_nickwhite

Unless I were at Brown on a fully paid scholarship, I'd transfer out. Plenty other fine schools that won't be a nanny.

Years ago I bought a huge box of old IBM Model-M keyboards- not model F's like here, but pretty close. I planned on refurbishing and reselling on eBay, but quickly discovered the cost of shipping ate any profit I hoped to make on them. Life lesson learned.

Anyone who has ever dealt with the Better Business Bureau from a business perspective knows that this is also their business model.

If you want your company to have a positive rating, you'd better pay them. Sad to see Glassdoor move to this business model, but hey, it works.

While this may be pre-IPO fluff to lift mindshare for Airbnb, the subtitle for the article:

Focus on the core business, keep expenses low and listen to customers

is true for ALL businesses, not just hot new Silicon Valley "startups".

I had a pretty bad case of Coronavirus, had a high fever for nearly 2 weeks, but I actually never lost my sense of taste or smell! Those around me who contracted a mild case, actually lost smell and taste. Pretty odd stuff.

The OWASP has been around for a long time and they regularly publish a "Top 10" Web Application Security Risk list. It's amazing (or maybe not) how long some of these have been on the list:

1) Injection 2) Broken Authentication 3) Sensitive Data Exposure 4) XML External Entities (XXE) 5) Broken Access Control 6) Security Misconfigurations 7) Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) 8) Insecure Deserialization 9) Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities 10) Insufficient Logging & Monitoring

https://owasp.org/www-project-top-ten/

I learned this _years_ ago that Godaddy will steal your name for fun and profit. As the HN comments confirm, there are several shady outfits that do the same thing.

For years, I've gone to ICANN directly to check domain name availability: https://lookup.icann.org/

Sendgrid have a HUGE problem with spammers using their service. I've probably reported 20 SPAM campaigns using their official channels, but I think they route such e-mails to /dev/null. Never gotten a response- just more SPAM through their service. And I can't block their IPs, as a lot of legitimate sites utilize their services.

This reminds me of the time I bought a high-end GTX video card at Best Buy... only to find a bottle of shampoo inside. These types of return scams happen all the time.

In 1993 I was 12 years old and spent many, many hours drawing a pixel-perfect replica of the Mortal Kombat dragon logo in MS Paintbrush (the name of MS Paint at the time). I believe it was a 640x480 BMP. I so wish I had saved a copy of this and all of the other stuff I downloaded off bulletin boards! Stuff like this got me started in web graphics, HTML, and eventually sysadmin.

To this day I still take screenshots (PrtScn) and save them using pbrush (WinKey+R pbrush).

From the article:

"We evaluated a number of CAPTCHA vendors as well as building a system ourselves."

and

"We worked with hCAPTCHA in two ways. First, we are in the process of leveraging our Workers platform to bear much of the technical load of the CAPTCHAs and, in doing so, reduce their costs. And, second, we proposed that rather than them paying us we pay them. This ensured they had the resources to scale their service to meet our needs. While that has imposed some additional costs, those costs were a fraction of what reCAPTCHA would have. And, in exchange, we have a much more flexible CAPTCHA platform and a much more responsive team."

So Cloudflare are basically cloud hosting hCAPTCHA's services. I wonder why Cloudflare didn't just buy them, as it seems like it would be a win-win with getting an excellent CAPTCHA service, and not have to build it themselves?

From the article:

"Security is Clearview's top priority," he said in a statement provided to The Daily Beast. "Unfortunately, data breaches are part of life in the 21st century. Our servers were never accessed. We patched the flaw, and continue to work to strengthen our security."

Servers never accessed? Then how was the client list stolen? Was a paper copy stolen from a filing cabinet? I find this posture somewhat arrogant and dismissive. Also, the article is light on technical details- does anyone have info on what flaw was exploited and patched?

This seems like a good idea... until your self-hosted DNS server starts getting DoS attacked. I've had seemingly innocent servers practically taken off the Internet with UDP/53 floods- very easy for any 12-year-old to execute.

I have a new Surface Go with a Verizon LTE SIM card. Being online all the time is great, and the portability of it is also great. But the keyboard is really painful as the keys are all about 30% smaller and scrunched together. I've even contemplated using a regular Surface keyboard on my Go, but it looks ridiculous. So I've been traveling with both my Surface Go and new Surface Laptop- and I'll probably roll down the Go to someone else at the office who can use it.

To the 70: Thank you for contributing to such incredible software for all these years. Your contribution to my life is not insignificant. Good luck on your next chapter.

