Posts by Gene Cash

Das Keyboard 4C TKL: Plucky mechanical contender strikes happy medium between typing feel and clackety-clack joy

Re: No back light on a black keyboard?

Actually, I would be buying it because it has no lights.

If your room is so dim you need lights on your keyboard, may I suggest you invest in these newfangled things known as light fixtures?

Thunderbird implements PGP crypto feature requested 21 years ago

No thanks

With current Mozilla developer levels of skill, I'd expect Thunderbird to send my private keys directly to China. I trust them to be about as competent on security as Trump is competent being president.

iOS 14 suffers app preference amnesia: Rebooting an iThing resets browser, email client defaults back to Safari, Mail

Re: Ha ha ha...

Yup, especially since Android 11 is now blocking access to the camera, so you can no longer use 3rd-party camera apps.

Feeling bad about your last security audit? Check out what just happened to the US Department of Interior

Nice picture

So did they also worry about getting shot for "carrying a bomb"?

In this part of the USA, that device in the left hand picture would get you instantly shot, no questions asked.

Internet Archive's way cool Wayback Machine gets way more websites in Cloudflare fail-over pact

Daaaaaannnnggg

Four hundred and sixty eight billion webpages. That's almost half a trillion pages. That's an accomplishment that doesn't get the recognition it deserves.

Brit MPs to Apple CEO: Please stop ignoring our questions about repairability and the environment

Re: The easy solution

> Don't buy Apple devices.

The problem... as an Android owner... is that Google/Android sucks just as much, and there's not any real competition to the current duopoly since Microsoft has proved exceedingly incompetent at phones.

Family wrongly accused of uploading pedo material to Facebook – after US-EU date confusion in IP address log

Re: 11Oct16

> unambiguous

Not without at least a 4-digit year. So is that the 16th of October 2011? Or the 11th of October 2016??

Climb every mountain, wsl --mount every Linux disk in latest Windows Preview

Re: Not till hell freezes over.

Considering the last time Windows looked at one of my Linux filesystems and it trashed it, I agree.

Australia starts second fight with Google, this time over whether app stores leak data, gouge devs, steal ideas and warp markets

Thanks

Thanks to Australia for at least asking the hard questions. Nobody else is even really doing that.

China launches and lands its first re-usable spacecraft

It's tiny

Apparently it fits in a standard payload fairing, meaning it's tiny, and certainly can't carry people.

OTOH, it might be 3 wheeled and easy to flip. Anyone seen Clarkson lately?

Taiwan tightens rules around local tech firms sharing tech with China

Re: Remember when people were afraid of the balkanization of the Internet ?

Well, I personally think when you give up local production, you've really harmed yourself. When the US stopped producing steel, it turned out to have a ripple effect that ended up being a really bad day.

Amazon spies on staff, fires them by text for not hitting secretive targets, workers 'feel forced to work through pain, injuries' – report

I'd like to stop buying from Amazon

But that would mean I'd have to stop buying anything, as local stores stock almost nothing I need.

The local auto parts place doesn't stock jack oil any more, for car jacks. Nor does it stock anything but the shittiest of gas cans or oil drain pans.

The local Best Buy doesn't stock wired mice, video capture devices, USB microphones, ethernet switches, or SSD drives.

Nowhere stocks a decent size bench vise, or decent brands of pliers, like Knipex.

When I wanted a decent motion sensitive night-light, so I didn't bang my shins going to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I went to Home Depot, Lowe's, Best Buy, Bed-Bath&Beyond, and a couple other places. They had shitty Chinese stuff that wasn't all that motion sensitive, or just stayed on for 10 seconds.

It's so bad, I don't even try any more, even though the Best Buy is only a block away.

The article starts off with "Amazon is famous for its extreme efficiency yet behind the curtain is a crippling culture of surveillance and stress"

I'd think they go hand-in-hand.

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

Is setting up a non-shitty email client really that hard?

It boils down to people being lazy and impolite.

How about people stop the goddamn top posting?

How about email clients having a plain-text version of the email instead of a choice between HTML and fuck-you? A true modern email client should be able to provide plain-text email by checking a preference. If it can't, then it is broken.

The advantage of plain text is that you can search it, and quote it, and thread a conversation in an archiving page, and do a lot of things that HTML breaks.

Why should I have to deal with parsing the shitty HTML a lot of mail clients (including Thunderbird) put out?

gmail and the Apple Mail do a lot of shitty things. For example, I regularly get work emails at home because Apple Mail just puts "Gene Cash" in the address, and people can't tell if that's my work address or my home address. People don't give a shit to the point that I've had to stop responding to these emails from home.

Why are people focusing on the HTML wrapper instead of the message inside it?

If you can't configure your email client, do you really belong on the LKML or writing kernel code?

So... just 'Good' then? KFC pulls Finger Lickin' slogan while pandemic rumbles on

Re: Stats

> Where I live we can have alternative for the same price so why bother with the fast food

Well where I live, I'm fucked. I have either shitty hole-in-the-wall dives that serve hair-in-the-eggs and sweat-in-the-coke or I can go to a chain where at least corporate sets SOME sort of minimum standards.

