Posts by deep_enigma

AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending hunger for any and all content

a scraper can come and go in short order.

Count yourself lucky. :/

My personal site is of no appreciable consequence, hosting mainly dribbles of code I've open-sourced, along with the VCS and ticket system I stuff it all into. Actual real human traffic typically amounts to, well, me committing things to version control, and a couple of requests to remember which ticket some commit needed to be tagged with, and possibly as many as five actual third party visitors per month, most of whom almost certainly (I haven't waded through the log swamp to find them) only request static files from my ~user subsite rather than the "main" site, such as it is.

I have the good fortune to have two moderately beefy couple-of-generations-old enterprise servers colocated at work for more or less free, with my main site recently converted to a VM scaled to about an eighth of one machine's CPU/RAM. I have plenty of capacity to throw hardware at the problem if I figured it would even be worth the bother of trying.

I have recently noticed instances of 5+ hours (verified at least as far as the Proxmox CPU usage graph) of being hammered with absolute gibberish requests that are clearly straight up hallucinations and have no just cause to have been requested from me at all... on top of the way-faster-than-justifiable requests for paths in the VCS infrastructure from at least six different identifiable bots, and an unknown horde that don't have the courtesy to identify themselves. I noticed because my source code commits and other access to my own resources were failing because the bots were hitting everything so hard the DB was hitting its connection limit.

My Apache log file for one month should be on the order of maybe a couple of megabytes. It's been >1GB for close to a year. For July it hit 2.5GB. Last month the useless garbage bots pushed it up to 2.8GB.

AI bots can just go fold themselves until they're all corners, stuff themselves up their own backsides, and launch themselves into the nearest supernova.

Users left scrambling for a plan B as Dropbox drops Dropbox Passwords

Re: Or control your password data yourself

Soooo..... Note taped under the keyboard then?

What if Microsoft just turned you off? Security pro counts the cost of dependency

Re: Nobody in their right minds runs a mailserver.

Can confirm. Source: Have self-hosted my own email for closing on 30 years, maintain mail and spam filter services for a smallish medium-sized ISP.

Microsoft lists seven habits of highly effective Windows 11 users

Re: randomly rearranged the start menu

Microsoft has randomly rearranged the start menu so many times that regular users cannot nobody can find programs using it.

FTFY. :/

Windows 11 24H2 strikes again – Outlook might not start with Google Workspace Sync running

Re: "... features like Pinning and Snoozing mails"

... Do I even want to know? O_o

Windows 11 24H2 rolls out to more devices – with a growing list of known issues

Re: windows mail

Seconded. To turn the point upside down - what's the problem with a UI that looks the same today as it did last week, and the week before that, and the week before that, and....?

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

check out a project such as Spleen

Oh dear.

Everyone[*] knows the One True Console Font is fixedsys.

(Yes, I do actually prefer it. I also go out of my way to disable most of the modern antialiasing and subpixel rendering on both Linux and Windows [on the increasingly rare occasions I use it], because after about the late Windows XP era, every possible variation of settings for either looked blurry, colour-separated, or both, on every display I tried. Well-shaped jaggies are infinitely preferable to the eyestrain of blurry fonts with funny red and/or blue shadows.)

[*] for suitably stretchy values of "everyone"

GitHub alienates developers by force feeding them AI recommendations

Re: I detest all this "for you", "did you know" stuff

Do you have any idea how hard it is to make a popup show up exactly where you were just about to click?

Meet the merry pranksters who keep the workplace interesting, if not productive

Re: mail headers

"mail headers were not 6K 60K a piece because Microsoft likes to stuff them with what appears to be the complete works of Shakespeare.."

FTFY. Not even joking one bit. :(

(I don't know if I've actually seen one that hit 60Kb, but I've seen many that topped 40 and several that I'm pretty sure bulged out to at least 50Kb. *shiver* *twitch*)

How GitHub Copilot could steer Microsoft into a copyright storm

4. License Grant to Us

Nowhere in that paragraph does it say anything about giving up copyright ownership or any of the other OSS license requirements that go along with "copy-paste this blob of code into my project".

