks on top of it. Reddit's a very juicy target because its ownership, administrators and staff are arrogant to the extreme and are masters at doing inexplicably tone-deaf and stupid things at the worst possible moments. Medical providers are very juicy targets because they're infamous for utter incompetence in securing patient data and related infrastructure (they heal people, not build IT infrastructure, and they have a well-deserved reputation for getting security wrong). Nvidia's a juicy target because they're one of just a handful of vendors of highly sought-after products but have a reputation for being malicious and anti-competitive in their market and notably hostile towards open-source development.

Being notorious (for good or ill) doesn't just attract desirable attention. It attracts groups like these more than being boring does.

Apple stomped all over NYC store workers' union rights, judge rules

Re: Workers rights in the US

Given it's NYC I'm surprised the court didn't reward the prevailing party (the workers) with an extra tax on their income as compensation for its time and a "temporary income adjustment" to compensate Apple for its inconvenience.

FTC accuses DNA testing company of lying about dumping samples

$75,000 settlement! Oh no, how can they possibly afford that?

I sincerely wish governments would start imposing *meaningful* fines and penalties on companies for stuff like this. $75k is pocket lint, even for a "smaller" biotech company like this. Assuming the settlement goes as described here, the company will probably buy the lawyer responsible for it a brand new mansion as thanks for all the profits saved.

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

Doesn't even trust his own company's products

I'm delighted knowing that this Microsoft engineer was using Amazon and Apple products to automate his home in lieu of whatever incompetent also-ran flavor of it his employer offers. And the best part is he's not immediately drop-kicking all that fancy Amazon gear straight back out the front door and safely out of his house.

New York City latest to sue Hyundai and Kia claiming their cars are too easy to steal

Wait...

Why aren't they arresting and prosecuting the thieves instead of shouting at the lock makers?

Twitter now worth just a third of what Musk paid for it

The Seething is Real

Before the acquisition, Twitter was "the most important platform in history" and "immeasurably valuable," and letting a monster like [person we previously all worshipped for building electric cars, LEO satellite internet, SpaceX, etc.] Elon "He Talked to Trump Once" Musk buy it would represent a terrible crime against humanity.

Now that he's paid for it, Musk is dumb, an idiot, a fool, and a soon-to-be permanently-embarrassed millionaire and Twitter is, of course, a "dying platform" and we should just "let it die." It's horrible that he fired a big chunk of employees from the company, but rah-rah we're rooting for the company to fail (leading to the firing of thousands more) so we can laugh at a billionaire (who we used to like) losing money on an investment.

It's worthless, untrustworthy and "dangerous" in some vague, ill-defined fashion, but naturally everyone's still using it, of course. That awful, horrible, life-threatening "pay for your vanity badge" decision, which will singlehandedly ruin Twitter and will lead to a mass exodus from the service has resulted in countless users ... paying for their vanity badges and complaining about it ... on Twitter.

I love all the impotent rage over this. Remember lads, if you don't like it, go build your own! Or try to co-opt another one (a tall order since every "not-Twitter Twitter" has been smeared as some kind of hate platform and is barely allowed to even exist despite breaking no laws). Oh wait ... you tried that, but the fediverse laughed you arrogant nutters back to the hug box.

Ampere heads off Intel, AMD's cloud-optimized CPUs with a 192-core Arm chip

Pining for a decent desktop

I know these guys are squarely aimed at the server market, but it'd be so nice to be able to get my grubby paws on a desktop workstation with even their lowest core count Ampere and decent I/O on board. Bitty boards are fun and all, but I'd love to have a 64-core 64-bit ARM-powered desktop with tons of memory and bandwidth. It's basically wishing for a unicorn to hope for it not to cost an arm and a leg, I know.

Remember those millions of fake net neutrality comments? Fallout continues

So Biden's FCC will be reversing Pai's decision in 2017 to scrap the rules and revisit net neutrality now, right?

Right guys? Guys?

It's official: BlackLotus malware can bypass Secure Boot on Windows machines

Even the manufacturers hate secure boot

My brand-spanking new ASUS Pro Creator X570 whats-its-name motherboard shipped with secure boot turned off by default. It made me chuckle knowing even the mobo vendors are getting sick of this crap too.

Arm still strong despite SoftBank loss as shipments pass a quarter of a trillion

Still waiting for desktop CPUs

I still think they're missing out on a potentially lucrative market by all but ignoring the desktop CPU segment. It's been repeatedly demonstrated with all the Raspberry Pi and workalikes (like Hardkernel's ODROID line) that just popping an ARM CPU meant for cell phones onto a bitty-board and bolting some connectivity and an HDMI port to it doesn't make a good desktop (too slow, not enough functionality) and trying to cram a beefy server CPU (like Ampere Altra) into a desktop case results in a Frankenstein's monster that still breaks the bank.

C'mon, ARM, throw out a design for a 16-core workstation CPU with decent bandwidth and good clock speeds, and I bet if it's cheap enough you'll find plenty of business (and even prosumer and home lab and hobbyist) buyers eager to throw $500-$600 at a workstation that can handle everything besides gaming and high-performance video work that stays below 100W under load and doesn't need a fan to stay cool.

