Posts by Grogan

San Francisco billboards call out tech firms for not paying for open source

Re: Sorry, no.

I didn't mention the GPL (it doesn't speak about money) but that's what I meant when speaking about permissive licenses, as in BSD-like. At least with the GPL, you may get something back in the form of contributions.

Sorry, but if they don't have to, they aren't going to. Don't release something under a permissive license and then complain when people/companies make use of it. Especially if you use a BSD-like license... you asked for it.

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

Exactly... these are just a bunch of jumped up, small minded prigs in here. Low intellect, authority whipped tools. I said something similar. that one should be able to use AI to find sources of information, but then those sources need to be credited and footnoted like any other. They wouldn't have even known.

I find research papers using search engines. One could also use AI themselves to find information on the Internet.

One should be able to use "AI" (or any means) to find sources of information, but then the individual sources that you use should be footnoted like any other. This wouldn't be an issue (they wouldn't have known) had he done that.

FCC probes whether it can pop a cap in ISP data caps

Some years ago, a friend/colleague that ran a computer shop became a reseller for an ISP, and their highest tier at the time had a 300 Gb monthly limit. I said no way, I'm not putting up with bandwidth limits and overage charges. He chided me that it was an insanely generous limit, nobody should be using that much.

Firstly, I pointed out that I'd use that up in a week purchasing games on Steam and downloading shows (again, "you shouldn't be doing that!"). Secondly, I pointed out that it had the potential to cost me thousands of dollars a month in overage fees if some process used excess bandwidth for a long period of time. Thirdly, if they are going to be charging for data, then they'd best make sure it's a clean connection that doesn't result in packet retransmission, as well as network noise like packets not legitimately destined for my node.

That ISP soon dropped that idea because it was an outdated way of doing things (their words, or similar). They now offer services from 50 megabit/s to 2.5 gigabit/s speeds (depending on where you live) with no data caps.

Elon Musk's disaster relief promises: Should we believe the hype?

Here's the thing... liars and grifters (both have been normalized in the U.S. of A.) can promise whatever they like, because they don't have to follow through once they get what they want.

Digital River runs dry, hasn't paid developers for sales since July

Re: Krazy Krazy

I never understood "lay away" purchases. If you can't afford it, lay your own money away until you can, if you have no source of credit. Buy now, pay later schemes are a much better trap :-)

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

Companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft generally LOVE things like this, because it's a barrier to entry. Only the big boys should be able to play.

Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?

Re: Mental image

Indeed! Vivian Stanshall was my immediate thought, mostly because it's the first masculine usage of the name that I had encountered (in Canada here I've only seen it a girl's name).

"... all the beautiful people..." heheh

Another one I love is the "11 mustachioed daughters" (with his own named band "Vivian Stanshall's Big Grunt")

Re: Mental image

Exact detail escapes me, but it was early to mid 2000's. My school teacher sister used Office 2000's PowerPoint to make a presentation and generated a 900+ Mb file. She was telling me that most of her colleagues were complaining that they couldn't open it, it was freezing their computers. I was all "hmm" until I saw the file she gave them. She could open it (made her Pentium-D with 512M RAM computer sluggish with pagefile use) but other people had older PCs. They were bitmap images... Microsoft's garbage generators, in the wrong hands, will happily let you do things like that.

Campaigners claim 'Privacy Preserving Attribution' in Firefox does the opposite

Re: So how does one turn it off?

Thumb down for stating a fact. What a bunch of jumped up pricks in here. I'd make a screenshot to prove it, but I can't be arsed. Die in a fire.

Re: So how does one turn it off?

It's a checkbox right there in Privacy and Security in the main Settings interface.

"Website Advertising Preferences

Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement

This helps sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about you. Learn more"

AI PCs will dominate shipments by 2026, but not because of demand

Re: History repeats itself

That's what I have (according to lspci) in my Xeon based server, I was surprised to see the onboard graphics as Matrox G200. I used to buy those for Windows 98 and 2000 back in the day, they were great desktop cards. Nowadays, at least at the datacenter I use, those servers don't ever get a display hooked up. They are provisioned remotely through a web interface (choose from serveral linux images) and if you lose control of it, remote KVM console (through IPMI interface).

Python in Excel goes live – but only for certain Windows users

Re: run Python scripts inside workbooks

Python 3.7 to python 3.8... removal of nullptr broke a lot of shit. That's one example that came to mind (because it affected applications I needed to use... had to build LibreOffice with its own python interpreter)

Also, regardless of compatibility, any x.x.y upgrade is going to break all your modules anyway.

