Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 09/03/2023: Mesa 22.3.7, Samba 4.18.0, Peek Discontinued



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • conflicted

        i've never had a hard time making decisions. when conflicted with two options, i always chose fast and logically. this is why this situation i've encountered myself in is quite odd for me.

        i don't remember the last time i couldn't make a decision swiftly. i'm debating wether i should let a random chance choose for me.

      • Abyss of links

        If your capsule has URLs with numbers in them, and the resulting pages have a link to "next" that adds a constant to the current number, you have this issue, and crawlers may well crawl all the possible numbers. I found another one of these that accepted very big numbers indeed, up to the point where it gave an error about not being able to translate a string to a number.

      • Well-defined Blacks and Stark Whites

        I soaked up myriad musings stretching back to the dawn of the universe as I sat on that bench. I *was* the babe without a single drop of remembrance. I absorbed and penned a novel about the collective consciousness of every being that ever crossed the perimeter of the park. I experienced once again that one must remind oneself to clear the mind completely when traversing a space one has traversed before. If not, the danger of letting one's own past interfere in the current moment looms.

        What I was trying to say, surely, in a non-elliptical tangle, was that it'd be groovy were the park an accumulator of memories from all that traversed it. A container of sorts. Given that, I'll write about something tangential to it.

      • Spring is here!

        Formally is is still winter (night temperatures are still often under zero degrees) but during daytime temperatures are going over 10C here and my spring allergy is back once more.

        It seems that I wrote no phlog after the last SDF server OS upgrade (to the NetBSD 9.3) because only no I realised that the par(1) is not installed.

      • The Nature of Home

        I've found myself in Nightfall City during a layover on my journey back to my hometown, so I figured I'd take a break from typing away in some old office suite on my Motorola Droid Pro and hop into the pub while I'm here.

        Throughout my travels today, the nature of what home is has been on my mind. As a college student, studying hundreds of miles away from where I grew up, it's a peculiar split. On the one hand, my hometown is an integral part of my identity, It's where my partner, parents, brother, and dog are. It's the central point where I can see all my friends who scatter to various corners of the country most of the year. It's the place I go back to so I can connect to all of the people that are close to my heart.

    • Politics

      • Integration

        In Swedish politics, the faction (the blue-brown alliance of KD, M, L, and SD) that has claimed “integration and immigration” as their main talking point has policies that are the opposite of integration.

    • Technical

      • Low Tech in the Midwest

        The double-whammy of a warmer planet and a cooler economy has renewed my interest in reducing my consumption of resources and my impact on the world around me. To that end, I spent the last few evenings reading many posts at Low Tech Magazine ^, a site dedicated to identifying problems caused by modern technology and proposing low-tech solutions to them.

        Some of the ideas proffered by the site made me consider some of the particular challenges I face. I live in the American Midwest, not far from a large metropolis, and conditions in the area seem a tough fit for a number of the site's proposals.

      • Hypocrisy of enterprise IT security

        Quick rant. In work I've been debuging issue with some customers. Recently we updated how our virtual camera works on MacOS. Before we use the DAL interface and now switched to the more secure system extension. DAL works more like how Windows implements virtual camera using Direct Show. The system loads a dynamic library into apps that wants to use it. There's obvious problems, any DAL plugin can execute arbitrary code at that point. Including reading the process's memory and steal confidential information. Also, since DAL is executing as another app. You need a daemon to transport video frames from source to destination.

        So Apple introduced the new API, System extensions. It runs the extension in it's own "sandbox" (ignoring technical details here) and the system does the IPC. Basically a microkernel design so app developers can have low level access to the system while keeping system integrity. Extension can't read anything it shouldn't. After we released this upgrade. Some of our enterprice customers started to complain that they can't install the system extension. We did soem debugging with them. Turns out MDM software can and commonly will block 3rd party system extensions from loading.

      • Losing Signal

        Warning to my friends : Until further notice, consider I’m not receiving your Signal messages.

        Signal, the messaging system, published a blog post on how we were all different and they were trying to adapt to those differences. Signal was for everyone, told the title. Ironically, that very same day, I’ve lost access to my signal account. We are all different, they said. Except myself.

