Posts by onefang 1954 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Dec 2017
"If wifey and I found something to be particularly effective, whizzy or generally spiffing, we have been known to refer to it as 'orgasmichael', which was great; right up until the point where we realised our very bright 8yo lad was also using it; I have since heard one of classmates using it too!"
Just wait until the classmate called Michael hears it, then you'll see the true results of Pandora's box opening.
"...and caffeine, aspirin, insulin, etc. etc.?"
I wouldn't be calling insulin a drug, it is made by the human body, and generally only injected by diabetics that are lacking enough insulin. That's like calling blood a drug, coz some people have blood injected into them. Next you'll be calling blood donors drug dealers.
A certain Air Force Base contains it's own residential suburb, where the families of the Air Force members stationed at that base live. The base, and the residential suburb are naturally surrounded by "security", as is the bases golf course. The main gate has a small jet on display, and maybe half a dozen guards, who may or may not have access to firearms. At regular intervals around the not particularly high barbed wire fences are signs warning that guard dogs patrol the area.
Right across the busy road from one of the many unguarded and never locked rear gates is a large public primary school. Every morning on school days, a large stream of very young children accompanied by various parents / guardians / older siblings / friendly neighbours streamed through that small gate, to go to school. And every afternoon, they come back. In the many years I lived on that Air Force base, I don't recall seeing any vicious guard dogs snacking on any conveniently placed small school children, or any actual guard dogs at all. My younger brother, who attended that school, was never worried about hungry dogs.
Dad got posted elsewhere, but I stayed in the city coz I had a civilian job when the rest of the family followed him, you could say I never left home, home left me. Same years later I had a short door to door sales job in between proper work. I was young, and had yet to learn that I'm terrible at sales. At one point I ventured onto the Air Force base to try my luck at selling door to door there. I was two or three blocks into the base before anyone bothered to call the MPs. The friendly MPs picked me up and drove me to the main entrance, telling me that Bert, my father (that's his nickname they used), will hear about this, and please don't do that again.
Though it has been decades since I have had a legitimate reason to visit any Air Force base, I still have an Air Force civilian ID, which is falling to pieces, but apparently is "VALID TO: RECALL", at least I think that's what it said, that part has faded completely. It has yet to be recalled, all my hair is now in different places, but I bet I can still get in using that pass.
Helicopter icon, coz while they are not black, they do have some.
"My Moto Z, which is an older model, was getting security updates once a month, until the rather lengthy wait for Oreo. It got Oreo this month, I'll see if it returns to monthly updates. Considering it had Marshmellow on it when I bought it, that's three major updates it has had, and several minor ones."
Two months later, and I got another OTA update for my Moto Z. It's entirely likely this update was out sometime in the last month, I wasn't checking for them. So yeah, Motorola isn't being slack with their Moto Z series updates.
The author of WireGuard claims that the code is a lot simpler, thus easier to audit. It also works in a different way, which the author claims makes it easier to deal with by the people setting it up. As mentioned above, I've heard good things about it, but have not actually looked deeper yet, so I dunno how true these things are yet.
OK, I'm back, it was just the new neighbour wondering about all those helicopters. I live half a suburb away from six major hospitals, at least two of them have helipads on their roofs. I live in a house that is on stilts ("Queenslander" they are called, very common here in Queensland), on top of a hill, in a suburb with "High" and "Hill" in the name. I've watched helicopters flying past two blocks away, by looking down from my bedroom window.
Oh look, there goes another chopper. /me waves to the pilot. Cool, she waved back.
Usually "delete" means remove the linking data that points to it, but don't actually overwrite the actual data, and especially don't overwrite it using the sorts of military grade overwriting algorithms that the NSA might just be able to read through anyway. Oh, and don't bother deleting copies on the backups, or on old backup tapes that have been retired due to wear.
Hopefully they are not using that other definition of "delete". Hold on, there's a loud knocking at the door, and I hear lots of nearby helicopters.
Maybe NSA forgot to turn on the USA citizens filter in their slurp of the rest of the worlds stuff? A simple mistake really, some PFY wandered past thinking "what's this switch do?". Too easy to miss hundreds of millions of extra people in a database of several BEEELLION.
