Posts by Grunchy

UK government woefully unprepared for 'catastrophic' ransomware attack

I feel prepared

First of all, my personal data is pretty much worthless anyway!

Plus I keep offline backups, those are incremental and held on power-off servers (yeah, I’ve got quad redundancy).

Next, I work in VMs anyway, with ZFS raid and snapshots and all that jazz.

Plus some cloud account or two holding more backups. Plus a drawer full of old HDDs that were never deleted, and may still fire up.

Did I mention my data is completely worthless anyway? It really is, the only reason I have such redundant backups is because the local electronic recycler is practically giving away heaps of top notch equipment from just a couple years ago.

(It’s an interesting hobby.)

Uncle Sam plows $42M into nurturing fusion breakthrough

Nuclear weapons research

Thunderf00t already “busted” the idea that this research has anything to do with power generation. It’s actually nothing but weapons research.

(For example: to “harness” the heat energy you’d have to incorporate a steam generator, or some kind of thermal capture apparatus, and they don’t have the room in between all those super laser beams.)

Sabine Hossenfelder goes further into competing technologies, but even the most likely candidates use severely esoteric, sketchy techniques. Probably all 100% of this research space isn’t being commercialized in the next 50 years…

(It’s a wonder Musk isn’t mixed up in this too, if he were then we’d know for certain it’s just an elaborate scam.)

Microsoft issues deadline for end of Windows 10 support – it's pay to play for security

Moved up to Linux. Now I run “ghost spectre” win10 in virt-manager sandbox (no internet — antivirus no longer needed, nor are ‘updates’ since it’s just for legacy software anyway).

The nice thing is that vm “snapshots” actually work, unlike microsoft garbage “restore points” that always failed. Plus I became offended by microsoft snooping, stealing personal data, and unwanted advertising. That all ended just a few months ago, I did not realize how anxiety inducing that “experience” was — until I fired microsoft.

Elon is the bakery owner swearing in the street about Yelp critics canceling him

Re: "the customer is always right"

Although it is absolutely true that the customer is always right, it’s also true that they aren’t the only potential customer in the whole wide world.

Correctly understood, the two facts tend to render any disagreement moot.

The forgotten cage match…?

I’m still waiting for the cave rescue submarine!

Musk promised he would deliver even though the kids were long since rescued!

You might laugh at my “faint hope,” but he did finally get around to delivering his abysmal cyber truck, after all.

(I’ve noticed that people seem to have extremely short memories about stuff like this. Does anybody remember, there used to be a company called “Pontiac?” Do people remember when they released their latest godawful truck, “Aztek?” Yeah.. that one.)

No link between internet use and poor mental health, according to Oxford boffins

I remember trying to ask out girls (prior to Windows 1995, which is when the internet started in earnest) and every single one of them said they were suffering some kind of emotional crisis.

I was like, what gives with this???

The only thing they all had in common was that they all happened to be suffering nervous breakdown at precisely the same moment that I happened to be makin’ my moves on ‘em.

+*+ Mystified! +*+

You get a Copilot, and you get a Copilot – Microsoft now the Copilot company

I don’t “get” A.I.

For some reason A.I. never provides any useful suggestion to me. It *always* guesses wrong. Which is troubling; is it simply useless, or has it become passive-aggressive?

Broadcom re-orgs VMware into four divisions – none of which mention end-user compute products

Proxmox vs Qemu

I’ve got Proxmox on the servers and Virt-Manager (Qemu) on the workstation.

I tried out VMWare many moons ago, upgraded to VirtualBox, then settled on Proxmox & Qemu.

Of course Proxmox is a given, for the ZFS pool.

On the workstation it’s really unimportant, it’s just a sandbox for Microsoft Windows to be trapped in. It’s strictly for legacy stuff, I don’t even really have a use case for it.

(If I was running a cloud server I’d probably just use Proxmox, depending on the specific technologies needed, of course.)

Half a kilo of cosmic nuclear fuel reignites NASA's deep space dreams

ASRG

The “advanced Stirling radioisotope generator” implies a working fluid, does it not?

I can’t see that working reliably for 8-10 decades continuous without service.

OpenAI meltdown: Where does this leave the upstart, Microsoft, and you?

Oh yeah!

That’s right, the artificial intelligence thing. Yes, one of the reasons I bought all this server equipment was because I wanted to set up stable diffusion down in the basement. But then I got way more interested in Proxmox, virtualization, and ridding myself completely of Microsoft.

