Posts by Grunchy 927 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2015
The rover had to travel 500m and send images and data back to Earth, and the privateers would win $20 million or $30 million or something. Except the deadline was March 2018.
Well I sincerely hope India makes it, I’m actually confident they’ll succeed this time.
I’m just afraid there’s nothing worthwhile on the moon to bother with. I think the Americans came to that realization in 1972 after just 6 trips…
Rossmann (in his latest Zoom-sponsored snarl) recommends some “freeware” app called “Jitsi.”
https://youtu.be/Nzt0tzsaWDE
It used to be that an operating system served a useful purpose by abstracting the computer’s physical resources to facilitate application development. But now you can do anything on the browser itself, within html5.
Windows, Mac, Linux: they are all obsolete. They are all VMs in my Proxmox hypervisor!
I deleted Twitter back before Musk put the deal together.
I actually gave up “life online” once already, prior to the era of the World Wide Web.
I had my own computer, paid for my own telephone line, programmed my own bbs.
But then the “scene” exploded, there was practically a bbs phone book (just for the local numbers), technology was evolving. But really, I found engagement to be less & less rewarding.
Then I graduated high school, sold ALL of that stuff, and did not hang around to witness the demise of bbs culture.
…although I did recognize the worst parts of bbs culture in Twitter.
The first network I heard of was our high school computer lab had “MUPPET” (multiple pet) scheme for sharing the 4040 dual disk drive and the dot matrix, and I -never- figured out how that worked.
On the c64 all that kinda stuff was hooked up to the common serial bus and every peripheral had its own unique device no. in which 4 was the printer, 8,9,10,11 were the floppies, 1 was the cassette (on the cassette interface). 2 was the modem (user port), 0 was the keyboard and 3 was the screen (supposedly). The network people were always the most smug in the computer lab, they really were intolerable!
I knew this wizened old guru with a 2400-baud Hayes that had a huge range of AT commands, it was practically like having a dialogue… and you weren’t even connected to a bbs yet!
Fidonet was true long distance email.
Windows has this “AutoPlay” setting by which it performs a pre-determined behaviour upon the “event” of a particular media type becoming loaded into the PC.
“Under Choose AutoPlay Defaults, set the default action for AutoPlay when connecting each type of media or device.”
(Because it is bothersome to command Windows to run the installation software, and since the OS detects when the media is loaded and “mounts” the directory structure, why can’t it go a step further and run the installer too?)
OR: I think sometimes a usb device will present a system-specific driver to be installed that facilitates access to the usb device. Which the OS might do automatically.
Another possibility, an executable is provided an icon that looks like a folder, so the user double-clicks it to explore the folder, but instead they unintentionally activate the payload.
Which vulnerability was exploited? We’re curious!
I’m feeling friggin invincible these days, what with my cast-off industrial server hardware from HP.
(DL380P Gen8 for $20 a pop - plus 256 GB ram, 1x SSD for Proxmox with 7x 5TB enterprise drives for ZFS, topped with a Tesla P4 for machine learning duties).
Plus a separate Netgear NAS for ISOs and snapshots and backups.
The icing on the cake… HP had sabotaged this entire line of cast-offs by infecting them with a freeware “fan bomb” that defaults to 100% pulse width modulation if its spyware detects you running any sort of late model storage solution. It’s like a friggin jet engine hair dryer, blowing the loose papers all ‘round the joint + sucking about 300W at idle…
THANKFULLY the hacker community delivers, yet again, by stumbling upon some disabled fan control commands in the 2.77 iteration from a couple years back. Their resultant masterwork, entitled “Silence of The Fans,” graces GitHub for the benefit of all:
https://github.com/kendallgoto/ilo4_unlock
My cheap ass hypervisor lives! And is livable! And if I get hacked I’ve got stacks of iterative snapshots to fall back upon!
(I’m not joking, the $cheap E5-2697V2s bench at 77% my venerable Ryzen 1800x - and that’s single core vs!)
HAH. I got the first aid certificate, even joined the first aid committee… and I was still made redundant.
(I was even named sole “Responsible Member” representing the firm’s engineering credential. Though it appears that once that person is removed the only action by the Association is to log the corporation as “deficient” in expectation they take remedial action, hopefully. Like when you never type in your Windows license code and Microsoft punishes you by making your desktop become “dark mode.”)
Thunderbird comes to mind, or maybe Seamonkey (I showed my Granny Seamonkey much more than 2 years ago & she still rocks it!)
I prefer Thunderbird because it deals with RSS and NNTP, not saying Outlook doesn’t, but it probably doesn’t work as well.
