Posts by cd

Linux Mint 21 hits beta, and it's looking fresh

I just tried Mint on an old Mac

2009 MacBook Pro that the latest MacOS won't run on without serious wrangling so once in a while I face some obsolescence.

Downloaded the latest Mintamon iso a few weeks ago, made Live USB with Balena because that iso won't work off Ventoy, sadly (great tool though). Then booted to the Live USB and installed on another USB after partitioning it.

Live USB saw my Wifi SSID, and so does the installed Mintamon stick, but will not connect.

Have to use wired connection to do the updates to get that driver. Which I do not have available, but am assured that if I did I could "update" to get the wireless Broadcom drivers I need. Using cellphone for Wifi, no wires.

Booted back to OS X, found that there might be drivers included in the distro, got the names of files, booted back to Mint USB, found those files and forced an install of them, getting several dire warned each time abotu how it would be better to just update.

Still doesn't connect. Sees the SSID, tries, but no.

I greatly appreciate the distro reviews, I read them all and have tried several. This same issue occurs every time with every distro I've tried,

My point being that recommending Mint for older Macs is not without the need for caveats.

I get that there are moral codes and so forth, but this felt like I was dealing with evangelicals rather than a technical issue.

How a botched kernel patch broke Ubuntu – and why it may happen again

The root!

The root!

The root is on fire!

Marriott Hotels admits to third data breach in 4 years

Re: clients

are they still clients if you're offering them a discount on your blackmail demands?

Ask Oracle or IBM that question.

In the US, Marriott has been known to heavily spam-call, pretending to have an existing business relationship. I dislike the company so do not and have not used their lodging. Are their calls a type of blackmail?

AI's most convincing conversations are not what they seem

The real question is...

...will we be able to pass their test?

Today's XKCD seems to have anticipated that nicely.

Teeth marks yield clue to widespread internet outage in Canada

Re: Not really novel

Last century I went to the large railroad company HQ to take my annual railroad rules class.

At one point we were going to be shown a safety film, this year's was called "Into Dark Territory!", which was likely about operating on trackage that isn't signaled The intro was in faux-50's TV B&W with dramatic noir music and lightning bolt title lettering down the screen.

Just after that title screen flashed on the monitor with accompanying orchestral flourish, the building went completely dark and quiet, until the emergency lighting came on years/hour/minutes later.

I ended up taking the test sitting on the floor in the hallway under an emergency light. And being let out by security.

This time it was a state trooper who lost control during a pursuit and knocked down a power pole.

Twenty years or so later in my railroad career I was flagging for crews laying fiber by the right-of-way. That's where cable belongs, IMO.

Brute force and whiskey: The solution to all life's problems

The farmer's name...

...was Guff, Farmer Guff

Atlassian: Unpatched years-old flaw under attack right now to hijack Confluence

Stupid Question

"Security company Volexity, which reported the flaw to Atlassian, has published an analysis of the situation that suggests attackers are able to insert a Java Server Page (JSP) webshell into a publicly accessible web directory on Confluence servers."

Couldn't the write permissions have been removed from that directory as a temporary patch?

US won’t prosecute ‘good faith’ security researchers under CFAA

Reporting system from another industry

I've worked in the US railroad industry in various ways, and have come close to being extinguished. In 2003, FRA (Federal Railroad Admin) began to work on a reporting system that separated blame and reporting, so that more safety incidents would be reported. They based it on a system that NASA had been using (guessing since the Morton-Thiokol incident), and NASA handles the data from their center in Sunnyvale.

Here's the background reasoning of the process.

The current page for the program.

The idea is that when an employee witnesses or participates in something that would be punishable and so they would not report it, they can submit a report online or by mail. The data is then anonymised and a summary is given tot he employer. NASA holds and protects all of the data to prevent obvious employer reactive behaviors. When I first read about this I was very interested and tried to apply myself. Likely my Aspie-rations got in the way.

"C3RS provides a safe environment for employees to report unsafe events and conditions and employees receive protection from discipline and FRA enforcement. In addition, railroads receive protection from FRA enforcement for events reported within C3RS."

It seems to me that the kinds of reporting where bounties are given which could remain much as they are.

The above system could be used for potential security threats where there is potential for legal retribution by the connected.

Fish mentality: If The Rock told you to eat flies, would you buy my NFT?

This is your chance

The perfect chance to become wealthy yourself, you have access to a random fish and the tech skills to follow the instructions here.

Apple patched critical flaws in macOS Monterey but not in Big Sur nor Catalina

Re: There is an official update available from Apple

There are updates for that model from here...http://dosdude1.com/software.html

They will help you download the OS, see menu bar, and then make an install stick with it. Boot from it, install the OS, then it has a patcher with the checkboxes already checked for your model, which you can alter if you like.