"The Wireguard VPN service"
Er, it's not a service, it's software. It's own website says "WireGuard is not yet complete. You should not rely on this code. It has not undergone proper degrees of security auditing and the protocol is still subject to change." I wonder if US Senator Ron Wyden read that bit. I do hear good things about it though, and intend to try it out later.
'Would it not be simply better to devise a translation table to trap and refuse to register names in Cyrillic that "look like" anything in Latin?'
Normally I'd say that's a bad idea, some purely innocent things might trigger that. Flag it for a human to check, sure, not flat out "computer says no". On the other hand, it's a step up from what they did do, so up voted anyway.
"Except that .ec (in latin) is the TLD for Equador. This was the grounds they've refused registering .бг on !"
That reminds me, in the source code for the Sad Life viewer (Second Life for those that have not been reading El Reg for long enough), they use the country code SL to refer to their own timezone (otherwise known as Pacific Time, or PT, coz that's where their headquarters are). While I have yet to hear any residents of Sierra Leone complaining, I don't think many have noticed.
"аррӏе.com is fully in Cyrillic, apple.com is in Latin script"
For what it is worth, they got rendered in different fonts in my browser, obviously different. I likely wouldn't be able to spot the difference if they where not side by side though, and I wasn't looking for the difference.
"(Has anyone managed to figure out how to stop cats from posting for you when your back is turned?)"
Make sure that what you are doing while you have your back turned is opening up what ever is their favourite food. You will then have their undivided attention, at least until you get out of the way and let them eat. With my last cat, if I didn't know where she was, I'd just poke my head out the door and yell "CHEESE!".
I guess I should add germophobes to the prudes and Windows fanbois I often get downvotes from.
Even though science agrees with my method for keeping my immune system well exercised, alas the marketing budgets of soap companies is huge, and no one listens to scientists. So I get "ewwww" from most people, but don't get diseases from them. I'm allergic to eggs, so I can't have the flu vaccines, but never catch flu anyway, coz well exercised immune system. Infection never bothers me, despite walking around bare foot, over broken glass, and often never bothering to clean wounds, or even bandage them, coz well exercised hyperactive immune system + rapid healing.
When I go for my blood tests, I have to remind them to not bother putting a bandaid on my arm, coz it'll heal before I get to the street corner. One day I donated some blood to my doctor in the arvo after the regular blood test that morning. The doctor picked the same vein, one centimetre from where the blood lab had hit me. I also told him not to bother with the bandaid, it would heal before I got to the corner. It healed before I left his surgery. I guess the healing bits of my body where still primed from the mornings blood sucking.
I once got a three millimeter bit of glass embedded in the underside of my big toe. That part of the toe that carries all of your weight as you walk each step. I noticed it, but kept walking around for half an hour, until I got home. Then I fished it out, it left a big hole, no blood, no cleaning, no bandaid, no infection. When you walk around bare foot everywhere, you develop thick skin on the bottom of your feet and toes.
I'm one very healthy and tough dirty old man, and I save money not spending it on the excessive amounts of soap most others buy. Also good for the environment, saves water, saves what ever carbon foot print manufacturing and transporting too much soap creates.
I also don't shave, cut my hair, nor my finger and toe nails. All of which is just companies with hugely successful marketing having brainwashed most people in our society. I don't care what others think, they think wrong, I'm not abusing my body to cater to marketing and profit driven fashion. Science, it works bitches! Fashion, it sucks bitches!
Downvote away germophobes, I'm all sorts of tough, I can take it. And just to trigger the prudes, I'm also a dirty old man in the other sense of the phrase. Windows fanbois can downvote me anyway, I'm sure to say something nasty about Windows again sooner or later.
"This is encouraged by the surgeries who are often very tight fisted when it comes to paying for test strips."
That very much depends on what the health system in your country is like. Here in Australia, we have Medicare that pays for a lot of things, like your doctor visits and HbA1c tests, National Diabetes Services Scheme that gives you a discount on things like test strips and lancets (probably syringes and insulin to, I never had to), and the Health Care Card for those on any sort of pension that gives you more discounts or freebies.
