Posts by jake 26707 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
For (probably) better security than the stock unit, look into replacing the firmware with something like OpenWRT. Most Linux/GNU/FOSS usergroups will be happy to help you with this if you are unsure of your technical ability. Ask at your local Uni to find such a group in your area.
When I want to sit down and write without distractions, I use a dumb terminal.
The computer I'm typing this on right now is a nearly 17 year old HP Pavillion laptop running Slackware-stable. Alongside its stock screen, it has a much larger display (usually in portrait), and an IBM 3151 + Model M keyboard plugged into a serial port. I simply login to the 3151 as "writer", and instead of a friendly shell prompt I'm greeted with an empty vi document. All I need to do is start typing. It's the fastest way I know to get my thoughts into a computer ... and with zero distractions. If needs be, I can save the text & re-open it later in a word processor to make it look pretty.
I have the GUI right next to the dumb terminal ... but there is nothing stopping me running a wire to the next available space to remove the distraction. Or even into the next room, for that matter (and I do, sometimes). Obviously email, Usenet, FTP, etc. are still available on a dumb terminal, and I can shell out of vi and run links or lynx for text-only WWW browsing, so a little self-discipline is needed to ignore the distractions ... but honestly, once I start typing I don't think about the outside world.
I'm not suggesting this solution is right for everybody, but try it, you might like it. vi is not for everybody, either ... so use your text editor of choice as your shell instead ... or simply login to a more standard shell and then fire up your editor of choice.
Whitewash is usually a mixture of lime, casein and water. Milk can be substituted for the casein and water, thus the term "milk paint". A chemical reaction cures and "plasticizes" the mixture, creating a long-wearing surface. Other colo(u)rs are available, depending on location. Us farmers are cheap bastards and will use whatever is local and plentiful .... if there is abundant red ochre (hematite, Fe2O3), local barns will be red. Note the present tense in this paragraph. We still do it this way.
The more I think about it, the more this reason alone is more than enough to put this whole bit of nonsense in our collective rear-view mirror.
The fact of the matter is that, like it or not, the American dialect of English is the defacto lingua franca of most of the collaborative coding projects in the online world. Deciding to capriciously change even a small percentage of the words already in the common vernacular will decidedly detriment coders for whom English is a second language. For this reason alone, the very concept should be filed in a drawer marked "thought about it, decided it was unworkable on a global scale".
Thanks for helping to clarify my thoughts on this aspect of the subject, Muhwyndham. Have a cold one of whatever you like on me ... and please stick around. The more non-North American/European views on various subjects we can get, the better off we'll all be.
Yep. It's a meritocracy. All that matters is coding ability ... at least for the vast majority of us.
Unfortunately, a very small minority of people seem to think that that's unnatural, and are trying to throw a wrench into the works. Why, I am not sure. If I were paranoid, I'd suspect Big Business.
Apropos of the meta conversation, I posted the following about two and a half weeks ago:
"Worse, how do they deal with the word f__k?"
Which word would that be? Near as I can tell (with a little shell script and an open-source word list), in English that could be fank, feck, fink, firk, fisk, flak, folk, fork, fuck or funk.
See how important using English unambiguously is?
More to the point, why do people think that using placeholders to mask letters somehow changes the word into something non-profane? We (TINW) know you meant fuck, so fucking type fuck. If some fucker can't handle it, they can fucking leave.
Or we can let the fuckheads who pretend to be easily shocked take over.
"If you doubt me, jump on the LKML & ask why there is no mention of current slavery in Africa."
Whatever you do, don't ask who the Europeans bought the slaves from in the first place, how they had become slaves, and how long the evil practice had been happening before the Portuguese stumbled onto it and figured out how to make a quick buckreal.
The only reason those particular aspects of the vile Atlantic Slave Trade are conveniently glossed over is in order to make rich, fat, white Americans feel guilty over something they have never participated in, and in fact think is an abhorrent practice.
In other words, the proponents are whitewashing the issue, making the appearance of "doing something" while not actually doing anything at all?
(Note that "whitewashing" is a technical term involving the actual appearance of Ca(OH)2 after reacting with CO2, and in no way connotes the author is racist. Except I'm sure somebody will probably insist that I must be ...)
Or perhaps it's simply curtain-twitchers and namby-pambys, doing what they always have, in an attempt to ensure that we all evolve into nameless, faceless, lowest common denominator grey goo with absolutely zero distinguishing characteristics?