More than 4 in 10 PCs still can't upgrade to Windows 11

Audacity for my music collection

Hey now! The One True Music Player is clearly Winamp!

It's just a little trickier to run on Linux...

FCC takes on robotexts. Good news if your dad thinks IRS gives SMS rebates

Re: All the above but also

..... about a couple zillion years past "never"?

PC component scavenging queue jumper pulled into line with a screensaver

fake (and endless) Windows update.

How do you tell the difference?

Serious surfer? How to browse like a pro on Firefox

Website developers should detect features, not versions.

Web developers should *not* be relying on (mis)"features" where the ink on the standards document has barely dried (assuming it even got that far before being bodged out half-baked in Chrome).

School chat app Seesaw abused to send 'inappropriate image' to parents, teachers

Re: I blame the parents

"... people who have access to an account through which they can send messages to kids and access their personal information were so bloody lazy they couldn't be bothered to set a password they hadn't used before."

FTFY. :(

Deluge of of entries to Spamhaus blocklists includes 'various household names'

Re: Open Resolver Public DNS problem, 8.8.8.8

No, it has nothing to do with any particulars of the mail transmission path. It's a DNS lookup volume issue.

Spamhaus (and most other public DNSBLs) put a limit on how many DNS queries "you" can do for free. Most place that limit at 100k queries.

That's a fairly large mail system - a small private system doing direct lookups will generate on the order of hundreds to maybe a low thousands per day.

Each and every SMTP connection to your server will generate a query to the DNS cache you have configured. At a small scale, that will be passed on to Spamhaus' DNS servers each time because the cache timeout for DNSBL data is generally pretty short. As mail volume goes up, some of the lookups will be found in the cache instead, saving a query direct to Spamhaus.

If you run your own cache, you'll stay within the free limits for quite some time - easily 10k+ mailboxes and 200k+ messages/day for general ISP mail traffic.

However, if you're forwarding DNS queries to a big public cache, Spamhaus only "sees" the query from the public cache - there's no (trivial/simple) way to see the individual cache users. So the query volume from these shoots past that free 100k-query limit in a matter of a few minutes each day. DNS is pretty lightweight..... up until you start looking at large platforms, supporting literally billions of queries daily. It costs big money to run a system capable of supporting that query volume, so they insist high-volume users pay for either a datafeed or "authenticated" direct query service.

Re: Spammers use SPF and DKIM too.

... And they're substantially better at setting them up correctly (in the purely technical sense) than most legitimate sites. :(

Tesla Full Self-Driving 'fails' to notice child-sized objects in testing

Re: if the brakes are failing

I literally had to do this once. Driving down the highway, about to turn left, push on the brake pedal.. Nothing. Push a lot harder. Nothing. Since I'm not a complete maniac, I had space to use the hand brake before running out of turn lane, and instead of continuing to work I diverted slightly in the other direction to the dealership to get the brakes fixed.

Intel’s first discrete GPUs won't be a home run

Re: Proof just how effective modern marketing is

> Sounds like we need to have team Alpha too to add some transparency to the market...

Those might be a bit hard to see on the shelf though...

Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL

Re: Just a quick question.

Oh hell no.

The golf course is where they make all their biggest, bestest, most headache-inducing sales.

Day 7 of the great Atlassian outage: IT giant still struggling to restore access

Re: Ah....remember....."cloud" is cheaper......

No, that one's buried in about:config in your browser....

To err is human. To really tmux things up requires an engineer

Re: Step outside

It didn't help that it also had a handy, obvious menu item "Eject Floppy". Which did in fact eject the floppy... and promptly complained for you to stick it back in. WTF?