      • Loopy links 🔄

        One thing I found by looking at where my #hashtag crawler went was that some people have a bottomless pit of links.

        The first one I saw was someone exposing a repository of the site content. That included a link to the content itself. Not a link to the actual site, but to the copy of it in the repo. That had a repo link, where you could find a site link, and so on. I spotted this when it got to several levels of site/repo/site/repo/site/repo and told the crawler to give up. I'm mildy curious how deep that could go. I suppose it's limited by the maximum length of a gemini request (assuming that either the server or the client respected that limit).

      • Re: Why it's bad that the web is so feature-rich

        The thing I really hate about stage 4 web (to borrow idiomdrottning's terminology) is being gaslit by webdevs about accessibility, especially as it relates to JavaScript. When I bring up the topic, it's like, "JavaScript isn't harmful for accessibility. In fact, the web is inaccessible without JS." Yeah, I much prefer being able to use the web with command-line tooling and other comfortable tools. But the thing often doesn't even work from the environments that web designers and developers insist that I use.

        This morning, I've asked Deedra to pay our Internet bill, because I couldn't manage it with either Firefox or Chromium on Linux. She tried Brave on Linux, and now she's booted into a Windows VM. If Windows browsers don't work, I'll try my phone. If that doesn't work, we'll try Safari on her iPhone.

      • Video Switch hack

        It seems that I can't concentrate on software much these days.

        A friend had asked me to see what I can do with a broken 80's video switch with about 100 lit pushbuttons. Ah, I remember seeing one of these at a high-end studio back in the day. I found myself drawn to it. How does one light up dozens of incandescent lamps with a microcontroller?

        Well, all the lights were blown out, so I stuck LEDs into the switches. Reverse engineering the board I traced past the drivers to flip-flops for the lamps -- and it worked. I McGivered these into a shift register through creative soldering and lead-clipping, but it the thing was unreliable and after replacing a few chips I gave up on in-circuit modification. I think that someone attached a 12-volt power supply to 5-volt logic, blowing out every lamp and making the logic flaky.

      • Programming

        • Returns

          I've got an old macbook air. The "Enter" key also says "Return" on it. An old Smith-Corona that lives near my desk also has a "Return" key. My PC just says "Enter" at me. Neither word makes a lot of sense in the modern world, but I think "Return" makes more.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



Recent Techrights' Posts

British Justice Minister Sarah Sackman Blasts Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)
The "legal industry" is due for "some reckoning"
Someone at Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is Censoring the Birthday Greetings to Richard Stallman
Some people remember
Links 16/03/2026: Moscow Experiencing Cellphone Internet Outages, "Salman Rushdie Is Tired of Talking About Free Speech"
Links for the day
 