Elon Musk's assassination 'joke' bombs, internet calls for his deportation

Re: I feel unclean...

Well... it would be different if you or I made a joke like that on social media. We'd just be called jackasses etc.

Whether it was his intent or not, it's a dog whistle coming from him.

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

Re: not a solution for all

I know some fans of the "stick" approach that have come away with pretty serious contusions and skull fractures. (There are millions of people with bigger sticks than yours and they vote and pay taxes)

Microsoft PC accessories rise from the grave just in time for Christmas

Re: Alas, no "Internet Keyboard Pro"

I don't care for those "ergonomic" keyboards either, always found them awkward.

I can't even find a keyboard that I really like. For decades, on my main rigs. I'd been using a big old IBM clickety clack keyboard from 1986, one of the first PS/2 keyboards. I first tried to use it on my new rig (no PS/2 on this board) with an i/o converter dongle, but it proved gimmicky. Sometimes latency, sometimes even missed keystrokes and one or more of the keyboard lights would blink (caps lock, numlock, scroll lock). I still have it on an older rig but I seldom sit at that one anymore (use it headless mostly now).

So waaaah is me, I can't get used to anything. It's been several months too and I still have to backspace and correct a lot of rtoubg (typing lol). I don't look at my fingers when I type and I'm forever disoriented. I've since tried a mechanical keyboard, gaming keyboards and finally settled on this plain jane logitech keyboard/mouse combo because I needed a new mouse at that time anyway. The less shit in the USB ports the better, too.

Zuckerberg admits Biden administration pressured Meta to police COVID posts

Based on correct information. Your ignorance is not as good as our knowledge, chuckles.

Telegram founder and CEO arrested in France

The list of hostile places people shouldn't go gets longer every day...

Somalia

United States

Russia

North Korea

Iran

Syria

...

... France

So he's been kidnapped for disobeying France's orders about how to run a chat service on the Internet, essentially.

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Good documentation has quick reference pages, and more detailed chapters/sections and/or common examples that follow :-)

I find some man pages awful for that reason, the synopsis alone is too silly like "foo [options] [arguments]" but then you have to wade through prosy stuff to try to understand how to actually use the program.

Chrome dumped support for Ubuntu 18.04 – but it'll be back

Re: That bloke in the corner...

Yes, you have to compile with/against older GNU if you want to distribute binaries that everyone can run. The libraries are good at providing backwards compatibility, but they have symbols to prevent loading them in the opposite case.

At this time it's that, not deliberately choosing to "drop support" for older userspace.

LibreOffice 24.8: Handy even if you're happy with Microsoft

Back in the day, we used to mock MSKB articles with Solution: Don't do that :-)

(Not as bluntly, but some of them were basically saying just that)

There was a MSKB article for just about everything back in the late 90's. I had so many of them in my bookmarks I decided I needed a search engine for my bookmarks. That was when I made Netcape's home page "bookmarks.htm" and used the find text function. (Netscape 4.x, because it was really the only fully functional browser on Linux back then)

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday borks dual-boot Linux-Windows PCs

That's right, the TPM isn't so much to protect you, it's to protect content FROM you.

I refuse to have that adversarial hardware enabled on my systems. If have to test something in Windows 11, I fake a TPM2 in a KVM

Writers sue Anthropic for feeding 'stolen' copyrighted work into Claude

Those Anthropic "Claude" bots are intrusive, they ignore robots.txt directives (most bots except legitimate search engines do), and abusive. I started noticing them back in May, hammering the shit out of my web forum and photo gallery. We're talking like 400 to 500 simultaneous bots all coming from different IP networks within Amazon's cloud.

If AWS is going to allow that kind of tomfoolery to take place on their network, fuck em. I have blocked every single CIDR block used by AWS with kernel rules. We're talking /9, /10, /12 bit subnets etc., millions of IP addresses. I don't have to care about that, for there are no internet clients (butts in chairs with web browsers) in there. I've been thinking of dropping the rules to see if they were still a problem, but... nah. AWS can stay blocked.

It's no joke, I like to allow large publicly viewable attachments and gallery posts for my members, and these asshole bots rack up tens of thousands of downloads.

It's not even that I mind the content being scraped, it's the bloody abuse.