I have used his High Sierra 10.13 patcher on my mid-2009 and it worked fine, but I didn't like being forced to AFS or the early AFS performance and it seemed to use a bit more battery, which I'm often on, so I went back to 10.9.

Honestly the Jony Ive years of MacOS were characterised by poor visual design decisions. I get that these people are all in their elite club, but they do have to answer to customers at least a little bit, thus more ports returning to MBP's.

If they could get away with it, they'd sell a touch screen that grabbed the contents of your mind and uploded that to their cloud, while charging 10k fro the privilege.

In the graveyard of good ideas, how does yours measure up to these?

I had an idea for a comment...

...but had second thoughts.

Don't go giving Ubuntu any ideas, now.

FAA now says 5G airports may interfere with Boeing 737s

Re: In conclusion

I translate "Award Winning" as "Participation Trophy".

File suffixes: Who needs them? Well, this guy did

Re: It is transparency what is going on below!

I've noticed that only AH companies do this helpful conversion. Instead of anything Adobe or MS and having extra work to do fending them off from molesting my files, I use alternatives.

Affinity Photo has not changed anything, it does use its own suffix if I save developed files as such, nor have the other graphics programs I have used in my workflow, including other commercial ones like Capture One or DxO.

LibreOffice doesn't molest either.

Funny how it's all the companies I'd ban from any government branch if so empowered. I did have to disembowel iTunes on this older version of OSX to open music files with something else (BTW, right-click on iTunes>>Show Contents>> put contents in Trash, icon remains but is an empty shell, sorta like a Tory PM)

Machine learning the hard way: IBM Watson's fatal misdiagnosis

Parallel

Echoes the Theranos story in some ways. One could argue that the intent was cleaner and more sincere, but I wouldn't, given that it's IBM.

Waymo sues California's DMV to block autonomous car crash data from publication

Not Ready for Service

I've commented about this before, was fueling a diesel truck in a fuel depot near Phoenix, USA, not a place where cars typically go. A Waymo van festooned with all the whirling gadgets pulled in from the nearby street, a bit too fast, and started circling the pump area I was using. Which is surrounded by cinder block walls, so should have been obviously an obstacle.

The whirly-van drove a narrowing circle around the tanks and pumps and was headed right for my parked cab with the fuel hose active in the tank when the human driver intervened and grabbed the wheel and turned it away.

It then tried to circle again and the driver directed it out to the street and away with two hands on the wheel and some leaning. I was relieved when it sped out of sight.

It seemed to me that those vans are programmed to explore and intrude without concepts of private property or propriety, much like all the other products Google is associated with. They get away with it with Chrome and ReCaptcha but those are not potential catastrophic events.

Larry Page intended to not emulate Edison taking advantage of Tesla, yet his company takes advantage of a huge swath of the human population with far more damage and profit than Edison could have dreamed of.

What begins with a 'B' and is having problems at tsoHost? Hopefully not your website

A name change might be in order..

Something like Tso-Tso.

Not looking forward to a greyscale 2022? Then look back to the past in 64 colours

Those BMW's would temporarily have more color if the drivers used the turn signals, unless those are meant to fashionably blend in. Might as well.

Another great year in the offing, excellent and competent world leadership all in harmony, brilliant new variants likely to pop up from just about anywhere (given the coherent prevention guidelines being carefully followed) and they'll be easily transported and shared with the rest of the world via our extensive travel network. First class!

It's almost like the powers-that-be read last year's article, nodded sagely, and left the autopilot in charge for another trip around the sun.

Is Sealand accepting citizenship applications?

After deadly 737 Max crashes, damning whistleblower report reveals sidelined engineers, scarcity of expertise, more

If you think this is the extent of corporate capture in the transportation world, allow me to introduce you to the Federal Railroad Administration, which has been steadily hiring inspectors from the ranks of failed railroad managers since at least the Bush2 years.

Now we have Positive Train Control and increasing decision power is being taken away from operating crews while trains are still hauling thousands of tons of stuff like chlorine and propane and assorted chemicals that aren't allowed to be transported on highways, often traveling through and being stored in highly populated areas.

Not only do those products present a hazard, but the question of whether trains could run in the future if the GPS system in knocked out is arising. Purely coincidentally, not long ago a certain adversarial nation decided to demonstrate quite casually that they could destroy a satellite with their current tech.

Has there ever been a merger where the good guys ended up in charge? They all seem to end up with the very worst at the top. Almost like someone planned it that way.