That's what I get for moving to a town of less than 45K where I can drive around the whole place in 25 minutes.

This PDP-11/70 was due to predict an election outcome – but no one could predict it falling over

Re: The elevator did it

We used to have Thanksgiving dinners in the '70s, where everyone would be gathered around the TV watching whatever parade and/or sporting event.

Then grandma would use her electric knife to carve the turkey, which would completely kill TV reception.

FYI: Chromium's network probing accounts for about half DNS root server traffic, says APNIC

OR we could fix the root of the problem

Can we turn domain hijacking into a privacy issue or something? Something we can sue ISPs over?

We've heard some made-up stories but this is ridiculous: Microsoft Flight Simulator, Bing erect huge skyscraper out of bad data

Sigh. I went from "what a cool stone fronting, I want a better look at that" to "ffffffffuuuuck, they sure turdulated that."

You there. Person, corp, state. Doesn't matter. You better not shoot down or hack a drone. That's our job – US govt

Re: Hypocritical

Or as my grandfather used to say: "I have 210 acres, a swamp and a backhoe. You'll never be found"

Good news: NASA boffins spot closest near-Earth asteroid ever. Bad news: We never saw it coming. Good news: It's also really small

Arecibo is borked

Arecibo was the main asteroid spotter, and with it out of commission... well, we miss some.

Farewell to notches and hole-punches? ZTE expected to announce mobe with under-display camera next month

Re: I would be happy with a no camera phone

I use my phone camera an absolute fuckton for documenting things.

For example, I used it to capture how the right switchpod of my bike looked before I disassembled it, and then various stages of that disassembly. I only needed the pictures for about 3 hours, but they were invaluable when I was putting it back together.

Friday I took a picture of where a router was supposed to go, to demonstrate it wouldn't fit there to the boss.

Phone cameras are worth their weight in gold.

Re: I would be happy with a no camera phone

So you're using your phone to make a call that doesn't use the phone as a phone...

(sorry, had to bring up the momentary dissonance I get when I do that)

I can see my house from here! Microsoft Flight Simulator has laid strong foundations for the nerdy scene's next generation

I feel really old

considering I flew the original Sublogic sim on the TRS-80

Xiaomi turns 10 and celebrates by sitting down to relax in front of its new transparent television

Re: Transparent TV

I'm wondering how it tells a pixel is transparent... are these "normally black" pixels?

Steve Wozniak at 70: Here's to the bloke behind Apple who wasn't a complete... turtleneck

What people remember you for...

Woz: all the good he's done and things he's invented.

Jobs: "Oh yeah he was the asshole one at Apple, right?"

Firefox maker Mozilla axes a quarter of its workforce, blames coronavirus, vows to 'develop new revenue streams'

This is actually a good thing

If they have fewer "developers" then they can't remove as many features as usual.

As far as I'm concerned, they're negative "value-add" these days.

Android user chucks potential $10bn+ sueball at Google over 'spying', 'harvesting data'... this time to build supposed rival to TikTok called 'Shorts'

App that "competed" with Faecesbook was probably Google+

Google reports 80% spike of Flutter-built apps in Play Store as 1.20 is released

How long before they abandon it, like most everything else?

> Google seems committed to the project

Google has seemed committed to a lot of projects that are now just historical footnotes. Also see Revolv.

China slams President Trump's TikTok banned-or-be-bought plan in the US

What ticks me off, as an American, is that I can buy a lot of useful and different tools at Harbor Freight, which are not available at Sears/Home Depot/Ace/Lowe's/etc at any price.

Leaky AWS S3 buckets are so common, they're being found by the thousands now – with lots of buried secrets

Re: Outsourcing

Not Amazon's fault this time. Amazon themselves warn against this, and try to make it difficult. People still do it.

So many stars, so little time: Machine learning helps astroboffins spot the most oxygen-starved galaxy yet

"All I see are the lights of a billion places I'll never go"

https://i.imgur.com/9O9aco8.jpg

Thank you, Howard Tayler

An irritating itch down the back of your neck? Searing midsummer heat? Of course, it can only be SysAdmin Day

Re: Colonies of sysadmins have a single queen

Hey, I'm still sore over my loss of Schlock Mercenary.

Fresh astro-underwear, anyone? Orbital shenanigans as Progress freighter has last-minute ISS docking wobble

Re: Only 3 hours?

> Are you sure that dropping an exploding rocket on Orlando wouldn’t be an improvement?

It would definitely be an improvement. Source: I live there, give me 10 minutes notice.

Re: Only 3 hours?

Yes, the "normal" Russian trajectory is just under 3 days, but that's a long time cooped up in a very tiny Soyuz.

They've spent a lot of time and effort getting an accurate launch, accurate tracking, and accurate correction burns. After launch they have a very short time to determine the trajectory and the appropriate correction, then do the correction. This took several years and 3 or 4 Progress missions before it was approved for manned Soyuz.

Things are launched east to take advantage of the Earth's rotational speed. it's WHY Kennedy is on the east coast.