It's a trifle archaic ... but is still in use to a degree. I have a friend who has several boats at a marina here in the Bay Area. He asked me to meet up with him "on his boat". When I got to the marina, I asked a mutual friend where John was ... The answer was "He's down in the bilge of his three-master."
Do we ban all black cats, because of the evilness they traditionally portray?
Or do we mandate that all cats be black, because black awareness?
Personally, I think all cats are beautiful regardless of colo(u)r, and thus I treat them all equally. Strangely enough, they all treat each other equally, too ... but they treat most humans with utter disdain.
We can learn a lot from cats.
"an Internet version might be to use Usenet to propagate the messages."
That has been done by at least three different groups[0] as proof of concept. The first was in the alt.binaries hierarchy in the late '80s, shortly after The Great Renaming. The second was in the massively abused Jobs groups in the late '90s, followed shortly by the third in the so-called "Dutch dump groups". All used what seemed to be "broken binaries", with a special line in the header, making them easy to filter out of the noise.
All were successful, in that nobody commented on them in situ ... Anybody who knows anything about Usenet knows that if they had been detected, the conspiracy nuts would have been going out of their tiny little minds. Obviously, nobody knows if any government agency detected it.
Some say the Hipcrime entity was attempting something like this, but the consensus among most newsadmins is that that particular bit of sillyness was just simple flooding/cancellation/reposting in a misguided (and ultimately failed) attempt at disruption.
[0] There were probably many more, given the reality of Usenet and its users, but I am only aware of these three.
No legaly mandated backdoors, no. Just the ones EncrChat made available to their own employees. All the cops had to do was get someone employed by EncroChat, and Bob's their Auntie.
I wouldn't call it good police work, I'd call it bad security practices at EncroChat.
How's that Zoom and/or Skype (etc. etc.) workin' for all y'all? Are your corporate lawyers happy with Microsoft storing all the stuff your employees use Office363 for?
It's actually simpler than that.
The cops infiltrated EncroChat (the company itself) and snooped on supposedly encrypted data directly off the EncroChat servers. This is a very good example of why using code that has to go through a central server not under the control of the users should never be considered secure.
If you want security, peer to peer is the way to go. And sometimes not even then, at least in the hands of typical members of the GreatUnwashed.
We now return you to the usual unfounded bickering and speculation.
"When three sit down to talk revolution, two are fools and the third is a police spy."
I'll be ignoring the rest of your tantrum from yesterday, but I simply have to ask ... That's the second time that you've somehow tried to link me to comments about IR35. But I haven't ever commented on IR35, as it has absolutely no bearing on my life whatsoever. So why would I ever "work IR35 into it"?
Is it possible that you are targeting the wrong person with your juvenile attempt at bile, AC?
It occurs to me that ElReg needs a couple of units of length that are slightly longer than a London bus or a brontosaurus.
May I suggest a pair of units, the Bars[0] (at 3.4km, 155ish Brontosauruses) and the Hadrian (at 117.5km, or 839285.7143 Linguini (obviously)).
For a unit of negative measurement, perhaps the Trump (93 miles (150 km, or 2338 Devon fatbergs) of unnecessary replacement, no actual new wall to date) would be appropriate.
[0] Not bar, Bars. See: York. And have a homebrew while you think about it, not that that has anything to do with it ... but it can't hurt.
Worse, regulations slow trains down to a crawl. A little quick research shows it is about 2430 train-miles (3910km, or 177925 brontosauruses) from San Diego to New York. It's real passenger service, in that there are 9 trains leaving SD for NY per day. The fastest makes the trip in just over 72 hours on a good day (or three). That's an average of about 33.7 MPH (54 KPH, or 0.0005% of the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum) ... I can drive cross country faster than taking the train. And for two or more people, it's cheaper to drive. Sad, that.
Don't believe the bullshit spouted by the curtain-twitchers and hand-wringers. The environment isn't toxic at all. If it was, I wouldn't have been contributing for over a quarter century.
Unless your skin is so thin it tears when you get out of bed in the morning, that is.
To be fair, there are only 6 kernels in long term support (3.16.X was finally EOLed in June, and 5.6.X was initially released at the end of March of this year)). Maintenance on them isn't really all that great a burden, at least not from what I've seen.
Back in the day, one of the first things I did with any new DOS box was check for RECOVER, and if it still existed, nuke it. I have no idea who ever thought that it would be a useful tool to release to the general public, but they should be taken out behind the barn and flogged.
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