Posts by HooHah!

Fix LibreOffice now to thwart silent macro viruses – and here's how to pwn those who haven't

Debian 10

Debian 9 (stretch) and 10 (buster) have libreoffice-librelogo versions 1:5.2.7-1+deb9u9 and 1:6.1.5-3+deb10u2, respectively, installed by default. My buster machine was upgraded from stretch.

I didn't even know it was there until I read this article. Feeping creatures, indeed!

Apple's poisonous Touch silently kills the GNOMEs of Linux Forest

Re: When will developers learn?

Thank you, XFCE developers.

I run XFCE on Debian stable. A bit behind the times, but *stable*. And if I need more recent, I have Xubuntu on a virtual machine.

NASA cuts inspire 'Planetary Exploration Car Wash & Bake Sale'

Re: Sponsorship

Or corporate sponsors could buy the right to not put their names on things. As Robert Heinlein suggested in his novel The Man Who Sold the Moon.

Extreme weather blown away from unexpected direction

Do you believe....

Do you believe everything you read from the IPCC?

Vacuum cleaner set Swedish nuke plant on fire

Human Error

"It was a human error, and those shouldn't occur in our power plants,"

What kind of error *should* occur? Martian? Tursiops Truncatus?

Of course, it is human error to assume that there will be no human error.

US decommissions massive Cold War nuke

@Bill B.: "I agree... we should keep at least one just in case the apes take over"

Who do you think are in charge?

"Darwin was wrong. Man is still an ape." -- Inherit the Wind.

MS denies secure boot will exclude Linux

Run out of space?

OK, suppose the UEFI folks let us add new keys to the system. How many keys will it let us store? Three? Five? 20? And what happens when that number is exhausted? Can we delete obsolete keys? How will the system let us identify which keys are obsolete?

The people likely to hit this problem are kernel developers and boot loader developers. Including Microsoft's kernel developers and boot loader developers. It will also affect some driver developers, and PC maintainers such as IT support people.

Messy, messy.

No pain, some gain: Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot examined

It's almost as if

Microsoft had taken over Canonical ...

Right. Unity is Microsoft Bob for Linux. That explains a lot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

MPs probe science behind bogus gov booze guidelines

Who is going to evaluate all that evidence then?

@Frederic Bloggs: I'm sure we can find volunteers. Considering the subject matter.

Farewell, Novell

Erratum

That's Provo, Utah, not Provost, Utah. Makes me wonder what else is wrong in the story.

Facebook causes eating disorders in teenage girls

Teenage girls....

Feh. Being a teenage girl causes eating disorders in teenage girls.

Steve Ballmer proposed $15bn Facebook acquisition

How appropriate

Given both companies' solicitude for privacy and security, I'd say it's a perfect match.

Unfeasibly vast amphibian found croaked on video card

I couldn't put the article down

It was ribbiting.

How I built a zero energy cost, zero carbon home server

Fit-PC 1

I've been running two Fit-PC 1s for network services on my SOHO network for several years. The only reason for two is that one is the firewall, the other provides everything else (including amanda backup to a 1 TB Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex), and (being paranoid) I wanted those functions separate.

The Fit-PC 1 is clearly underpowered compared to more recent small machines, and I would not recommend them to the author of the article for his application (if you can still get them). But they are solid reliable machines, well worth the price. They consume ~5 watts max each (my measurement).

I would suggest the Fit-PC 2, though.

The Fit-PC 2 should run from automotive 12 volt power. Folks using PV can bypass the inverter and wall wart to power them. That saves you those inefficiencies.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fit-PC

Is US prudishness ruining the internet?

Loud wowsers

How much of American companies' over-prudishness is because the companies are prudes, and how much because they cave in to the first loud wowser to come along and complain?

Darwin was wrong. Man is still an ape.

US appeals court bashes warrantless GPS tracking

And trespassing, too?

"FBI agents secretly planted the device on his Jeep Cherokee while it was parked on private property." So did they have a warrant to be on that private property or were they trespassing as well?

Judge limits DHS warrantless laptop searches

How to Secure Your Laptop Before Crossing the Border

How to Secure Your Laptop Before Crossing the Border

By Luigi Benetton

Here’s what you need to know about data searches at he United States border, and how you can protect sensitive data.

Canadian Bar Assn.

http://www.cba.org/cba/Practicelink/tayp/laptopborder.aspx

South African Bill to block all porn

This will make teaching South African history interesting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_smuts

3 men charged in $100m scareware scam

Unindicted Co-conspirators

How many of the alleged victims are running operating systems that are not Microsoft products?

While I'm all in favor of nailing these bozos' hides to the wall (after a fair trial, of course), it was Microsoft negligence that made this scam possible. How about fining M$ the money necessary to give each victim a full refund, compensation for their time and the Linux installation CD of their choice? They could pay it out of petty cash.

Nuclear synthi-jetfuel plants wanted for US Afghan bases

@Saucerhead Tharpe

"H Beam Piper does the Indian Mutiny with silicon based lifeforms

"Excellent"

Yup.

I just wish Piper had written more verses of his drinking song, "The heathen geeks, they wear no breeks." *Very* politically incorrect, as Piper was.

Apple voids warranties over cigarette smoke, users say

Biohazard?

I can see not working on the machine if it's so gummed up with accumulated tars and dust that the machine can't work correctly. Remember that good ventilation is essential to proper (read: cool) operation, especially with laptops.

The dirtiest machines I've ever worked on were those used in coal mines: black, conductive coal dust all over everything, especially fan intakes and heat sinks. You take them outside to blow and brush as much dist as you can off them. (Which is probably illegal now.) And that's regular semi-annual or quarterly maintenance.

But biohazard? Feh, someone's using PC as an excuse to duck work, and to duck telling the customer that the customer screwed up.

Cosmic rays hit Space Age high

And it's all our fault

And who will be first to claim it's anthropogenic?

Paris, because she's anthropogenic.

Breakfast cereal freebie CD dishes up hard-core smut

How to Sour A Relationship!

Way to go, Palmer: blame the boyfriend first. Knee-jerk political correctness sounds to me like a really good way to sour a relationship.