Posts by bombastic bob

Re: I don't care what the experts say....

no NAT for IPv6

well there IS a spec but I have not heard great things about it nor widespread use (other than NAT-PT which is IPv6<->IPv4 and not what you were looking for, probably)

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc6296/

Re: Underwhelming

All IPv6 addresses (with a few exceptons) are public.

For privacy, it looks like we should use VPNs or SOCKS proxies.

An ISP could provide this service or you could just use the Tor network so long as it has IPv6 exit points (I do not know, probably does, my guess).

Seriously though if you have a fixed IP(v6) address (like a home office or a business) you just assume you're being tracked, and an IPv6 /64 will be trackable based on the prefix anyway. So yeah, for true privacy, Tor or a proxy or a VPN..

And tracking is the LEAST of the problems. A windows box with an IPv6 address that is NOT firewalled by a non-windows "something" is like being promiscuous in a series of adulterous activities. NOT a matter of IF you get a virus (or whatever), but WHEN.

(I remember WinNuke, and I still see ALL of those open ports on any windows box connected to my network, and Micros~1 firewall does not, In My Bombastic Opinion, inspire ANY sense of confidence and/or security for stopping malware or outright attacks)

Re: This process is widespread at Canonical

I have to ask who is wasting time reading the responses to those questions... and what silly questions were THOSE PEOPLE asked in order to be hired to read people's answers to even SILLIER questions... and it goes on and on and on and on in my mind, like a bad bureaucratic nightmare from HELL...

(how can a company like this make money?)

Re: This process is widespread at Canonical

The blatant use of "singular 'they'" (i.e. BAD GRAMMAR in the name of political correctness) would have put me off immediately.

Re: high school

If I were interviewing candidates I would have questions like "what would your close friends/family say is your most annoying trait"

If someone asked ME that, I'd probably say something with the words "Fuck" and "OFF" embedded within. You should ask something relevant like "How would you solve a problem like ...' and skip the amateur psychology.

Re: high school

playing in a jazz band isn't going to win me the job.

From MY perspective, you should gain a LOT of points for that one (creative people do creative things, and Jazz implies improvisation, which is EXTREMELY creative In My Bombastic Opinion). But the way in which the questions were framed leaves too much ambiguity as to what they're looking for. You could add to your Resume/CV that you are a musician and achieve the same effect.

Re: high school

maybe the recruiters were extemely unpopular in school when they were teenages and are secretly out for some warped kind of revenge (like an extreme grudge coupled with cancel culture) ? You know, TW[A,I]TTER [ab]users!!!

"*I* am in charge now, and *I* can EXCLUDE YOU now, because *I* have *Da POWAH* !!!"

(or something else equally psychotic)

Re: Usual attempt to see how far they can go before causing real outrage...

Go all the way to installing explorer++ Linux

Fixed It For Ya

Re: Community consensus

You can try Mate's Caja and Pluma. They work fine for me.

Re: SystemD

Slackware's audience probably won't miss having Gnome, and may not even have noticed...

"There's no Gnome? Really? Whatdya know! I never noticed!" (or similar)

Re: All your...etc.

Ugh, systemd

And now I have Burt Bacharach singing the theme song for "The Blob" running through my head....

*Pop*

Beware of the Blob it creeps, and leaps, ...

Re: GNOME themes are CSS stylesheets

middle click still works. But I want non-hiding scroll bars that show me about where I am on the page based on their relative position. When searching through a doc or source file or whatever for specific text, and it wraps around, the scroll bar will bounce back up to the top and let you know you've "wrapped".

That and I tend to grab the thing and scroll it like was intended.

Besides - it IS my computer and my theming choice. They SHOULD respect it!

Re: GNOME themes are CSS stylesheets

and TRIPLING DOWN apparently on the 2D FLATTY FLATSO McFLATFACE FLATASS rounded-look scrollbar (that is WAY too FORNICATING SKINNY to properly grab with a mouse) and FUGLY Micros~1 Windows-Ape/Win-10-nic/FLATTY look. YUCHHKKKKK!!!!!

NO. Just NO.

TraditionalOk, please, or similar, or GTFO.

But having ALL WEB PAGES AND APPLICATIONS COMPLY with my theming choice for GTK3 and GTK4?? THAT I *WANT*!!

