@drwho@beehaw.org avatar

drwho

@drwho@beehaw.org

Living 20 minutes into the future. Eccentric weirdo. Virtual Adept. Time traveler. Thelemite. Technomage. Hacker on main. APT 3319. Not human. 30% software and implants. H+ - 0.4 on the Berram-7 scale. Furry adjacent. Pan/poly. Burnout.

I try to post as sincerely as possible.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

drwho ,
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Outfits that haven't installed patches since February are getting popped in May by a vuln that was published in January.

drwho ,
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You don't say.

drwho ,
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That lawsuit was a long time in coming. Covid just goosed the schedule forward about a year, and probably made it easier.

drwho ,
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Is it bad that I keep wondering if one of the big book publishers bought a DDoS from somebody's botnet?

drwho ,
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Before starting something new, I ask myself if this is going to bring me a step closer to my eventual goals.

drwho ,
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Don't forget folks aging bot accounts by downvoting everything they see to generate history.

drwho ,
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There are spambots that still post on Usenet newsgroups even after organics abandoned them twenty years ago.

drwho ,
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I'm in a similar situation these days. Things are too crazy these days for that kind of risk.

drwho ,
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Historically, playing by Chicago Rules when reacting has done pretty well. It's certainly worked pretty well for me.

drwho ,
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It's probably something easier to set up, like a couple of fuses in the package that, when a signal is applied to a particular set of pins, will blow and disable the chip.

drwho ,
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Is Lisa still running site security?

drwho ,
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If they could get away with it.

drwho ,
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Give her my best!

drwho ,
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It would be far easier for the manufacturer to set up fuses that a killer poke could blow than to jump through all of the (legal) hoops to get hold of an explosive of some kind. And get Legal ready for it, because nothing like this ever affects only the intended group you don't like. To put it another way, one USian gets hurt because it went off at the wrong time and they're in a world of shit.

drwho ,
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Of course it will.

Gender bias in open source: Pull request acceptance of women versus men ( www.researchgate.net )

Our results show that women's contributions tend to be accepted more often than men's [when their gender is hidden]. However, when a woman's gender is identifiable, they are rejected more often. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.

drwho ,
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It's worth trying.

drwho ,
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"Illegal state subsidies?" From whom?

drwho ,
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Got it in one.

drwho ,
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Ask Amazon why they picked a name that was the same as a small publishing company that had been around for years and sued them into a smoking crater in the ground.

drwho ,
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Isn't this just a personal website with a links page?

drwho ,
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It still strikes me as odd that anybody ever trusted a mega.

drwho ,
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Anybody have a VPN link into HK? It'd be easy to find out.

drwho ,
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That's a really good question, the article doesn't go into specifics.

Then the body’s own repair systems recognize the damaged DNA as foreign and get rid of it.

This is somewhat ambiguous. It could mean that human DNA polymerases see the damaged DNA, scroll backwards and forwards to the START and STOP codons, and break the bonds to snip out the bits of viral DNA. Then endogenous DNA ligases patch the ends together. It could mean that it affects DNA in the viral particles themselves (but from the context in the article I don't think this is the case). Or it could be the case that the process triggers apoptosis to eliminate the infected cells entirely; I don't think this is the case because then you have necrotic tissue all over the place, and given that we're talking about herpes viruses this means fragile skin in tender places... ouch. That's kind of like using thermite to roast a marshmallow: Fun but overkill and potentially hazardous.

drwho ,
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Somebody seems to think so.

I can't shake the feeling that we're in the middle of a passive-aggressive depopulation operation.

drwho ,
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It's a Google hosted service, which is arguably worse because they may as well be a nation-state unto themselves.

drwho ,
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I do not think so, no. However, Amazon is certainly big enough to be un-humorously compared to nation-states as well.

drwho ,
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Doable, but a huge pain in the ass because of conflicts in the protocol. I spent about a year trying to suss them out and come up with a fix but never figured it out.

drwho ,
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For non-profits (like 501(c)(3)'s) that's not unusual. Non-profits are more like specialized tools for the board of directors than like companies.

Source: First ten years of my career were at non-profits.

drwho ,
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Them's who has the gold, makes the rules.

drwho ,
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https://gizmodo.com/23andme-is-selling-your-data-but-not-how-you-think-1794340474

https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/23andme-sells-anonymous-dna-data-to-drug-company-for-20-million/article_ea59fe96-79df-11ee-8473-47193d62656b.html

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-30/23andme-will-give-gsk-access-to-consumer-dna-data

https://www.dailyjournal.com/articles/377206-23andme-accused-of-having-fire-sale-of-customer-dna-data

The usual warnings about "anonymized data" and "data aggregation" apply.

drwho ,
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Have you tried a smaller card? 32GB was pretty well unheard of, even in the DOS 6.22 days.

It's been a very long time since I've thought about stuff like this. It reminds me of when I was trying to get a 1GB drive working on a 486 when I was in college. The drive wasn't seen (just like you're seeing). What I had to do was install the manufacturer's backwards compatibility software (it was for systems that were too old to have BIOSes that recognized drives that big) so that the BIOS, when it probed the hard drive would somehow load a TSR that added support for large hard drives.