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Re: For once

It could be a brilliant post, with insight from a seasoned IT veteran from days of old, and it will get downvotes here. Petty, judgemental people that think they have a little power... and don't like anybody smarter than they are.

Some of them may be deserved, including for myself, but it's a piss off that there are people that sit here and go "nope, nope, nope"

Apple is coming to take 30% cut of new Patreon subs on iOS

Re: That is an absolute dick move

I used to have a few youtube videos. Nothing much, just some game captures of funny things. A few thousand views and a few comments etc. I deliberately didn't choose to monetize them, I don't like ads and I wouldn't subject other people to them on my behalf (not a single one on my web site and forum etc. No sponsors, no affiliate links, no begging for money... I just don't do that shit).

First, I don't know why, but one of my videos got flagged for copyright. Google then put ads on it. I was annoyed, but not murderously pissed yet.

Then another got flagged for adult content. Cartoon nudity, because I showed some naked corpses because I had this skyrim nudity mod. They made it 18 only and, you guessed it, stuck ads on it.

That was it. I deleted everything I had on youtube. If I want to post a video I'll just host it on my own fucking web server. I have a shit tonne of monthly bandwidth.

Small CSS tweaks can help nasty emails slip through Outlook's anti-phishing net

Re: Email is for text

I use a mail program (Sylpheed... pry it from my stiff, dead, fingers) that strips out most of the crap in html messages and gives you plain text, or a html alternative with hyperlink text and stuff. If you really need the original message, it's still there in the encoding, it can be saved as a file (or view message source). Between all that, there has never been a message I couldn't deal with (I've been using this since 2001)

I don't like html emails.

San Francisco set to ban rent-hiking algorithms used by landlords

Re: I suppose...

Hey you downvoting simpletons... we have rent control in Canada, and I like it. Rent increases are controlled. Municipalities also regulate by not rezoning property so people can just build more expensive apartments and condos when they aren't what's needed, to encourage affordable rentals. You high school civics parrots would change your tune when it's you that can't find a place to live. So fuck you.

Re: I suppose...

You can't homogenize rent prices across the board or anything like that, but rent control is necessary in a civilized society. I'll bet they don't let landlords jack up the rent as they see fit in Sweden...

US sends cybercriminals back to Russia in prisoner swap that freed WSJ journo, others

They should have surreptitiously stuck them with a tiny pellet of Polonium before releasing them, so they'd rot and die within a few weeks of getting home. In other words, "out Putin" Vladimir Putin.

I wouldn't seriously want them to do that, but because these are computer criminals, releasing them to Putin does have consequences (v.s. some other type of criminal that is never going to be in the U.S. again)

Compared to other distros, Vanilla OS 2 'Orchid' is rewriting how Linux works

Re: chicken come home to roost

It makes me fucking sick, what distributors are doing. Merging those directories and leaving symlinks in their place, because they are expected to be there at those paths. It's silly

Dumping everything in /usr is messy... people suck.

Kaspersky says Uncle Sam snubbed proposal to open up its code for third-party review

It's not unexpected at this time. Later they will be interested in this, but for now, they simply are not going to trust the government that Kaspersky (the company) operates under, or its personnel at this time. Regardless of what they may think of Eugene Kaspersky himself.

Google to kill off URL shortener once and for all

Re: Good riddance

I detest those fucking things. I teach people to HOVER over links before clicking and those URL obfuscating services make a mockery of it.

Probably the most ominous thing about them is, neither you nor whatever site or service you posted the link on, have control over what that link may redirect to in the future.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Re: Good

What a small minded simpleton, that you can't handle having the choice. You'd rather have the nanny state cripple your vehicle.

Windows Notepad gets spell check. Only took 41 years

I don't care about the red underlining type spell check where you can take action to correct it, if I choose not to ignore it. That can only be helpful even if it doesn't have an entire language with all its made up words and vernacular in its dictionaries.

What I hate is spell checking that I have to fight against, that automatically corrects deliberately misspelled words (or auto-completes). I have to turn all that bollocks off on my phone.

I'd have to say that would be pretty useless to me in a plain text editor, though. Every sequence of characters separated by spaces would likely be underlined in the type of file I'd be editing with Notepad on Windows. (script, .inf, .ini type configuration files etc.)

Algorithmic wage discrimination: Not just for gig workers

This doesn't apply to ride sharing, as you need the infrastructure, but if you're going to do gig work, try to get your own gigs. I can't stand these middle men that take your money and lock you in with non-hire policies for the companies they send you to. I refuse to be controlled like that.