(I remember using Outlook way back in Win95 days & enhancing it with the “Lookout” extension, then I thought better and dropped the Microsoft spyware altogether. Not ever going back.)
It’s a completely hostile environment, there’s nothing to do there, and the view you get to enjoy isn’t much better than if you had just sent a camera.
(Personally I was a bit aghast they chose to operate it with an Xbox controller. That’s not even “drive by wire”. What if the batteries expire, did anybody bring any spare AAs?)
Just because cops can’t use them doesn’t mean organized crime won’t use them. You could rig up a drone with a 3D printed weapon no problem, or fire accelerant, or acid, or it could blow a cloud of fentanyl or sarin gas. An explosive would be trivial, as Ukraine is demonstrating on a daily basis. People have rigged up cellular-controlled drones with first-person cameras, presumably you could use something like that from anywhere in the world.
(The movie was “Runaway” from 1994 with Magnum, P. I.)
I popped down to the local tech recycler and picked up a venerable Linksys EA6900 (v1.1) for $4.20 to repurpose as a client bridge for this stack of servers I’ve got heaped up in the back bedroom, to be confronted with this peculiar installation procedure for dd-wrt firmware:
-obtain oldest possible linksys firmware 161129;
-obtain linksys “tftp” abandonware utility from archive.org;
-ping 192.168.1.1 -t and watch for TTL 100;
-after about 25 pings, hit “upload” on tftp;
-repeat if timeout, retry if boot succeeds;
-login to diagnostics and revert to the older version on the alternate partition;
-repeat all that first step so both partitions are the same;
-now reset to factory defaults;
-now obtain dd-wrt #23194 dating from Dec 22, 2013;
-manual update firmware to that one;
-repeat again for the second partition;
-administration / factory default again;
-now you can pick which iteration to choose, whether the “Kong” or the “brainslayer” edition (I couldn’t decide so I just picked the latest June 12 2023 version);
-to be confronted with the bootup sequence followed by “Linksys” lamp flashing off and no response to telnet, ssh, or WebGui! “Brick,” except it’s responding to the ping -t with TTL 64.
-power cycle 3x with 10 second pause each time while crossing fingers & toes will trigger the second boot partition, except obviously, no.
-ULTIMATELY, after farting around hard enough, I discover it’s merely ignoring the WebGui request when stated as “https”. Deleting the “s” reveals the damn thing really was running, the whole time.
-
Unlike youse guys, I’ve actually *flown* a model quadcopter. Yes.
What seems peculiar to me is that we somehow look at these devices as threatening, as opposed to delicate apparatus always on the verge of falling out of the sky due to any single one of a countless set of minor catastrophes.
What I mean is, it’s quite an amazing miracle these things can get to a position where they pose any kind of a risk? When they are far, far more likely to wind up in a crumpled heap anywhere else?
Seems like a massive huge opportunity to develop & deploy “anti drone” solutions. And it really matters not how it works, any and all failure modes are equally successful (and rewardable).
Hyuge opportunity for the first one capable of “grabbing a brain”…
Thunderf00t quotes some industry experts who characterize Tesla “full-self-driving” as somewhat of an industry joke. Moreover he’s now claiming all the Musk enterprises are techno-Ponzi schemes that will be bankrupted by June 2028, this on the eve of Musk being declared world’s richest human again.
https://youtu.be/vYURUiOjZSw
(It’s like, some people you’re never going to please.. !)
Besides, one of the best file explorers around still persists in “Midnight Commander,” kind of an homage to Norton’s own Commander, itself a rather shameless clone of similar softwares we developed and dabbled with on the Pet and other Commodores.
I find modern File Explorer quaint and endearing in its manner of trying to hide certain file types, certain system files, certain system directories, and how it respectfully disagrees with certain direct commands, “oh, but that could be an important system file,” or, “that might be a virus or malware or might even not be sanctioned by Microsoft.”
It is comforting to know that, whenever Microsoft tries to impose these flimsy limitations, I can always fire up “mc” to cause affirmative action to take place! No backtalk, neither!
All you do is isolate the cameras, to communicate exclusively with one Network Video Recorder.
Then, you control access to the NVR — over a separate interface.
Anybody who has configured a router and can grasp the difference between Local Area Network LAN vs Wide Area Network WAN has enough background to foil any of these rogue cameras.
https://archive.org/details/mpx_20211104
You can still run MPX in “DosBOX” but the problem is the authors only ever let loose this “hobbleware” version.
Which is too bad because it looks like a real cool program!
