Posts by Number6

It comes back to my opinion that HTML email is in itself a security hazard. My system is set up to display plain text and considers the presence of HTML to incline it to bounce a message. Stick to plain text, people, you know it makes sense.

Another Linode customer here, wondering how long it will be for the basic offerings to be ruined by excessive prices for bundling services I don't need. The purpose of a Linux machine in the cloud is that it is set up to do exactly what I want. I can install what I need, all I need from the hosting provider is a reliable platform on which to run the code of my choice and a way to access it (the ssh console is nice) if I screw up.

I really hope that Akami is sensible enough to leave the basic Linode offerings alone. The price/performance is ideal for those of us who are not making money from what we have in the cloud, and so don't have much of a budget to pay for increases in cost.

What it needs is a way of getting compensation awarded from HMRC for lost income due to having to wait for the appeal to work its way through the system. That would speed things up a bit, if they ran the risk of having to give some of it back. Of course, the law is written to avoid that happening.

Perhaps it's the bookstore where they've got Fly Fishing by J.R.Hartley in stock.

I noticed it as I went to bed last night. A quick check showed that TV and phone had also gone down so I decided it was a good excuse to get some sleep. It was back up this morning when I got up. To be fair to them, outages are fairly rare here, we must have more modern kit in the local cabinets than some people.

Looking at some log files, we lost service at 21:43 and it came back at 22:50 (PST).

Google is the new Microsoft in terms of ignoring anything outside its own monoculture. I gave up on Chrome some time back. I tend to use Firefox at the moment, with Chromium as a reluctant last resort if something really doesn't like Firefox. I still remember stuff that only works on IE and MS systems (and sends email notifications that use ancient encryption methods that modern SMTP doesn't support by default). Sadly I still have some of that in the house because I haven't gotten around to upgrading it.

As for checking against latest browser releases, that's a fool's game. I tend to hand-write boring HTML with an occasional bit of CSS and rarely some Javascript, and if that doesn't work on your browser then I guess you're not going to look at my page. I check it out when I write it to make sure I haven't done anything too stupid, but then it just sits there taking up space on the web.

I was there the week before it launched. Had it launched at the originally-scheduled time I would have seen it launch, but instead it waited until the afternoon of the day I arrived back in the UK so I got to watch it on TV instead.

That's me screwed then. My desktop dates back to 2013. Having said that, I only run Win10 in a VM on this machine anyway, it has always been a Linux box and it's got 32GB RAM in it.

What benefits might I get (running Win11 is not considered a benefit) from an upgrade to a more modern CPU. I don't consider a lighter wallet to be a benefit either. If one is not doing high-end graphics or CAD then why upgrade something that's still working just fine?

So much for the free market his party espouses. Or his definition of "free" is somewhat different to mine.

I've had full console access with my VPS provider for many years, surprised that AWS is only just catching up with it. Fortunately not had to use it often, mostly when doing major upgrades, but it's nice to know it's there in case I've done something stupid.

When it comes to typing, they're clearly not old enough to remember typewriters, nor allow for those who used them because we do tend to hit the keys. I'm not sure that "peer" is an alternative to "slave" either, peers are equals, whereas when you have an architecture where one unit is controlling others, the others could be minions, subordinates or secondaries.

They missed kicking the watchdog though, when the nicer term is to pat the dog.

All us HW types will have to think up some creative alternative meanings for MISO and MOSI, found on a lot of SPI documentation.

Time to bring back Usenet (not that it ever went away, but it lost market share to all these annoying web-based things).

US politicians should be careful about taking out section 230, I suspect a lot of them could fall foul of it. If you're going to change it, just provide immunity until a legal take-down notice turns up, at which point there's 24 hours to remove the offending item, and that if the removed party wishes to challenge it they should be awarded costs (and possibly more) against the legal firm issuing the takedown notice if they win the challenge. That should help cap the frivolous notices, I assume most legal firms will be smart enough to pass on such costs to the originator.

I'm glad that OpenWRT doesn't seem to be vulnerable, makes me glad I'm running it when things like this crop up.

One of my former lecturers provided a rare bit of excitement in one of his classes by dropping dead in front of the class. This was a year or two after my time though.

That would probably destroy the business of most US hosting providers if offshore competition set up and didn't insist on such information. Nice idea in theory, falls flat on its face when you consider the follow-on effects.

Twitter is being a good old capitalist company. They've made a business decision that they will lose more by not shutting down his feed than they would by letting him continue. The same with Facebook and Instagram.

Trump could always create a TikTok account and use that.

Given my opinion of how US credit ratings appear to be put together, it's got to be an improvement, although I am fascinated by what they'd deduce about my credit rating from my search history.

I guess if "how to defraud the bank" is one of the search questions then you've failed.

Sounds like an excellent reason not to have a smart TV, too. Not shedding any tears for the content that didn't appear, though.

All ads should be selected server-side. That would make it way safer for us as users and stop our browsers being bogged down with badly-written or malicious scripts. It would also make them way harder to block because if done well, they'd be indistinguishable from other images in the downloaded page. Then it's between the ad brokers and the server owners. Given how the money flows, that would give the ad brokers every incentive to make the server-side code efficient.