Links 17/03/2026: American Fentanylware (TikTok) Investors Implicated in Kickbacks, "Big Oil Knew It Was Wrecking Louisiana’s Coast"
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For Third Time in a Week The Register MS Runs Google SPAM That Paints Google as an Ally of Women (Which is False, They're Womanisers)
What does that make The Register MS to women?
GAFAM Deprecating Old Videos ("Content") by Removing the Support for Their Format for No Good Reason
"Security" is not a valid excuse
Credit/Debit Cards Have Long Been Called Plastics, Over Time They're Becoming More Like Pure Plastics
They cost less than a dollar to manufacture
The European Patent Office (EPO) Holds a Public Demonstration Tomorrow and It'll be Live-streamed
The EPO's workforce was meant to be capable of speaking many languages and have extensive experience in the sciences
People Who Attacked Techrights Also Attacked My Mother
Picking on old ladies because you don't like Free software advocates is never OK
Little Community Element Left in CentOS
CentOS, unlike Fedora, was meant to be long supported and solid
Social Control Media is Cancel Culture (Companies Like Facebook Also Punish/Ban Accounts for Mentioning "Linux" and Lobby for Anti-Linux Legislation)
The masters of Social Control Media decide what ideas can and cannot be expressed
Over at Tux Machines...
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IRC Proceedings: Monday, March 16, 2026
IRC logs for Monday, March 16, 2026
The European Patent Office (EPO) Illegally Transitioning Into 'Gig' 'Economy' Equivalent (a Shop for Patent Monopolies in Europe)
for scabs aka SEALs
At Least Six EPO Strikes Next Month (Yes, Six!)
The pressure intensifies over time
Several MPs Blast Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) for Inaction and Ineffective Action This Week
"Four MPs have written to the SRA"
Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 14 Out of 200: The Abusive Cases of the Serial Strangler From Microsoft and His Litigation Buddy Garrett Did Cause "Serious Harm"
claims were de facto abandoned at the trial
Today's Discussions About How IBM Pushes Workers Out
The corporate media keeps trying - baselessly and in vain - to paint everything that happens with the "hey hi" brush
Linux Teck (linuxteck.com) and Ubuntu PIT (ubuntupit.com) Are Botspam
now they just keep experimenting by trashing their sites and reputation
Links 16/03/2026: Arctic Security and 'Mr. Nobody Against Putin'
Links for the day
Gemini Links 16/03/2026: KN95 Skins and CSS Surprises
Links for the day
Debian is Dying for Some of the Same Reasons IBM's Fedora is Rapidly Dying
Prioritising CoC censorship, not communities
The Register MS is Again Femmewashing GAFAM (Which Makes Widows) in Exchange for Money
This is a moral issue because they betray or harm women and prop up authoritarian regimes
Gemini Links 16/03/2026: AB 1043, Lagrange Android Beta 47, and Poetry
Links for the day
"Slop-forking" or "Vibe-forking" as the New 'Noble' Plagiarism
New Cloudflare Slop Project?
EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part VII - Cult Mentality, Mobbing, Nepotism
Does the EPO actually believe in the law?
2026 Microsoft Layoff Rumours
Surely if we had properly-functioning media, then someone would investigate this rather than rely on official statements from Microsoft and WARN notices
EPO Strike This Week
contact your national representatives about it
Gemini Links 15/03/2026: "Create Opportunities for Good Things to Happen", DOSbook, and Bitcoin Criticism
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
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IRC logs for Sunday, March 15, 2026
Pirate Praveen Arimbrathodiyil & Debian denouncing volunteers, hiding romances
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 15/03/2026: WB Games Montréal Undergoes Layoffs, "Swiss Reject Cuts to Public Broadcasting"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 15/03/2026: Messages in Bottles and Audio Streaming in Lagrange for Android
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Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 13 Out of 200: Abuse of Process to Make False Accusations of UKGDPR Violations
familiar barrister and same lawyers
Thrown Under the Microsoft Bus
Microsoft wants disposable contractors
Quitting IBM and "Rumors of an Upcoming RA [Mass Layoffs] in April 2026"
Blue layoffs or "RAs" were confirmed upfront by the CFO
GNU/Linux Distro Builders Barely Paid Enough to Pay Basic Bills, Chief of "Linux" Foundation (Not Even Using Linux!) Increases His Own Salary by Over 50% in 5 Years
Salaries or compensation correlate with the ability to exploit people, not to create things
What Puts the Brakes on GNU/Linux Adoption on Laptops and Desktops is Monopoly Control (or Monoculture) Over the Distros
Distros that adopt systemd are controlled by IBM and GAFAM
The "Zero-Sum" Fallacy
Fallacies like "zero-sum" - especially in the context of foreign affairs including war - are utterly ruinous
A Happy Birthday to Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman will turn 73
Jürgen Habermas is Dead, But the Politicised, Inherently Corrupt, Corporatised Court for Patents That He Inspired Is Not
In the news throughout the weekend
Mountains of Abuses of Process by Brett Wilson LLP on Behalf of Americans and Sometimes at the Expense of British Taxpayers
a virtual "limited liability"
linuxteck.com FUD by LLM Slop, ubuntupit.com Passes the Slop Baton
Unless they get back to doing long-form authentic articles, as opposed to slop, no good will come out of it
Links 15/03/2026: New Shortages, Lynx Populations Depletion
Links for the day
Sruthi Chandran & Debian Diversity, Favoritism, Hidden Conflicts of Interest
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
software in the public domain
Reprinted with permission from Alex Oliva
Links 15/03/2026: Slop "Bubble Driving Interest in Chip Alternatives" and Wildlife Erosion Reported
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Over at Tux Machines...
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IRC Proceedings: Saturday, March 14, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, March 14, 2026