Butterfingers who don't bother with phone cases, rejoice: New Gorilla Glass 'Victus' tipped to survive 6ft drops

Here's a better option

Don't buy a phone with a glass back. I reached that decision with my Nexus 6P. Fuck that noise.

I drop stuff so often my grandfather had a special racist swear he would yell at me.

Did you know if you have an empty (no oil, no spring) motorcycle fork leg and you drop it, it destroys the bumpstop and all the hydraulic valves? That cost me nearly $450.

Did you know if you drop one of those WD MyPassport drives, even when it's off, it's destroyed and will never read data again?

You can also destroy Cisco routers and PIX firewalls by dropping them.

Twitter hack latest: Up to 36 compromised accounts had their private messages read – including a Dutch politician's

Twitter reported a loss this quarter of $1.2bn

Well, that's the best news I've heard in a couple months!

Frozen: Bank accounts of suspected Chinese Cisco counterfeiters who exploited pandemic shortages

Re: Ouch

China shouldn't have needed to be notified. It should have been doing the notifying, considering it started there and its doctors were trying to tell people. Instead it tried to stifle the news until it got out.

My life as a criminal cookie clearer: Register vulture writes Chrome extension, realizes it probably breaks US law

Re: "Removed in v44"

> No, it's still there.

Yes, that is still there, but Preferences -> Privacy -> History -> Keep Until "ask me every time" is gone.

And the point is that you don't know what sites or subdomains are setting cookies, and that "Manage permissions" requires the full subdomain.

Re: "Removed in v44"

All of those options are a major PITA compared to a dialog that pops up for a new site and you just say Y/N

> hit the F12 button to bring up the Developer Tools when the open tab is the site you want to clear cookies from. Click the Storage tab and expand the Cookies option in the left hand menu. Click the relevant site name and all cookies for that site will be listed in the main pane. Select any you want to remove and hit the Delete key.

Seriously? Fuck that.

Don't need it

I still use Firefox v43, which allows you to pick and choose which cookies get stored from where, and stores that choice. Removed in v44.

IBM profits cratered 46% last quarter. But its share price is up ~5% because Wall Street expected that to be worse

Re: New buzzwords

Er, I worked for a company in 1986 where they used opex/capex as shorthand terms.

Mainframe madness as the snowflakes take control – and the on-duty operator hasn't a clue how to stop the blizzard

Data General

My community college (2-year degree) got a Data General to replace the SDS punchcard system. I remember finding and dumping my "user data profile" and being shocked to see my unencrypted password as the first thing to display. Even as a complete newbie, I knew that was not right.

Twitter hackers busted 2FA to access accounts and then reset user passwords

At least they seem to understand they fucked up. They're at least not going "we take our customer's privacy so very seriously"

OTOH I abandoned Twitter at the beginning of the month when they randomized their CSS to kill adblockers. I just don't have the patience to deal with the torrent of ads.

Black hole destroys corona

Re: In Real Time?

Einstein just called: he says you're a twit.

AMD fans forced to sit out latest Windows 10 Insiders build due to 'bug impacting overall usability of these PCs'

Linus won't be able to use Windows on his new AMD box?

Oh wait...

Bad news: Your Cisco switch is a fake and an update borked it. Good news: It wasn't designed to spy on you

Too expensive

You know your shit is too expensive when people go to this much trouble to make bootlegs, and still make a profit.

Linus Torvalds banishes masters, slaves and blacklists from the Linux kernel, starting now

Re: Wishy washy

I see it as my goal in life now to slip "dictator and minion" and/or "boss and peon" into some official technical documentation at work now.

An email banning our staff from using TikTok? Haha, funny story about that, we didn't mean it – Amazon

It's not irrational. TikTok does grab a ton of data.

"We're proud that tens of millions of Americans turn to TikTok for entertainment"

Why? That's like saying "We're proud that tens of millions of Americans babble about inconsequential trivia on Twitter" or "We're proud that tens of millions of Americans jerk it to PornHub" - who cares? It's not something to be proud of.

Shopped recently in a small online store? Check this list to see if it was one of 570 websites infected with card-skimming Magecart

Re: I won't shop at a small site

I've had too many friends with funds either frozen for months or outright taken by Paypal to ever trust them.

You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Another anti-immigrant rant goes viral in America – and this time it's by a British, er, immigrant tech CEO

Re: We hear these stories all the time

> I'm pretty sure most of the people I know are racist, but they're pretty sure that they're not

I was raised by horribly racist relatives in a podunk shithole in the Deep South. They thought "Roots" was a comedy, and Kunta Kinte was too uppity and needed to be beaten again. That was the point I realized something was wrong and started trying to get out of there. I think I was 14. My grandfather used the "n-word" at least 3 times a day. My grandmother swore "well, I'll be John Brown!" and JB was a famous abolitionist.

I'm probably pretty racist but I try not to be.

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

Re: I'm sure we've all done this too

> My ex-wife had the exact opposite effect

She wasn't named Margaret Dresden, was she?