These agencies exist BECAUSE of and only because of, your work. They do nothing. Fucking parasites.

Apple reverses course to approve Epic Games Store on iOS in EU

Re: Arguments over buttons set to continue while European Commission looks on

It will be a cold day in Hell (and in a $10 desperation sale on Steam) before I purchase ANY game, whose studio/publisher took that Epic Store carrot.

Epic accuses Apple of foul play over iOS access, wants EU to show DMA red card

Well... the obvious, primary purpose of walled gardens is to protect revenue streams.

I detest Epic and anything I can do to deprive that company of money is my pleasure, but to be fair... Apple isn't concerned about your security with an Epic store application. They would happily let Epic sell their games in the Apple app store, for their 30% cut.

Nasty regreSSHion bug in OpenSSH puts roughly 700K Linux boxes at risk

Re: Mitigation

You people who downvote are ridiculous... moreover, one of the recommendations by Qualsys was to mitigate this using "network based access controls". Since I don't have access to the routers upstream from me, that prevents any attack from reaching a service listening on the port. This has nothing to do with logins. Not sure what your problem is, but you're pathetic.

Re: Mitigation

Fixed for me now on all boxes with non-rolling distros (e.g. Arch had this fixed before I went to be this morning). The one I was most concerned about was an Alma Linux 9 box in a datacenter but those packages just hit my repos (Alma specific nomenclature in the package names while same base package and version)

Re: glibc??

It's not a vulnerability on the BSD's because their signal handling isn't implemented the same way (they don't use glibc... except for some Linux ports that may need to link to it. That won't be OpenSSH)

Re: glibc??

Forget reasoning, they are ignorant downvotes. There must be people that sit here and go "nope, nope, nope, la, la, la" because I see a lot of wisdom that gets downvotes in this peanut gallery.

Re: Mitigation

A better option would be to:

# iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 ! -s a.b.c.d -j DROP

or for example, a network:

# iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 ! -s a.b.c.d/24 -j DROP

Where a.b.c.d is the correct IP address you wish to accept, or a.b.c.d/24 is the correct network and subnet.

The ! of course means "not" DROP from that source in this case. (doing it that way saves needing two rules for DROP and ACCEPT)

Re: RHEL not vulnerable.

Ahh, thanks. I checked today and noticed I didn't get a package update yet (Alma Linux 9) so I created a few rules to block the port for all IP addresses but mine. I guess I didn't really need to do that then, but that's OK. I would expect it to be fixed regardless, though.

P.S. Oops, I see that info is not quite correct. Thanks anyway :-)

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

I'd have to say you don't necessarily need to be a skilled welder to just weld something for repair purposes, however there are concepts you need to know and common sense type knowledge working with such things. So no, some jackass with an arc welder and electrical outlet to plug it into need not necessarily apply.

In any case, it wasn't even the welding itself that was the problem, but the knowledge of fire alarms and consequently, the harm caused by the unnecessary evacuation procedures.

(I used to get a laugh out of "no smoking in the welding shop!" for either reason)

From network security to nyet work in perpetuity: What's up with the Kaspersky US ban?

The others take up more time (and often waste... with umms, ahhs and repetitions, vain waffling etc.)

With text, I can first gauge my interest level by skimming. If searching for information, I may need one "tidbit". It would take me e.g. 10 minutes of jumping through some youtube video to find it.

Appeals court reanimates lawsuit accusing Meta of hiring bias against US citizens

If he got interviews, he wasn't likely discriminated against. Just because an interviewer tells you that you are "perfect" doesn't mean you are getting the job.

It may even be a tactic to lower your inhibitions. I've been conned like that before, being lavishly praised for being over qualified (I did not feel that I was quite qualified, let alone over) and that the job would be mine etc. Then simply never heard from them again, and was "ghosted".

Oracle Java license teams set to begin targeting Oracle users who don't think they use Oracle

Re: How’s that going to go?

I just never answer phones. If someone matters, they'll leave a message. If not, they don't matter to me. That's how I operate for self employment too. My customers know they have to leave a message to get me. Or send me an email (either directly or through contact form etc.). Sure I'd get more calls if I answered my phone, but that would only mean more talking on the phone and dealing with soliciting. It's the limited time for one individual that's the bottleneck, not the number of potential customers (that's why that works for me, I mean) :-)