To Mozilla: Let's figure out this monetization thing. Heck, I'd pay for Firefox to keep it as great as it is and independent.

I actually gave Edge Dev an honest try for a few months using it as my only browser. At some point it just stopped syncing bookmarks between my various computers (all Windows), and that was the breaking point for me. I went back to Firefox. I may give it another go if they can fix sync.

Small sample size of my household, be we bought nearly everything we were going to buy at Costco elsewhere due to them being basically offline all of Thursday AND into Friday.

Seems like they host all of their web infrastructure in-house and need some major help on scale-ability.

Better performance [2] with less cores, much better pricing, and the kicker for me is PCI Express 4.0 [1]. Intel doesn't even support the newest generation of NVMe storage. So yeah, AMD is dominating for a good reason- for now anyways.

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/3400176/pcie-40-everything-y...

[2] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

System Image Backup (SIB) Solution

We recommend that users use full-disk backup solutions from other vendors.

This is the only major bummer for me. I'm one of the (likely few) people who use this, and I also use it across the network to create system images for Windows 10 UEFI machines.

” We recommend that over the next year, you identify an alternative solution and execute a migration strategy.”

Another Google product killed, another migration strategy to execute. What's next?

When I was in college around Y2K, I took a "Foundations of Music" class offered online- an elective that taught, well, foundations of music, specifically how to read music. Students had to install this janky, low-quality, Windows Visual Basic application and do 100% of the coursework using it. This VB app would output a results file, and then we had to upload it to the professor. Well, I edited the file, and found that it had a primitive CSV-like format where right answers were basically question1=1 and wrong answers were question1=0.

So theoretically, I could have just generated answer files for every single lesson for the whole semester- and a lot of them I did. BUT, I was scared that the final exam was going to be conducted on-campus, where it would be less tenable to be a dirty-rotten-cheating-scumbag.

So I actually had to learn the coursework, and learn how to read music and all its intricacies. (I do not play an instrument unless you count guitar chords.)

When the final exam came, instead of it being on-campus, the professor used the EXACT SAME VB application to run it. It took me about 5 minutes and I scored a 100% on it thanks to notepad.exe.

There's a moral to this story somewhere. I use notepad.exe a lot more these days than I read music, so perhaps it was foreshadowing an IT career?

Google is what, a 3/4 TRILLION dollar company, based on market cap! It's absolutely unfathomable that they have such a prolific reputation of non-customer service and inability to contact them. Any other company would suffer massive consequences with customer service that poor. What will it take for them to turn this around? Maybe they believe they are too big for this to matter?

If Google are _really_ reviewing the apps, creating a 3-day backlog to get approved, then I say "Bravo! The world could absolutely use less crapware on the Google Play store." But, the cynic in me tells me this is just a ploy by them to put on a masquerade of actually caring.

Years ago (in the late 90's or early aughts) when ordering vanity plates online became a thing, I got approved for the plate "127.0.0.1". This was a California or NC plate- can't remember as I lived in both states. I checked the mailbox excitedly every day like Ralphie from A Chrismas Story for my uber cool plate. When I finally did get something from the DMV, it was too small to be a license plate and was simply a note that said "Sorry, your requested plate conflicts with a motorcycle plate, so we have to deny your request." Huge bummer, but I guess 127.0.0.1 becomes 127001 in their systems.

"With /proc/sys/kernel/pid_max defaulting to 32768 we actually ran out of PIDs. We increased that limit vastly, probably way beyond what we currently need, to 500000. Actuall limit on 64bit systems is 222"

Time to start thinking about 128bit systems!

The NSA doesn't need a root certificate installed on your computer if they already have the private keys to the root and/or intermediate CA providers.

Seems the site went down, here is Google's cached text-only version:

*edit - wayback link below is a much better cached copy. thanks manchoz.

Not only Facebook, but Instagram (which shares common infrastructure) has also been mostly down (read-only mode it seems). The most popular Twitter hashtag right now is #instagramdown

I also saw the first FH launch, but I was at the (free) Playalinda Beach public access area. It's so close (~3.59 miles to 39A) they actually close the beach and move spectators further back. HIGHLY recommended if anyone is looking to see a launch. I've seen other launches from the causeway, but this was closer and had a much better atmosphere - and literally right on the beach, so the kids love it.

Since I haven't seen it posted yet, an invaluable tool for sifting through fake vs real Amazon reviews is fakespot.com. They use AI to score every product and crawl an item's review tree (reviews left by the same people for other products) to verify the authenticity of individual reviewers. I've sifted out a lot of shady products AND sellers using this. (I'm not affiliated in any way with them.)