(and no, I'm not buying a Mac Mini)

Twitch bans AI-generated Seinfeld show for making transphobic jokes

Re: Oh but it does

That's a very risky assumption, unless you want to also try to argue that Google's engineers are inherently [whatever]-ist because they had to scramble quickly to teach their image recognition AI that a black person was in fact *not* an ape or that Microsoft is filled with naht-sees because their AI bot "Tay" started quoting he-who-shall-not-be-named (not the orange one, but the other one he was compared to).

Yeah, I'd prefer we emphasize the existing precedent that you can be an asshole *period*, regardless of whether someone else takes offense. I'm not joking. Outlawing "being a jerk" is not going to eliminate jerks. I *really* wish people could bend their minds enough to understand that.

Google unleashes fightback against ChatGPT, a Bard by any other name

"Toxic and false information."

That didn't take long. Naturally none of us gets a vote on what qualifies for censorship.

Ah well. AI sounded neat there for awhile.

Amazon CEO accused of trampling labor laws with anti-union comments

Boy I can't wait for impotent, uninterested regulators to wake up and decide to carefully "monitor the situation" while doing nothing. Again.

Though this does reveal some serious amateur-level thinking and abysmal inexperience with unions by these C-level goons. Publicly bad-mouthing unions in general (or the union your own company's employees have formed) is never the right way to stop them and only makes you look like idiots (like these folks in charge at Amazon). The tried-and-true way of dealing with unions has always been embracing them fully then corrupting them completely, rendering them toothless, difficult-to-impossible to remove, and making your employees hate them far more than they hate you. Companies have done this for nearly a century, and it's awesome seeing these modern arrogant buffoons refusing to learn from history's lessons on this and lining themselves up for relentless hounding over the next few years before they reinvent the wheel.

Then again there's always the Walmart approach -- if a store votes to unionize, close the store and fire everyone employed there. Sure, they might get sued for doing it, but the union itself is dead in the water, the employees who voted for it are punished, the area/city where the store was setting up shop loses jobs and revenue, and so on. Walmart's got enough cash reserves to fight lawsuits until the end of time (or at least the end of the US dollar), and the Walton family is notorious for preferring courtrooms over union halls. And besides, it's not like a victory could actually force the company to re-open a store it shut down to avoid unionization. You may score a payout eventually, and maybe even a fine against Walmart, but the company will go on and you'll still be out of a job and without a local Walmart (though many people consider that last bit a victory of its own).

I gotta say I really do wish regulators would actually pay attention and do their jobs to help put an end to this kind of stupidity. But of course, the corporate world has pretty much sealed up their regulatory capture process and those regulators don't work for us anymore.

Elon Musk jettisons Twitter leadership, says takeover was 'to try to help humanity'

Re: Replaceable

Funny how every time someone *has* gone to the trouble of trying to build a replacement, it's been instantly maligned as "racist," "bigoted," "right-wing," "alt-right," "haven of not-sees," etc. Often also debanked and deplatformed while being smeared in the press as well.

Clever trick, really. Ban the "out" group by calling them [Mean Label 1 Wot Must Ban User When Applied]. Tease them that since Twitter is "private property" (lol, how'd that work out?) they can do as they please, so if they don't like it, they can go build their own. Once they do build their own, since you've already labeled them with [Mean Label 1], immediately label the new platform [Mean Label 1] because it's a haven for [Mean Label 1] and surely now represents the single biggest threat to humanity the world has ever seen (hurt feelings are srs business). Have your friends in the press publish and broadcast endless smears to that effect. Pressure Visa/MC to refuse to process payments for the target. Pressure banks to deny them service. Pressure ISPs to deplatform them.

I'm so glad this purchase went through. Now, I get to remind people that Twitter is a private company and can do what it pleases, and if you don't like it, you can go build your own. Go right ahead. There's a handy battle-tested blueprint available now to help deal with challengers to the throne. Surely no one would ever use such a thing, even if they've had it leveled against them in the past. Surely not.

God this is hilarious. I'm loving every second of it, and the seething sustains me.

'Chief Twit' Musk delivers bathroom furniture to Twitter HQ ... but not Tesla results

My God the raw seething this man generates for daring to tickle the cathedral delights me to no end.

The GNOME Project is closing all its mailing lists

Cynical, but accurate. GNOME is famously a "write-only" project; you will use it their way and you will like it, pleb. There's a reason I always install KDE on desktops instead of GNOME's garbage.

Microsoft's Lennart Poettering proposes tightening up Linux boot process

Sigh. It's a losing battle, isn't it?

A Microsoft employee, already infamous for absolute garbage software and unmatched arrogance, proposes yet another in a long line of overly complex "solutions" to imaginary problems that wrest control from the users and hand it to corporations in charge of the crypto keys, and people are cheering him on and mocking Linux users for being closed-minded.

People are just handing over the keys without realizing they'll soon be locked out of their own cars, and trying to explain why that's a bad idea is always just met with incredulity and mockery.

What's the point anymore? Maybe it's just time to move on to different architectures without this hardware security garbage in it, roll over to a Linux fork that doesn't entertain this nonsense, and leave the self-flagellating users to the walled garden they seem to be begging for.

Lufthansa bans Apple AirTags on checked bags

Their Property Their Rules, Right?

Airlines have arbitrarily banned random bits and bobs for decades now with either no explanation or with ridiculous excuses. Why is this one any different? Besides, isn't this a case of "their property, their rules" anyway?

I'd rather people fight airlines & TSA over carrying water bottles through security than bickering about brand-locked bluetooth emitters anyway.