(Well, I still have the Windows. Locked safely inside a VM sandbox. Mostly for legacy software, but also to observe Windows and Mac OS being brought to heel — utterly — inside Linux.)

SpaceX celebrates Starship launch as a success – even with the explosion

Re: I can't help but feel....

“I might also mention that I'm somewhat skeptical of the drive for human spaceflight in general”

Yeah. Agree. Virtually the entire Universe is completely hostile to human life. There’s nowhere to go, and once you get there, there’s nothing to do.

I predict when Musk sends people to Mars they have a thoroughly awful time interrupted only when they die in thoroughly appalling circumstances. Luckily, they will be too far away to actually take any revenge against Musk.

(Much like Russian armed forces fighting in Ukraine, and will never be able to do anything against Putin.)

Copilot coming to Windows 10 to help navigate the OS's twilight years

Re: Plan to slow Windows 10 - try the other side, its less hassle (mainly)

“Oh for the happy days of Windows 7 when the OS (mainly) did what it was asked and nothing more.”

Yup, I hear you. I actually set up about a dozen Windows VMs, each of which to run one particular app, and all of them using the same license key. Once I got GPU passthrough working, yeah let’s get several instances of that set up.

Not only Win10, but also Mac OS, Linux server, and even Solaris, Free BSD, whatever I want!

I admit I do have one Win7 setup (also Ghost Spectre) that I let online because I have it running Steam. Sadly, this absolutely perfect setup I only get to enjoy until Dec 31. Because Steam are foolishly dropping Win7 support on Jan 1.

Grr.

Ghost Spectre edition

I upgraded to Linux and I only run Windows from within VM now. Furthermore, I don’t expose Microsoft to the internet anymore.

It’s just a setup to run certain legacy software, and absolutely none of it is ever gonna be tampered with, a.k.a. “updated.”

So that’s why I run the Ghost Spectre edition. No antivirus, no updates, no internet, no viruses, and no meddling.

Also, absolutely zero spying.

LockBit redraws negotiation tactics after affiliates fail to squeeze victims

Ransomware has negligible cost to distribute, same as email spam. Even though both schemes only pay off in a tiny fraction of instances, and may be long periods between payoffs, they’ll never go away, or stop evolving.

All you can do is be aware of the problem, protect your interests, and live your life.

Keep a sharp eye for new exploits, because they will be coming…

My workplace got hacked!

Somehow they weren’t doing backup, or data security, or email rules. The virus got into the server and encrypted entire data sets. Plus you can bet the baddies kept a copy.

Cost $50,000 in bitcoins and about 5% was never recoverable.

(It all happened mere months before I started.)

Personally, I run Windows inside Qemu now, from disk images inside a ZFS data pool.

I’ve got snapshots and backups, including offline.

It took me decades to switch to Linux, I’m glad I finally got around to it!

Double Moon crater riddle solved? Spent Chinese rocket booster carrying mystery payload crash landed

The reason why nobody cares about the moon is because there’s nothing to do there.

Scientists use Raspberry Pi tech to protect NASA telescope data

Re: 5TB of solid-state storage

I’ve got a 512GB Ultra Fit, plus those USB pens are actually Micro-SD adapters. In fact I had some of those exact ones, the Micro-SD card slots into the USB-A plug.

Cheap and cheerful adapters, except every single one I had eventually died. Not very sturdy.

Right-to-repair fight going national as FTC asked to lay down the law

“Right to repair,” nothing.

The real scene is, “right to build your own damn stuff.”

(Rip out your stupid ECC and slot in a Speeduino, yo!)

Beijing reportedly asked Hikvision to identify fasting students in Muslim-majority province

Crackdown on keyhole

I’d be busted for sure, I already lost 3.5 gallons of fat on the “keyhole” diet.

keyhole.compy.ca

CCP lacks patience for us flabbies!

Google dragged to UK watchdog over Chrome's upcoming IP address cloaking

Artificial Intelligent Observer

It seems to me that Google has access to everybody’s email, all of which are exposed to an artificially-intelligent observer., which is owned operated controlled and queried by Google.

“Hey Google, what are the top 5 stocks on Nasdaq that are gonna jump in value today?”

Nice system.