Thank you, FAQ chatbot, but if I want your help I'll ask for it

Re: I'm not so old that I can't scroll downwards without assistance

One of the first things I do on the increasingly rare occasions I have a completely new browser install is to go into about:config and turn off the ability for a web page to disable the title bar, menu bar, address bar, scroll bars, etc. These are UI elements that belong to the browser and the page has no business monkeying with them.

NixOS and the changing face of Linux operating systems

Re: A more easily understandabe file tree? Yes, please!

What kind of Linux-head are you? The binary is *obviously* called joesbigbrother! /s

(Sadly this is not *quite* as sarcastic as it should be, I have in fact run into exactly this disconnect between package name and actual runnable program file name and menu entry name.)

Beijing issues fines for 43 Big Tech M&A deals all the way back to 2012

Re: Less than 100K in fines?

"...schmuck in accounting will ... fling at the regulators..."

That might be the body tasked with digging up the loose change, but I'd bet it would be presented to the government by someone a fair bit higher up the food chain.

I'd also expect, unlike all too many similar fines in North America and Europe, that these will be paid in full the last yuan.

Don't underestimate the regional value of "face" either.

In the '80s, spaceflight sim Elite was nothing short of magic. The annotated source code shows how it was done

Does that still hold if you don't have space (or at least strong enough floors) for all the books you've actually read already?

Netflix sued by South Korean ISP after Squid Game fans swell traffic to '1.2Tbps'

Re: Looks like the ISP wants 2 bites of the cherry

I *work* for a smallish mid-sized ISP, and I (and by all indications, the owners of this company) think you're wrong. It is absolutely NOT on the content provider to help pay for the receiving end's costs; it is up to the customer's ISP to scale their transit/peering as needed to support their customers' use of the Internet - whatever that usage is.

Or find some way to not have the data flow over a transit link for each and every viewer in the first place.

I've just had a quick skim through the Netflix Open Connect site, and if SK has decided not to host a handful of these appliances they've just gone and shot themselves in both feet with great enthusiasm. This kind of transit data volume is exactly the kind of thing they're designed and intended to PREVENT, and it's not like Netflix charges for them.

When free and open source actually means £6k-£8k per package: Atos's £136m contract with NHS England

Re: What is FREE?

Erm..... and why would statistical toolkits or scripting environments like R and Python be deployed to 15k users when it's all of maybe a couple of hundred that have any use for them?

Installing all of the tools that anyone in the organization will need on all of the desktop machines in a big organization is a really horrible idea. If there's that much tracking and planning, surely someone realized that different groups need different sets of installed software...

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

"The 'long in the tooth' issue is my main problem with TB."

Erm.. so... no *actual* problem then?

"Old", in and of itself, should never be a problem.

Big right-to-repair win: FTC blasts tech giants for making it so difficult to mend devices

Re: Some products are expected to display energy ratings

Name and shame praise! Help others vote with their wallets!

Former Senator and one-time astronaut Bill Nelson named as NASA's new administrator

Re: NASA head is a political job?

"...we will find out if he wants to political leadership will let him run a space exploration program or a fake jobs pork funnel."

FTFY.

Partial beer print horror as Microsoft's printer bug fix, er, doesn't

Re: Update: 19.03.2021 Latest Patch, on Patch, on Patch: KB5001649 Fails to install.

... Except that now your network card sings "Daisy, Daisy" every time you connect to anything on Microsoft IP space.

Pure frustration: What happens when someone uses your email address to sign up for PayPal, car hire, doctors, security systems and more

Re: Netflix

I recently came across a form that forcibly PREVENTED pasting anything. Bizarrely enough, the "I forgot my password" form was quite happy to let me paste that same email address (you know, in order to, oh, say, make sure it was really the address I actually signed up to that site with...) and let me reset the password on a rarely-used account.

'This was bigger than GNOME and bigger than just this case.' GNOME Foundation exec director talks patent trolls and much, much more

Re: Move to Wayland?