Missouri governor demands prosecution of reporter for 'decoding HTML source code' and reporting a data breach

They should just change the state's name to Misery and get it over with.

Report details how Airbus pilots saved the day when all three flight computers failed on landing

Searching for flights...

...on airlines that still use DC-3's. Better late than never.

When everyone else is on vacation, it's time to whip out the tiny screwdrivers

Good vintage, decant carefully and enjoy

Posting from a 2009 MBP that has had 4 batteries, 5-6 hard drives, and now has a second hard drive where the DVD used to be.

Two things about MBP's of that era, which was a golden time for Apple laptop repairability and OS functionality, unlikely to be repeated given the current short-sighted company admin.

-The battery screws can be removed and installed with a flat-bladed screwdriver that spans two of the lobes, I actually do that over the special tri-lobe tool which came with one of my battery kits because I can reach for it and use it without remembering where I hid the special one from myself.

-The screws holding the bottom plate on have a bit of threadlock on for a good reason, the short ones will fall out and disappear quickly after that it disturbed. Locktite Blue (US name) works well for keeping them in place, shake the little tube, apply a drop, then put it in wet.

iFixit will make you a printable disassembly sheet with spots for all the screws to be placed. That is, if your printer is working.

Would have been a good time to replace the thermal paste as well. Apple tends to use too much and it'll be desiccated crumbles by now. You can test how the current stuff is working by downloading Macs Fan Control, which will display temp readings at all the internal sensors.

Audacity fork maintainer quits after alleged harassment by 4chan losers who took issue with 'Tenacity' name

They could name it Tubacity, that's how I pronounce Tuba City, AZ when I drive through. No one else using it and it sounds close.

Prez Biden narrowly escapes cicada assassination attempt, hunkers down in Cornwall

Their leader is named John. John Cicada sometimes changes the spelling of his name to remain incognito.

Seven-year-old make-me-root bug in Linux service polkit patched

If it stinks like a polecat...

Six years in the making, Vivaldi Mail arrives alongside version 4.0 of the company's browser

Re: Vivaldi/Thunderbird

Or Seamonkey, apparently, which had those features long ago. Which also works with the Firefox plugins like NoScript, uBlock Origin, etc. and there's even a Firefox plugin converter in case something doesn't.

Fastly 'fesses up to breaking the internet with an 'an undiscovered software bug' triggered by a customer

Fastly Over-rated?

See title

Tesla to build cars made of batteries and hit $25k price tag about three years down the road

The California plant had quality and labor issues when it was run by GM and staffed by UAW members. Then the partnership with Toyota resulted in higher quality and comparatively happy labor.

Source: Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg

Now Tesla is reportedly barely as good as GM was in in the 70's at either metric.

Musk is not even the Roger Smith of electric auto CEO's.

When Toyota and Honda make this kind of vehicle I'll be interested.

State of Iowa approves $17m in budget for Workday project after bid to use coronavirus relief funds was denied

Idiots

Out

Walking

Around

Diary of a report writer and his big break into bad business

Re: A Simple Observation...

Not to mention quantity over quality.

Perhaps a script/automation could be written to idio-cise (make PHB compliant) a Word doc, drawing on a dictionary of buzzwords and phrases and being able to set an output score on a scale of zero to subzero intelligence. There are times in my life I would've bought that.

SAP community suggestions for on-prem database canned as app giant looks cloudwards

A second padlock on the stable door?

So, where does Silicon Valley stand on S.230? Zuck wants 'industry best practices', Pichai demurs, Dorsey urges more Bluesky thinking

They need to implement a "TIme-Out" for these companies, give them six months or so inaccessible to all to give them time to think clearly and implement more effectively. If after that Time-Out they have not yet learned, another six months.

It would be effective if enforced, and could give competition time to take root.

Also need a ban on any Tech M&A for ten years.

US military employs neural networks to figure out interference in photons for quantum communications

This is a "someone else's goose" story if I ever read one.

Founders of medical science upstart uBiome once likened to Theranos now indicted for, you guessed it, fraud

Re: Anyone know?

The case is delayed because she is pregnant.

Backblaze on the back foot after 'inadvertently' beaming customer data to Facebook

Re: Blocked

And her they all are, ready to cut and paste.

Re: No customer dashboard should ever fire off a connection to Facebook, Google, or any 3rd party

I convinced my major credit union to drop recaptcha by declaring that I do not have any business relationship with Google and do not want to confide my personal practices with them.

I used an article here about an alternative captcha and they ended up adopting it for a while.

I am sympathetic to the need of blocking bad actors, but too often Google or Fb provide something "easy" as a solution that has ramifications for their customer. I view that choice as an indicator of whether sales or engineering is dominant and act accordingly.