Impatient LockBit says it's leaked 50GB of stolen Boeing files after ransom fails to land

You know what’s gonna be funny, is if they finally get Assange into US court and then they find him, “not guilty.”

Swish! All those wasted years, for nuttin.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Emacs and Lisp scripts? Fantastic!

The part I liked was that the only thing actually wrong was a simple typo.

The part I didn’t like was that the only thing actually wrong was that the email script wasn’t able to handle undeliverable messages (that’s really poor). Tsk.

Theora video codec to be coded out from Chrome and Firefox

How about Theorium

Because you know what, you can run Thorium browser on WINDOWS 7 BABY!!!

Ha ha, yes!

I’ll probably put Macromedia Flash on there too, what do I care?

And if one of my Win7 VMs ever gets infected somehow, big whoop I’ll just reactivate an old snapshot.

Pentagon seeks government gossips to dish dirt on UFOs

No extraterrestrials.

You can’t even get out of the solar system in a reasonable time frame, let alone to another star system. Even just getting to the sun takes no less than 8 minutes — no matter who you think you are!

Any alien that’s gonna travel for centuries to get here, when they do show up they’re going to be real “slow talkers.” As in, not very stimulating…

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

Re: Apple's League

Operating system is irrelevant now, no matter what software you want to run. Said from the perspective of, “if I can do it, pretty much anyone can.”

I’ve upgraded my CAD and engineering workstation to Ubuntu 22 and am running Qemu and Virt-Manager to run Win7, Win10, Mac-OS, even Solaris. I’ve even gotten these to work with full GPU passthrough acceleration (even HDMI audio, if that’s important.)

So, that’s it then. I converted to Linux for daily driver and any other operating system as a mere sandboxed environment, completely sheltered from the view (and control) of Microsoft, Apple, even Oracle.

“Arm” is great, I guess? I already have all the computational power I need or want, it’s all paid-for, and the electricity bill is quite affordable. I doubt I’m upgrading any time soon. Put it this way, I’m still going great with iPhone 4. What do I need a modern, clown-size phone for? Nothing!

I might upgrade one day

I’ve been upgrading my 2017 “budget build” went from Ryzen 1800x to 3800x, still pleased with my SX8200 1TB “pro”. Main slot has the Vega56, secondary has the GTX1050-Ti. Just yesterday splurged $300 Cdn on 4x 32GB DDR4-3600 modules.

The *big* upgrade, however, was from Win10 to Ubuntu22. Now I run Virt-manager with Qemu, and pass-through the Vega56 to my compartmentalized instances of Win7, Win10, and Mac-OS (which no longer run any form of anti-virus, since they are unfit to be exposed to the internet. Nothing but legacy offline apps.)

Even though my rig is already 6 years old, I doubt I’ll be upgrading anything else before 2030, if ever.

No more Mr Nice DoJ: Tesla gets subpoenas over self-driving software claims

Elon Musk was hanging around the Mercedes garage in Austin yesterday, which attracted attention of scrutineers, BAM Lewis Hamilton instantly disqualified.

Coincidence?

There are no coincidence.

'Influencer' gets 7 months in prison for plot to interfere with 2016 US election

That was a pretty good trick though

But it’s really true, in 2024 you can text “Krusty” to 59925 to vote for the clown (or whichever other clown you intend to support.)

You don’t even need to be American! You can even vote King Charles if that’s Your Fancy.

The problem with Jon Stewart is that Apple appears to have cancelled his show

Who’s Jon Stewart

I never heard of the guy.

On a related note, who’s Apple computers.

I have never bought anything from whoever those guys are.

Shrug!

Take Windows 11... please. Leaks confirm low numbers for Microsoft's latest OS

Re: There's nothing particularly wrong with it except for its hardware requirements.

“It all has to do with monetizing the user after the sale. Create a Microsoft account just to install, now they know who you are. Send you a text to your cell for MFA, now they have hooked in your mobile device as well.”

Seems that Microsoft has become a peddler of “shitware.”

Re: Maybe it's the installer

I haven’t tried KVM, but I am using QEMU with successful passthrough. I also set up a Hackintosh (despite there being zero use for that) but also a creaky old Solaris installation.

I’m having way more fun just monkeying around with abandonware. I don’t care what Microsoft does anymore, they are irrelevant now.