And you can BET YOUR SWEET ARSE that on MY machines, it will NOT be ADWAITA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Within Mate, getting rid of adwaita requires an extra step:

For Firefox, this (about:config):

widget.content.gtk-theme-override = "TraditionalOk"

widget.non-native-theme.enabled = false

Yes it WAS a ROYAL PAIN IN THE ARSE to figure this out. It PISSED ME OFF SO MUCH I *BOTHERED* to figure it out. Those 2D FLATASS millenial SMUGS can SUCK MY FREEDOM OF CHOICE instead of FORCING ME into their 2D FLATSO HELL!!!!!!!!

(see icon - this 2D FLATASS ANTI-FREEDOM crap REALLY pisses me off!!)

Re: Stupid is as stupid does

So, this Miller is an asshole.

I was thinking 'criminal' but in my mind, you are "not wrong"

Re: Stupid is as stupid does

the war is not universally popular there

It is my understanding that the war is universally UN-popular in Russia, among the regular people. Why would they want to become the SOVIET UNION again?

I have to wonder WHAT LAWS WERE VIOLATED in the (alleged, reported) intentional publishing of MALWARE with the intent of causing damage and copying unwanted files onto people's computers...

because if THIS is TOLERATED, then WHAT'S NEXT?

(think of every wacko out there who ever did things in protest that simply IRRITATE everybody and even cause various forms of damage, from throwing paint on people's fur coats, to filing predatory and/or malicious lawsuits to halt a project over some political or environmental pet pieve... (and YES, I'm talking 'new form of cancel culture' and WOKENESS being a major factor here)

Re: Just don't use ANY anti-virus

Real security involves using a computer system that is more secure by design, such as GNU/Linux instead of Microsoft Windows, plus being more careful about what you do with your computer.

You are "not wrong". however, for the average user, especially those who actually SURF THE WEB with a windows computer using a login that has administrator-level access, the A/V at least provides a minimal level of defense. (I do not use it, as it mostly gets in the way of software development, but I do not use windows machines for web surfing either, and any e-mail is read by "not outlook" in PLAIN TEXT MODE ONLY and NO inline graphics)

So yeah I call that "safe surfing" but it works best when NOT using a Windows OS.

Isn't Hamburg going TO open source, and NOT reverting to Micros~1 products? I just found a 2020 article that says so, and nothing since to say otherwise.

I think it was Munich that flip-flopped on this but they seem to be back in the open source realm now along with Hamburg.

Imagine having to redo from scratch the whole fragile and utterly complex back office structure

it has been done before (at a significant cost savings, I might add)

Re: You say that like it's the first time

I would not consider Windows 3.0 an "F-up". I thought it was BRILLIANT at the time.

Remember how Windows 2.x and even the 386 version were all 2D FLATTY with CGA compatible colors? Well 3.0 fixed this with a 3D Skeuomorphic appearance and IT SOLD LIKE CRAZY, because of the 3D SKEUOMORPHIC APPEARANCE. And solitaire. (good luck finding that in any "modern" version of Windows, unless you like ad-ware or paying for it. Worthy of mention, Aisle Riot on Linux).

So even though ME and Vista were true "F-ups" you have to admit that everything ELSE showed actual improvements worth having the upgrade for... even XP (they focused on game compatibility, which mostly worked).

What I do not understand is how you could POSSIBLY include Win-10-nic in your iist of NON-failures.

I cannot agree nor upvote this enough

Change is not progress

see icon

how about that TV screen in "Idiocracy" in which 3/4 of the screen was covered with ads and only the middle 25% or so had actual content you WANTED to see.

Cue Micros~1 "New WIndows" in late 2022 or 2023, using up that "unused" screen space and slowly encroaching onto your desktop until the amount of screen space available for actually USING the thing is only a fraction of the size of the monitor. "I'll need to upgrade my monitor to get work done now".

(Cycle of evil continues until it's like IDIOCRACY)

That and frogs being slowly boiled

Re: IT OS need Versus Machine tool need

at the cost of maintaining such older machines, would it make sense to invest money into projects like ReactOS in lieu of buying up the hardware? (you know paid developers and people who are really good at systems programming and even retired Micros~1 employees who understand the nuances, etc.)

Community support with paid developers might get it done.

(that, and maybe some open source help from Linux and FreeBSD if that's at all possible - not sure if ReactOS licenses are compatible with GPLv2 and/or BSD licensing)

Re: Chip Shortage?