Somewhere, somebody’s still got the diskette with an actual working copy… !
Time travel really works but the problem with going very far into the future is this tiny problem of the Earth hurtling through space at about 50,000 mph.
(You’ll get there ok but you may find yourself either in outer space or else soaking in lava in the Earth’s interior. Maybe be more careful about what you wish for? We may never recover any time-traveller’s body, if you think about it.)
You could invent a “game” camera and stick em all over the woods and lake shore and such, but you know why the right pictures never get captured? It’s because of the Fermi paradox, i.e. how do you take photos of faster-than-light phenomena. Answer: well, first of all your Polaroid probably isn’t up to the task.
No not an “M.2,” but the new “M2.” Though it also has a ridiculous teeny “Tim Cook”-size M.2. That’s the new Mac Mini for 2023.
The last time we got her one was 2014 and whereas that still works just fine, people been jazzin up their web pages and the old tech is rather abandoned.
Like a great silly ass Tim Cook sells ya the M2 all right, but (permanently) welds on the most pathetic M.2 money can buy. If you want an adequate storage that’s another $800 Cdn. No, Tim.
Thankfully I can rummage in my tech box and rustle up a 500GB SATA SSD + USB 3.0 SATA adapter cord. Tim’s nefarious plot thwarted. Nice try there ya villain.
I tried the Linux subsystem and found it a hacked up broken mess. I don’t really “get” Linux to be sure, I find it fragile and finicky at the best of times. For example my PS3 “may or may not” suffer some kind of crash when activating “HEN,” the homebrew enabler, which in turn requires a “hard” shutdown, followed by an exhaustive and time-wasting disk assessment. In fact Linux fundamentally sucks in that it produces this extraordinarily verbose dialog of self-conversation that flashes past at each and every bootup, before vanishing to show a login prompt. What in the Royal Hell is all that garbage? I find, if I try to catch a glimpse of what’s flashing by about 1/4 appears to be in some kind of error condition. Is there anything to pay attention to there, well presumably because it all goes whipping past, and presumably not, since it’s all cleared away before you can see it.
But the frustrating nature of the Linux CLI is you carefully construct each command to issue to the software, and if there’s the slightest typo it fails with the most pathologically useless error message describing what went wrong. Entire batch jobs are one bit-error from massive pile-ups. But I digress.
Running Linux subsystem simply so you can run RPM seems crazy to me. Packages, containers, really?
Because I run Windows itself as a virtual environment — not the other way around. As far as I’m concerned Windows is merely an environment for running a desktop application. Though I may use it to “run” a primitive emulator for a long obsolete system (nostalgia purposes only).
If I want to open up a Mac environment or a Linux environment then they get their own, separate and distinct, sets of resources. Also, they, too, are only good for running some other, different, desktop applications.
And that’s all it is.
I got 3x X3550 blades for $30 apiece at auction, I mean whatr ya gonna do with all that?
But seriously: I own the product, I am a customer.
I’d say IBM should listen to my first-hand customer account except I haven’t gotten around to doing anything with em yet?
They are nice equipment though. Good enough for $30, anyway.
“In the 1980s many men had skilled "traditional" jobs like machinists. CNC replaced (most?) of them.”
The 1980s…? You might be surprised for how long we have been mechanizing all these different jobs. Luddism draws its roots from developments prior to 1800s!
https://youtu.be/TnsKj1Hwf7o
When Jennings lost to Watson back in 2011, I had assumed ibm would use the technology to train a “super-lawer” with 100% knowledge of all legal precedent and which could out-argue any human alive.
Instead, they e-o-l’d it, and the real entrepreneurs have been mercilessly trying to replace taxi drivers and truck drivers for gosh sake.
Somebody needs to make it a priority: run all humans out of the legal profession.
(Ultimately I would like it to be that any human tries to enter the legal profession automatically gets sued for incompetence until they are all exterminated, permanently. But that’s just my own ‘druthers.)
“To me, returning online to Shades after months away, with friends in both camps, it seems that the players are behaving like members of a paranoid cult. A closed, self-referential culture, with shared experience of addiction, shared conventions of behaviour, thought, and expression, the use of purpose-made clichés to stop thought, a jargon incomprehensible to outsiders, a revered leader whose word cannot be questioned, the bitter hatred of renegades: these are hallmarks of religious cults.” (Cybergypsies, 1999)
I don’t like relying on anything online. All of that stuff is just one single bit-flip away from catastrophic failure. The international cloud team could be the same group of mafia-hackers who’ve been trying to steal your same precious data for years, that you’re now willing to entrust to some unknown entity. At any second some calamity can befall whatever data warehouse you let yourself get swindled into trusting with anything.