Back to Windows 7

Since I’m running Ubuntu now and I can run any Windows I want as a virtual machine, I’ve ditched Windows 10. I’m back on Windows 7. (By the way: with full GPU passthrough. I solved the puzzle!)

Virus protection is irrelevant since Windows isn’t used for internet anymore. Just for legacy software, which is also prohibited from any more “update” meddling. Everything works good enough the way it is!

Ransomware attacks register record speeds thanks to success of infosec industry

My system could be encrypted and locked in 60 seconds

I run Windows VM in only a 40GB sandbox qcow virtual drive which could be completely destroyed in seconds. On the other hand, I could recover my last “snapshot” even faster than that, so who cares?

Good luck getting to it since it runs 100% disconnected from the network.

Good luck getting to my NAS backup device, which is literally powered off every second it isn’t tasked with backups. “Off,” as in unplugged from the wall power outlet.

Nice try, hackerz! But think again.

From chaos to cadence: Celebrating two decades of Microsoft's Patch Tuesday

I don’t get any Microsoft patches anymore!

I finally, Finally! upgraded my Windows PC to a certain Debian distribution, and using virt-manager configured a Windows VM running Ghost Spectre with all updates halted until the year 2077. It is running sandboxed and isolated and is used for nothing but legacy apps that are also prohibited from all future updates. I set up another Monterey Hackintosh VM in the same manner.

The meddlers are totally locked out.

Meanwhile, I have embarked (emborked?) on a separate “voyage of discovery” into the vast sea of Debian. So far, clear weather…

(I am just so tickled at the power of snapshot! The proprietary OS’s will angrily sabotage themselves in response to some new liberty I am exploring, and each time it’s like the ultimate “undo”. Refreshing! Microsoft and Apple are literally powerless now. FREEDOM!!)

AI girlfriend encouraged man to attempt crossbow assassination of Queen

This is the best story ever!

Imagine if Steinbeck or Hemingway had ever dreamed up such a scheme, what a magnificent tale they could have spun. Spectacular! Bravo!

(Or maybe, you know, Kipling. Or Dickens!)

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

“Google,” who dat?

YouTube is dead, my friend. The only worthwhile way to access their upload library is with NewPipe. Google is rapidly becoming irrelevant… Microsoft may as well not even exist anymore, as far as I’m concerned. As for Apple, I haven’t bought any Apple equipment since the 1990s.

I like Firefox

Wow, 3% market share? But what difference does it make: nobody pays any money for a browser, they’re not making anything from sales. I like Firefox because it is NOT constantly upheaving everything all over the place. It’s an information appliance and that’s good enough for me. As for the “app” store, I bought exactly one app ever and that was Star Chart on the iPhone: a very clever “augmented reality” view of the sky. I have never found reason to pay $5 for any other app. I got my Firefox web browser, Thunderbird email, voip, sms, instant banking, gps mapping. Good enough!

(I used to do web browsing with Emacs on the Vax terminal at Uni, Mozilla still seems like the “new thing” in comparison. Shrug.)

If the Linux Foundation was a software company, it'd be the biggest in the world

Ideal for cheapskates

Since computers are so cheap and software solutions have become so mature, companies are resorting to subscriptions and obsolescence schemes to churn software and maintain revenue. PCs used to cost big money for much less horsepower than you can get in a $60 Raspberry Pi 5 today, and not all that long ago. People like me pay pittances for cast-off hardware from recyclers and run abandonware for $nothing. I remember being offended how outrageous expensive PS3 was, now people scrap them as junk and the entire game library is freely downloadable. Being a natural scrounge & cheapskate, I don’t pay ‘nuthin for anything !

Google killing Basic HTML version of Gmail In January 2024

Still getting bills for $0 a month from Telus after firing them 10 years ago

They finally called me up to switch me to fibre optic since they are spending megabucks to convert the entire city of Calgary. So I asked the lady “why” I am getting monthly bills for $0 owing for the last decade. She says that’s cause I still have access to my Telus.net email address (even though no service!) because they ditched that server way long time ago and it’s been operated by google mail ever since then, which retains your data for at least 99 years after your demise, whether they caused it or not. So I’m all, “ok how do I access that defunct account then,” and she’s all, “well are you buying fibre optic service or not.” Check Mate.

No joke: Cloudflare takes aim at Google Fonts with ROFL

It’s about time !