I thought about doing a post filled with spinny conspiracy "logic" for laughs, but I'll just settle for the icon.

Re: Quite frankly ...

having done electronic design for a SIMPLE battery operated device's circuit board, dealing with the inevitable "how do you handle a dead battery without having it swell up like a balloon" problem [none of which was supported by any of the battery charge I.C.s inherently, it required some clever use of discrete MOSFETs and schottkey diodes to create a special blocking circuit that would reset whenever charge power was applied but stay disconnected from the battery once voltage dropped below a certain point), so yeah.

Battery management IS pretty difficult, especially with the ones that tend to catch fire when you get it wrong. And I only dealt with a single cell. Dealing with ICVs (Individual Cell Voltage) and what do you do when one of them gets too low [you do NOT want a CELL REVERSAL] more or less requires a bit more than an old style relay-based voltage regulator like you'd find on a car made in the 1950's.

So yeah. Computer monitoring of the battery is more or less MANDATORY for an electric vehicle. And that is just the battery, not even the digital waveform generators for the motor coils... (unless you want to do regular brush/commutator maintenance or have a short vehicle life, you need brushless motors)

(Amazingly piston gasoline or diesel engines seem quite simple and reliable by comparison)

[athough I would not mind seeing a swashplate design become practical, the piston engine has been perfected for over 100 years and is very very good nowadays]

Re: Thank god for small favors

We will have to stop burning carbon soon

No. JUST NO. infrared absorption spectrum and black body radiation. It's really NOT that hard of a concept. It's also science.

(what DO they teach in these schools, anyway???)

Re: Thank god for small favors

the problem with cold and batteries is that their capacity drops off rapidly as it gets colder. I think that's what was meant by "loses a boatload of capacity".

(that's just basic chemistry and physics)

Re: Thank god for small favors

I have a convertible, and when driving in snow it's the WARMEST car I've ever owned. Something about the nylon (or whatever material it is) weave allows the heat to stay inside the car much better than metal. And of course when weather is nice, top comes down and it's cool as hell.

You do not need heated seats. You just need more convertibles.

Re: liking the new normal

and realized they could do without all that extra crap?

yeah my old car does not have those things. Seems fine to me.

(car designers - just because you CAN does not mean you SHOULD, and if you price every vehicle higher because you have too many 'extras' we do not need, you might end up making new cars UNAFFORDABLE along the way)

Re: $50 Credit

if oil companies in the USA were able to pump oil from Alaska without gummint restrictions and red tape, this would NOT be a problem. And, it would hurt Putin WORSE than any sanctions, by the way, by keeping the prices low as he tries to sell to China, instead.

Re: Oligarchy

i was actually hoping that vaccine research for "the virus" would lead to great improvements in medical science... and maybe it has? May not see anything for decades, though. However, the political side of this went off the deep end LONG AGO, from mandates to anti-vax hysteria. It stopped being medicine when politics got involved. And it does not take "rocket surgery" to "follow the money" to see why this happened.

Re: China attacks me!!!!

Things like Fail2ban help with that

A short time ago I commented on recent attack frequencies, so i decided to chart the number of IP addresses banned per day (just ban count, not unique IP) since forever. Seems 2 or 3 years ago there was an even HIGHER peak for some reason (attempts to crack ssh anyway). So recently it has gone up, but it has actually been higher in the recent past, close to double from what I can see visually.

[and that is simply Fail2ban's ban log, sorted by date, and indicating the total number of bans per day, charted with gnuplot to a PNG file. I should publish it, maybe. I used an aggregation utility I wrote a decade or so ago to sum ban count per day, and a shell script to control it, output to an x,y file and a vertical bar chart in gnuplot)

most of those crack attempts are dictionary login-in names and attempts to log in as 'root'. I do occasionally report them, especially if I am bored, or when they are irritating enough to become "my new special friend".

Re: From, or via?

Article: It is entirely possible that whoever drove this attack co-opted resources at those IP addresses

yes. That was my first impression of what happened, since it explain things the best.

Also a windows zero day might help explain things, too. Or maybe it's just one of the 'Anonymous' group's botnets. Whichever I guess, results are kinda the same for either scenario.

And, limiting to 30-something Gbits (as a DDoS) might just be a function of the data pipe between N.Y. State and China... (not such a fat one after all maybe?)