I'm Type 2, and I used to prick my finger twice a day, until my diet and exercise dropped my weight, and put my diabetes into remission.
Something that has not been mentioned, which is another great reason why some sort of non invasive glucose measuring device would be a great idea for diabetics, is that diabetes attacks your immune system. This is what sometimes leads to leg amputations. Constantly poking holes in your fingers, that spend a large part of the day touching all sorts of things that may or maynot be covered in nasty bugs that your slowly depleting immune system may or maynot be able to handle today, isn't a good thing.
Yes, I know, I sometimes rag on germaphobes in these forums, but other diabetics don't also happen to have a hyperactive immune system that is kept well exercised like mine. It's a careful balance, and most diabetics have the extra issue of pin cushion finger tips to worry about.
Exhibit A, other peoples keyboards ->
"Not only Netflix. Gmail, for example, treats frequent IP address changes as suspect*"
Which is why I gave up using Tor for gmail. I use a proper email client not their web front end, and have fetchmail log into gmail every couple of minutes to see if I have new email. You can imagine how Tor would trigger an gmail complaint email every couple of minutes. Though I guess that would ensure there is at least one email to collect each time.
I'm going with another fix for that problem, weening myself off gmail.
"I've found that netflix works best with edge."
Edge doesn't run too well on that Linux desktop I mentioned. And ever since Windows 10, I'm not letting my test boxes Windows 8.1 partition anywhere near the Internet without an armed chaperone and a straight jacket. Safer that way for all concerned.
https://www.anonymousspeech.com/ had no problem adding DNS records for the single IPv6 address my server company handed to me. https://freedns.afraid.org/ already had infrastructure in place for doing the same for the freebies I use for other peoples freebie web sites on my server. My home ISP reminded me that they had handed me several GAZEEEELION IPv6 addresses, and would be happy to let me setup my own DNS servers, then delegate to me. Something I was thinking about doing anyway, for other reasons. No extra charge from any of them.
"They need a series of clue-by-fours"
I think you mean clue-by-sixes.
"So if you login via a browser but you have cookie blockers, or regularly clean out cookies, it'll see the browser as a new "PC" because their persistent cookie is no longer there."
Nope, it's not cookies in my case. I use Chrome specifically for Netflix, without my usual filters and such in place, and no other protections. Mostly coz A) Netflix wont run on anything else under Linux, B) I get Netflix quota free in this land of expensive Internet and my usual filtered browser proxies everything via Europe, which would bypass the quota freeness.
"It's essentially security through obscurity, but it makes it difficult to scan your network when the IPs change from day to day."
I get an email from Netflix each time I log in, telling me that some new computer they have never seen me log in from has recently logged in, and that changing my password might be a geed idea if I don't recognise that computer. I'm IPv6, Netflix is IPv6, their IP checking code is still a bit behind the times.
"a far better way to gradually upgrade any component (and so upgrade or change a system incrementally) rather than forcing everything to either say the same, make massive upgrades, recompile many times with different options"
You left out what seems to be the Windows option, each program comes with it's own copy of "shared" libraries, so there's not much sharing going on.
"I have most of the above, including a lot of tape. I am starting with ESP8266s and simple circuits, Mosquitto and Home Assistant. My VMs live on a proper SAN and VMware cluster. I start with multiple segregated VLANs and firewalls (including hosts). All comms including MQTT are TLS 1.2 or similar. Web apps live behind HA Proxy etc etc. If anything fails, it is designed to fail to manual operation rather than fucked."
I have a finger, and a light switch in each room, much simpler. If it helps, I can give you the finger.
"My inbox currently has 70k+ unread messages - to say email is close to useless would be an understatement..."
I suspect the useless thing is your email filtering system. Mine filters out spam and sorts the rest into folders for me, so I know which ones are worth ignoring.
There's Google Cardboard and it's many clones (I and II), and Google Daydream (original flavour, and 2017). The Cardboard, often being made out of used pizza boxes, or cheap plastic knock offs, is usually ugly. The Daydream is the better looking VR headset of the three I own.
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