If you had 10,000 customers and they each saved 150 ms, you know what that’s like uh, 25 minutes saved. That’s worth nearly $9 at my rate of pay! Practically a full qtr pounder meal deal.

The iPhone 15 has a Goldilocks issue: Too big or too small. Maybe a case will make it just right

I find it interesting anybody goes to malls anymore

I bought my iPhone SE (first gen) 2nd hand back in 2016 for $100. Had to replace the battery and screen once or twice, but it’s still going strong. It’s one of the last ones that were still ‘phone’ size and not ‘clown’ size. It has 64 gb space, good enough I reckon. Plays video non-stuttering. Apple has several no doubt critical updates necessary to improve and modernize their surveillance capabilities (and sabotage its video playback), but I have it configured to ignore everything they say and do.

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

People still buy games?

The entire PS1,PS2,PS3 catalog is utterly hacked. So too NES, SNES, C64, Wii, XBox, XBox 360,N64, Atari 2600, Vectrex, countless arcade consoles. I still haven’t conquered colossal caves yet, it’s the damn little dwarf keeps coming out of nowhere and nailing me with Ax.

UK judge rates ChatGPT as 'jolly useful' after using it to help write a decision

AI takes the pith

I guess it would be unethical to get an artificially intelligent parser to write pithy remarks for me.

US-Canada water org confirms 'cybersecurity incident' after ransomware crew threatens leak

“Water Rights” info

This is something probably nobody cares about. It’s like, some guy hacks the FBI website. So? I honest to God never clicked on the FBI website. I could not care less.

What I’d really like to know about is the knob who’s gonna sift through 80 GB of stolen water rights data in search of the tiniest interesting thing. Who is that guy. Why is he such a looser.

Meet Honda's latest electric vehicle: A rideable suitcase

It’s the shabazz

I’ve got an Airwheel, it’s exactly like BC’s Quest For Tires. Including hopping over potholes and ducking beneath branches.

The kids ‘round here seem to prefer motorized skateboards, talk about little hard wheels! I can only imagine what befalls when you go past where the geese congregate by the river, I guess it’s a long green streaky skid to calamity. The Honda Suitcase ought to be packed full of 1st aid supplies…

Long-lost 1977 Star Wars X-Wing prop discovered – lock s-foils in bid position

X-wing is cool

Mostly because of the orange racing stripes that matched Luke’s “blu-blocker” tinted visor. But there’s a reason they don’t make biplanes any more: too much drag. Plus, I mean come on, where’s the control surfaces? Not even a propeller?

The only “model” I remember seeing in Close Encounters was made out of a big tub of mashed potatoes by a slightly manic Dreyfuss. No way anybody hung onto that.

Apple races to patch the latest zero-day iPhone exploit

What?

Guys, get real: the insecurity is the iMessage service itself !

Any information you send via Apple or Google or Microsoft is definitely getting read by artificially intelligent daemons trying to figure out how to steal your money or your vote or your stock tips or whatever else they can steal.

antiX 23: Anarchic for sure, but 'design by committee' isn't always the best for Linux

Somehow if you’re going to host your own web page, now you have to install certbot because http is illegal for whatever reason (because unless you register with Let’s Encrypt and the Electronic Freedom Foundation, your site is automatically boycotted by all the latest browsers). But certbot instructions only walk you through their snapd installation. So if you’re running Ubuntu server in a Proxmox container, you can’t install snapd containers because your Linux os is already in a container.

And it’s like, what’s with all this farging bollshet??

(There’s another sneakier installation procedure involving a Python script which I believe is disparaged because it doesn’t necessarily program your computer to generate daily system reports to certbot HQ as part of its continuous “update” scheme.)

Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists

Re: Expose

Hint: The bible is free

The Koran is free

The Torah is free

Mark Twain described a circumstance in which Tom Sawyer had to do a LOT of horse-trading to muster up enough Sunday School credits to be awarded his “free” bible ! !

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

Multics and Pine and Emacs

I got in hot water with Sysadmin at Uni for wasting minutes on Pine and IRC (funny thing: I had just returned from my internship at Alberta Research Council which in 1993 provided internet access to ALL of Alberta — including UCalgary and UEdmonton, and ULethbridge — and which I participated in the setup of). So in response I required Sysadmin to delete the /usr/games folder “in case somebody wastes minutes of their Multics session.”

The jerks actually deleted /usr/games!!

What a bunch of maroons.