OVH flames scorched cloud customers with pledge to build data centre fire simulation lab

Re: OVH may want to retire the name SBG1

They should mutate their own name to OVAH.

Crafty: Cricut caught out by user revolt, but will cloud stop play?

Jawbone

I remember buying one of their BT extra headsets and finding out that I could only change settings by logging into the company website. There were two things I wanted to change occasionally, and every time I wanted to change them I had to log in and make a new password and so forth just to toggle those.

Then they stopped supporting any browser I had, riding on the Google planned-obsolescence and keeping ahead of regs horse.

I didn't buy another Jawbone anything, despite it working well otherwise, and they're no longer here so perhaps other felt the same.

Privacy purists prickle at T-Mobile US plan to proffer people's personal web, app pursuits to ad promoters

Don't forget the MVNO's, they may also be involved in this scheme. Was just easing away from Mint Mobile anyway, noticed they now offer unlimited for the same price as my 10 GB. Now, thanks Reg, I know where the "unlimited" is coming from. Not that they offered it to me when I was an already hooked customer.

First Verizon, now T-Mobile: US carrier suggests folks use 2G to save battery

I am close to the end of a trial of a T-Mo MVNO. It is clear that, at least in my area of the US, T-Mo is having issues with capacity and/or config. What happens to me is that hotspot mode on my 4G phone slowly dies, then the phone's access to data dies, then no telephony at all is possible.

The solution from the MVNO is to switch to another APN and sometimes restart the phone, so in order to use that SIM i need at least two and preferably three nearly identical APN's to switch among as time passes, the expiration being variable. The story being told to me is that T-Mo is reconfiguring towers for 5G. It seems to me that 5G might demand more out of the existing hardware and some gros scrimmage just realised that when he put off some engineers pointing this out he screwed up. Not himself of course, but the customers and shareholders.

I stuck with 3G during the onset of 4G and can't see any reason why not to do the same with this transition, so it's amusing that the carriers themselves are now suggesting this course.

Perl.com theft blamed on social engineering attack: Registrar 'convinced' to alter DNS records by miscreants

NetSol is still living in 1999.

So, bye-bye mighty nerd haven Fry’s, took Silicon to the Valley... and now you must die

Last year I spoke with a clerk at another retail outlet who once worked for Fry's. His claim was that one of the brothers had money-handling issues and possible substance issues as well, so the stores got ignored. He said that his store's manager pleaded for more stock and support but that the top people were often MIA for long periods.

I really liked Fry's for being different and comprehensive. When the shelves started being empty and the employees started looking unwell it made me sad. So much potential and convenience, and they are the last place, not that Radio Shack was great but now we're down to the delivery truck to get some simple small things.

I wonder if the new Gamestop regime might consider a synergy buyout/resuscitation.

Microsoft president asks Congress to force private-sector orgs to admit when they've been hacked

Re: A team of 1000.

This is just asking for a new Reg measurement of incompetence.

"How incompetent were these people?"

"x000 Microsoft Engineers"

"Ahh"

Whistleblowers: Inflexible prison software says inmates due for release should be kept locked up behind bars

Re: inflexible prison software

They aren't locked-in enough for my liking.

Malware monsters target Apple’s M1 silicon with ‘Silver Sparrow’

So the way to defend against this is to add an empty file to a directory?

Amazon deploys AI cameras inside delivery vans, misspells 'surveillance' as 'safety' in reason why

Re: In defence of Amazon

As I wrote in a comment above, it can also be used against Amazon. When they face one of those cases, and their drivers --being underpaid and high-turnover-- are pretty terrible, the cameras may go away.

Re: Excellent!

You've hit on something that Amazon, being a newby transportation company , hasn't considered. Which is that the recordings can be evidence.

Some trucking companies in the US have learned that the recordings can be subpoenaed. This has resulted in the removal of cameras by some companies. Of course there are many stupid companies out there still using them.

Amazon is the personification of the wealthy idiot alpha-hotel, if they were a person.

Vote machine biz Smartmatic sues Fox News and Trump chums for $2.7bn over bogus claims of rigged 2020 election

Re: Ballot Marking Devices

I don't know why everyone says their name wrong, it's Mudrock.

Amazon coughs up $62m to shoo away claims it stole driver tips, cut pay rates without telling them

Trader Joes is owed by Aldi I think.

Were you thinking of Whole Foods?

File format conversion crisis delayed attempt to challenge US presidential election result

Re: Trying to subvert the results of a Presidential election?

If they do turn blue when their breath is withheld, it suggests a possible solution to the US political situation.