Meanwhile I can buy old servers with dual 12-core cpus and hundreds of gb of ram for $30 apiece, and brand-new 5tb enterprise drives can be had for about $100. It truly is a case of “cheaper to buy than rent.”
I started shopping at this one convenience store, the one down by the laundromat? I’d go walk the dog over there, then pop in for a slurpee & lotto ticket and then back home. Well, the guy had enough of that b/s, and said so. He said, “ you come around here and all you buy is slurpee and lotto, and it never fails, you pay all the time with credit card. Whatsa matter, you never heard of cash?” So I’m like, “that’s right, I don’t carry any cash whatsoever, in fact I never carry any cash.”
So he says, “well that’s not the way it works anymore, you can’t buy anything here with credit anymore, from now on it’s cash only. You have been warned and now you have been told.”
So that’s it! Now we have to swing by the circle k ever since, or, I guess I could go to the drugstore because they too have slurpee.
I’m not saying the guy is gonna go bankrupt imminently, but it’s never good for business when you deliberately drive your customers toward your competitors.
Ehhhh whatever, it’s not as if I’m any kind of Microsoft customer anyway. The only thing I bought off them in the last 10 years is flight sim 2020.
I can confirm, at my current employer they got stung last year and paid $60k in Bitcoin (geez) to get >50% files recovered.
It was a PDM vulnerability, the solution was to shut off automatic email notification for state changes or whatever.
(Plus sloppy backup hygiene, come on, guys. I swear I’m gonna figure out Proxmox and switch permanently: you’ve got compartmentalization of the OS environments plus rolling, iterative backups with that ZFS scheme. Add to that inherent immunity due to 0.5Mbit upload and Win95 environment that nobody uses no more, or remembers how to crack. Come at me bro!)
I use Thunderbird because I don’t care about new things with arcane psychurity holes built-in. But on second thought, is this possibly also a thing on Thunderbird?
(To be honest I’m so far behind the curve I’m still on Seamonkey, because I truly just don’t care about new things with all their unwanted psychurity holes they are riddled with. Also: they ain’t anybody left in the world trying to hack my Win95, let’s be perfectly honest about it. Ain’t even one Win95 hacker left on the planet. They all died out!)
The last time I ever paid Microsoft for anything was 2020 (you know, the flight sim).
Once a long time ago I used to play Xbox 360 and I got swindled into paying $1.99 for one month of Xbox Live, with the stipulation that they would charge me regular rate for all subsequent months until the day I logged in to cancel the recurring payment scheme, which I attempted to do the very next second. Well I never was able to cancel those payments, short of telling PayPal they’re not allowed to grab any payments without authorization. So sure enough next month came, they triumphantly went in to grab another month, were denied access by PayPal, my Xbox live service was instantly shut off, and I have never been allowed to buy another single thing from Microsoft. Well you go to call in & the Microsoft lady says “nuthen can be done, any payment you send for anything will apply first to the outstanding balance, and you’ll probably have made only a partial payment for your purchase, which you won’t get until the full amount had been paid.”
(Honestly, I stopped caring years ago. Except for 2020. I had to buy that one through Steam I do believe. I guess if any other worthwhile product arises some day I might spend some time sorting it out, but I can sincerely predict that Microsoft never produces such worthwhile product ever again in my lifetime. I really do believe it.)
In “where the red fern grows” is described a trap for catching a raccoon (without a hunting dog) so you can harvest the fur to train your dog so that you can hunt raccoons “fairly.”
What you do is you climb up a tree and you bore a hole down partway into a branch. Then, you place a shiny metal disc into the hole, just small enough to fit. Then, you drive a nail into the branch, but angle it so the pointy end protrudes into the hole.
The upshot is that the raccoon can reach into the hole, and he can grab the metal, but he won’t be able to pull it out past the nail. He can drop the metal and pull out his paw and escape if he needs, but he can never pull out the metal: he can only touch it, and grab it, but can never have it.
In the book raccoons are dumb enough that they won’t let go of the metal, and you can blast them in between the eyes before they give up the sparkly treasure.
I feel that data security specialists have never yet been smart enough to figure out a way to use a similar technique to reliably secure precious databases.
There’s raging dumb out there, for some reason.