Looking up the card in question, it loads the XTIDE BIOS, and the card has "Select XT-CF(PIO) Mode/Base IO 300h" silkscreened on the back. Zooming in on the front of the card, it doesn't look like you can set that on the DIP switch block for some reason. I don't see any documentation for download from the site. Did any docs come with the card?

drwho ,
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There has to be a way of getting FreeDOS onto the SD card. Way back when, there used to be ways of getting a floppy disk (and hard drive, I did it a few times) bootable with the SYS command to write the boot files to the right places. That was MS-DOS, though.

Hmm.

This article seems like it could be helpful.. It's for creating a disk image, not a drive, but the commands should work if you substitute in the SD card you want to use.

Please note that I haven't actually tried any of this. I'm at work and trying to pull together what scraps of knowledge I still have from my DOS days into something that seems coherent. This might not work, so please treat it as kicking some ideas around over coffee right now!

ms-sys basically does the same thing that format /s and sys a: used to do back in the days of DOS. That makes a drive bootable. So, you'd partition and format your SD card as VFAT or FAT32 from your box (I don't know if you have a Linux box or a Windows machine, or what). I'm guessing it'd be something like this:

sudo fdisk /dev/mmcblk0

# New DOS disk label
o

# New partition.
n
p
1


t
c
a
1
w

Format the partition on the SD card:

sudo mkfs.vfat -c -v -F32 /dev/mmcblk0p1

Then use ms-sys to write the MBR to the SD card.

sudo ms-sys --mbrdos /dev/mmcblk0p1

Mount the SD card. Download FreeDOS and uncompress it. I think that would be FD13-FullUSB.zip. There doesn't seem to be a downloadable archive of "Here's all the stuff that's in the disk image," just the disk image. Some gymnastics do seem to be required to mount it:

sudo losetup /dev/loop0 FD13FULL.img
sudo fdisk -l /dev/loop0

Disk /dev/loop0: 512 MiB, 536870912 bytes, 1048576 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device       Boot Start     End Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/loop0p1 *       63 1048319 1048257 511.8M  e W95 FAT16 (LBA)

The gymnastics in question have to do with mounting a partition of the disk image, because you can't just set up the disk image and manipulate it like a disk device. In this case, it's calculating where to mount the FreeDOS partition: sector size * first sector == 512 * 63 == 32256

sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0
sudo losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop0 FD13FULL.img
sudo mount /dev/loop0 /mnt

From there, it looks like you'll have to look at /mnt/setup.bat to figure out how to do a manual setup of FreeDOS on the SD card. There is also a /mnt/FDOS-x86/SETUP.BAT file that I think will have to be read through to get the process figured out.

Again, this is all theoretical. I've no idea if it'll work without tinkering with it on real hardware. It's as close to figuring out how to do a manual installation as I have time for right now.

drwho ,
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Thanking? No. That would be impolitic.

Quietly using? They'd be foolish not to.

Google fires 28 workers for protesting $1.2 billion Israel contract ( www.nbcnews.com )

"Google issued a stern warning to its employees, with the company’s vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, saying, “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC."

drwho ,
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I think yinz missed the sarcasm in the comment you're replying to.

drwho ,
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I was just about to ask if anybody else had been "advised" through the usual social back channels to not consider hiring anyone on that list. I got a couple of messages last night from folks I used to work for about that.

drwho ,
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It's not an actual list. There's no GDoc that gets shared around or anything. People talk to people. Folks who used to work together who kept in touch sometimes give each other "a friendly heads-up - that guy at the protest? He's getting fired. Don't hire him." Then e-mails to recruiting addresses get deleted or a resume' gets dumped in the recycling bin, and that's that.

It's the same back channels on LinkedIn and Skype chat groups (yes, they're still a thing) that are used to organize parties at RSA and shit like that.

drwho ,
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Locksport.

drwho ,
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Shit. I'm going on travel in a month or two.

drwho ,
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Maybe it's taken him this long to kick the tires and develop an opinion from daily use. There's nothing wrong with that.

drwho ,
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That's pretty much the entire Internet these days.

drwho ,
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I think it's because people are taking their frustrations out on whatever seems to make people think something might be on the upswing. Even better, because you can't necessarily see who upvoted nobody can call them on it.

It's like the folks who go to see a movie and gush about how awesome it was when you're sitting around shooting the shit, but the moment they get on the Net they trash it in as many ways as possible.

drwho ,
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We don't know what Cory does all day. We know he has a family, I think he has a kid, that means that he has responsibilities that don't involve blogging. For all we know, at the end of the day he curls up with a dead tree book and unplugs to relax. He might not be as online as his overall style might make him appear and we don't know what all circles of people he runs with, so it's entirely possible that he just heard about it.

drwho ,
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Parasocial relationships are weird.

drwho ,
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If you actually talk to some of those people as people (person to person, just shooting the shit, not questioning or obviously gathering intel or anything) and the subject comes up, they'll straight up tell you that.

drwho ,
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"Conservatives seem more excited about change."

No, conservatives seem excited about changing as much back to the way it was before. Progressives are sad because un-doing progress is significantly easier and faster than making progress.

drwho ,
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Of course they are.

drwho ,
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It's not like we can do anything about it. Customers can't control what a business does with the money they pay.
Writing and calling don't work. The best any one person can do is cancel their service, but they're in the minority.

drwho ,
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Exactly so.

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