I don't really care one way or the other about "a whole remote desktop in a local window", but I *do* want to remotely access the entire remote console GUI workspace that has many browser windows and shell windows each with many tabs open on tasks in progress, times several desktops for different task groupings. Just logging in to all the servers I touch on a regular basis would occupy 30-45 minutes of my day, never mind the time lost to manually reconstructing all of the rest of the workspace state.

Shonky as it may be, Windows Remote Desktop utterly destroys anything I've tried on Linux for accessing a remote workspace. I can do *almost* anything over Remote Desktop, on a grotty 2M DSL line, that I can do sitting in front of the console of that remote system. I can barely read email, trying to use VNC (or any similar *nix tool I've tried) to (try to) work in the GUI workspace of a machine that is literally right next to the one I'm "in front of", both connected to the same gigabit switch. The situation is marginally better if I connect to a headless X11 workspace/session, but then I'm stuck with the leftover grottiness ALL THE TIME, including when I'm sitting in front of the machine the headless session is running on.

Net neutrality lives... in Europe, anyway: Top court supports open internet rules, snubs telcos and ISPs

"If I pay more, I SHOULD get better service. Right?"

Sure, because YOU have decided that you want this or that service to work better FOR YOU. The problem comes when it's the ISP and/or content provider who pays extra for priority, giving that specific content provider (or in many cases in the US, the content division of the ISP/telco) a "free" ride into YOUR home - and leaving you stuck with shoddy service from the content providers you DO have an account with, because despite paying your ISP for the top-tier multi-gigabit-symmetrical connection, they're prioritizing someone else's traffic leaving you no better off than if you switched to the entry-level tin-can-and-string 1.5Mbps DSL.

Firefox 72: Floating videos, blocking fingerprints, and defeating notification pop-ups

Re: Nope ...

> which broke all many useful plugins for about 2 days permanently.

FTFY.

A History of (Computer) Violence: Wait. Before you whack it again, try caressing the mouse

Re: The tine of a forklift wielded like a scalpel

"...in a packing crate suitable for international shipping being dropped off the fork lift... The rack itself was bent..."

Then it was not in a packing crate suitable for international shipping...

Facebook: Remember how we promised we weren’t tracking your location? Psych! Can't believe you fell for that

Re: Interesting phrasing

(Fair disclosure - I work for a medium-sized Canadian ISP, and I have a couple of fingers in our DNS pie.)

"Your IP maybe dynamic but your ISP provides a hostname to that IP. That hostname is not dynamic, it's yours,"

Umm..... No. This is techically possible, but I'd be very surprised if many ISPs anywhere did this, and even more surprised if they're larger ones. Managing reverse DNS is turning into an arcane art, and all too many providers can't even get simple static names based on the IP right. Handling dynamic changes based on user logins requires more automation and processing to manage things, and it's easier to statically assign an IP to someone who wants a static connection for a server, and set the reverse DNS once, than to set up all that automation and provision the DNS platform to handle dynamic updates.

Anatomy of an attack: How Coinbase was targeted with emails booby-trapped with Firefox zero-days

Re: Just an idea

I've seen (small(ish)) businesses that *printed their business cards* before registering the domain they wanted. Which they ended up having to change, because the domain they wanted was already registered and Not For Sale. I've seen others who managed to score the domain, but only as a "premium" domain for a ridiculous price. (Think $5-10K for a .com, of no obvious significant value. No idea if these continue to cost huge bucks on renewal.)

Never underestimate the ability of business to totally not get this Internet thingy.

For pity's sake, groans Mimecast, teach your workforce not to open obviously dodgy emails

Re: Point of detail please....

Unfortunately, yes, depending on the specific phish it is possible that just opening the message is enough to cause trouble.

The problem is what I consider a design defect in most mail clients - the fact that they execute Javascript in the HTML part of the message. It's one of the very first things I do on the occasional new install of Thundebird or Seamonkey - go into the settings, and turn off Javascript support in the email handling. I can't imagine any valid use case for it - if anything really needs that degree of complexity, it should be hosted on a normal web site, and handled by a full web browser.