(I’ll even spell it out, if anybody cares. You put your data into a “hole” that has only one public way to access it, which is through the opening, and you can see that all the data is in there, but there’s a nail blocking the opening and you can never get the whole data set out at once. The exact way this is done is a supremely trivial exercise which probably involves a completely isolated server and a single pipe out by just one query protocol that is accessible by one single device. I’ll even describe my own personal security measure, my entire household is serviced by the absolute cheapest, slowest connection commercially available, which is 5 Mbit download, 0.5 Mbit upload. You’d have to continuously saturate my upload bandwidth for several years before you can steal all my data. Security specialists: are you seriously so stupid, you cannot figure out this trivial issue?)
Back in 2011, when IBM was still involved in artificial intelligence technologies, they put up their latest “Watson” software against humans on a quiz show about arcane trivia. And for its final, on-air answer (not long before it became retired For Good) it spectacularly guessed “Toronto” as a “U.S. City” which had its largest airport named after a WW-II hero and its second-largest named after a WW-II battle.
(Hint: “Toronto” ain’t a “U.S. City”, not even to this day.)
Methinks A.I. is not yet ready for mission critical tasks that it isn’t liable of committing Stunned Blunders on, ye jest don’t trust et!
https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sheila/384/w11/why-toronto.pdf
I use the SPA2102 myself, you merely enter command 7932# and 0 to disable the WAN access. Simple enough.
I still run my trusty old DNS-323, and the reason is because D-Link released the source code which allowed the enthusiasts to take over development of “Alt-F” alternative firmware. It has become a really useful device, you can put big drives in there, format with EXT4 if you care to, run ftp torrent nfs all sorts of different servers and services. Lately I even put AdGuard Home on there, a light-weight alternative to Pi-Hole. Just the cats pyjamas kind of device, and all because the source code was opened up one grand day. Thanks D-Link!
Anyway my SPA-2102 runs constantly (well of course, when do you ever turn off your telephone?) and the only thing that went wrong was I had to replace the 5V adapter a couple times.
Too bad they don’t open-source it, I bet there’s all sorts of wizard things it could do if they’d cooperate with customers for a change.
I’ll just run whatever as a virtual machine.
I’ve got Ubuntu server, Win 7 ultimate, win 10 pro retail, Monterey… open step, solaris, we’ve got Amiga OS, even geos if I care to.
The nice thing about compartmentalized virtual machines is I can run whatever virus I want & completely eliminate it from my system whenever I feel like it, just delete & restore.
They’re busy installing fibre to every single house in the city because they intend to control everyone by their online activity. No deal. HTTP and HTTPS are merely a type of protocol. Anybody can invent their own protocol, be it xmodem ymodem zmodem kermit “punter,” or torrent, or dark web. If HTTP becomes too commercialized I’ll just switch to something else, I don’t care. I don’t need Microsoft anymore, now they are merely another environment to choose among on my Proxmox cluster.
I have a script that copies the digital file, scrambles its contents randomly, and then erases it bit-by-bit. It runs in RAM exclusively so I’m not needlessly wearing out HDDs or anything.
I was thinking of releasing it as a RAM/CPU burn-in freeware.
(Actually I have done no such thing, but of course it wouldn’t be hard. Plus I’d make it optional which work to mutilate: the Quran, the Bible, the American Constitution… Groening’s “Life in Hell” comics… or supply your own hated document! Whatever you want for an empty, futile gesture.)
I finally figured out how to put my old Raid Array into HBA mode, also how to enable IOMMU. On my proxmox cluster. So I finished setting up my ZFS “RaidZ” array and am about ready to begin deploying a whole mess of VMs.
(To me, the “thin client” scene royally kicks “the cloud” in the trousers’ backside. I’ve got NAS backups out the wazoo, I can’t wait to get hit with ransomware!)
I dislike Android, Google has no incentive to support any manufacturer that isn’t Google, so Android is perpetually out of date and buggy. I have a Planet Computer PDA, it’s stuck on Android 7. So is my T95Z media box, so is my blackberry Keyone stuck on older Android. My 2016 era Apple iPhone SE 1st gen is still fully supported, so I keep on using it!
I still run my DLink DNS-323 boxes, why? Because DLink gave away specs for free and Alt-F “alternative firmware” was created, and it works great! I can’t get over how tidy “BusyBox” is as the main Linux command repository, it just works great, man.
I’d love to get rid of Android forever on everything.
I just bought 4 cpus from vendor in China, the 12/24 core units, cost me $36 apiece (completely obsolete 22nm devices). They were delivered via postal service and didn’t even trigger customs charges, Same with my $95 Tesla P4s I received last week. If I were to guess “why,” I’m pretty sure customs are amused by my toy supercomputer installation :)
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